e-Lit Resource
Post-digital

The concept of post-digital is, in the words of Florian Cramer, defined as “the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization” (17, original emphasis). In Cramer’s view, one of the main aspects of the post-digital is that the concept reaches beyond rigid dualities such as new vs. old media or analog vs. digital technology – but instead recognizes that the old and the new, the analog and the digital, all exist as part of the same post-digital reality. In the context of art and aesthetics, the post-digital condition means that artists increasingly “dismiss the notion of the computer as universal machine” (Cramer 16). Rather than opting for a neo-Luddite rejection of all that is digital, post-digital practitioners “choose media for their own material aesthetic qualities … regardless of whether these are a result of analog material properties or of digital processing” (Cramer 18).