Place and Time in Digital Landscapes: Critical Jewish Resonance in Contemporary Israeli New-Media Art

Modern art traditionally tends to deal with the question of place in the theme of landscape taken from life. On one hand, the meaning of place is a result of seeing nature as the other of culture (thus lending nature meaning by opposing it to industrial culture), and on the other, place acquires meaning as an object existing within culture. In modernity, following the Romantic depictions of landscape in the early nineteenth century, landscape was reborn as a painterly, social agenda by the Impressionists, but the roots of landscape painting are of course much earlier. The Impressionist place is a space shared by the painter with the social mileu in which he lives; this place includes urban life as well as poppy fields in nature in the most primary sense (allegedly with no allegorical or symbolic meanings). Into the twentieth century, painting continued to present landscapes according to the understanding whereby the artist, and the place represented, gradually emerge on the canvas in continuity with each other. These paintings report on the place from within: the artist paints the place and he is part of it. As I discuss below, the new, digital media art as well as new painting done in the digital age operates from within a different paradigm, in which the account of what is seen, the representation of place, the discovery of its topography (whether using digital or other tools), occurs outside of the place.1 Landscape has become a prevalent theme in contemporary Israeli newmedia art. Landscapes appear at times to resemble a molecular map of digital particles, or a picture of energetic mass, unfolded in space. These imaginary landscapes do not present a picture of a concrete space, there is no identifiable mountain or familiar sight from the countryside, and it sometimes seems as though the works have been deliberately emptied of any recognizable images and loaded with microbial, digital traces that are difficult to interpret. Digital works of art amplify concepts of time, space, color and movement, and harness them to an enticing but at the same time off-putting technological dazzle. The questions we should answer are to do with the meaning of landscape in these works of art, and the coordinates by which we are to read them. Journal of Jewish Identities 2009, 2(2)