New Ways of Seeing: Episode 3
Tiffany & Co., couldn’t have picked a better personality for “Digital As Medium”, the third episode of New Ways of Seeing, a five-part video series on art viewership. Tavi Gevinson – the star of the brand’s latest film short – is, like many millennials, a product of the digital age: her blog, Style Rookie, later evolved into Rookie, a successful online media empire, while she pursues other passions like acting and writing.
In the video, Gevinson explores how computers and social media are changing the way we consume and experience art in the 21st century. “The museum is now our feed, and the internet is not only an archive of artworks that exist elsewhere in their official form, but its own medium,” she says.
As she ponders, the appearance of artist Petra Cortright interrupts her brief revelry. A self-described “digital hoarder”, Cortright creates moving images using vintage webcam software. Quickly – just like how we move from one thing to another on social media – Gevinson diverts her attention to three other artists, Austin Lee, Cory Arcangel and Douglas Coupland, as she introduces viewers how they experiment with digital technology to bring their work to life. Lee mixes Photoshop with traditional painting in his works, Arcangel “hacks” or decodes computer-generated images and videos; while Coupland utilises facial recognition software to obscure subjects’ visages as a social commentary on online privacy, or the lack thereof.
Watch this space for the fourth episode, which will be premiered exclusively in Singapore on L’Officiel Singapore in March. For more New Ways of Seeing videos, see episode 1 and episode 2.
