There’s a rule of thumb in the real estate business that if you want to know which part of a city is going to go up-market next, look at where the artists go to work. The combination of cheap space and available properties draws in artists – never slow to spot an opportunity – which then brings in the “cool crowd”, which then brings in the “wannabe cool but wealthy crowd”, and so the process of gentrification begins.

It’s that same ability to spot an opportunity – something new and full of potential – that often puts artists at the forefront of any cultural movement. And so it is with the idea of Post Digital, which is almost defined as an artist movement currently. Certainly, that’s exactly how Wikipedia sees it right now:

Postdigital is a term which has recently come into use in the discourse of digital artistic practice. This term points significantly to our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. It points to an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital. If one examines the textual paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either the “postdigital” society has intrinsic meaning, or it is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes art as a totality.

And this is an idea that’s being widely explored through art already. The MU exhibition space in Eindhoven ran an exhibition called After the Bit Rush – Design in a Post Digital Age:

The digital revolution, the great Bit Rush, is over. The question whether something is analogue or digital does not matter anymore. Everything we do is infl uenced by digital technology. Just as air and water, the property of being digital is only noticed when it is not there, not when it is there.

And that’s a core idea of Post Digital: that something’s analogue or digital nature is, actually, irrelevant. We Make Money Not Art has an excellent post, full of pictures and videos of the more interesting Post Digital ideas from the exhibition.

These are the first, playful and often obscure attempts to reconcile digital technology with our existing world, to create thought leadership, if you like, that will be followed by the more prosaic, and the more commercial. Russell Davies, who coined “Post Digital” in the context we’re using, and who will be part of the NEXT 2012 programme, spoke at the conference, outlining some interesting ideas:

Playful Post Digital Culture Symposium by MU STRP and TUe Russell Davies from stichting MU on Vimeo.

 

Lead Photo by note thanun on Unsplash