Digital Age

As I explain in detail in my earlier book of The Story of Dada, the Dada movement was a short lived period that originated in 1916 as a reaction against the horrors of World War I. It came to an abrupt end in the early 1920s, when it was replaced by the surrealist movement. However, this basically nonsensical art form influenced the entire art history of the 20th Century in a major way.

The reasons for a Dada Renaissance today, however, appear to be different from those of the initial movement. Our world has become so specialized in every single aspect that, paradoxically, instead of becoming more structured, our planet seems to be more in chaos than ever before.

Take my case: I went to school for 21 years of my early life, but still have to learn on a daily basis the newest developments in computer technology, economic news, political events, health matters, etc, etc to remain what I would like to be: not only an artist, but also a global thinker (open minded and up-to-date).

And yet, while trying to achieve my goal, I find myself more and more in the position of Socrates who famously said two and a half thousand years ago “I know that I know nothing,” and that of the Buddha who taught to “forget everything you ever learned.”

At a late stage of my life I came to the same conclusion as Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 400 B.C.), that wealth, rank, honors and success are worldly aims that stand in the way of a complete independence of the mind.

I call it my Dada mind.

This is why, a few years ago, I became a self-declared Dadaist. In a world of chaos, where the most basic logical thought process has vanished from almost every aspect of our public and private domains, the only dictate of a basic survival instinct and defense mechanism may well be a return to the childlike nonsensical Dadaism where the questions and the answers are always Dada.    

Sometime in the late 1990s the world changed and life became digital. The 25­year intervals between generations were substituted by the newly found computer generations: First every ten, then every five, and now every two or three years the computer world undergoes radical changes. Consequently, if the ordinary citizen wants to remain “in the loop,” he or she needs to update his or her computer literacy on a permanent basis.

At the turn of the Century, I had been a conventional painter for twenty­five years. Having long monitored the foreshadows of the upcoming computer age, I was ready to jump on the bandwagon when it actually happened, by subjecting myself to a self­taught secondary education with “Photoshop” and “Final Cut Pro,” the new state of the art technologies for digital photography and the moving image.

After two years of intense studies I had familiarized myself with these computer programs that opened a whole new world for me. Yet, I was not going to be satisfied for as long as I could not integrate my newly found “CAA” (Computer Aided Art) images into my own conventional paintings. I was going to create canvases and then work them over with a myriad of new techniques, until the two approaches would harmoniously integrate themselves into the new looks of my CAA manipulated images.

I found the changeover from my traditional upbringings onto the new digital age to be the most challenging task of my life. But the results were so fascinating that I was never the same after that newly found universe with its endless possibilities.

The results were indeed a series of staggering computer images, and their new looks could neither be achieved by all­out computer images, nor by any traditional artistic technique.  

Everything is in a rush. Time is money. The world has become visual. Who has time to read a book? Even short stories seem like endless epic tales. Who cares about a narrative description of hair, the shape of a nose, or the smell of a meadow?

Are you kidding? Get to the point. Talk fast. Do you have something to say? Say it!

And so I wrote these Manhattan Flash Stories, in a permanent attempt to get to the point.

If there ever was one in the first place …