Digital Currents

Art in the Electronic Age

Margot Lovejoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134397280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

Digital Currents explores the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examines the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator.

Margot Lovejoy recounts the early histories of electronic media for art making - video, computer, the internet - in this richly illustrated book. She provides a context for the works of major artists in each media, describes their projects, and discusses the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field. Digital Currents fills a major gap in our understanding of the relationship between art and technology, and the exciting new cultural conditions we are experiencing. It will be ideal reading for students taking courses in digital art, and also for anyone seeking to understand these new creative forms.

part one: SOURCES

1: Vision, Representation, and Invention

The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.

Walter Benjamin

Seeing is changing

The mind of any age is the eye of that age. Consciousness of the way the world is understood changes at different moments in history relative to the available knowledge of that period. A major shift in consciousness can change the premises about how we should seek to understand the world; what is important to look at and how we should represent it. Technological advances inform powerfully our knowledge base and affect all the premises of life, altering the way we see and think. They affect the content, philosophy, and style of art works. Technological development and artistic endeavor have always been closely related in one way or another, whether in a linear sense or a paradoxical one. Invention of technological tools for representation affects the way the world is seen, how events are interpreted, and the way culture is formed.

Today’s avalanche of powerful new representational electronic tools has created a dramatic change in the premises for art, calling into question the way we see, the way we acquire knowledge, and the way we understand it. Contemporary artists face a dilemma unimaginable even at the beginning of the twentieth century when photography and cinematography created a crisis in existing traditions of representation. Electronic tools and media have shattered the very paradigm of cognition and representation we have been operating under since the Renaissance.

Figure 1.1. Abraham Bosse (1602–76), Perspective Drawing.
Sighting 2-D illusion in 3-D space using the mathematical structure of perspective.

Dick Higgins, poet, composer, publisher, and performance artist, sums up the current paradigm shift by formulating a myth as illustration and by raising questions.

Long ago, back when the world was young – that is, sometime around the year 1958 – a lot of artists and composers and other people who wanted to do beautiful things began to look at the world around them in a new way (for them).

The Cognitive Questions (asked by most artists of the twentieth century, Platonic or Aristotelian till around 1958): “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?”

The Post-cognitive Questions (asked by most artists since then): “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?”¹

What does it mean when the image is no longer located in the visual field but is located only as information in a database? What is the role of the artist in an interactive art work in which the public becomes an active participant? Can art go beyond objecthood to be an immaterial form of communication located on the Internet for downloading through a localized printer? What is the function of art as a result of this major change? New technological media have transformed the nature of art, the way it communicates, the way it is distributed or transmitted. With the change of consciousness that accompanies the postmodern electronic era with its new technological tools for representation, the questions challenging artists today deepen and raise new ones: “How did we reach this point? What is the function of art? Is art disembodied communication? To whom am I speaking? How will I act?”

These questions force a confrontation with the legacy of artistic practices and myths rooted in the traditions of contemporary culture. This book is committed to seeking answers to these questions. To find a basis for answers to them and to create a new set of guiding assumptions, we must understand the relationship between technological development and artistic endeavor and how that relationship has profoundly influenced the evolution of culture since the Renaissance.

Vision and art

Vision is one of the most powerful of the senses. Seeing is related to art through a system we call representation, a complex term which allows us to examine significant aspects of art practice. Images are not just simple imitations of the world, but are always reordered, refashioned, styled, and coded according to the different conventions which develop out of each medium and its tools – sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, video, and computer amongst others. However, the way we see is shaped by our worldview, which governs our understanding of what representation is. Thus we can say that representation is a form of ideology because it has inscribed within it all the attitudes we have about our response to images and their assimilation; and about art-making in general, with all its hierarchies of meaning and intentionality.

A useful construct for examining the distinction between vision and representation is provided in an interesting current book by contemporary art historian Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century.² Here she compares the differences in attitudes between Dutch and Italian Renaissance artists toward representation. Italian forms of representation were based in the humanistic textual worldview of the Renaissance with its conceptual notions of perfect beauty and poesis. Artists’ selections from nature were chosen with an eye to heightened beauty and mathematical harmony – an ordering of what was seen according to the informed choices and judgment of the artist based on particular issues and concepts rather than as a form of representation where the single most important reference is the natural appearance of things. It reflected the views of Plato as articulated in texts such as the Republic (Books VI, VII, and X). Plato regarded imagination and vision as inferior capacities, a product of the lowest level of consciousness. He believed that reason allows us to contemplate truth, while the products of vision and imagination can present only false imitations, part of the irrational world of illusion and belief inferior to philosophy and mathematics which he designated as higher forms of knowledge. He illustrated his ideas using the example of a bed, postulating that there are three kinds of beds: one the essential concept of the bed, created by God; then that of a real bed made by a carpenter trying to make ultimate reality; finally, the artist’s representation of it which stands removed from its reality. For Plato, human vision and imagination are based in imitation, and thus never able to claim access to divine truth. Plato mistrusted and opposed visuality and imagination through his fear that various forms of mythology, where life was defined as a series of relationships between human beings and various deities, could become dominant ones. He held that the basis for understanding human existence was through reason and the mind. Imagination and the images produced by it could be trusted only if, first, they were deemed to be imitations, never original; second, they were subordinate to reason; and third, they served the Good and the True. His need to create boundaries around the cultural legitimacy of products of the imagination was meant only as a means of protection for the “greater good.” Reflecting Platonic ideals, in its rejection of a visual culture, Italian culture was based in a textual one – a search for truth, meaning, and knowledge.

By contrast, according to Alpers, Dutch seventeenth-century Renaissance painting reflected an acceptance of technologically assisted seeing. Over several epochs in Holland, experiments had been carried on to perfect the accuracy of mechanically assisted means of seeing such as the optical lens. Confidence in technology and cultural acceptance of this form of research into technological visualization in confirming and extending sight through microscopic close-ups, reflections, and distant enhanced views was understood as the way to new and potent forms of knowledge. Such commitment became the basis for a more visually oriented culture based in objective, material reality. Dutch paintings of this period focus on a world seen, a straightforward rendering of everyday life, based on observation, sometimes with the aid of the camera obscura lens, with all the spatial complexity and social detail of real interior views. Meaning in them is not “read” as in Italian painting, but rather the paintings are energized by a system of values in which knowledge of the contemporary external material world is “seen” as a means for understanding.

Figure 1.2. Albrecht Dürer, Untitled, 1538, woodcut.
Artists have always designed their own tools for creating the two-dimensional illusion on paper or canvas of what they see, such as this early grid with a sighting eyepiece.

In this sense, Dutch painting can be said to reflect the views of Aristotle,³ who was confident about the value and importance of vision and the direct observation of nature and taught that theory must follow fact. In his view, form and matter constitute individual realities (whereas Platonic thought posits that a concrete reality partakes of a form – the ideal – but does not embody it). Aristotle taught that knowledge of a thing beyond its description and classification requires an explanation of “why it is” and posited four principles of explanation: its function; its maker or builder; its design; the substance of which it is made. Also, he characterized imagination as a precondition for reason, describing it as a “mediating sensory experience rather than the experience which Plato thought would lead only toward dangerous illusions.”⁴ For Aristotle, imagining is based in the visual. Imagination lies between perception and thinking because it is impossible to think without imagining. Picturing in the mind, such as abstract forms or flashes of reality, accompanies abstract ideas, and thinking cannot proceed without such imaginings. Believing that imagination is not only a mediator between sensation and reason, Aristotle understood that it could also rearrange sense perception to form new ideas. It is essential in understanding abstract conceptions that go beyond human experiences of space and time to imagine the future.

Between these two poles of thought, many different positions exist. Even though some Italian artists used optical devices in the production of their work, what they saw was informed by their philosophical attitudes. Reality can be an abstraction depending on the mindset of the artist despite the mechanical device one may be observing through. The distinction we must draw between Dutch and Italian painting lies in the differences between their outlooks and methods inscribed within their worldviews which define their approach to representation. We can draw a comparison between Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura and Italian artists such as Bellotto, Guardi, Crespi, Zucarelli, and Canaletto, all of whom used it as an aid in preparing their drawings and paintings.

Figure 1.3. Early camera obscura, from A. Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 1645.
The camera obscura was recorded by Aristotle (384–322 BC) and was well known to Arabs in medieval times. Leonardo described it in his Codex Atlanticus: “When the images of illuminated objects pass through a small round hole into a very dark room, if you receive them on a piece of white paper placed vertically in the room at some distance from the aperture, you will see on the paper all those objects in their natural shapes and colors. They will be reduced in size and upside down, owing to the intersection of the rays at the aperture. If these images come from a place which is illuminated by the sun, they will seem as if painted on the paper.”
(Collection Boston Athenaeum)

Art historian Charles Seymour has shown that the optical effects in Vermeer’s paintings are the direct result of aided viewing and recording of phenomena that could be seen only in conjunction with a camera obscura. Seymour describes Vermeer’s View of Delft:

The highlights spread into small circles, and in such images the solidity of the form of a barge for example, is disintegrated in a way that is very close to the well-known effect of circles (or disks) of confusion in optical or photographic terms. This effect results when a pencil of light reflected as a point from an object in nature passes through a lens and is not resolved, or “brought into focus” on a plane set up on the image side of the lens. In order to paint this optical phenomenon, Vermeer must have seen it with direct vision (through the camera obscura) for this is a phenomenon of refracted light.⁵

The aforementioned Italian painters, although known for their use of the camera obscura, simply used the device as a reference tool for placement accuracy without incorporating any of its effects directly into their landscape painting. Considerably more information on the use of mechanical aids in Renaissance painting is now available as a result of the research of British artist David Hockney in his recently published Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.

Figure 1.4. (opposite) Camera obscura, circa seventeenth century.
By 1685, a portable camera obscura (in appearance, much like the first cameras) had been invented by Johann Zahn, a German monk. Described as a machine for drawing, this version concentrated and focused the light rays gathered by the lens onto a mirror which then reflected the image upwards where transparent paper was fixed in place for tracing the image. Count Francesco Algarotti confirms the use of the camera obscura as a tool in his 1764 essay on painting: “The best modern painters amongst the Italians have availed themselves greatly of this contrivance; nor is it possible they should have otherwise represented things so much to life. Everyone knows of what service it has been to Spanoletto of Bologna, some of whose pictures have a grand and most wonderful effect.” Canaletto, Guardi, Bellotto, Crespi, Zucarelli, and Canale used it as an aid in preparing their drawings and paintings.
(International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House)

Figure 1.5. Camera lucida, circa eighteenth century.
The camera lucida consisted of a lens arrangement that enabled the artist to view subject and drawing paper in the same “frame,” and thus the image that seemed projected on the paper could be simply outlined.
(International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House)

These two distinctly different attitudes toward representation have characteristics similar to those distinctions between vision and technological seeing, which today are still important aspects of the discourse about representation.

Science and art converge in the Renaissance in different ways

The incomparable development of the Renaissance art of both the south and the north rested to a large extent on the integration of several new sciences in anatomy, perspective, mathematics, meteorology, and chromatology. Supporting the use southern European Renaissance artists made of theses important scientific ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Sources
• Part Two: Media
• Glossary
• Select bibliography
• Index