David R Burns

While there are a variety of approaches to examining the valuation of digital media art, I limit my discussion to its economic valuation within the context of Western capitalist economies.  In this paper, I argue that the dematerialized and reproducible nature of digital media art requires it to have alternative models of economic valuation because the classical model of economic valuation does not effectively value digital media art.  I examine existing economic models of digital media artwork valuation and I explore unique opportunities for alternative and hybrid economic models of digital media artwork valuation.

This book chapter explores the themes of overconsumption, relationships, and environmentalism in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Through both the character development and imagery in Labyrinth, Henson educates audiences about the deleterious effects of overconsumption on interpersonal relationships and the global ecosystem.  With the anti- consumerist theme in Labyrinth, Henson encourages viewers to resist mass media and contemporary culture’s messages of conspicuous consumption, embrace the benefits of interpersonal relationships over the accumulation of consumer goods, and think critically about the destructive impact of overconsumption on the global ecosystem.

In this article, I explore the relationship between the media industry’s representation of important events and our personal and collective memories of these events.  Through my investigation of what happens when an important personal and collective event is recorded to digital and neuronal memory systems, I examine the spaces between an individual’s personal memories of real-time events and the media industry’s influence over an individual’s constructed memories of these events.  With digital sequences of images being broadcast in real time across media outlets worldwide at the same time as important events unfold, an international consciousness is informed and influenced by these images both during and after these events.  On 9/11, I watched the fall of the World Trade Center in New York City outside my apartment in lower Manhattan while simultaneously watching this tragic event digitally broadcast to my television in real time and, after over a decade of reflection, I examine the effects that the repeated broadcast of lossless, digital imagery has on the individual and collective consciousness.  Through my examination of my lossless digital media artwork, Rebirth, as a site of resistance, I argue that digital media art offers alternative perspectives to the hegemonic media industry’s dominance over memory formation.

This book chapter explores the anti-consumerist theme in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.  Through Sarah’s education in the bildungsroman film, Labyrinth, Henson reveals the uncomfortable truth that consumer goods fail to provide the fulfillment of genuine human relationships and have negative effects on the environment.  In Labyrinth, Henson encourages viewers to resist mass media and contemporary culture’s messages of overconsumption and value the fulfillment of human relationships.

The proliferation of artists, audiences, and participants who have the ability to create mirror copies of original digital media arts work challenges us to re-examine how value is assigned to digital media arts work.  Historically, space and capital limitations restricted the public’s accessibility to artwork, but the growth of mass digital reproduction and alternative forms of art exhibition spaces is having a profound effect on the experience and valuation of digital media arts work.  For example, the online distribution of digital media arts work across networks facilitates the circumvention of traditional valuation models.  In this paper, I explore the background and challenges to assigning value to digital media arts work and investigate alternative models of exhibition and valuation of digital media arts work in the institutional, private, and public spheres.

Borders, surveillance, and control in the digital age explores the way in which public and private institutions leverage electronic surveillance technologies to monitor and control individuals’ personal communications, information, and movement across physical and virtual borders.  Public and private institutions’ transition from an emphasis on using physical border controls to an emphasis on using virtual border controls reflects a paradigm shift from a disciplinary society to a controlled society.  Whereas in the past, visas and passports offered only a limited amount of individuals’ personal data at physical borders, electronic surveillance technologies allow nations and institutions to instantaneously collect, monitor and control a vast amount of personal data from decentralized virtual access points. These decentralized virtual access points add a digital dimension to Foucauldian panopticism and expand the ways in which nations and institutions can continually monitor and control individuals within, across, and outside their borders.  In this paper, I investigate three major apparatuses of physical and virtual border control: global communications monitoring, ubiquitous tracking technologies, and biometrics and electronic databases.

Over the last several years, there have been many developments concerning technology and humankind that have influenced my research. There are three major tiers of developments that have inspired me to write this piece: global monitoring, ubiquitous computing technology and the pervasive use of biometrics, and the creation of virtual borders.