A Companion to Digital Art

Christiane Paul, Dana Arnold

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118475218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Reflecting the dynamic creativity of its subject, this definitive guide spans the evolution, aesthetics, and practice of today's digital art, combining fresh, emerging perspectives with the nuanced insights of leading theorists.

• Showcases the critical and theoretical approaches in this fast-moving discipline
• Explores the history and evolution of digital art; its aesthetics and politics; as well as its often turbulent relationships with established institutions
• Provides a platform for the most influential voices shaping the current discourse surrounding digital art, combining fresh, emerging perspectives with the nuanced insights of leading theorists
• Tackles digital art's primary practical challenges – how to present, document, and preserve pieces that could be erased forever by rapidly accelerating technological obsolescence
• Up-to-date, forward-looking, and critically reflective, this authoritative new collection is informed throughout by a deep appreciation of the technical intricacies of digital art

Part I
Histories of Digital Art

1
The Complex and Multifarious Expressions of Digital Art and Its Impact on Archives and Humanities

Oliver Grau

Introduction

Compared to traditional art forms—such as painting or sculpture—media art has more multifarious potential for expression and visualization; although underrepresented on the art market, which is driven by economic interests, it has become “the art of our time,” thematizing complex challenges for our life and societies, like genetic engineering (Anker and Nelkin 2003; Reichle 2005; Hauser 2008; Kac 2007), the rise of post-human bodies (Hershman-Leeson 2007), ecological crises¹ (Cubitt 2005; Himmelsbach and Volkart 2007; Demos 2009; Borries 2011), the image and media revolution (Grau 2011; Mitchell 2011) and with it the explosion of human knowledge (Vesna 2007; Manovich 2011), the move toward virtual financial economies,² and the processes of globalization³ and surveillance, to name just a few. Visually powerful, interactive media art, often supported by databases or the World Wide Web, is offering more and more freedom for creative expression and evidently is much better equipped to directly address the challenges of our complex times within the very medium that shapes them. Although it has been around for decades and has even quantitatively dominated many art schools, digital media art has not fully arrived in the core collecting institutions of our societies. Due to the lack of institutional support and rapid changes in storage and presentation media, works that originated approximately ten years ago can often not be shown anymore. It is no exaggeration to state that we are facing the “total loss of an art form” created in the early years of our post-industrial digital societies. Over the last fifty years digital media art has evolved into a vivid contemporary form. Although there are well-attended festivals worldwide,⁴ funded collaborative projects, discussion forums, publications (Grau 2003a, 2011; Dixon 2007; Popper 2007; Sommerer and Mignonneau 2008; Vesna 2007; Shanken 2009; Da Costa and Kavita 2010; Gardiner and Gere 2010; Wilson 2010), and database documentation projects,⁵ digital media art is still rarely collected by museums, barely supported within the mainframe of art history, and has relatively low accessibility for the general public and scholars.

Media Art’s Revolution?

Media art is the art form using the technologies that fundamentally change our societies. Globalization, the information society, social networks, and Web 2.0—the list could be far longer—are enabled by digital technologies. Although not all digital media art comments on social, cultural, and political conditions, it is nevertheless the art form with the most comprehensive potential for cultural urgency. We know that digital art today is taking highly disparate forms, like time-based installation art, telepresence art, genetic and bio art, robotics, net art, and space art; this “art of our times” is experimenting with nanotechnology, artificial or A-life art; and creating virtual agents and avatars, mixed realities, and database-supported art. Through its expressive potential—visually, aurally, and beyond—all senses can be addressed, an ability which exceeds technically that of traditional art media from earlier centuries such as painting and sculpture; thus digital media art attains a key role in the reflection of our information societies. The artworks both represent and reflect on the revolutionary development that the image has undergone over the years—even as visionary demonstration of new instruments for visual analysis and tools for playful or scientific comparison of large amounts of images.⁶

Contemporary media art installations can include digital stills and video, 3D objects and animation, digital texts and music, sound objects, noises and textures, whereby different meanings may be inscribed and combined with each other. Meaning can develop by chance, experiment, and well-directed strategy. Active, “combining” users become the source for generating art and meaning if the artist leaves enough degrees of freedom to them to engage. They are dynamically involved in navigation, interpretation, transfer, contextualization, or production of images and sounds which may be generated by their participation. Memory, thoughts, and experiments—along with chance—may create fertile connections. The art system increasingly transforms itself into a type of organism comprising slices that organize themselves while the user has an opportunity to experience and produce combinatory meaning.

Media Art’s Multifarious Potential for Complex Expression

Thousands of artworks make use of and express the multifarious potential of media art. In the installations Osmose (1995) and Éphémère (1998) Charlotte Davies transports us into a visually powerful 3D simulation of a lush mineral-vegetable sphere, which we can explore via a bodily interface consisting of a vest that monitors breathing; both works are classics of digital media art that generated more than 100 scientific and art-historical articles but were ignored by museum collections (Davis 2003; Davis and Harrison 1996).

Open-ended questions about the complicated ethical issues involved in the manipulation of DNA are raised in Eduardo Kac’s installation Genesis (1999) (Kac 2005, 2007, 2011; Kac and Ronell 2007). For UNMAKEABLELOVE (2007), inspired by Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1971/1972), Jeffrey Shaw and Sarah Kenderdine used their cybernetic theatrical environment Re-Actor to create a real-time augmented world of thirty simulated humans. The dark space or “prison camp” formed by a hexagon of six rear-projected silver screens results in a powerful reappearance of the phantasmagoria. Shaw got inspiration from media arts history:

The history of the cinematic experience is a rich chronicle of viewing and projection machines. Before Hollywood imposed its set of ubiquitous formats, there were a myriad of extraordinary devices, like the Lumiere Brothers Photodrama, the Cyclorama, Cosmorama, Kineorama, Neorama, Uranorama and many more. The Kaiserpanorama—a stereoscopic cylindrical panoptic peepshow—is an especially relevant forerunner of a newly configured display system, Re-Actor.

(Kenderdine and Shaw 2009)

William Kentridge, one of the best known artists of our time, also has been working on the subject of a history of vision for years. Even historic image media like the mirror anamorphosis⁷ have made their way into his contemporary media art. In 2007 he created a hybrid previously nonexistent in the media history of seeing: for his eight-minute What Will Come (Has Already Come) he combines a hand-drawn animation film with cylindrical mirror anamorphosis, connecting it for the first time to moving images and thereby helping us to put the latest image revolution into historical perspective.

Victoria Vesna’s Bodies@Incorporated (1993) allowed visitors to construct their own avatars. Using a variety of web tools, users could create a 3D representation of their body. Throughout the site, references are made to identity politics and other concepts used to separate and identify bodies (Vesna 1998; Gonzales 2010).

The Golden Nica winner Murmuring Fields (1998–2000) by Fleischmann and Strauss is yet another example of a work largely ignored by museums. Here, interacting users maneuver through a virtual space of media philosophy in which statements by Flusser, Virilio, Minsky, and Weizenbaum can be heard—a new type of Denkraum, or sphere of thought (Fleischmann and Strauss 2000, 2008), and an early prefiguration of web-based knowledge exchange.

Johanna and Florian Dombois’ Fidelio, 21st Century (2004), named after Beethoven’s Fidelio, was the first classical opera directed as an interactive virtual 3D experience. Protagonists embody music, follow the dramaturgic direction and react to the interventions of the audience (Dombois and Dombois 2001; Dombois 2009). All these examples demonstrate that digital media art can deal with questions and challenges of our time in an experimental and participatory way, where traditional art media could simply offer metaphorical approaches. In the best humanistic tradition, digital media art takes on the big contemporary questions, dangers, and proposed transformations, yet it is not adequately collected, documented, and preserved by traditional museums and art institutions. A techno-cultural society that does not understand the challenges it is facing and is not equally open to the art of its time is in trouble.

Today we know that the virtualization and increasing complexity of financial products is partly responsible for the crisis that cost us trillions of euros and dollars in the crash of 2008. More than a decade ago the architecture and art studio Asymptote proposed a 3D info-scape for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to manage financial data within a real-time virtual environment, providing a better, more transparent image and thereby a better idea of transactions—before we get driven into the next mega-crash.⁸ The NYSE did not want further development of a visualization of their “financial products”—and following Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008 we know why.

Ingo Günther’s obsessive cartographic work Worldprocessor—an artwork that implicitly conveys the explosion, ubiquity, and the availability of data by the introduction and consolidation of digital media on illuminated globes—multiplies more and more and appears as a clairvoyant prefiguration of the attempts of the growing visualization indus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Histories of Digital Art
• Part II: Aesthetics of Digital Art
• Part III: Network Cultures: The Politics of Digital Art
• Part IV: Digital Art and the Institution
• Index
• End User License Agreement