Artists working in digital terrain, as in so many other corners of the internet, can get defensive if not downright nasty when it is pointed out, but there’s no denying it: the influence of new media artists has, until now, been very limited. Claire Bishop, an art historian at the Graduate Center in New York, delivered the bad news in an article called Digital Divide, published in 2012 and endlessly debated since. In the ‘90s, when the world wide web came into being and email became ubiquitous, Bishop expected the art world to be transformed. Largely, this didn’t happen. “Whatever happened to digital art?” Bishop asked. The answer she came up with was that the really important shift in contemporary art of the last 20 years was not towards the digital but away from it. Noting the recent popularity of real-life interactions in galleries, the huge rise in performance art and the high esteem given to obsolescent media like film and slide projectors, she concluded that the art world generally responds to the upheavals of digital technology by disavowing that they are taking place.
