Military Abstaction

About

Issues involving the ambiguous meaning of productivity and the abnormality of autonomy

Artist as a social being (Web 2.0)

I was born in 1996 and define myself as a member of the digital native generation. ‘Digital Native’ refers to those who were born in the 90s, an era after the generalized supply of information technology devices during the first world. Here, the conditions that identified our generation as ‘a generation conforming with technical changes’ stand out. They are the biggest supporters of ‘post-internet’ discussion, so they consider experiences mediated by the screen as the original basis of the visual and perceptual environment. The terms like Art on the internet, Gene McHugh, virtual reality, Web2.0, Internet of Things, the emergence of ‘digital native’ after 2012, net art, atomized boundaries between material and immaterial things, born in the 1980s, born in the 1990s, an ‘always-on’ era, and World Wide Web are concepts and conditions that sustain post internet art (Jeong, 2018).

As a part of the generation that grew in technological environments, I admit that this forms the foundation of who I am as an artist. Yet, there are questions about whether defining the environment, which involves creating complicated forms in a more elevated, farther away, and rapid manner with technology as the medium, as art is only limited to progressionism that ends up with simply digesting it in a formative manner. Moreover, it brings doubts about whether it degenerates artists as producers of self-contained works that are consumed by specific interested parties based on what they discover daily without any emotional preparation.

The exhibition MILITARY ABSTRACTION leaves off from the following point. Does art reflect on social relationships? (It is clear that art deals with social relationships. However, doesn’t art in the present-day chase after a specific image instead of staring into surrounding relationships around the position where one is standing?) Or is art misemployed for production? If not, does that purpose form art with whatever method is applied? In that case, what is the ‘decision’ (conditions of determination or what forms the basis) that is implemented through the overall ‘production relations’ and what does the concept of decision imply when the production relations harmonize with the ‘given stages of material productivity?’

Jisoo Jit Seo

Berlin, December 2022