Art as digital counter practice

The call for new frameworks to understand the increasing complexities of the contemporary digital context is not new. Innovative approaches to the digital have given rise to design literacies, the maker movement and coding, which are now integrated into many educational and community programs. However, as the tensions of the digital era have become more ubiquitous and pronounced, researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines are exploring the challenges and opportunities that emerge from using digital technologies. Contemporary art has been at the forefront of this. This article explores the work of artists like Evan Roth, Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen, who are grappling with the complexities of the increasing digitisation of everyday life. These artists do not always use digital technologies as their primary medium, rather they activate a diverse range of media to interrogate our relationship to the digital. The artists we look at use analogue media, embodied, performative and sound works to explore the increasingly porous threshold between the digital and the biological. What these artists' works have in common is their focus on how the digital is shaping contemporary life. In this way, art becomes a relay through which to de-familiarise, problematise and reimagine our relationship to digital technologies. Indeed, the experimental, ambiguous and indeterminate qualities of contemporary art can be used to rebut the certainties of binary code and its relationship to capital. In reading these works through a diverse range of theorists − from Claire Bishop and Jack Burnham to Alexander Galloway and Lori Emerson − new perspectives and counter strategies are offered in what can be thought of as an emergent form of digital resistance. The paper concludes by exploring how the artist, viewer/ participant and the artwork can work together to cultivate critical counterpractices in the digital space.