ABOVE: Detail from Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror (2004), which uses motors and software driven by a hidden camera to move individual wooden blocks to create an image of the spectator. It’s one of the most important pieces sold by bitforms, a New York-based gallery specializing in digital art.

Pioneering digital art dealer Steven Sacks, a self-proclaimed “dotcom burnout” is profiled in this month’s Wired, and while the piece is relatively kind to Sacks, who obviously cares deeply about the art he sells, it really doesn’t give a very positive impression of the art itself. Digital art, a wildly imprecise and nebulous term, doesn’t have much traction among mainstream collectors, being favoured more by geeky California billionaires who like the idea of installing 140 inch plasma screens in their living room solely for the purpose of running what Wired charitably calls a “high concept screensaver.”

Although artists working in digital art are doing some amazing work, it tends to be fragile, prone to software or hardware failure, incorrect installation, or careless maintenance. The most telling part of the Wired profile is when Sacks leads the author around a South Korea hotel that has purchased several works from Sack’s bitforms Gallery, despairing at the hotel’s negligent upkeep: Wooden Mirror (above) had a few wooden pixels broken, and an interactive touchscreen installation in the bar had been de-networked. All art needs maintenance, but are collectors going to buy pieces of such finicky delicacy that they require thousands of dollars in tune-ups every year?

LINK: Wired > The King of Digital Art