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Art of the Digital Age

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

pictures, sculpture, installations, and web-art

Art of the Digital Age is a beautifully illustrated survey of the latest developments in art which has been generated digitally. Well, for ‘latest’ read ‘in the last ten or fifteen years’, because people were attempting to use IT for art even before the arrival of the Web. Bruce Wands very sensibly begins by defining ‘digital art’ – pointing out that many artists may use computers and digitisation in the preparation of works which are then executed by conventional means.

Art of the Digital Age His first section on digital imaging illustrates that perfectly. Many of the artists combine photography, painting, and scanned imagery – to produce data files which can then be projected into other media. He then moves on to show works which are categorised as ‘virtual sculpture’. In this genre, 3-D modelling software is used to produce wireframe shapes which can then be clad in a variety of skins or surfaces. The results can be sent as a file to a rendering studio which creates the object in a substances of the artist’s choice.

There is also 3-D printing, in which layer upon layer of a plastic coating can be applied to a surface until the result is a three dimensional shape. This can be the desired sculpture or a mould from which the finished work is cast. there are some slightly gruesome-looking organic forms here, but the constructivist work of sculptor Bruce Beasley (www.brucebeasley.com) stands out as possibly the most impressive work in the book.

On installation art I remained unconvinced. Much of it seemed like 3-D objects with light shows thrown in – though it is hard to judge an environment when it is only captured in a 2-D photograph. The problem here and elsewhere is that the term ‘art’ has been taken to mean ‘arty’. If the pages had been thrown open to the truly popular users of new technology, we could have had the work of those people whose works are viewed by up to ten million at a time on YouTube.

The same is even more true of digital music – though he ‘cheats’ by going back into performance and installation art which also happens to feature music. Video (which is now called ‘time-based media’) is another example where current commercial practice far outstrips the arty experimentalists

I followed up lots of the sources, and was amazed how few of the artists featured had their work available for view on their web sites – though the spectacular animations of Dennis H. Miller were an honourable and very worthwhile exception here (www.dennismiller.neu.edu). But when I arrived in the ‘Net Art’ section at work which allows you to connect interactively with snakes, I felt I could give that one a miss.

It’s a visually rich publication, marred only by the use of a sans-serif font for the body text which sits rather unsympathetically with the pictures; but this is offset by a richer-than-usual scholarly apparatus which includes a 1450—2006 IT timeline, a glossary, lists of further reading, a list of digital art resources, and a webliography of the artists featured.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Bruce Wands, Art of the Digital Age, London: Thames and Hudson, new edition 2007, pp.224, ISBN 0500286299


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Filed Under: Art Tagged With: Art, Art of the Digital Age, Digital art, Media, New media, Technology

Digital Art

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated survey of contemporary digital art forms

Digital technology has revolutionized the way art is now produced and viewed. Traditional forms such as painting, photography and sculpture have been transformed by digital techniques. Entirely new forms such as software art, digital installations, and virtual reality have emerged, and they are now collected by major museums, institutions, and private collectors. Christiane Paul’s book surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s right up to the present day. It’s difficult for books like this to keep up with what’s being developed on the Internet, but she makes a good stab at it. She starts out with a rapid survey of the period 1940-1990, in which the foundations were laid. Then came the world wide web, which opened up the Net to Everyman.

Digital ArtAfter this comes her first main section, which deals with the digitisation of the two-dimensional surface. This yields computer-generated images which look like paintings, photographs which look like web sites, and collages which look like a combination of both – some of them even digital images which have been transferred onto canvass, to complete the illusion. There are lots of examples, all of them illustrated in full colour. It’s a visually rich book.

Most of the time her exposition is clear and straightforward, but now and again it does keep slipping into the style of Art School gobbledygook to which commentators on modern art seem irresistibly drawn:

Suggesting antagonisms, the project explores the concept of different poles in dataspace and the ways in which various forms of information can materialize in a dynamic matrix.

Whilst it is unfair to judge these complex works from a text description of them on the page, plus a screenshot, it seems that many of them go down tempting but false avenues of discovery and innovation.

Randomness, interactivity, or simultaneously viewing events from different points of the globe have no intrinsic connection with art – though it is understandable that people should want to exploit such possibilities. ‘Allowing the viewer to select/mix/choose’ is a false avenue.

Works of art are almost always the finished products of one person which we are invited to contemplate. Exploiting the possibilities of the Web and Flash animations seem much more promising routes to me. Time will tell.

Real artists will be grappling with these new digital possibilities right now – musicians making symphonies in their back bedrooms, Flash animators making the next generation of films.

The last part of the book deals with the various forms in which digital art is popularly manifest – artificial intelligence, telepresence and robotics, data visualisation and mapping, hypertextual narratives, and of course gaming.

She includes an excellent lists of artists’ web sites, digital arts organizations, networks, museums, and festivals, plus a select bibliography.

Despite any reservations I might have expressed here, this is an extraordinarily wide-ranging and thorough investigation of what is going on in digital art right now. She discusses all the key artists and works, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, and ownership and copyright. Very good value.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Christiane Paul, Digital Art, London: Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2008, pp.256, ISBN: 0500203989


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Digital Art History

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Teaching and learning art using IT

This is a collection of academic conference papers which look at the ways in which digital art history and the use of computers is affecting the ways in which art is both taught and studied. The papers cover issues such as the storage, access, and searchability of images; ownership and copyright. iconography and classification, and the analysis of art works using Computer Aided Design. There’s an account of a multi-media project for instance, Colour and Communication in 20th-Century Abstract Art, which teaches issues of tone, tint, and hue by making comparisons with music which are included as audio files alongside interactive exercises.

Digital Art HistoryNext comes a web-based project called The Cathedral as Virtual Encyclopedia – a virtual panoramic tour of Chartes cathedral. The really interesting and ambitious feature here is that the authoring team, lead by Stephen Clancy, have been digitally manipulating the panorama shots using Macromedia Director to produce a thirteenth-century version of the tour.

This is followed by an account of creating a multimedia database of the source materials archived by Georg Morgenstiern, professor of Indo-Iranian languages at the University of Oslo, Norway. The resulting collection of photographs, sound recordings, and movie clips can be seen at www.nb.no.

There is a short encomium for computer gaming which could safely have been left out of the collection. More interesting is an account of experimental new media art at the University of the West of England in Bristol – though the emphasis is on problems of curation rather than the ‘exhibits’ themselves. This is also true of an essay on the creation of a visually searchable database of images at London Guildhall.

The centrepiece of the book shows how computer graphics and visioning techniques can be used in the scientific analysis of paintings. Once the examples have been digitised using CAD software, new versions can be generated from different points of view; partly occluded objects can be completed; shapes and objects can be analysed; and a 3D version of the scene can be generated.

They show an amazing three dimensional reconstruction of Masaccio’s Florentine fresco, The Trinity. This paper is the work of three scholars in art history and engineering science working collaboratively at the University of Oxford and is probably the highlight of the collection.

As an e-learning author myself, I would sometimes have welcomed a little more technical detail, but there’s certainly enough here to stimulate anybody who want to see what’s possible in harnessing the power of IT to the teaching and learning in visual arts.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Anna Bentkowska-Kafel et al (eds), Digital Art History, Bristol: Intellect, 2005, pp.118, ISBN 1841501166


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Filed Under: Art, Media, Online Learning Tagged With: Art, Computers, Cultural history, Digital art, Digital Art History, Education, New media, Online learning

New Media in Late 20th-century Art

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new forms of multimedia, performance, and digital art

There’s nothing like discussing ‘contemporary’ art forms for making you realise we’re now in the twenty-first century. When you look at developments which seem quite recent (particularly related to the Internet) you suddenly realise that these were in the LAST CENTURY!! – (to sound for a moment a little like Tom Wolfe). The latter half of the nineteen hundreds saw artists breaking up the boundaries of aesthetic genres and introducing all sorts of new technology into their work – as well as mixing disparate activities into one experience. New Media in Late 20th-century Art is a survey of the new media which evolved roughly in the period 1950—2000.

New Media in Late 20th-century Art It covers the mixing of media and performance, video art, video installations, and the new forms of digital art. Starting from the notion that traditional Art has been a painting in two dimensions, Michael Rush looks at the extensions made by the twentieth century. It’s a beautifully illustrated book, with picture captions which explain the significance of each medium.

After an introductory consideration of the inclusion of Time, which is made possible by film, he passes into the early stages of media and performance. This covers the multimedia happenings which started with events organised by the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham organised in the 1960s. These mixed together various combinations of film, acting, music, and dance, and there began the widespread use of video film around the same time.

Performances range from video films of ultra-minimalist events such as hand gestures or people asleep, to live broadcasts of people commenting whilst under local anaesthetic on their own cosmetic surgery operations. Yes, it’s true.

There’s a lot of combining performance art with video recordings of it. Artists put themselves into embarrassing and even dangerous situations and record the consequences as a work of ‘art’. The problem for a lot of the art works created between the 1960s an 1980s is that there is little easily recoverable record of them. On the plus side, there are lots and lots of artists represented here – and their work is illustrated in colour with stills from exhibitions and ‘installations’.

The general problem with the survey is that most of its emphasis is on the content of the so-called art works, rather than the art itself. There is nothing new in an artist putting her adolescent traumas of sexual identity into a work of art just because it’s in the form of a video film.

The older artist to whom most repeated reference is made in the context of cross-boundary works is Marcel Duchamp, and the contemporary names which come up most frequently are Naim June Paik and Bill Viola, both installation artists. Most of these works seem to add up to multiple projections, using TV monitors or giant split screens

Bill Viola – ‘Acceptance’ 2008

A section on digital art attempts to bring things up to date with digitally altered photography and virtual reality programs. But in fact it’s very difficult to keep up with the developments of digital multimedia. I think the publishers will do Michael Rush a favour by publishing a second edition which allows him to add material on the Flash and Shockwave movies which are now sweeping the Web.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London: Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2005, pp.248, ISBN: 0500203784


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Filed Under: Art, Media Tagged With: Art, Digital art, Installations, Media, New media, New Media in Late 20th-century Art, Technology

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