Correa for &&&: Alex, I’m interested to see how philosophy as such has a certain take about the ways that more conventional art has been transcribed into the realm of the Internet; the vast majority of art is produced in an analogue way and thus becomes digital.
Galloway: One of the things I’m trying to explore now is the possibilityb that philosophy and digitality might actually be the same thing. At least they appear to share a similar structure. The digital is about creating discrete units of things. The digital requires the division of things; it has to separate something that is undivided and make it divided. As Laruelle has suggested, traditional metaphysics does the same thing. That’s why artists and metaphysicians both talk about representation. Art is a “philosophical” undertaking in this fundamental sense. What I mean is that, if art is always world-bound — if art is a system of representation — then the artistic relation between an image and its original is analogous to the philosophical relation between body and soul or entity and essence. That’s the digital structure of metaphysics. So if traditional art is moving into a digital space, that might be the most natural thing it could do.
The Philosophical Origins of Digitality – &&& Journal&&& Journal
rafaelfajardo: I added the italics above. That passage narrows Galloway’s definition of Art to representation, to re-presentaion, to something that has some referent to some other thing in the world. So, Malevich’s black square and Lissitsky’s prouns and Judd’s boxes and Reas’s code drawings would fall outside this definition. I will need to read on to see if Galloway reconciles non-representational definitions of art with the one he has created for this argument.