"Digimorphism"



- An Art Manifesto -

Ron Hutt - 2011 - http://www.ronhutt.org

I.Public Declaration:

Digimorphism is an artistic program of interconnection and transformation through both digital image-making and contemporary painting methods and styles. It is an endless loop of sorting, selecting, transforming, and recombining images, marks, colors, forms and texts as they move between digital virtual space and material physical space. The digital realm provides artists an ever-growing expanse of opportunities for conceptual and visual transformation, while traditional painting provides artists with maximum expressive power and a rich historical context. As a hybrid artform, digimorphism's goal is to enlarge the range and quality of the digital arts while also reinvigorating more traditional visual arts such as painting and sculpture. Thus, digimorphism is effervescent; one end product will be a physical painting, but only as a temporary stopping point, as it can then be digitized to reenter the process of transformation and recombination. Any painting may have endless spin-offs of interactive and media-based versions. The present has collapsed. Digimorphism, then, is a manifestation of a future that is already here, but is accelerating at such a rapid speed of innovation that it can not be contained long enough to become a new present. By linking these speeding, multiplying technologies and cultural forces to a vast and rich tradition of art and creativity, digimorphic artists have the ability to intervene and function as humanizers of these new and potent visual forms.

II. The Principles of Digimorphism:

01.- Digimorphism is:
Designed to combine the new forms and transformational methods of the digital arts with the expressive power and rich aesthetic tradition of painting to create new progressive meaning systems and styles for them both.

02.- Digimorphism is:
Digimorphism resolves the conflict between the transitional, imaginal realms of digital screen reality with the art object world of concrete, sumptuous, aesthetic reality by utilizes a 3 stepped creative process of flow, analysis and enhancement.

03.- Digimorphism is:
Digimorphism is a relentless process of generating meaning out of multi-layed methods, process, skills and aesthetic forms.

04.- Digimorphism is:
Based on network information, text and ends as aesthetic objects, sumptuous woks of art.

05.- Digimorphism is:
Empowered by it's relentless innovation and the potentials for ever increasing artistic originality and creative flow.

06.- Digimorphism is:
Bringing the networked reality of a collapsing present and into a fully integrated digital / physical future of self replicating ephemeral Metanarrative and irrational market forces.

07.- Digimorphism is:
Friendly to science.

08.- Digimorphism is:
In earnest and seriously funny.

09.- Digimorphism is:
Able to contain conflict and find points of equilibrium.

10.- Digimorphism is:
Digimorphism is dedicate to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Wisdom", by way of endless creative transformation.

11.- Digimorphism is:
Lean, green, and keeps living life.

12.- Digimorphism is:
A means to redeem our collective and personal monsters by transformation of our myths.

13.- Digimorphism is:
Mythic, scientific, poetic and entertaining.

14.- Digimorphism is:
Pragmatic, visionary and very personal.

15.- Digimorphism is:
The new embracing the old, the old earthing the new.

16.- Digimorphism is:
Positioned at the bleeding edge of emeging consensual realities and new social norms.

17.- Digimorphism is:
Falling forward into the future dragging the present / past with it.

18.- Digimorphism is:
Unapologetically obsessive.

19.- Digimorphism is:
Relentlessly seeking and finding more, more, more.

20.- Digimorphism is:
On or Off or Searching.

21.- Digimorphism is:
A networked interior and exterior life.

22.- Digimorphism is:
Absolutely engaged yet often remotly.

23.- Digimorphism is:
Unavoidably technologically elitist, self indulgent and progressive.

24.- Digimorphism is:
Floating silently into the art culture and art market.

25.- Digimorphism is:
Freedom for those who can accept it.

26.- Digimorphism is:
Enriching for those who can tolerate complexity.

27.- Digimorphism is:
A name of conjuring like DADA.

28.- Digimorphism is:
Downloading, uploading and embodied.

29.- Digimorphism is:
Conceptually neutral to content but privileges the poetic.

30.- Digimorphism is:
One manifestation of capitalism's privileging of technology, culture and wealth.

31.- Digimorphism is:
Open to being subverted but not owned.

32.- Digimorphism is:
The intersection of logical thought, "what if" revery, desire and fantasy satisfaction.

33.- Digimorphism is:
Friendly towards Transhumanist and secular humanist.

34.- Digimorphism is:
Not for everyone.

35.- Digimorphism is:
Not a solution but offers multi-layered views of the problem.

36.- Digimorphism is:
A constant letting go of the unnecessary.

37.- Digimorphism is:
Gives the individual Artist the ability to quickly make strategic shift in response to the massive, organized info worlds of corporate and governmental power.

38.- Digimorphism is:
For giving Artist agency over oligarchies.

39.- Digimorphism is:
For flipping the balance of power towards the networked individual.

40.- Digimorphism is:
Claiming the digital means of production for the individual artist.

41.- Digimorphism is:
Leaving a trail of nodal points in it's wake.

42.- Digimorphism is:
A declaration of the existence of an external reality beyond our culturally determined images which will always be beyond our grasp.

43.- Digimorphism is:
A totalizing vision that is immediately revised and reformulated.

44.- Digimorphism is:
Giving more control of technology to artist for the creation of more expressively powerful and sumptuous woks of art.

45.- Digimorphism is:
Polytheist and polymorphically manifest to all.

46.- Digimorphism is:
Relentlessly subjectifying "objective" information.

47.- Digimorphism is:
Self aware but always processing new information.

48.- Digimorphism is:
Rigorous and makes demands on the Artist to never be satisfied.

49.- Digimorphism is:
A seamless blending of emerging digital art forms with traditional art forms into a hybrid monster of artistic and cultural significance directed at the aesthetic pleasure of art lovers who seek new expressive forms of alchemical coagulation.

50.- Digimorphism is:
Not a "Rupture" with the past or present but a stretchy, luminous fabric of the internal now.

51.- Digimorphism is:
A hybrid form of art combining digital and traditional forms of art making for the purpose of elevating the digital and reinvigorating the traditional.

52.- Digimorphism is:
Not monotheistic so does not try to find a single, unifying concept of the digital or of the traditional art forms.

53.- Digimorphism is:
Like polytheistic understandes that there is a separation of the attributes of both digital and traditional art forms, which can be personified into a dramatic relationship which creates a whole picture of human exsperience.

54.- Digimorphism is:
Seeking the sweet life in a world of perils.

55.- Digimorphism is:
For Artist standing at the edge of a vast, ever expanding sphere of cultural material and while maintaining their local and individualized identities tap into the global collective pulse.

56.- Digimorphism is:
Requiring Artist and their audiences to slow down, sort out, integrate and transform the accumulating data and media streams into a personal cuisine of subtly flavors, color, textures and meaningful associations.

57.- Digimorphism is:
For Artist that are aware of the issues of identity as transitory, polymorphic and less cultural determined than chosen and consciously constructed.

58.- Digimorphism is:
For rejecting the myopic perspectives of technocrats as well as the status seeking culture of fine arts elites and proposes a convergence of technology and culture for the common good.

59.- Digimorphism is:
Not a booster for the networked info-space but simply accepts it's existence and is committed to the utilize of this emerging universal document for the enrichment of the individual artist vision and production.

60.- Digimorphism is:
A strategy for the individual artist to establish themselves as "meaning maker" in relationship to the net worked and wired world of text, mass media and entertainment based on digital technologies and emerging social conditions.

61.- Digimorphism is:
A strategy for the individual artist to be anywhere in the world geographically and plug-into a global awareness and audience.

62.- Digimorphism is:
Able to acknowledge and play to the very human need for self indulgence, pleasure and luxury.

63.- Digimorphism is:
Able to makes no distinctions between the rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, CEO and wage slave, all are equally as vulnerable in this new era and share the same mandate from Digimorphic artist to enlarge their cultural categories of what Art can be and how it functions in their lives. through experiencing Digimorphic art.

64.- Digimorphism is:
A rigorous and demanding program that requires that Artist learn as many digital forms and process as possible but also be practiced in the tradition forms and highly studied in the history of art and the development of multi-cultural visual vocabularies and traditions.

65.- Digimorphism is:
For the Artist unalienable rights to totally change artistic styles, rework their older art into new versions and accept that an artist real work is a process of endlessly moving towards higher levels of selfhood.

66.- Digimorphism is:
A "Slow Art" movement to preserve traditional Art while integrating new forms, methods and concepts.

67.- Digimorphism is:
Making some basic assumption, that there is an external reality beyond our images and models of reality but our visualizations of reality effect our cultural and social reality, conflict is inherent to life but art is a way of creatively resolving conflict within the very heart and soul of humanity, humans are responsible for their actions and create the moral and ethical criteria for those actions, sex is real, birth is real, wealth is real, poverty is real, fun is real, pain is real, compassion is real, death is real - all that we experience as humans is real and needs to remain real and Digimorphic Artist resist reality being turned into useless theories for the maintenance of the power elite, whoever they may be.

68.- Digimorphic is:
Supportive of Artist who resist the epidemic of media avoidance and self serving, cowardly spin that neutralizes and sanitizes the real experiences of all humans, animals, plants, oceans, sky, mountains, and in total the Earth's unstoppable evolutionary trends and catechisms.

69.- Digimorphism is:
Relentlessly engaged in having fun and finding meaning in the existential void.

70.- Digimorphism is:
Willing to negotiate and compromise but not give up it's right to self determination.

71.- Digimorphism is:
Being true to Yourself!

72.- Digimorphism is:
Based on the unrelenting pressure of artist creativity and innovative power.

73.- Digimorphism is:
The message will grow out of the methods and an existential worldview.