Ella Wolf

The long-lasting impact that Cage had on his students, many of which would go on to play central roles in the Fluxus movement, cannot be overstressed. But what was so special about Cage? What made his audience in Darmstadt so receptive to his ideas? And where did composers go from there?
My aim in this essay is to propose a response to those questions by zooming in on three years from about 1959 to 1962 during which a circle of key figures – among others electronic music pioneer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Korean musician and multimedia artist Nam June Paik and visual artist Mary Bauermeister – embarked on a short-lived, yet immensely influential quest for new creative expressions, that would transform the languages of art and music to come.

The proliferation of digital technologies in nearly every aspect of life has been accompanied with narratives of change – both dystopian and utopian – from its early days. And if art is in any way to relate to our lived experience, then it comes at no surprise that artists started to investigate the digital – as a tool and medium, but also as a testing ground for new models of thinking about art in relation to society. As Walter Benjamin infamously demonstrated in his analysis of art in times of technical reproducibility, technological advancements not only affect the way art is produced, but also the politics of its distribution and consumption. If the reproducibility of a photograph has caused the loss of the aura of the unique original – what effects do the ephemerality and malleability of the digital artwork have on previous formulas of producing, viewing and thinking art? Is digital art in its fleeting, participatory nature capable of challenging the the status of the artwork as a commodity, as envisioned by the politically motivated computer art of the 80s and 90s? Or are we today merely dealing with a digitalised version of an established system of contemporary art under the rule of neo-liberal capital?

As a luxury product, fashion is consumed not for rational considerations, but for its affective and emotive power. And it is in regards to this power that, as I will argue, the ongoing process of digitalisation is having its most profound effect. What are the parameters that define how, what and why we consume fashion online? How are marketing experts responding to the newfound agency of the consumer-turned-user? And what consequences do the fluid and non-linear communication constellations between brand and consumer in the digital realm entail for academic distinctions between media subjects and objects, between art and fashion or between content and commerce? This essay makes the attempt to tackle these questions by looking at three case studies: New York-based label Eckhaus Latta, Paris-based label Vetements and Canadian e-commerce site Ssense. Following my analysis of the hypertextual, user-centred marketing strategies used by these brands in order to build affective, emotional and social bonds with their customers, I will propose that the focus of the fashion industry has shifted away from the commodification of products towards the commodification of an expanded lifestyle offer – a development that I consider to be a direct result of the proliferation of digital communication technologies.