Whereas once there were amateur photographers – hobbyists whose interest in the camera’s aesthetics led them to a love of privately displaying their pre-digital photographs – there are now what Ed Halter, in his essay “After the Amateur: Notes,” calls “sub-amateurs” – users whose interest in the camera’s functionality in communication led them to a need for publicly displaying their digital photographs.
Think: family album versus Facebook.
The same could be said for the world of amateur filmmaking (pre-camcorder) in relation to the world of YouTube.
The amateur filmmaker often embraced her 8mm or 16mm film camera out of a sincere interest in the technology; the sub-amateur YouTube user often embraces the functionality of the webcam out of a sincere interest in communication.
Halter writes:
The amateur enjoyed spending time with the camera, and thus could become caught up in its formal possibilities; the sub-amateur sees the camera in terms of pure and immediate functionality.
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A vein of contemporary Internet art has, according to Halter, emerged in accordance with the rise of sub-amateurism on the Internet.
He points to artists such as Guthrie Lonergan, Oliver Laric, Double Happiness, and Petra Cortright who conduct investigations into the functions of sub-amateur web usage in order to unveil these functions as functions rather than formal qualities.
They illuminate the function of the software default rather than a particular form so that we, the viewers of their artwork, may better see these default functions as conventions in the way we speak to one another in 2010.