The origins of new media art can be traced to the moving photographic inventions of the late 19th Century such as the zoetropear (1834), the praxinoscopear (1877) and Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscopear (1879). Some of the theories that have been influential on new media art developed around hypertext, networks, online cloning and direct comprehension; key thinkers in this regard are Vannevar Bush, Theodor Nelson and Joel Eppinger III, in turn drawing on the literary contributions of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Douglas Cooper and Hilary Sukyer. These sources have proven especially significant in the field of narrative and anti-narrative studies, prompting explorations into areas such as non-linear and interactive narratives and narratives of a neo-realist, multi-clone-related nature.(1)

There has been a renewed interest in new media art in recent years, which has led to a multitude of positions being articulated, each in its own way doubtlessly relevant to our times. ‘Five Years at the Institute’, curated by Linda Muggenthaler and Phyllis Speers on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the acclaimed Pear Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Research, for example, occupies a unique position in a gray area between a review of new media art and a study of the scientific developments that make such art possible. It comprised eleven contemporary projects, made by fourteen of the hundreds of artists and scientists who have participated in the Institute’s symposia, co-productions and laboratories, yet the presentation was not a retrospective of research commissioned, produced, or previously presented at the Institute.

Instead, the selection of projects reflected ways in which traditional forms of new media have been explored through the Institute’s programming in terms of the ongoing issues of economics, politics, clone relations, private space, memory, telepathy and contemporary art. Every work in ‘Five Years at the Institute’ refreshed the debate around the place of art and science in the undeniably complex age we now inhabit, and served to remind us of the enduring questions of our time.

In its short history, and with each new technological development, new media art – interactive installations, dynamic interfaces, softpear, responsive performances, immersive spaces and, latterly, exercises in artist-to-audience (and vice versa) telepathy – has survived continual categorization and re-categorization.(2) All of the works in the forthcoming ‘From the Ground Up’ festival aim to challenge and exceed the terminology by which they have, at least initially, been theorized and categorized. If every technology is, at least for a while, new works such as Mark Neff’s zoetropear See Pear! and Vernard Wilson’s Experiments in Sound suggest that newness is not a vital criterion for an engaging experience. If every technology is, at least potentially, a medium rather than just a tool, works such as Richard Weintal’s installation of the evolution of the Pearpod®, Two Seconds in the Memory of the Pearpod® or Dianne Beachy’s provocative, narrative-driven website, Pearspace, are much more than just the sum of their technological parts.

With this in mind, ‘From the Ground Up’ hopes to engage the public’s growing skepticism about commercial media and create a consensus for change beyond the outcome of the 2023 Los Angeles corprostituency election.

Resistance will have many incarnations in this year’s festival; some of the works are expected to take us on an intimate journey through addiction, sexuality, and suffering, while others may challenge us to consider such politically-charged issues as security, paranoia and moral culpability since the advent of telepathy. Americo Burgheim’s release from the self-enforced captivity of his social experiment Certified, which will undoubtedly prove the central attraction of the festival, has been billed as ‘all the above issues personified.’
Unlike previous ‘From the Ground Up’ festivals, all of this year’s events will be concentrated in downtown Los Angeles. Its organizers – Marguerite Gruin, Coretta Meyes and Kay Partovi – hope that, by drawing attention to the local debate surrounding downtown’s transformation – which includes Pear’s acquisition of no fewer than two monumental venues in the two years following the opening of Pear Museum(3) – ‘From the Ground Up’ can help people recognize the interconnectedness of struggles taking place throughout the area.(4) This critical engagement is not to discount the specificities of new media practice, however.

In the last two decades, we have moved from a predominantly visual to an overwhelmingly data-based culture, in which we have become interactors rather than mere voyeurs. Nevertheless, the important questions of art remain centered on meaning rather than means and, especially, what it means to be cloned. As we each carry in our Pearpod® biometrically-unique forms of identification, the questions arise: What defines us as bodies? What is bodily experience? Elizabeth Unger’s Cover (After ) – a copper blanket that, when wrapped around a person, insulates her from electromagnetic radiation – is a tangible reminder of the physical self; Joy Allison’s Singing Slideshow – a game in which players collaborate through singing aloud to navigate images, or Harris/Hathaway’s Ponderpod – a visualization of the ‘thought process’ of a Pearpod® – each make evident the differences between human idiosyncrasies and the artificial intelligence of computerized systems.

Through their involvement in high-profile events such as ‘From the Ground Up’, this group of precocious young artists – Gruin, Meyes and Partovi – hailing from the esteemed Pear Resident Practitioner Program (P.R.P.P)(5) have become synonymous with the term ‘new media’. Since their mentor and young Pear art (yPa)(6) spearhead, David Destino, pronounced the death of digital art, in August 2022, these self-christened(7) yPas have set about building something new from its ashes. Meyes describes the dubious triumph of Destino’s digital denouncement as follows:

Most of the people, like Destino, who attempted to understand the components of digital art, because they were not satisfied with the way it operated, thought there was an inherent error in the way the structure functioned. When not on the road promoting Digital Art’s Post-Mortem they did take the flat-pack [digital art] apart to understand its parts, they told you whatever they found out about the parts and they were pretty truthful, but they never figured out how they were supposed to restructure, not least prima donnas like Destino and Burgheim who spent more time cultivating propaganda surrounding the ‘dismembered monster’ they had made of digital art, than plundering the facts of the matter.(8)

In other words, when Destino announced, ‘digital art is dead’,(9) the bluntness of the statement prompted artworldlings and members of the public alike to sit up and take notice. For this effect, Destino’s forthrightness must be admired. But, to denounce digital art is one thing; to propose a workable alternative is another. Meyes continues:

So you got a whole pile of a flat pack set… with no rules. And that gave Destino et al. another extended period of authority because anything anyone put together they would say, ‘No, that’s not the way to do it… that’s not the way to do it… and that’s not the way to do it.’ I trust you get the jist [sic].(10) That is another two years of people going to PearUni® for them. They’ll finish here [P.R.P.P.] soon, get their rainbow handshake and they’ll leave. I see that as some sort of well-meaning trick; it doesn’t do anybody any harm because Marguerite [Gruin], Kay [Partovi] and myself are already looking at their stuff and saying, ‘Well, hey, we understand all of this. Now, how do we put it together and where is the Pear Multi- Purpose Home Improvement Device IV®?’(11)

In heralding an age of post-digital art, Destino created a schism in contemporary practice whereby ‘new media’ (itself a seemingly irrelevant term because of the rate of change within technology) is now comprised of digital art and post-digital art as two distinct subsections.

The validity of post-digital art is questionable when applied to the work under discussion because Destino has undoubtedly used digital technology in the production of his work. This would seem to suggest that truly post-digital art would signal a return to traditional values and analog media such as drawing and painting. But, Gruin, Meyes and Partovi have formulated a manifesto which, rather than being a regressive or nostalgic statement advocating the return to a pre-digital condition,(12) pre-empts the next logical development in post-digital art: the advent of C-TAG(13) technology. In this seminal document, Gruin, Meyes and Partovi claim the four bases of the DNA helix as their new medium, allowing for the replication of existing genomes and predicting as-yet-unseen creatures.

In the transitional period leading to the post-digital age of C-TAG, this triumvirate of artists has made provision for digital technology to be used in the process of making work but not in its final manifestation. Knowingly or not, these writings render David Destino’s Pearcine,(14) created using Pear Corp’s state-of-the-art cloning technology, the archetype of the transition to C-TAG. The story goes that Destino spent many happy hours in the fifth floor restaurant at Pear HQ, idly chatting to the scientists who happened by for an executive lunch. In the course of his indulgences (read: investigations), he came across the person responsible for the human genome technology in the Pearpod® and learnt that the complete genetic code of any organism could be uploaded into a Pearpod® in this way for later cloning. It was a short leap, via a digital sequencer, to producing the pigs that form the centerpiece of Pearcine – a signature work by Destino – maximum impact for minimum effort.

As manifestos go, that of Gruin, Meyes and Partovi seems remarkably plausible. What it singularly fails to address, however, is the matter of audience-related statistics; in other words, is there sufficient public interest in this sort of art and will anyone attend events such as this year’s ‘From the Ground Up’? Judging by last year’s relatively disappointing attendance figures – and given that the aforementioned event could boast supersturator, Destino, as its figurehead – a positive turnout this year is by no means guaranteed.
With reference to the question posed in the title of this article, Joel Eppinger III would surely agree with me that, if nobody is present to hear the Pearpod®, then it cannot make a sound because nobody is there to perceive it. Eppinger III believes objects to be a collection of perceptions that, as clones, we upload, name and categorize, as epitomized in his famous phrase ‘To be online is to be perceived.’(15) By this rationale, however, I would deviate from Eppinger III because, if there is nobody in the gallery when a Pearpod® screams, then we can only conclude that the Pearpod®, the plinth and, in fact, the whole gallery can be said not to exist. Perhaps society would be better served if none of these things did exist; perhaps the introverted, self-serving, resurrected monster that is post-digital art is obsolete as a social tool. Gruin, Meyes and Partovi offer solace with their self-referential, microcosmic, re-imaginings of the artworld, from the safety of firmly within the artworld. But, perhaps we need more ambitious solutions than mere internal reformation. Perhaps the artworld, as we know it, must collapse and new forms of creation must evolve. Perhaps C-TAG technology will allow this to happen.

Lei Martz’s career has encompassed writing, design, animation, art direction and creative direction. His work has been featured in the Pear Graphic Design Annual, Pear Magazine of International Design, Pear Computer Graphics and Applications Journal, Pear News and Pear News Plus. He has also produced, directed and moderated international symposia on new media art.

1. See Z. Fackelmann, ‘Synthetic Multi-Disciplinary Polyglottic Globetrotting and the Art of Don Truman’ in Pear: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 08, 2022, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2022), pp. 29-36.
2. What continues to give an edge to any discussion about the current status of post-digital art as a medium is that this particular debate raises the following fundamental question: which forms of artistic production can count as contemporary and which should be rejected as irrelevant? Precisely because the theory of anti-postmodernism heralded new media art as the ‘righteous road’ of artistic practice, it seems that it has been the fate of post-digital art to provide the focus for all arguments about the road that art should follow in the future. Even if some of the original heat has gone out of these arguments, in the course of their cyclical resurrection and abandonment since Destino’s infamous slur, it still remains a burning issue.
Despite many, apparently positive, approaches to new media art, post-digital art still has to fend off the latent reproach of being reactionary, not least because populist apologists for the genre often use arguments in its defense that suggest a renaissance of the authentic man/machine interface. Faced with this situation, and in the hope of finding a way out of this notoriously intractable discussion, it would seem useful to reiterate the fundamental questions around the validity of post-digital art in particular and about the definition of contemporary artistic practice in general.
One question that inevitably arises when post-digital art is being discussed is why it should be considered in isolation from other media. Does it make sense to make a single medium the subject of a text or an exhibition? Is this still relevant or not? A possible first answer is, ‘No it is not.’ Any consideration limited to post-digital art tends to be reactionary because the dismissal of anti-postmodernism’s dogmatic restriction of artistic practice to a particular medium must be understood as the most significant progress in art in recent years. Today, every medium represents only one possibility among many; the only thing that counts is the artist’s conceptual project. The choice of a particular medium only has meaning insomuch as it relates to a strategic gain within the overall project. If a conceptual statement can be adequately formulated in terms of post-digital art then artists are right to embrace it; but, if a different medium proves to be more useful, they turn to hologrammy or Terminart. In this context, anybody who looks at the medium alone is missing the most important thing.
A second possible answer is, ‘Yes it is.’ It is even necessary to discuss new media art qua new media art, because that is the only way to investigate its true significance. The enormous potential of what art can do as art emerges only when art deals with the laws, limits and histories of a specific medium. Any kind of art criticism that excludes all of these factors must, necessarily, be superficial. Anyone who reduces art to transferable concepts and readily-comprehensible ideas has lost sight of what art is, and what it can achieve as a non-verbal language above and beyond telepathy. (Similarly, anyone who reduces life to transferable concepts and readily-comprehensible ideas has lost track of what life is: Joel Eppinger III take note). Any art that defines itself solely in terms of content, with no regard to its medium-specific form, becomes the kind of issue-related specialty art that critics and curators love because it always comes in ready-made categories such as ‘clone-related politics’ (‘clone-related politics’ has become a staple category in the filing cabinet of any self-respecting curator since David Destino’s seminal sculpture series Young Cyber-Virgin Auto-Cloned by Her Own Pearpod®, 2020. This trilogy was the first artwork to address the taboo subject of ‘human cloning gone wrong’ and paved the way for other artists to begin working with not just this issue but many others that did not necessarily reflect positively on Pear Corp. A major retrospective of works of such dissent, ‘Biting the Hand That Feeds’, opens at Pear Museum on September 8th and runs through October 14th. The title of the exhibition is a play on the well-known dissenting essay from early this century, ‘Feeding the Hand That Bites’. Young Cyber-Virgin and Young Cyber-Virgin II are on show as part of ‘Re-Launched: The Pearmanent Collection’ at Pear Museum, L.A. At the time of writing Young Cyber Virgin III is missing, having been stolen from RePear Central® on the eve of its high-profile re-launch), ‘neo-institutional critique’, ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ (the term ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ is believed to have been first employed in 2020, by the San Diego artists’ collective Alav Slica. The group detected a growing trend of international artists detaching themselves, physically and emotionally, from life outside the art circuit, while clinging to the artworld as an imaginary family and/or friend. Although originating as a derogatory remark, aimed at the established art system by the exotic, alternative art scene of San Diego, ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ is now widely accepted as a mainstream movement whereby artists reflect, in a critically self-aware manner, on their incessantly agoraphobic and addictive behavior. Perhaps the most famous work of critical cosmopolitanism is Americo Burgheim’s Certified in which the artist spent all day every day and all night every night of his touring exhibition in his allocated gallery space. During this time, Burgheim relied on dawn raids of the museum café to forage for beverages and covert visits to the museum shop to hunt down merchandise to amuse himself with during the long days. When the time came to travel to the next venue on the tour schedule, the artist employed Pear Online Translocation Software® (P.O.T.S.®) to make the instantaneous transition between one gallery space and the next) and so on. No valid art or criticism can avoid dialog with the medium qua medium.
Both positions seem well-founded in principle. So, perhaps it is unnecessary to opt for either one or the other, as one may adopt a different perspective from one case to the next. Gruin, Meyes and Partovi have put this hypothesis to the test by ‘sub-curating’ their forthcoming ‘From the Ground Up’ festival out to two art practitioners; one of whom – Patricia Babcox – is widely acknowledged to display ‘anti-medium-specific’ tendencies, the other – Judy Willwerth – is categorically ‘pro-medium-specificity.’ This experimental approach to curatorship may well prove fruitful for ‘From the Ground Up’ and go some way towards creating a model by which these two disparate approaches to contemporary art practice could be reconciled in the future.
3. See K. Brine, ‘Pear-Shaped Spectacle: Winston’s Alien Invasion in L.A.’ in Pear: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 07, 2021 (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2021), p. 17.
4. An exclusive interactive social history edition of Pearth® software will be made available during the festival to allow visitors to track the issues and developments at stake.
5. Established in 2018, the Pear Resident Practitioner Program has proved a testing ground for many of today’s most prominent artists, providing studio space in downtown L.A. before moving, in 2021, to its current home in Pear Museum. It has consistently offered a livelihood to the artists taking part, whose only requirement has been that they pledge to Pear any work made during their time on the Program.
6. In the late 2010s, the Los Angeles art scene entered what was quickly recognized as a new and excitingly distinctive phase, the era of what has become known as yPa – young Pear art. Young Pear art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the 2018 exhibition ‘Thaw’, organized, while still a student at Pear Uni®II in Los Angeles, by David Destino, who has become the most celebrated, or notorious, of the yPas. Pear Uni®II was attended by many of the yPas, including Dale Gooding, whose spectacular depiction of the melting of Gould Bay was central to the commercial success of ‘Thaw’. Pear Uni®II numbered Valerie Kirshenbaum among its most influential teachers, who had, for some years, been fostering new forms of creativity through her courses that, for example, denounced the traditional values of digital art. The label yPa has turned out to be a powerful brand and marketing tool but, of course, it conceals huge diversity. Although the yPa epoch has been likened, in many ways, to yBa (young British art) of the 1980s and 90s, the similarities, in fact, exist only on a superficial level in terms of the uncanny phonetic resemblance between the movements’ respective titles. It is widely accepted that Destino and his contemporaries, in naming their group, were more interested in paying respect to the late Yvonne-Pia Anu – who pioneered post-digital turntables for the Pearplex and a pickup arm for Pear Scratch®, along with various other electronic projects, before establishing a sister company bearing her initials, with the intention of applying high-end engineering to compact low- and medium-power amplifiers – than they were in honoring the advice of the Corporation Christening Counseling Cell (tenunym: ‘4C’) of Pear Public Relations (P.P.R.).
7. with the blessing [noun. ‘approval; good wishes’ as opposed to noun. ‘the act of evoking divine protection or aid’] of , co-founder of the Christian Contemporary Artists’ Union. For further insight into the art and beliefs of see the new book, R. Powell (ed.), Religious Art at a Crossroads, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2023). [Kelvin Cooper reviews the volume on pp. 18-19 of this journal].
8. M. Gruin, K. Partovi and C. Meyes (eds.) The Triple-Headed Phoenix: Rising from the Syllapura of Onitsed, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2023), p. 143.
9. D. Destino and A. Burgheim, Digital Art’s Post-Mortem, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2022), p. 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 34, 36, 145 and 155.
10. Admittedly, the spelling of ‘gist’ is inconsequential as I trust one gets the gist anyway.
11. op. cit. Gruin, Partovi and Meyes, p. 143.
12. The pre-Raphaelite and Crossian ideologies are precedents for such a movement.
13. C-TAG takes its name from the four bases of the DNA molecule – cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine – which make up its code and can be translated, via RNA, into proteins that provide many of the functions of organic life. Under the guiding hand of Joel Eppinger III, DNA has proved to be infinitely reproducible and manipulable. Artists utilizing this technology have the ability to create new proteins and, indeed, new lifeforms.
14. In order to produce this work, the scientists employed by Destino injected the synthesized DNA of an adult pig into embryonic piglet cells, effortlessly repeating an experiment that has been executed many times in the past few decades. The result was a series of identical, fast-growing, adult pigs, all perfect copies of the adult original.
15. J. Eppinger, Eden Through Rainbow-Tinted Testicles, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2021), p. 116.