The artist Cory Arcangel arrived at a strategy for inserting a conversation regarding virtuality/computers into contemporary art without making work about personal computing or contemporary art per se.
Rather, it is an investigation into the force that bridges those worlds.
Here is a passage from an interview Arcangel conducted with Petra Heck, a curator at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, where Arcangel explains the title of a show he did there called “Depreciated”:
[…] in software “depreciated” means something should be avoided and is no longer being updated or supported. In short, something depreciated has been replaced by something newer, but still continues to exist in a sort of state of suspense. This very much comes into play in my work. A lot of these ideas we’re talking about – structuralism, phasing, atonality – were once the vanguard of creative practice, but are no longer being ‘supported’, so to speak.
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He does a nice job here of connecting the term “depreciation” from the world of technology to the world of contemporary art, suggesting how the bridge between both of them is their objects’ inability to persist and stay relevant as time has its way with them.