Contemplating Art

By Emily Zeek

It is an ambitious undertaking in the age of Trumpian anti-intellectualism to create a brand that explicitly embraces a sense of cultivated excellence. However, within the philistine environment of contemporary society and drawing perhaps on a persistently defiant artistic impulse, the founders, curators and artists involved in Denver Digerati have embarked on an effort to digitally materialize the esoteric and enlightenment, bringing a meditative artistic intelligence and inspired mysticism to a digital online landscape shook in recent years by electoral hacks and government cyber wars, propaganda, and filled with pedestrian corporate advertising.

As artistic vanguards, defying the cultural trends set forth by bureaucratic elements in modern society, curators of Supernova, the annual online digital video art festival, have populated screens not with a cheap form of enlightenment—narcissism offered by traditional capitalism, white supremacy and misogynistic ideologies—but rather worldly truths that cross international boundaries and incorporate a diversity of artists and creators.  

But artists have always had to cut through the noise of dominant discourses to intentionally carve out beautiful, aesthetic spaces embodied with wisdom. Art is about desire, about what we desire for ourselves and society and how to materialize and embody that desire. As Black queer feminist scholar Audre Lorde writes in her essay, Uses of the Erotic, “It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work.  To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society.”  

It’s not a new phenomenon to turn to digital space with one’s desire—after all the internet’s most pervasive utility has historically been pornographic. But as we collectively mature through the internet age, our desires continue to grow more sophisticated as well. What makes Digerati a departure from the internet of old is the use of digital space to highlight contemplative digital environments that simulate a state of wisdom, in some cases caused by tranquil aesthetic choices, and other times by chaotic manifestations of the absurd. The offerings in this year’s festival show our collective consciousness growing in real time. 

There are a series of nine programs under the heading Re-Generation in this year’s festival, including one competition of about a dozen short videos competing for a grand prize and a residency. As a whole the competition videos reflect fatigue with the dirtiness and grime of digital online space, and ideologies that have reached their expiration dates. Bleak industrial environments, profiteering corporations, and botched experiments provide the backdrop for the series seeking regeneration from unseemly forces operating in the world today. Interspersed into these dystopian themes are executions of astounding beauty, creativity and inspiration.

In Currents Off the Invisible Shores, Gloria Fan Duan and Alessia Lorea Arregui create a sweet and saccharine dreamscape, rendering visual poetry out of electrical currents simulating water, with lovely words and seductive phrases voiced throughout.  As ephemeral contemplative scenes of fluidity and hydration, the artwork replenishes and regenerates the digital space, serving as a palate cleanser from the dystopian nightmarish reality we’ve been inhabiting.  More such visually succulent works are found in the auxiliary program Age of Aquarius, curated by Livy Snyder.

Other works in the competitive programs offer bleak digitized thought experiments illustrating the mechanized mind.  In Eunseo Kim’s Megolomania, her main character is “sucked into his delusional world while reading his childhood diary in the hospital room.”  We Will Love You by Linyou Xie provides a glimpse into the workings of a video game like mind we can feel but cannot see. The wandering coder in Louis Crevier’s Sometimes I think about things and sometimes I get sad anthropomorphizes personal demons, literally sending them through a baggage carousel at a desolate airport.  

The graphics and visuals present in the works cross aesthetic and technical barriers.  John Harlan Norris’s Costume Change for Ever and Eunseo Kim’s Megolomania utilizes flat drawing techniques while Johannes Duncker’s Soft Rains perfects a three dimensional visual environment with beautiful depth.  While some of the works create extensive storylines like John Butler and Lina Theodorou’s Jellyfish Intelligence delving into complex thought experiments, others are shorter visual outlines and sketches of digitized space, like Lee Yebin’s Penetrating Being which melds piles of fleshy beings in a black void.  

This conscious inclusive ethos is part of the mission statement of Supernova and Denver Digerati that is shaped by a “belief that equity is achieved by inclusionary practices.” It should be noted that this mission is not just a platitude of diversity.  The commitment to these values is present in all aspects of the festival from curation to juror selection. Works from Glasgow to Los Angeles to South Korea from creators of Indian to Vietnamese descent, are balanced in gender parity and represent creators with a variety of levels of educational attainment—some have MFAs in diverse fields such as Architecture and Art and some are self taught.  

In addition to visual signifiers present in the works, music accompaniment produces a heightened state of meditative consciousness through repetitive beats and EDM inspired techno-trances. In Soft Rains, the soundtrack by Kai Andresen and Mehmet Guren, simulates a hypnotic state of consciousness similar to the effects of electronic dance music pairing lighting with music in immersive environments.

One might expect that artists free from the limitation of a corporeal body in digitized space would embrace a liberated identity, taking on abstracted, wavelike or electronic forms. But the majority of the works in Regeneration make use of at least one figurative element—the anonymous body. The enduring figures present across many of the digital works taunt the viewer, making us more aware of the confines to our material bodies. As the artificial entity in Soft Rains approaches a burning bush on his path to a tranquil nirvana, he gently nudges our consciousness to see ourselves as something separate, more durable and sustaining than our fragile tissues.

While mainstream culture has regressed in recent years fueled by Trump era populism into pseudoscience and misinformation, digital artists have been forced to recalibrate society's values and feed an eager malnourished populace with new ideas. Populist leaders turned internet charlatans--simultaneously denouncing the institutions of higher learning and scientific inquiry as untrustworthy and fraudulent while encouraging their followers to “do their own research”—appeal to a certain egotistical drive in the human psyche that desires wisdom without discomfort. 

But Digerati, a 501 3(c) non profit, offers an alternative to this bleak capitalist dystopia where people can turn to be nurtured, inspired and challenged.  The internet as a placeholder of our collective consciousness is expanding through festivals like Supernova which build out spaces of mysticism, esoteric knowledge and enlightenment in doing so superseding the superficial potential of the pornographic, propagandistic and exploitative internet and reclaiming from false prophets the spiritual potential of evolution, regeneration and growth. 

Supernova Focal Competition Program No.1

Supernova Focal Competition Program No.2

Supernova Focal Competition Program No.3