Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film . Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Abstract

Minutes before visiting Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I was perched by the window of a coffee shop, attempting to back up my iPhone to my laptop. I needed to make space for the photographs of the exhibit I knew I would be taking—indeed, that I considered an essential prerequisite to writing about it at all. Naturally, my phone froze with a spinning circle on the screen and refused to turn back on. At the conveniently nearby Apple Store, a cheerful employee suggested that rather than waiting for an appointment with tech support, I could buy a new phone and return it later if my old device regained consciousness. And since I wanted the phone for photos, I might as well try the Pro. And so it came to be that I spent my time at Digital Witness carefully wielding a $999 camera, swiping away notifications about all the smart ways it could now document the world around me. Erase unwanted objects! Enhance in-frame audio! Record in 3D! Digital witnessing indeed.My new device seemed to encapsulate the many ways digital technologies have changed our relationship to witnessing—making possible ubiquitous capture, establishing new burdens of proof, aesthetically transforming the actual images through automated computational means. To my surprise, however, the witness referred to by the show was not digital photography, as I had assumed, or social media, as in the St. Vincent song that the curators cite as their inspiration for the title. Instead, the witness is the show itself, which observes and narrates the revolutionary growth of digital software from the age of the personal computer onward. In an essay concerned with the kind of digital witness I gripped in my hand, although written at the dawn of the iPod, John Durham Peters explains the notable slipperiness of the word “witness,” which refers to both a person, an act of seeing, and the testimony of what was seen.1 Witnessing comes with a three-piece set of historical baggage, Peters claims, in the form of its ties to law, theology, and atrocity, each of which ties witnessing in some form to deep moral and cultural forces, and most primordially, to questions of life and death. Digital Witness observes some trends in digital art from the age of the personal computer to the age of the personal feed, yet the question that dogged me throughout was: does it bear witness?This question feels particularly urgent given the long history of anxiety about digital images as witnesses. In a 1993 Los Angeles Times op-ed, media critic Brian Stonehill suggested it was no wonder a Simi Valley jury did not convict Rodney King’s assailants. Why should they believe the video of King’s beating when all year they had been assailed by commercials showing Humphrey Bogart hawking Diet Coke and Michael Jackson music videos filled with figures transforming race and gender? Three decades later, as synthetic media and AI-generated images flood our feeds, such early skepticism about digital witnessing seems less paranoid than prescient.The three areas of revolution witnessed in curators Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger’s exhibition, per the subtitle, are design, photography, and film—an already unusual grouping that proves insufficient to contain the actual works on display. The painter Lee Mullican’s digital drawing and Casey Reas’s custom software programs, for instance, fit more squarely within the absent term “art.” The intended unifier across these domains is the rise of digital tools, although the curators acknowledge these are far from the only areas affected (one could include music, fashion, and architecture, for example). This focus on tools permeates the exhibition catalog, where the Q&As peppered throughout all begin with each artist’s first experience manipulating digital images. The best answer comes from Reas, who evokes Tangrams, Lite-Brite, and cross-stitch, emphasizing the difference between digitality and computational technologies—an important elision in the show, which understands “digital” simply as the adjective form of the noun “computer.”Like Salvesen’s earlier LACMA show 3D: Double Vision (2018–19), the work in Digital Witness spreads broadly into visual culture. Also like 3D, one of the most compelling parts of the exhibition is the ability to experience the antiquated technologies firsthand. A row of Amiga 500s with Andy Warhol’s digital drawings pulsing across the screen is a highlight. But 3D was more narrowly focused, centered around the specific evolving fantasy of replicating reality in its dimensional richness rather than the tools developed to facilitate it. Encountering the richness of the myriad creative attempts to achieve this impossible idea was what made it interesting. Digital Witness lacks such a unifying concept, interrogating neither the digital nor the witness nor the tool. If this exhibition serves as a continuation of Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, LACMA’s 2023 show on the origins of computer art, it expresses all the narrative awkwardness of a sequel.If I appear to be taking too much issue with the categorization, it’s because the work itself is largely illustrative of the processes and tools that interest the curators in this anthropological endeavor. What organizes the show is three aesthetic moves that appear throughout the work on display: blur and sharpen (digital realism), morph and warp (computer aesthetics), and cut and paste (digital collage). The framing here situates us within premade software (Photoshop, most obviously) rather than in the world of coding, though some of the work is made through coding rather than premade tools. The video clip is dominant throughout. Screens play scenes from various sources, giving snippets of Jurassic Park, Björk music videos, dancing baby gifs. Several expected representations appear: Andreas Gursky’s crowded scenes, Takeshi Murata’s glitch art. Some omissions are surprising—graduate school seminar favorites Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Harun Farocki are missing, though four of Zach Blas’s “fag face masks” from his Facial Weaponization Suite (2012–14) make an appearance.Wandering through an exhibit filled with short clips gives the impression of walking through a digital feed, and the curation encourages that same passive state of absorption. The one work that knocked me out of my trance was Brian Bress’s Dune Medallions (2018). Nothing about the work needs to be digital—he could have shot it on film—but it embodies the processes and disorientation of the digital, making it strange again. Over the course of the video, shapes are cut out of a collage of photographs and illustrations of desert landscapes (a desert of representation?). The artist works from behind the collage, becoming visible through the holes that emerge at the same time the reverse side of the collage appears in pieces left dangling. He wears a camouflage costume that replicates the foreground collage. The various layers that emerge—the dangling paper cutouts; the flat desert collage; the moving, camouflaged body—trouble distinctions between surface and depth, movement and stasis. The work’s vertical orientation speaks to both the once-condemned, now de rigueur portrait orientation of mobile video and the human scale of the portrait. The labor of imagemaking is masked by the work itself, the artist only appearing in glimpses as holes are cut in the paper, but it is nevertheless made visible. As he continues to cut into the image, what initially seem to be mere graphic shapes turn into medallions of a sort. These serve as reminders of an alternative system of meaning, a return to the use value of images as religious icons, specific and nonfungible, yet the presence of Bress’s robot-like figure in disguise challenges such self-serious interpretation.The flattening of design, commercial filmmaking, and photography obscures what’s at stake with the growth of digital tools. The issues raised by AI are not absent—standing in for the phenomenon of deepfakes is, oddly, a video featuring a deepfake Mark Zuckerberg—yet these issues are, somewhat fittingly, lost in a sea of other screens competing for our attention. The unaddressed phenomenon of the digital here is the democratization of images: text, photographs, and film all become digital images, while black morphs into white in the Michael Jackson video or the Nancy Burson composite. The politics of this flattening enacted by the computer go unaddressed by either artist or curator. In the catalog’s Q&A, the answers to the repeated question of what is lost in the conversion to digital are illuminating, ranging from blanket denial (“I can’t think of anything that was lost after switching from analog to digital”) to sentimental nostalgia (“perhaps spontaneity”; “a sort of ‘warmth’ or ‘charm’”). A kitschy aesthetic of lime green and steel throughout the galleries gives the feel of a Nickelodeon studio tour in the 1990s rather than an important locus of inquiry. That artificially glowing green continues into the catalog, where its ubiquity results in the disorienting yet poignant experience of looking up from the texts to encounter a real-world tinted rose.In the digital revolution, the camera’s status as witness has been one of the primary concerns of media scholarship and the popular press. The general trajectory has been one of panic (“Images are losing esteem everywhere, and why? Because we have more control over them than ever.”2) followed by a recalibration (digital images understood as “radically breaking with older modes of visual representation while at the same time reinforcing these modes”3) to a new reassessment with generative AI. As witnesses to the digital, what have artists had to say? As viewers of this art and visual culture, what should we think? The exhibit neither celebrates nor condemns, but rather meekly taxonomizes, samples, and entertains.Wandering the galleries in the hazy days between Donald Trump’s second election and his inauguration, the existential threat that “digital tools” now present to democracy was top of mind. Days after I visited the exhibition, the CEOs of Adobe (a sponsor of the exhibit), Apple, and Microsoft each pledged $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. As I write this, Elon Musk’s teams are worming their way through federal data sets, witnesses to the sensitive information of institutions and individuals. “To witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it,” Peters writes.4 Once we have witnessed, we cannot honestly say that we did not know. What responsibilities are kindled by this exhibit, this witnessing of the digital? Exiting the exhibition, my gleaming iPhone still in hand, I stood to watch installers mocking up the adjacent Imagining Black Diasporas exhibit.5 Printer paper delineated where the sleek vinyl text (digitally designed, no doubt) would go. Curation and polish produce the veneer of comprehension, of control, suggesting to us that this work, this world is understandable. The seams of this process, the labor that goes into them, reminds us that this work is done by mere mortals like us, and we all can and indeed do have the responsibility to engage in the always unfinished processes of meaning making. As I snapped a picture, a guard told me no photography was allowed of the installation process. This moment was foreclosed for witnessing, digital or otherwise.