Towards a Digital Aesthetic –Panel 1
Feb 21, 2008
The College Art Association 96th Annual Conference, Dallas USA
The Panel was convened and chaired by Steven Bleichner, Coastal Carolina University
Digital Aesthetics and the collapse of Contemporary Common Sense
Warren Slack-University of California, Santa Cruz
The Persistence of Grids
James Nisbit, Stanford University
This paper will examine the phenomenon of pixilation in digital photography through a consideration of the grid in art of the past century. I will isolate three moments: the appearance of grids as independent entities of artistic production in the 1910s by such figures as Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, and Piet Mondrian; the recuperation and institutionalization of postwar aesthetics of the grid in exhibitions organized by Lucy Lippard and Rosalind Krauss, respectively, in the 1970s; and finally the role of the internet and digital processing in Thomas Ruff’s photographic series jpegs in which the artist expands and brings forward the pixelation of images found online. Specifically, this trajectory allows one to consider Ruff’s jpegs with more nuance regarding often polarizing discussions of a supposed break in the material conditions of digital photography from analog practices. The ties of Ruff’s work to avant-garde practices of the twentieth century suggest we must not only examine recent work in terms of its historical precedent but also begin to consider the inverse: the manner in which digital practices reframe our understanding of twentieth-century art.
The Personalised Surface within Fine Art Digital Printmaking
Paul Coldwell University of the Arts London
Digital technology has made a profound change on the way in which artists engage with the materiality of their work. In the context of fine art printmaking, this has resulted in a dramatic shift in the way the surface is considered, moving away from a surface that is negotiated throughout the making of the work, to surface decisions that need only be resolved in the final stages of image production. While this has opened up opportunities for print to be seen in an expanded form, there can be a loss of particularity of surface that is a feature of more traditional practice in exchange for a uniformity imposed by industry norms with inkjet prints often having the anonymity associated with reproductions.
Working digitally allows for dramatic changes in scale, form and context at anytime in the process of making, proposing a more fluid approach to making and the potential for multiple outputs. Within this, the surface can also be seen as the focus for issues of authorship and authenticity and questioning the role of the computer screen as matrix, intermediary or as the site for the final artwork.
Electronic Ritual and Ceremony
Joan Truckenbrod, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Professor
Digital artwork embraces the aesthetics of electronic rituals and ceremonies embedded in the digital culture. Investigations of ritual and ceremony in indigenous cultures reveal provocative parallels to digital media. Indigenous ritual and ceremonies catalyze out of body experiences, analogous to out of body experiences created by simulations in virtual space. Digitization creates parallel universes of abstract constructs. Image, sound, thought and touch transform into an invisible dimension parallel to our material, lived experiences, just as indigenous people exist in a polyphony of realms, the spiritual, ancestral and everyday experience, lived simultaneously.
When the physicality of the object is radically shifted to a different realm, how is it viewed, what are the aesthetic issues? If the artistic gesture is embedded not in a surface but rather in an emotional space involving motion, sound and moving image, how are the aesthetics discussed critically?
Is the aesthetic embedded in the digital object, or in a digital process such as programming? Is the aesthetic sited in the simultaneity of material and virtual , of improvisation with programmatic, or in a unique intersection of the physiological sensation of touch, the emotional experience of touch, and the gestural resonance of the hand in virtual space.
(Web) Site-specific: Public art on the World Wide Web.
Annie Gérin, University of Quebec, Montreal.
In the past, the monument usually appeared as a three-dimensional object placed in a public space. Built in durable materials, it was expected that its immutable meaning would last as long as its form. Around this monument, communities came together: the public spaces it inhabited transformed into physical sites of remembrance.
In the present, the expansion of communication networks and digital cultures have altered the spatial and temporal parameters of collective experience, and by extension, of memorial activities. With new communication technologies, public space has become fragmented, serialized and also strategically (if not universally) accessible.
This conceptual shift provides unprecedented potential for the digital monument, particularly as acts of memorialization rely more than ever on virtual rather than physical communities. These fragile and changeable populations are linked by ideals, convictions and interests shared in time, rather than place or geographical proximity. These are the intended publics for many recent memorials that overflow the locality of their origin to remember global causes such as September 11, Tiananmen Square, the Aids crisis and the war in Iraq, to name a few.
The paper will hence study how digital artworks that function as memorial art compose with the constraints traditionally imposed on the memorial form. More specifically, it will investigate how the concept of site-specificity, central to much public art and memorial art can be reframed to contribute constructively to discussions on digital memorial art.
Paper.
The Personalised Surface within Fine Art Digital Printmaking.
Professor Paul Coldwell
University of the Arts London
Since the advent of the home computer and desktop printers, digital technology has rapidly infiltrated the artist’s studio, transforming it in the process and presenting the artist with the means to produce, distribute, discuss and market their work. For artists concerned with ideas of the print or the multiple image, this technology offers opportunities that previous generations could never had imaged. The artist now, even working in their bed-sit, has the potential to work on a scale the size of the Sistine chapel, to draw from a palette of millions of colours, to be their own publisher, present their own gallery and to send their work round the world. All this can be done without engaging in the works material presence or even, it could be argued, getting out of bed.
The pixel and the vector are the means through which we now view the world. But artists come with histories and bring their sensibilities and aesthetics, formed through previous technologies, to bear upon their image making. I resist the temptation to talk about new and old technologies since it belies the fact that all technologies in their day have been new, from the lead pencil through to the mouse.
My paper focuses on digital printmaking and it is worth reflecting that the broad history of printmaking has been marked by technical developments, etching superseding engraving for its speed and capacity to carry a fluid mark, lithography in turn superseding etching as the dominant commercial process. But artists go backwards and forwards, drawing on experience and indeed pleasures from previous work and carrying those forward in pursuit of a means to express their ideas. This is no different for the artists working now with digital technology. There are qualities that they may wish to retain from previous work that they seek to embed into this new way of working. One such area lies within the consideration and engagement with surface.
In previous print technologies, the surface has been a physical fact, negotiated throughout production. Size and character where the result of an engagement with a particular surface, fixed by physical determinants. The artist working on an etching for example committed themselves to a size of image and a set of relationships. Change could only be achieved through physically erasing or by adding but only within a continuum of going forward. A decision to increase the overall dimensions for example would result in starting the game a fresh. Working digitally allows for the artist to work backwards as well as forwards. Size can be negotiated throughout the process; the form the work takes remaining fluid, a drawing on screen having the potential to be outputted as projection, printout, or an image the result of driving an engraving machine. The decision on the final surface through which the viewer perceives the work, can be postponed until the very last moment, and even then can be one of an infinite number of possible solutions. I want to briefly look at three very different artists who have approached this idea of surface when working digitally.
Peter Kennard who now works as a collaborative partnership with Cat Picton-Phillips, is internationally known as a political artist engaged with current issues. His photo collages against war established him in the tradition of Heartfield and his anti war images have become part of the contemporary language of agit prop. In recent years digital technology has dramatically affected his working practice
There is a great change between making a digital montage now and before we had this technology… I can get images from The Guardian, (newspaper). I can then manipulate them on screen and then it’s sent to the magazine so it’s all virtual. I still find this weird. I spent half my life going to the darkroom, making 10 images slightly different sizes, cutting them with a scalpel, cow gum on the back, blacking out, it was totally physical and yet now I can end up with an image in a magazine a day later. I still find it hard to think it exists.
In Kennard’s recent work he has sought to introduce a physical aspect to the making of the digital images. In the series Awards (2004) the scanner was used as a surface onto which sand, dust and other material was laid so that the scanner functioned as a camera recording these changing surfaces. The scanner recorded the evidence of gestures as the material was scrapped and pushed around. Reflecting on these prints, Kennard however felt that the final digital prints were too removed from the action
In the end, Cat Picton-Phillips and I felt a bit frustrated which is why we set out to find a way to make digital prints on a surface that could then be beaten up and battered….
In the later larger, installation pieces the attack on the pure clean digital aesthetic is further attacked taking the action into the finished works and making a surface that seems far removed from the preciousness of the digital print.
Well you feel this machine (inkjet printer) is like a corporate brain with that impassive quality and clean design of the corporate state so I think you are right that there is an element of trying to break it up. But always with my work it is also to do with subject matter. When I first made digital prints the were beautifully printed on hahnemuhle archival paper and there was a sense of aesthetising the subject matter and so through going on to cheap paper and newsprint its suggests the fragility of the situation that we are making work about, so its about content………..I’m not consciously saying I’m going to destroy ideas of digital, I think its taking technology and seeing how far you can make It your own because otherwise its defined by what you are told it is.
These large images of Kennard’s are printed onto newspaper in sections collaged together and take on the battered quality of old billboards, a far cry from the perfect photographic images through which inkjet is marketed. They deteriorate like any newspaper, counteracting the triumph of the technology, which claims to enable prints to last for a hundred years.
Adopting a very different strategy is the painter Charlotte Hodes. Unlike Kennard whose work is driven by political imperatives, Hodes operates within a poetic field of reference. She has established a reputation as an artist for whom the decorative arts have become source material for an investigation of female sensibility. Deborah Dean noted this aspect in the catalogue essay on her work in 1999
Hodes’ re-presentations of borrowed and found images thus appear to deny any traditional hierarchy: saucepans, wallpaper, a Gainsborough, some fruit- all seem equal. Durer’s Eve is overlaid with the chequered patterning taken from a swatch of fabric; a vegetable rack from a Sunday supplement jostles alongside references to Dutch 17th century still life.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in her recent exhibition, Fragmented Images, at the Wallace Collection London, the result of a two-year role as associate artist. As a painter she approaches her digital work with demands for a tactile surface that carries her mark. Her latest work takes the digital print as a starting point for collages and paper cuts which fuse old and new technologies, the print becoming the surface for negotiation.
She begins by developing the images from a bank of iconography developed over years. These are printed digitally onto both sides of the paper. She initially works from both sides, using the printed image as a template for cutting into the surface. The result is filigree work, which gives the prints a quality of delicate lace, ghosting the reverse image. Onto the selected side, she then pastes the cut out elements, tiny fragments of paper like confetti. The digital surface is therefore sandwiched between the shadows cast by the cut out areas, and the collaged elements which sit on top. The result is an image, part collage, part print, part cut-out. She uses the fluidity of the computer to bring together all her disparate imagery…
I want to develop an initial sense of approximation, in order to gradually make the images more precise. From these fragmented images I can sense how they might be put together. On the computer, I have the possibility of working with trial and error without the risk of loss. (Images are saved at every stage) and with the benefit of retaining all the versions before finally committing. One of the main things I try out is scale-the size of the figure relative to the area of pattern-the size of the figure relative to the whole image.
She has developed these works into editioned works made with the assistance of the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE. Here the laser has replaced her meticulous manual cutting. Great care in the drawing has to be taken in ensure the cutting supports itself so the drawing for the laser must be thoroughly thought through. The printed image is worked using pixel based Photoshop while in order to direct the laser, the drawing for this function must as vector.
These prints, like Kennard’s, challenge that uniformity that can so easily impose itself when working with digital print, and wrestles the surface aesthetic to be at the command of the artist rather than that as a given. For all this apparent transgression, the works themselves seem like silk, sweet pinks, and purples pervades these paper cuts, given them a delicate quality that belies their physical birth. The computer’s capacity for storing information is used in her approach to collage, but by interceding and interacting with the surface she instils in these works a reminder that collage is a bringing together of disparate material rather than presenting a seamless perfection that inkjet can impose.
Finally Tim Head, whose came to prominence in the 1980’s with complex installations using shadows objects and projections and has been working with digital technology for a number of years. In an early digital work from 1985, Animal, Digital, Cannibal, 2.5 x 3.5 metres inkjet onto Foamex he clearly shows his interest in the flat space engendered by the computer and again large prints from the series of 13 he moves the imagery into abstraction, with the images manufactured from photocopy ‘noise’, scanned from transparencies and then printed as large inkjets.
In 2003, Head wrote in an artist’s statement that…
The recent work explores the physical ingredients of digital space. It focuses on the space generated by a computer programme on screen in real time.
The work attempts to employ only those prime material elements that seem to be intrinsic to this encoded and disembodied space making clear its essential differences from other forms of represented space (i.e. in painting, photography, film and video).
Recently he has been working with the artist and programmer Eli Zafran to develop a series of digital prints that exploit the code through which the computer communicates with the printer in order to produce images that are randomly generated within fixed parameters. In terms of their surface, Head notes that…
The surfaces of the inkjet prints I’ve been working on are not ‘personalised’ in any sense, rather they use the impersonal, remote, computer coded, machine perfected properties of inkjet printing as the prime ingredients out of which the prints are formed.
However in essence they are concerned with each individual drop of ink, squirted onto the paper and retaining its quality as a single dot. These prints of Head’s, almost impossible to reproduce, are concrete images locked into their making.
In virtual space the scale of things is either an enlargement or a reduction in size or else a floating unanchored scalelessness. This seems to be the case for most digital inkjet prints. I want to return these virtual waifs to the actual physical world, to lock them at an actual one to one scale so that they sit in the same physical space we occupy. One metre of inkjet print is one metre, not a representation of a hundred metres.
Furthermore they are each unique images, each print a record of the millions of decisions set into a random framework. Each print can be interpreted as a concrete record of an event in time. Head challenges the notion that the computer enables the artist to go back and forward in time, here he locks the production of the images to real time, never to be recaptured. The surface therefore contains the evidence an event. Head and Zafran did numerous experiments using different ink sets and a range of papers to ensure that the integrity of each dot was preserved.
While digital print technology has focused o the photographic as a benchmark for quality, I would claim that Head’s work reveals the very essence of the printer itself and how it functions. Head shows us the raw data as image, not pretending to be other than itself. But he is a visual poet and these images are about looking and seeing. He refers to the function of these prints as being …
These slow random fields offer a brief pause amid the torrent of commercially fuelled digital images.
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They offer a moment to engage, to stop and to look. It’s all on the surface.
Each of the three artists I have considered have taken a very particular position in terms of he way the surface functions for them in carrying and supporting the ideas inherent in their work. By challenging industry norms and claiming an individual position, they give their digital work the stature of precise artworks rather than reproductions. They reveal that the digital aesthetic is not fixed but can be negotiated on an individual basis.
Each of these artists are included in a two year project The Personalised Surface within Fine Art Digital Printmaking at the University of the Arts London, funded by he AHRC, Arts and Humanities Research Council. Through the project, artists approach to surface when working digital will be examined through case studies, interviews and practical work. I would welcome you all to visit the site www.faderesearch.com/digitalsurface and contribute to this research. Under the section Case studies is an invitation to document the making of a piece of work for the website and this data will be referenced as the project proceeds.
Peter Kennard in conversation with Paul Coldwell Space Studios, Martello St, London. 12th October 2007. Reproduced in full www.faderesearch.com/digitalsurface
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Deborah Dean. Surfing History (cat) 1999 Eagle Gallery London.
Charlotte Hodes in Conversation with Paul Coldwell, France August 2007
Tim Head. An exploration into Digital Space. 2003 www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/home.htm
Tim Head. Diverting the Flow of Inkjet Printing. 2007 www.faderesearch.com/digitalsurface
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