[ISEA98] Panel: Horit Herman-Peled – The Disappearance of the Art Object

Panel Statement

Panel: Virtual Interventions: Digital Avant Gardes

These auratic shapes fill physical spaces and mirror endless outward and inward transactions of cultural codes. Inscribing dominant western cultural codes into an art object produces a unique commodity with speculative exchange value. While the visual representations etched onto the object grant it its integrity, they are held captive by its definition as a commodity. Digital technology functions as a means of producing, distributing, and viewing cultural codes, never becoming an art object. This disappearance of the object emancipates the art producers, their production, and their viewers, from the bondage of the mirrored object situated in the commercial context. Stripping the artistic codes from their material objectivity, freeing them from the constraints of the art market, delineates new possibilities for making art, which is oppositional, radical and autonomous. The possibility of a state of mind of detachment from material objectivity, combined with the digital means of creation, can extricate a stream of free imagination that would melt into endless web arrangements of distribution. This could result in a practical context functioning as a metaphor for fragmented society. Are these the conditions for the collapse of the hegemony of the art object?

  • Horit Herman-Peled (Israel), Oranim College, Kiryat Tivon. Horit Herman Peled is an Israeli artist and writer who has exhibited internationally and occupied various teaching positions throughout the world. She has been Director of the computer art programme at Kalisher Art School, Tel Aviv. In 1994, she founded “ZIKIT” multimedia and communications company, specialising in advertising for electronic billboard across Israel, Europe, and South Africa, including at Ben Gurion, Israel International Airport, ABSA Bank, Johannesburg, SA. Horit Herman Peled, Digital artist, resides in Tel Aviv, teaches digital art at Pollack college, Talpiot College in Tel Aviv and Oranim College, Kiryat Tivon. Israel. With the digital media, she maps, deconstructs and reconstructs a virtual world where moral cultural memory is the prevailing force. “The digital revolution continuously renders into a “spatial unified brain” orchestrated by a centralized/decentralized mechanism of selective, hierarchical memory called Cyberspace. Access to, and decoding signs in the virtual world are restricted to those who possess the digital means of production. Advantageous inclusion is granted to some citizens in the first world, at the price of excluding the majority of the world. Exclusion from the world digital revolution disadvantages, deepens poverty and creates the conditions for terror. Furthermore, the ability of the computerized digit to cache and camouflage individual social information with bodily physical characteristics, molds it into a tool of total control, an unseen energy propelling terror against those in the third world who need to find a living in the first. Horit will be developing work around the notion of totalitarianism and its relationship to information control. Projects: 1998 “The Disappearance of the Art Object”, Virtual Interventions: Digital Avant-Grades panel of ISEA98 at Liverpool. 1998 “Terror-Stripping identities” Gaza workers entering Israel. 1996-7 “Israeli Artists’ Colonies, Ein Hod, Jaffa, Zeffat”, an internet archeological virtual work revealing layers of wiped out communities. 1995 “Navigating in representations of Israeli society”, interactive live compu-terized video, sound and digital images involving the outside and inside of the physical space, criticizing the concept displacement. “Neither Here Nor There”, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv. 1994 curated and participated in the first Israeli computer art exhibition, “Seriality/ Randomness”, Kalisher Five Gallery, Tel Aviv Israel. “1994Unnamedi interactive live computerized video, sound and digital images involving the viewer with the resonance of two middle eastern women. An arab women 9 month pregnant which was shot by a Jewish settler in the west bank and an Israeli soldier woman who committed suicide the very same day. 1994 “Thank God for not creating * (making) me a woman” electronic Sign, “Emergency Space”, Bograshov Gallery, el Aviv. 1991 Miami Dade Community College, Florida, U.S.A 1990 Eurographics 90, Montreux, Switzerland 1989 Artware, Cebit, Hanover, Germany