DigitalCritic

For the last ten years or so I’ve been working with the artists and organisations who pioneered the use of internet technologies for art discussion. Back in 1991 a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called Thing was one of the first dedicated online spaces for debating art and culture. Soon mailing lists/list serves were popping up all over cyberspace and throughout the late 1990s/early 2000s, lists such as Nettime, Rhizome, the Syndicate, organised and archived a tremendous amount of art talk.

The reasons these lists were so popular and prolific was that they were not dedicated to just any old art, but art that wrestled with its relationship to technology. To put it another way, these lists focused on art that is known variously as Digital art, New Media art or Computer art and, in a more specific vein, Internet art or Net art (including net.art). And though such lists revelled in the mix of content from so-called professionals and amateurs alike they, for the most part, provided an invaluable resource for the thousands who used them.

The history of the rise and fall of lists is a complicated one and over the years, for a variety of reasons, many once popular lists have become less active or have ceased to exist at all. Of course, one of the main reasons for this has been the rise of social media. While sites like Facebook don’t exactly replace the sustained debates that lists were known for, they do provide for a certain type of sharing which is, at times, hard to resist.

Now we have the Twittersphere I find myself asking what Twitter is doing, if anything, for this still strong community?

Hashtags are the system used by the Twitter community to flag up certain content in tweets and they are used in a variety of ways. A well-known Hashtag, for example, is #ff, which stands for ‘Follow Friday’, the day of the week when tweeters provide lists of people they follow on Twitter and would like to recommend to others. Other Hashtags might relate to conferences or series of events. For example, the current Digital art and design exhibition, ‘Decode’, being held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has used the Hashtag #decode09. Tags such as #decode09 really come into their own when, for whatever reason, you can’t attend a conference but can get near your computer to set up a search for the tag to watch live comments roll in from conference attendees – which is exactly what I did with the ‘Decoding the Digital’ conference, a spin-off of ‘Decode’ itself.

Yet despite a tremendous amount of web-savvy among its members, the Digital/New Media arts community does not appear to have reached consensus on a Hashtag. You only have to look at the tweets of key organisations such as Furtherfield.org or Rhizome to see that there is no common or shared Hashtag in use. But why? Is this because we still don’t know what to call what we are doing – certainly a long been a debate has raged over what to call the realms of activity surrounding art and technology. Or is it because we are working so hard to break Digital/New Media art out of its ghetto that we’ve neglected to use one of Twitter’s most important tools?

And, here’s the thing, there is a Digital art Hashtag (#digitalart)!

However, as any self-professed Twitter expert will tell you, it is important to get the balance of Hashtag use right and what has happened with #digitalart is over-use. You only have to start reading tweets bearing the #digitalart tag to see that people are using it on any old thing they throw together in Photoshop. While I’m not in principle against discovering all manner of digitally re-mastered cat portraits via Twitter, the Digital art Hashtag fails to provide any true orientation on Digital art.

I’m lost on whether there should be a tag that reunites the tweeted content of Digital/New Media artists, curators and their various supporting organisations. What content could a Hashtag more usefully co-ordinate? And how might we implement one without being too ‘top-down’ about it? While I follow a good range of practitioners, I’d like to follow more, and the Hashtag is a great way to find them but, right now at least, I don’t know the tag the for the job and don’t know if, in light of the debates about what to call it and efforts to desegregate it, whether this is actually, truly at tag-able field?

If you have a pet, say, a dog or a cat, you probably talk to him or her a lot. This may range from general baby-talk (‘I wuv you’) to more extended conversations about day-to-day life (‘Did I put a wash on, I don’t remember do you?’), and if you really rate Rover, it’s possible you philosophise with him (‘Is this it? Is this all there is do you think?’). But the fact is, if Rover ever actually replied, you can guarantee he wouldn’t have the voice you’d imagined him to have. Well, that is how I feel about tweets from Tate.

Stephen Fry (unofficial Tsar of Twitter) is such an effortless communicator that, in a survey, 8 out of 10 people would surely be able to identify his tweets from a random anonymous selection. Other writers, journalists, publications and even celebrities are also tweet-true. Take Paris Hilton, for example: “Back in LA, going home to see my puppies and kitten ”. But for reasons I can’t quite settle upon, Tate doesn’t sound right.

Here is a Tate tweet from this very morning: “Here’s a fitting picture inspired by the orphaned baby antelope story in the papers today – http://bit.ly/3wgXHi”. A news story with cute animals? Isn’t that just a little bit Daily Mail? Then there’s this example of their Sesame Street-style: “C is for… Constant A. Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) See his painting”. After Us, Liberty” at Tate Modern http://tinyurl.com/mgggfm #ArtistAtoZ”. Not to mention their weather reports: “and the weekend weather forecast resembles…. Dickson Innes’ view of North Wales … hopefully! http://bit.ly/tVhrS”. Really?

I see what they are doing. In each of these examples Tate gets to remind us in a very accessible way of works from their vast and important collections. Twitter, as used by Tate, is a great marketing tool. The problem I have is that in all the conversations I’ve had in my head when at Tate (Britain, Liverpool, Modern, St Ives, or even on their website), this isn’t the voice Tate answered with. What I mean is that, rightly or wrongly, I’ve always given Tate a much more inquisitive and argumentative tone, but on Twitter I find Tate rather dull. In the examples I’ve cited, there is little provocation of further discussion: yes, those are indeed drawings of antelope, and you are right, Constant does begin with a C, and it is possible that the sky looked like that at the weekend. But so what?

Look at a-n Director and arts consultant Susan Jones. In brainstormy-bursts she asks all manner of questions about the state of culture today and sustainability of practice. Today alone she has offered several routes into an investigation of self-employment in the arts. Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer for the Guardian, has managed to pack multiple reviews of the Edinburgh Festival into single tweets: “Royal Ballet of Flanders Return of Ulysses clever, witty and beautiful #edfest”, “Silviu Purcarete’s Faust: spectacle doesn’t equal substance, however many forklift trucks & fireworks you stick in a show. Miss it #edfest”, “Will Gompertz’s Double Art History good fun. Sat next to arts corr of the Times. Not that we were competitive, not at all. #edfest #edfringe”. While Tate, on the other hand, seem to just drone on in the background.

I admit that I’m not be being entirely fair. Despite their connections to a magazine and newspaper respectively, Jones and Higgins are individuals. I’m perhaps making an impossible comparison. It is no doubt very difficult to give an institution a voice that rings true on Twitter. But then how come the Barbican’s heavy use of the ‘ReTweet’ function enlivens their Twitter stream with an energy Tate’s is sadly lacking? In fact, by reflecting back to its audience their own conversations about the Barbican, they minimise the need for a truly Barbican-esuqe voice while keeping the focus squarely on the debates the institution provokes.

Perhaps Tate is a conversational adversary of very particular kind; one whose voice should be less clear on its own but somehow present in our responses. And maybe it’s up to us to tweet our own tails off about Tate and gain a better connection that way. But either way, I can’t help feeling disappointed. I swear I’ve heard Tate and I’m telling you, it just doesn’t sound like that!

Woof, woof!