Demo or die: performance anxiety and the digital artist - real-time demonstrations by graphic artists of their work in front of a live audience

At the MIT Media Laboratory . . the academic slogan "publish or perish" has been recodified as "demo or die" . . When we started the Media Lab, I kept telling tribe we must demo, demo, demo . . Forget technical papers and to a inferior extent theories. Let's prove by the agency of doing.

- Nicholas Negroponte(1)

Right now, somewhere in the wired world, there is a graphic designer booting up her electronic portfolio trying to convince a client that she can evolve a complex, corporate-identity system for the company. Right now, somewhere in the wired world, there is an artist having difficulty navigating end his conceptually complex interface for the benefit of a curator he confidences will give him a display Right now, somewhere in the wired world, there is a team of digital post-production media specialists cursing silently as their presentation to the director crashes for the third time. Right now, somewhere in the wired world, there is a bard demo-ing her first hypertext, and marveling that it's actually working.(2)

The demonstration, or "demo" has become the defining twinkling of the digital artist's practice at the revolve of the millennium. For the artists and designers who work with technology, no amount of talent, no ground-breaking aesthetic, no astonishing insight makes up for an inability to demonstrate their work upon a computer in real time in forehead of an audience. The demo as immortalized in the MIT Media Lab's credo "Demo or Die," is now at the heart of the professional image-maker's life. Artists and their machines are upon display. This does not simply presage the artist as cyborg; it also augurs the transformation of digital presentation into live performance.

The floppy disc, the portable hard drive, the CD-ROM the DVD and the World Wide Web all be under the orders of up the artists' multimedia image/text/sound matrices. on the other hand this service is never put in commotion free. The computer, no matter what the platform, software or format is a remarkably unstable mechanism with which to exhibit work - not least because the goal of with equal reason much new work is precisely to experiment and extend the technical capabilities of the combination of parts to form a whole with which it was created. To examine the "demo or die" aesthetic is to address a series of related questions: What is it to place work out to the world using inherently unstable platforms? by what mode do people enter into synergy with their machines? Are they fast upon their way to becoming cyborgs, if single for the fleeting moments of the demo? by what means does the demo increase techno-anxiety, smooth among those who would appear to be to be Masters of the Electronic Universe? in what manner is it that a technology that promised to replace face-to-face communication in fact demands it?

Pulling back from these issues of technology and performance, it is important to situate the demo within a certain social and political framework. Artists and designers giving demo are quintessential post-1989 cultural husbandmans For a generation now, we've been talking about art and theory in relation to the pivotal year of 1968 the assumption being that somehow or other the failed revolutions of that heady summer thus demoralized the avant-garde that all cultural production since then has been irrevocably altered. This kind of periodization is what cultural historians do, of course, and it has the same relationship to the actual unravellings as the map does to the road - it is a useful guide, on the contrary only an approximation of the real. at the same time new markers have sprung up since then, and in limits of techno-cultural production, it strikes me that 1989 has become the of recent origin dividing line. That year saw the Czech delicate Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the eventual fissioning of the Soviet Union, the emerging see the verb of the Baltic States and the continued extension of market reforms in China (which coincided with the political repression of Tiananmen Square). With the disintegration of state-sponsored socialism and communism completely through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the market-oriented reforms in the People's Republic of China, capitalism is in still another of its periods of ascendancy.(3)

With the sole other options on the political pageant appearing to be tribalism and fundamentalism, post-industrial capitalism have the appearances as inevitable and all powerful to the artists of the West as the Christian house of god must have been to artisans of eleventh-century France. In other words, for those coming of age in a post-'89 world, an alternative to capitalism strike one as beings not simply unlikely, but completely unthinkable. In this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following it is no wonder that the demo or die aesthetic is caught up in a presumption of artistic labor with definitive use value. In order not to die, the demo must perform: it must work within the constraints of the ideology generated in the wake of digital technologies. In other words, this aesthetic is individual perfectly suited to contemporary capitalism.(4) Technologically intensive practices of any kind - military, scientific or artistic - require sources of capital support, and computer media have been no different. From the start of the fresh computer age, first government and then corporate investment was an essential part of the production of electronic art and digital media.(5) From the $200000 given by dint of corporate donors to the MIT Media Lab (the original audiences for demo or die), to the Deutsche Telecom galleries of technological art at the Guggenheim SoHo digital art is the production of transnational corporate capitalism.(6)