What comes to mind when you think about digital art?
When I think about making art in/with/for the digital, I think about what technology-informed methodologies afford new ways of thinking and hacking. This includes the poetics of computation through randomness, recursivity, querying online databases as found objects and artistic materials, and, more importantly, a networked imagination and agency that’s beyond individuals. W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. is such a project where I explore and experiment with how meaning is reconstructed through HCI, such as graphic user interfaces, and how meaning systems are unstable but fertile semiotic spaces that can be intervened or hacked to generate alternative realities. This project has been expanded through many versions, shifting meanings and taking forms from a flickering neon light sculpture (2017), to a flipbook and a lenticular print as artist multiples (2018) to two sound and video poems (2021). Twitterbot is amongst the various formats of publications I have been experimenting with for exploring the idea of digital poetry, uncreative and asemic writing. To quote from an essay I wrote on Twitterbot:
“TwitterBots are essentially applications that are built and authenticated through Twitter’s official API to get and post data on the Twitter platform/social network… In terms of cultural, linguistic and epistemic impact, Twitter is both metaphor and means of the contemporary discursive environment that is low in meaning yet abundant in information. Twitter has fostered a significantly new form of language use that can take hold of all the world’s cultures very quickly through a distinctive and purely electronic form of digital writing and reading with its “280 characters or less” rule and hashtag metadata ecology. Built on the use of language, both human languages and codes whose shape and pattern the Twitter software system subtly manages and controls, it creates an elaborate social structure, a digital institution constructed by its users interacting with software and databases… On the one hand, TwitterBot resembles the digital poetry precursors who employ authoring procedural systems to appropriate and re-contextualize texts. TwitterBots as a body of poetic work move through conceptualism into a space where intelligence can be automated and ethically sculpted. On the other hand, the computer processing and specific social network that Twitter is living on allow for possibilities that human authors alone or even collaborative human-machine agents would not be able to achieve without the Internet. Working with the Internet as a medium powered through APIs to access real-time databases (as Giles summarizes) instantiates a particular form of sociality: the TwitterBot poem can be seen within a social text in which “the digital is rooted in social and bodily experience.” – Ye, Xuan. “Et Cetera.” York University, 2018.
More about W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G: https://a.pureapparat.us/w-y-s-i-w-y-g/
Feature image: Xuan Ye 叶轩, IN BETWEEN () WE OSCILLATE, app, 2018. Image: courtesy of artist.
Image description: An animated GIF with bright white text on a black background. In the centre, the a glowing and flickering text reads “In Between We Oscillate.” In the background, a list of words turned sideways scrolls horizontally to the left. Some of the list reads: “Bitter Sweet, Bless Curse, Borrow Lend, Build Destroy, Bold Timid…”
Xuan Ye 叶轩 (CN/CA) works across various contexts of art, music, and technology through research and creation. They make publications, installations and performances as media poetry that synthesize language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time.
The artist has been featured and exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Venice Architecture Biennale (IT), MUTEK (CA), Centre de Design de l’UQAM à Montréal (CA), Fonderie Darling (CA), Varley Art Gallery (CA), the Art Gallery of Ontario (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), the Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM(GE), among others. They have received grants from the Arts Councils at three levels in Canada. They are a recipient of SSHRC scholarship and a finalist of 2018 EQ Bank Digital Artists Award.
As a musician, X is techne agnostic and genre eclectic. They have been commissioned by Edmonton New Music (2021), and the Canadian Music Centre (2020). They have performed at numerous experimental music festivals and DIY shows, sharing programs with Phew, Pharmakon, Chris Corsano, Carl Stone, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Xylouris White, GOOOOOSE, etc. Their live performances and music releases have received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim! [www.a.pureapparat.us/]
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