text: art, culture and
context
collection of writings and musings on art, artists and other related
contextual issues.
Who influences Digital Media Art? June
2002
published in Digital Arts Magazine, Novi Sad, 2002
Who influences Digital Media Art?
Internet Art needs a direction! But does its broad, open networked
character defy any attempt to define, control or develop its destiny or
image. It has always been the case with art and the art-world that it's
direction could be controlled by those in power, or with money, or
influence over artists. Eventually artists find their own way to produce
whatever they feel is relevant to themselves or their times. Avant Garde
movements thus develop a means to initiate and promote artistic
developments independently.
Since the advent of net.art, or following the innovations of it,
artistic development has been spread between people across a wide network
including artists, programmers, designers, academics and enthusiasts. The
direction of artistic developments are thus in the hands of many
individuals and groups located throughout the network. It becomes
difficult in this situation to determine or control a specific identity
for Internet art from a central position. Museums and arts institutions
still have a powerful position to encourage or promote their own agenda
but have many other groups to contend with. Artistic practice, development
and promotion traverse through a broad network containing traditional
institutional set-ups together with recent additions of individuals and
groups working to their own agenda. This situation creates difficulties
when attempting to organise or predict the movement's development. In
other words there is no single authority to determine what should or
should not be a suitable method for the development of net.art.
To partially illustrate this it is worth looking at some recent
exhibition projects that have taken place in a traditional gallery space
or purely online. Each set an example of how Internet and digital media
art can be exhibited and contextualised.
I will be looking at an exhibition currently showing at SpaceX gallery,
Exeter, UK; The Internet art promoter E-2; and Pocket Gallery, a project
initiated by an individual artist.
SPACEX
The show at SpaceX demonstrates how a traditional gallery space
can accommodate a show concentrated on Digital Media technologies.
Essentially this was achieved by creating a historical context for current
Digital Art practices. Of particular importance are the self-generating,
instructive and interactive characteristics of conceptual art, fluxus and
Computer-based, and other areas of contemporary practice. A wide number of
artists have been included each providing an artwork that generates or is
generated by instructive process e.g. Computer programming.
To begin with Alex McLean's work 'Forkbomb' is essentially a Perl
script designed to take computers to their operational limit, here he has
installed an old P.C connected to a printer in order to observe the
effects of the 'forkbomb' script on its system. The printer is placed high
upon the wall with a large stream of perforated printing paper constantly
feeding through it. The green and black screen of the monitor displays a
flood of indecipherable dots. The machine is still functioning but has
passed beyond any legible output. Moving on through the gallery we pass a
collection of Sol le Witt's serial postcard pieces, through a dark room
displaying a large viewer-sensitive video screen and onwards to a
collection of new works by Yoko Ono. These works produced by her embody
notions of instruction and participation without depending on digital
technology. For example Yoko has included a 'wish tree' where users are
invited to write a wish on a tag and tie it to the branches of a small
tree in the gallery. Also pinned up on the wall is 'imaginary map peace',
a colour map of the world where users may pin cut outs onto the map
imbuing them with thoughts and opinions e.g. the word 'WAR' written with
cut-outs of a map of the USA has been pinned up, also the outline of
Africa inscribed with 'free world debt' appears amongst an array of other
messages. The form and content of these works, once initiated by the
artists, develop according to the participation of the audience.
The term generator, not explicitly referring to technology, allows
SpaceX to curate a show covering a series of artistic forms to include
Artists traditionally associated with earlier art movements; Fluxus and
Conceptual Art. It has often been discussed how these movements embody
characteristics present in Digital Media based practices. This includes
setting parameters in which an artwork may develop (sol le witt) and
encouraging the audience to develop the piece through interaction within
those limits (yoko). Either way the outcome of the artwork depends on how
the system initiated develops. Both of these characteristics are mirrored
in work produced by artist-programmers or web artists today who set rules
allowing a computer system, or network, to perform the artistic task.
Once the links between these technologically based works or those
of simple material are established they may be categorised comfortably
within the same context, as has been achieved here at SpaceX. This helps
create a historical context for technological based art and a contemporary
context for those works associated with historical movements.
Moving on from the gallery space we can look at some projects
created purely for the Internet thus these projects are more open and
inclusive. At first they seem very similar in content and agenda but a
closer look and comparison reveals important differences.
E-2
E-2 is an organisation promoting and supporting Internet based practice.
They have worked with established artists such as Tomoko Takahashi
together with London's Chisenhale Gallery. Of interest here is their
recent open submission project 'Minus 20'. The terms of entry were for
web-based artworks sized 20K or lower thus encouraging easily downloadable
pieces with conceptual or formal immediacy. A small collection of
contributions are available on the website. E-2's decision to undertake an
open submission project indicates a temporal move away from commissioning
works by individual artists.
Of the contributions the following stand out. 'Timesacolour' by
Christopher Otto is a very clever combination of digital representational
languages. A coloured square whose numerical RGB value is determined by
the hour, minutes and seconds from the clock of the viewers P.C. For
example if the time is 20hours 30min and 59sec the square's colour will
have a red value of 20 a green value of 30 and a blue value of 59. As the
seconds tick by, the square becomes increasingly blue. Thus, every time of
the day is indexed with its own RGB value.
Ellie Harrison's work 'Minus 20KJ' interprets the title of the project in
a way that associates Kilo Bytes with Kilo Joules. Displayed to us is a
series of food items together with their value in KJ and a description of
how long that amount of energy would power the users computer. For
example a picture of a peanut stating that its energy, 20kj, would power a
computer for 20 seconds.
Vicky Isley & Paul Smith produced '7650 characters arranged in a dangerous
order.'
An entire set of instructions of how to construct a hydrogen bomb
presented one letter at a time. As the animation begins it is possible to
follow the instructions but becomes difficult after a while. Overall the
piece lasts for 1hr 7 min so it is unlikely anyone would follow it through
to the end (surprising how far they have stretched 20k!).
Most of the submissions to Minus 20 depend on compression software such as
Flash and Shockwave. This does enable the artists to achieve surprising
results all under 20K but is narrow in terms of the wider possibilities of
web work. The small, organised selection of works available indicates that
this is a juried show. The benefits of this means the viewer can quickly
access a selection of entries and interpretations of the theme but reduces
the sense of community and personality that is possible through such open
submission projects.
POCKET GALLERY
This has been interpreted in many ways but common characteristics
of works submitted are screen-shots or small animations of folder icons
and file lists. Those particular examples resemble Alexi Shulgin's
'Desktop Is' too closely (a well known project that called for
contributions of desktop screen-shots). The participators choice to
represent their 'digital pockets' in this manner is not the fault of
organiser. Jessica's terms of inclusion are broad enough for artists to
think in original terms but it is, however, slightly disappointing
For Example the artists; Nicolas Clauss; Agricola de Cologne; Nicola Tosic
and many others have included images of Folders and file lists. From
Nicolas Clauss' unusual shockwave piece named Pocket Nails that shows a
blurred image of a series of folder icons on top of which some animated
iron nails move up and down making a click noise on collision. To the more
involving Flash piece 'Message' by Nicola Tosic who produced a simple
imitation of a system explorer. Here the user can click on folders to
watch them unfold, then click on another and so on until an email message
appears from within one of the folders, written by the artist to her
parents. This piece gives us more than a snapshot from inside her
computer; we are given a modest guided tour through her files.
In presenting all the submissions, as is most often the case with online
community initiatives, the works included do tend to repeat slightly. As
it is connected to the online community many of the works are by artists
who have appeared in other similar open submission projects. This
demonstrates the size and enthusiasm of the online net.art community of
which Pocket gallery has tapped into. Therefore the project delves further
into the character and quality of the Internet. It has a feeling of the
everyday especially the metaphor of 'pockets' and personal information.
But this really is in many ways inherited from the earlier days of net.art
activity, of which this project depends a great deal.
Each of these exhibitions set some form of example as to the possible
understandings of Internet based art and directions in which it may be
developed. Generator at SpaceX is an example of how a traditional gallery
space might incorporate and contextualise technological artistic
developments together with older, but related, artistic forms. Pocket
gallery compared to Minus 20 shows how an individual artist well connected
to other artists and supportive networks can achieve results comparable to
those achieved by a well-funded and publicised organisation.
So the development of Internet and Digital Media art is influenced from
many directions with each promotion bringing with it an expression of its
own purpose, manifestation and historical or contemporary context. I must
admit however that the examples outlined above fall short of explaining
the wider picture of this specialised art scene but do give us some
indication of what to look out for.
Links:
SPACEX gallery:
E-2:
Pocket gallery:
dan@sparror.cubecinema.com