Who comes to mind when you think about digital art?
Scholars/Writers:
Hito Steyerl – In Defense of the Poor Image
Donna Haraway – A Cyborg Manifesto
Paul Virilio – The Vision Machine
Giuliana Bruno – Surface Matters
Jean Baudrillard – Simulation and Simulacra
William Gibson – Neuromancer
Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Morehsin & Daniel Rourke Allahari – 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK
Grégory Chatonsky – http://chatonsky.net/category/journal/
Laura Marks – Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
Art | Artists:
David Cronenberg Existenz + Videodrome
lana + lilly wachowski The Matrix
What does it mean to be a digital artist today?
Keywords: cyborg, AI, platform, versions, back-up, continuity, extension, collaboration, limits, algorithms, workflow, vision, agency, virtual bodies, cyberspace,video games, utopianism, ASCII, generative art, Internet art, flatten, layer, fold/unfold
There is an exciting conflation of physical and virtual realities. The democratization of photogrammetry and mocap technologies is allowing us to pull physical objects and motion into virtual space, while digital fabrication technologies are permitting us to manifest digitally generated objects and bodies in the physical world.
Artists have always worked with new technologies—there is a deep freedom in the undefined:
Brian Eno’s adoption of the synthesizerDigital tools have become more accessible (open-source) and intuitive. This flexibility makes it very exciting to experiment without too many financial/stylistic constraints.
There is a sense of working in dialogue with digital tools; a form of co-creation with software. I’m interested in the combination of freedom and constraint.
The influence of video games is tremendous, improving the software and tools that we have access to as artists while also establishing a visual vocabulary for computer-generated art. I often try to think in terms of game design when solving technical issues.
Finding meaning in flatness.
What broader implications do you see digital art taking on?
Contemporary life is saturated with technology, and this only increases over time. Digital art allows us to engage more thoughtfully and meaningfully with the devices and algorithms that shape our existences.
Digital art has the potential to decenter/intervene in the overwhelmingly consumption-based/capitalist applications of technology.
Authorship and the role of technology vs the hand of the artist (A.I., generative work).
The aura of the art object is in question. It’s exciting because the digital object is always in flux; it can change so easily and flexibly.
When did you start defining yourself as a digital artist?
I see myself as an interdisciplinary artist rather than a digital artist, but I’ve been interested in bringing together virtual and digital spaces for some time. The liberation of digital tools (and the ability to experiment) is what drew me to software, and I find the challenges that software provides to be exciting rather than frustrating. I’m interested in the compromises and adjustments that we have to make when collaborating with digital tools.
Where does digital art start for you?
In the conception of work—it’s a way of engaging with the images that surround me. It also gives a lively or an animated quality to my work that I find lacking when there is no movement.
Digital technology is an integral element of my work, informing its design and language (not just a method of documentation).
One of digital art’s great assets is its capacity for play and experimentation, especially at the inception of a project. You can work very fluidly without committing to materials. I become infatuated with real-world materials, but they also give me a lot of anxiety surrounding waste, expense, etc. The freedom to change/cast off/reorient in digital space is tremendously liberating.
Why is it important to create a language around digital art?
Literacy (public and within the arts)
Funding/support
Archiving/cataloging
Democratization of digital tools
How do misconceptions about digital art impact your practice?
Demands for interactivity (largely informed by consumer-technology). There is an expectation that technology should be tailored for the individual, so if you make a piece that rebuts that logic, people become frustrated. They are used to being catered to, and it isn’t their fault that this standard has been set, but it does impact our work. I am interested in slowness, in meditation, in thoughtful engagement, so I need to think carefully about how I might invite someone into this experience without frustrating them so much that they don’t take time with the work. Sumptuous visuals can be a strategy here, so that a viewer/participant wants to spend time with work even if it’s a bit boring.
Large-scale design also informs the general understanding of digital practice. In Montreal (where I am based), there are a lot of big-budget (let’s call them blockbuster) digital/media art installations. They are designed to appeal to a large-audience and they’re generally focused more on sensory experience than on meaningful content. These types of work establish expectations of art as spectacle. This is also echoed in some of the larger media-art festivals, which show work that is heavily invested in technology. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless it crowds out less flashy work. There is still a very macho kind of digital art that sacrifices substance for surface.
Based on medium alone, the expectations of consumer products are often extended to digital art (there is a lack of acceptance of glitch or error). Again, these expectations can be played with by artists in a productive way (which can also encourage a certain self-reflexivity regarding everyday technology). There needs to be enough space for acknowledging the failures of technology, because like anything, it isn’t infallible.
Musings…
Richard Abrams, Becoming Animal (2011):
“Of course, there can be no complete abolishment of mediation, no pure and unadulterated access to the real”
Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002):
“To use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s beautiful phrase, perception is a fold in the flesh of the world. Each time we express something we have perceived of the world, we make a fold in its thickness, ness, the way folds in the brain permit chemical communication among its surfaces.”
“I once watched someone make a strudel, beginning with a pliant ant sheet of dough, so thin it was translucent, that covered the top of a large table, and then folding and folding it until those thin layers pressed close together in a dense roll (with apples and raisins). The universe is like a strudel. Each time we perceive something, we acknowledge the continuity between its many layers. Expressing these perceptions, we actualize the virtual events enfolded in those layers.”
“Like Andre Bazin, that tireless seeker of the immanent in cinema, I search the image for a trace of the originary, physical event.”
“No need to interpret, only to unfold, to increase the surface area of experience.”
“In my emphasis on haptic visuality and haptic criticism, I intend to restore a flow between the haptic and the optical that our culture is currently lacking. That vision should have ceased to be understood as a form of contact and instead become disembodied and adequated with knowledge itself is a function of European post-Enlightenment rationality. But an ancient and intercultural undercurrent of haptic visuality continues to inform an understanding of vision as embodied and material. It is timely to explore how a haptic approach might rematerialize our objects of perception, especially now that optical visuality is being refitted as a virtual epistemology for the digital age.”
“Impassioned to understand how images provide a material connection between the viewer (hearer, toucher) and others distant in time and space, I become enraptured with Peircean semiotics, especially the indexical sign. What is an index if not an emissary from others that, even if they no longer exist, speaks to us in the present?”
“Like smells, electronic images are bodied forth in very small but nonetheless material entities. It’s fascinating that the word for the heady food of the gods, ambrosia, derives from the word amber, the Greek for which is elektron. When rubbed, amber releases charged particles, “which became regarded both as the elixir of life and as nourishment for the gods.” Amber, fossilized resin, the photographic mineral, is volatile both fragrantly and electrically.”
“Digital electronic media, though they seem to subsist entirely in a symbolic and immaterial realm, can remind us powerfully fully that they and we are mutually enfolded in material processes.”
“the electron, as physical entity, thickens and interconnects the physical world. It is far from an agent of dematerialization. This argument may frustrate readers, as it seems to move far from the social world to trace the materiality of digital media. The next essay, “Immanence Online;” brings the materialist analysis to a more macro scale. Moving from the quantum to the machine, software, and ultimately social levels, I argue that work on the Web, far from being virtual, indexes several levels of material, interconnected life.”
“While analog video suffers from bodily decay as the tape demagnetizes, digital video decays through “bit-rot;” William Gibson’s evocative term for lossy compression, information loss that renders images in increasingly large and “forgetful” pixels.”
“Digital video reflects both on the database as the outer boundary of knowledge and on the mortal life, the human and machine error, that cannot be contained in a database.”
“Digital video knows its body is not natural but is nonetheless mortal. It perceives for us humans the uncanniness with which it is possible to slip out of life and into virtuality.”
Feature image: aenl, DIGI-DEUIL DISTRIBUTION (DDD), 2022. Image: courtesy of artist.
Image description: A Grid of tombstones interspersed with disk icons sit on top of a purple background covered in digital pixels. The text on the tombstones is illegible, and the disk icons each read “FILE” in various colours.
Based in Montreal, CA, Anna Eyler is a media artist who holds a B.A. in Religious Studies and Art History from Carleton University (2010), a B.F.A. from the University of Ottawa (2015-), and an M.F.A. from Concordia University (2017-). She works in collaboration with Nicolas Lapointe under the name AENL. Recent exhibitions have been presented at the Sight & Sound festival at Eastern Bloc (2021), the MUTEK Montreal festival (2021), and the ZOOM OUT festival at Sporobole (2022). Eyler has been teaching 3D modelling for the past four years and is currently teaching in Dawson College’s Interactive Media Arts department. [www.aenl.net]
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