Early in 2022, I was invited by Christina Battle, Expanded’s editor, to reflect on the collaborative project Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum, which imagines a curriculum that critically articulates the dynamic discipline of digital art. In my effort at a response, I was inspired to create my own version—a process that, while fun, felt so precarious.
The presumptuousness of attempting to shape a canon for digital art encourages the common colonial habit of cultivating a singular, linear version of history, devoid of lateral realities and difference. The impossibility is humbling, though, and significant to this kind of imagination.
While reviewing the contributions to Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum I gathered a few observations:
- A refusal to claim where and when the notion of digital art began;
- An intertwining network of biographical inspiration and citation that speaks more of individual interest and lived experience than institutionalized influence;
- A critical approach to technology and an acknowledgement of its materiality and physical impacts.
Perhaps as a beginning, it’s a curriculum composed of subjective references and inspirations, deriving from both personal histories and shared experiences of growing up with the internet, adjusting with each technological invention and update. As such, the lineage of digital art reveals habits of collaborative co-creations between artist and technology, working through software chronicles as well as their functionalities. A curriculum that starts with technology—the applications and their adaptable and ephemeral nature—and criticisms of it can be one that is lateral, not singular or fixed. Perhaps from its material history and scope of usage, we can derive a network of resources and references ideal for determining digital art as a discipline. It’s an enduring and orbiting relationship, and as Kite suggests in her response—critical thinking of technology continues to define technology.
This is my biased, rabbit-hole attempt at creating a syllabus for digital art—one that is grounded in my interests and observations. It will focus on some technologies that are relevant to my general inquiry alongside a curatorial application sensitive to the artists’ responses offered through Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum. My framing will start with a selection of software and applications.
Unit One: Microsoft Paint and a beginning?
Does it make sense to start with a GIF? A JPEG? A meme? Aria Dean’s “Poor Meme, Rich Meme” is a comprehensive and compounded spotlight on the development of the meme, reflecting on the medium’s circulation and absorption—and inequities between Black creators and white appropriators—while calling to the widely referenced, 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steyerl. (This will be the only time I drop this citation, as the Steyerl article has been so widely referenced in the narrative of digital art it’s basically ingrained into the discipline.) We can keep moving backwards when thinking about memes. The imagery released by the Guerilla Girls in the 1980s could rightfully exist within this digital art history: they created “unprofessional” and satirical propaganda from stock imagery with targeted, provocative text printed across low-res images.
In November 1985, Microsoft Paint was introduced with the first version of Windows as a competitor to MacIntosh’s MacPaint. The software remains a simple raster graphic editor that saves files in JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. Because of its simplicity, Microsoft Paint was one of the more popular applications in the first editions of Windows, offering many users the opportunity to paint on a computer for the first time.1
But of course, these image files are outputs of software—Microsoft Paint, for instance—that have their own version histories, deriving from protocols and systems that were perhaps never meant to be used for meme creation. Matt Nish-Lapidus is interested in these foundational, latent protocols and systems that are usually unknown, forgotten, or deeply misunderstood, like in his work Finger Play, which explores the networking protocol acutely called “Finger” (written in 1971). Generally known as the first social networking protocol, Finger remains an unrelenting one that still lingers in all of our dominant operating systems. That’s a relevant 50+ year history.
While starting with a technological beginning seems counter to my desire for imagining a curriculum different from other genres’ canons, I feel it’s necessary to acknowledge the voids, misconceptions, myths, and histories of violence that run alongside technological development. Calling to Fallon Simard’s comparative survey of the overlapping histories between colonialism and lens-based technologies, the digital image and technology’s historical narrative both begin with misrepresentation and the invisible labour of Black and Indigenous bodies. (Also see UX Designer Florence Okoye’s Beyond Borders 2020 Keynote Lecture on the social beliefs of technology and its documented history.)
Image description: Close up of an open filing cabinet drawer. A hand from the left-side of the frame pulls at a file folder tab titled: “Publicly available gun trace data.” Other tabs that are visible include: “Accurate historical weather data,” “Cause of June 2015 black church fires,” “Location specific data on…,” “Accurate birth registration.”
Above: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness, and The Left Witness, 3d Sculptures, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Image description: Three figures from Allahyari’s She Who Sees the Unknown are arranged on a black background. A winged figure falls head-first in the centre of the image. On either side, two seated figures gesture towards the falling figure with their arms.
Unit Two: Blender and Institutional Critique
Blender is an open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set used for creating animated films, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, and virtual reality. The software features include 3D modelling, texturing, raster graphics editing, particle simulation, match moving, composition, etc.2
When reflecting on the capacities of Blender and opportunities for generating 3D models and textures, I think about archives, collections, memory, and the potentials in how these technologies can challenge, speculate, and refuse institutionalized processes of articulating and holding histories. And I think about the artists who explicitly engage with these ideas.
Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke’s The 3D Additivist Cookbook is a provocative compendium of contributions and prototypes from over one hundred artists, activists, and theorists that charge the 3D printer as an apparatus for activism, liberation, and disruption of the status-quo. Referencing this survey dovetails with acknowledging the importance of Allahyari—an influential artist who has been cited in the Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum—who, through digital archival storytelling and 3D-printed sculptures and videos, generates contrasting histories that protest the long-lasting impact of Western technological colonialism.3
3D fabrication can create a framework for science fictional thinking, invoking narratives of human evolution and extinction with imagined metaphysical realities.
To regain what was lost: Using 3D modeling technology, Shirin Fahimi introduced their performance persona—the divinator—into the digital realm. By taking a 3D scan of their own body, Fahimi was able to fabricate an original image, one that conjures erased folklore and resurrects a female prophecy that had been invisible in the political sphere of Islamic society.
To build and preserve: Founded by Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde and Salome Asega, Iyapo Repository holds a collection of digital and physical artifacts conceived and generated to maintain and envision the future of the African diaspora. The collection is developed through a series of workshops where participants become archivists of a future history and are tasked to preserve these speculative, diasporic digital records.
Unit Three: Unity and Worldbuilding
Unity is a cross-platform game engine that gives users the ability to produce 3D and 2D games, as well as interactive simulations and experiences. It is easy for beginners to use, and its capacity for iOS and Android game development makes the engine ideal for indie creators. With its seemingly democratic, compatible, and accessible usability, a thematic attribute of Unity is its readiness to create new worlds, forge critiques and captures of existing terrains, and find alternative modes for human and/or non-human interaction.
Unity can generate replicas of our world that traverse memory, time, and location, offering alternative models for understanding and experiencing our shared existence. To this end, artists like Scott Benesiinaabandan and Jawa El Khash employ digital worldbuilding to resurrect and secure vehicles for storytelling: language and archives. Benesiinaabandan’s Blueberry Pie Under the Martian Sky addresses concerns about the revitalization and evolution of the Anishinaabe language through a legend about a young boy who time travels back to his people’s place of origin. The Upper Side of the Sky, by El Khash, presents an immersive environment of restored ancient ruins and plant life lost to civil war in Palmyra, Syria, as a way of considering the interrelation of political and geographic displacement and botany.
However, as virtual reality continues to disseminate throughout our daily lives via gaming, journalism, military, and healthcare, critical artworks reflect on howtechnology’s capacities for cultivating authentic experiences and cognitive empathy could instead be regarded as voyeuristic.4 Erin Gee toys with these compounded factors within the landscape of Project H.E.A.R.T.—a biodata-driven VR shooter game where Call Of Duty righteousness, post-traumatic stress awareness, and pop music fuel a new form of emotional drone warfare.
Image description: Digital image from a virtual world. Bright blue graphic shapes of birds and branches appear atop of a darker blue, cosmic-like background. The image is centered around a spiral frame with a wood-like texture.
Unit Four: Instagram and your Data
Within the scope of a digital art curriculum, a unit focused on Instagram can offer a variety of tangents; a natural tangent for me focuses on algorithms and machine learning and the datasets used to train them. For beginners, artists Mimi Onuoha and Diana Nucera (AKA Mother Cyborg) published A People’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence—a comprehensive and accessible resource that both explains and demystifies everyday AI-based technologies and how they influence culture and economies.
The algorithms influencing and interpreting your social media usage are trained by datasets. These datasets are tarnished and biased, representative of a uniform perspective of the individuals employed to create them—typically a white, male demographic—particularly when corporate, blackbox algorithms are concerned (like Facebook, Google). Artists like Carline Sinders and Mimi Onuoha interrogate and challenge data collection processes for dominant AI technologies, either by determining what is missing, as in Onuoha’s Missing Data Sets, or through training and correction, like Sinder’s Feminist Data Sets.
These omissions and misrepresentations of data perpetuated by bias materialize IRL injustices and ramifications on marginalized publics. See Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression; Joy Bualamqini’s Coded Bias; and Tiara Roxanne’s work on Data Colonization. Towards this, facial recognition and surveillance technologies sit at the dangerous end of the machine learning narrative associated with social media. Twenty_Four_Seven / 365, an interactive installation by Aljumaine Gayle, comments on the increased, everyday dangers of surveillance technologies for communities of colour by creating an environment where audiences are surveilled without consent while viewing the work. Bahareh Khoshooee created The Lurking Variable, a body of work concerning the ethics of machine vision and the algorithmization of xenophobia in border control systems’ technologies that use biometric cues and proprietary algorithms to analyze a traveller’s body language.
Unit Five: TegakiE and your Community
TegakiE was an online forum where all entries were user-drawn images via a flash-based embedded input system in lieu of text posts and icons. Until last month, I didn’t know what TegakiE was and had, obviously, never used it. However, Cat Bluemke’s entry for Working Title: Digital Art Curriculum, which began with her formative experiences working with the blogging site, conjured more tender themes when considering the digital art medium, specifically relating to community building, peer-to-peer decentralizing the web, avatars, and information mobilization.
In her piece, Cat Bluemke speaks about the TegakiE fanbase—or really any digital fanbase—and its adaptability and resourcefulness for creation within the ever-changing confines of proprietary and black-boxed online platforms and digital technologies. As researcher and designer Mindy Seu remarks, “the internet is a collection of micro-environments that, at a certain scale, start to bleed together”5 creating communities and peer-to-peer networks. The Cyberfeminism Index, by Seu, began as a website, in the format of an open call and open-access spreadsheet built to collect as many cyberfeminist projects and references as possible to generate an expansive guide. The Index, as Seu sees it, acknowledges the genre’s latent origins and compounded history. Collective, online observations of digital technologies and peer-to-peer networking conjure alternative forms of digital realities and community perseverance. An AFK>IRL duality begins to become apparent, utilizing a hybrid existence to generate forums and manifestos (see Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Working Group).
As the global community became more reliant on their digital devices during the pandemic, the opportunity to use online communities and social media to spread awareness and education about enduring systems of oppression across the globe thrived. From Black Lives Matter to Woman Life Freedom, the brutal realities and lived experiences of targeted publics were becoming increasingly apparent, and localized demands for change became international. The art institution was not excluded from these call outs, and IG accounts like @thewhitepube and @decolonizethisplace helped the greater community question the status quo. While referencing Instagram accounts seemingly should belong in Unit Four, the importance of information dissemination and online community building is why it’s part of this component.
Final Assignment: A wonderful mess
I could go on, but similar to all software and applications, upgrades can always be made.
Being at the mercy of technology—both when considering our daily lives and digital arts as a medium—generates an acute and shared awareness of both the technological and material limitations experienced in the present moment. This awareness is always accompanied by speculations and desires for a future existence, as well as an acknowledgement of the nostalgia, warnings, and compounded histories of outdated and expired versions of digital technologies. This position offers a wonderful assemblage of perspectives, lived experiences, fictional, non-fictional, human, and non-human records reflecting on the digital image. This capacity for difference within a medium and a discipline is unique, leaving open opportunities for criticism, new definitions, emancipation, and even extinction.
Emily Fitzpatrick is a curator based in Toronto (Tkaronto). Recent work involves temporary public art projects rooted in social practice and feminist perspectives on digital sustainability and survival. She has extensive experience working within Toronto’s artist-run centres and public institutions including Images Festival, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Gendai Gallery, and Art Metropole. She has contributed to such publications as Canadian Art, C Magazine, Peripheral Review and CAROUSAL Magazine. She holds a Master of Visual Studies, Curatorial Studies, from the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Emily is currently the Artistic Director at Trinity Square Video (Toronto) and a member of the curatorial collective Aisle 4.
- With notes from the Wikipedia entry: Microsoft Paint. Wikipedia, 5 Jan. 2023.
- “Blender (Software).” Wikipedia, 1 Jan. 2023.
- See contribution by Shirin Fahimi
- From the Worldbuilding exhibition brochure, John G Hampton and Maiko Tanaka, Toronto, Ontario; Trinity Square Video, 2017.
- Citation Needed: Mindy Seu on the Internet’s Other Histories and Futures. Frontier Magazine, 11 May 2020.
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