Futures Past: Thirty Years of Arts Computing: 02 (Computers and the History of Art) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841501689 ISBN 13: 9781841501680

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In decades past, artists envisioned a future populated by technological wonders such as hovercraft vehicles and voice-operated computers. Today we barely recognize these futuristic landscapes that bear only slight resemblance to an everyday reality. Futures Past considers digital media’s transformative impact on the art world from a perspective of thirty years’ worth of hindsight. Herein a distinguished group of contributors—from researchers and teachers to curators and artists—argue for a more profound understanding of digital culture in the twenty-first century.
This unprecedented volume examines the disparities between earlier visions of the future of digital art and its current state, including frank accounts of promising projects that failed to deliver and assessments of more humble projects that have not only survived, but flourished. Futures Past is a look back at the frenetic history of computerized art that points the way toward a promising future.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel is imaging officer for the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom.
Trish Cashen is a member of the faculty of arts at the Open University, United Kingdom.
Hazel Gardiner is senior project officer at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Kings College, London, United Kingdom.

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Futures Past

Thirty Years of Arts Computing Computers and the History of Art, Volume Two

By Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, Hazel Gardiner

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-168-0

Contents

Contributors, 
Introduction by Trish Cashen, 
EXPERIMENTAL INTERACTION, 
Painting Digital, Letting Go by James Faure Walker, 
Microanalysis as a Means to Mediate Digital Arts by Matthias Weiss, 
Indexed Lights by Pierre R. Auboiron, 
EDUCATING WITH COMPUTERS, 
A Computer in the Art Room by Catherine Mason, 
Learning Resources for Teaching History of Art in Higher Education by Jutta Vinzent, 
PROJECTS AND ARCHIVES: HISTORIES AND RESURGENCE, 
Sourcing the Index: Iconography and its Debt to Photography by Colum Hourihane, 
The Medium was the Method: Photography and Iconography at the Index of Christian Art by Andrew E. Hershberger, 
The Good, the Bad and the Accessible: Thirty Years of Using New Technologies in BIAD Archives by Sian Everitt, 
ONLINE INFORMATION: LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD, 
Object Information at the Victoria and Albert Museum: Successes and Failures in Web Delivery by Melanie Rowntree, 
This is the Modern World: Collaborating with ARTstor by Vickie O'Riordan, 
Towards a Semantic Web: The Role of Ontologies in the Literary Domain by Luciana Bordoni, 
Abstracts, 
CHArt – Computers and the History of Art, 
Guidelines for Submitting Papers for the CHArt Yearbook, 

CHAPTER 1

Painting Digital, Letting Go

James Faure Walker

What is a painter (and in my case a digital painter) doing at a conference on computing and the history of art? The short answer is, I am as interested as anyone else in trying to understand this combustion of art fuelled by high technology, and, in part, it is my own history too. Along with my colleagues, I often wonder how I have arrived where I am, and wonder how many wrong turnings I have taken. Have I been tinkering on the edges while the important action has taken place over the hill? If histories are now becoming official, are they being dug out of cupboards, built out of theories, or drawn from the memory of witnesses? Do I see this as selfevident art history written in a sequence of major works, each deserving its marker at Tate Modern? No. Have I been programmed to think the way I do? Should I reboot my thinking in the light of new historical findings?

As a student at St Martin's School of Art in London in the 1960s, I watched here and there a few of the first clatterings of computer art: kinetic art at Signals, Cybernetic Serendipity, Bruce Lacey (who was the janitor of my studio from 1971 onwards), and the beige card science/art pages of Studio. As a painter and critic in the 1970s, I was aware of computerised typesetting (I was editing and designing an art magazine) and instinctively knew this was something I should know much more about, though, generally, I did not rate 'computer art' as art, apart from Richard Hamilton's Tyres. In the 1980s, I half-evolved into a 'computer artist' but without ceasing to be a painter. Now, I suppose, I am something of a sleuth, being an Art and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Research Fellow, both practitioner and commentator.

I know of several books in production and plenty on the shelves documenting the route to Net Art, Information Art, Digital Art, or New Media art. Naturally, I am curious as to how this history develops. Will it be contested? For one thing, painting does not feature very much in these accounts except as a 'technology' – that is to say, pigment on canvas – a technology past its prime. My impression is that here is a history that zeroes in on the beginnings of 'computer art'; it identifies pioneer figures, particularly those developing what are best described as 'computer- generated' images, primarily linear patterns. Yet if I reflect on who have been the dominant figures and the dominant topics of discussions over the past ten or fifteen years, I find much broader influences at work. Important as they are, algorithmic artists would feature only as one strain alongside performance art, video, installation, conceptual art, interactive technologies, the Web, the futurology of Wired, innovations in computer graphics itself, and contemporary art in general. In other words, in the small segment of all this that concerns me – painting with the computer – the history of machine art is only one fraction. In today's 'digital art' it is not possible to isolate just one history, one DNA signature.

The subject of painting and the computer is complex, little understood, and neglected. To put it simply, each new survey that comes out on 'digital art' has an interest in saying, 'here is something new and distinct from the old order'. The thesis of the book I am writing, Painting the Digital River, How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer, argues that painting is a living, adaptable art form, and painters can weave these wonderful visual tricks into their repertoire. Art historians may object to the notion and argue that a painter has no critical distance; they could point to the lack of highbrow magazine articles, proper exhibitions, the lack of sustained interest by critics. All this I would have to concede, but I would also ask how anyone could be expected to find out about this way of painting except by doing it themselves. You cannot investigate retrospectively what does not yet exist. There have been one or two minor surveys and there are networks of artists but that's about it. With software, as with painting, only a user can really taste the difference. It is not like a documented installation with photos in a catalogue or a promotional critical essay; material that can become instant history – what Hal Foster has described as 'hind sighting the present'. I have found it hard to get the basics of computer graphics across to colleagues who are critics and sophisticated thinkers – I wonder how many understand the difference between bitmap and vector, not that I am that good at explaining it. They will always counter my argument by saying, well, as there is no major art – as yet – in that field, we do not need to bother with it. But some do.

I recall a Courtauld art historian a couple of years back, supposedly an expert on the Web and a curator, giving a talk with 35mm slides at the Tate. I also recall a leading expert on avant-garde film who did not know what a website was. At a talk I gave six years ago at the Tate on Patrick Heron, a number of the audience were quite unaware that you could 'paint' with the computer in colour. I still find it bizarre that a technology which has so many echoes back and forth in the history of painting (which would have been sheer dreamland for any assistant slaving in a Florentine studio 500 years ago) means little to today's cognoscenti. There are advantages in having so few art historians and critics around with expert knowledge. It is liberating to work with a powerful technology where there are few precedents, few established idioms, and few tracks in the snow to follow. The downside is that prejudices go unchallenged; in the Jerwood Drawing competition, digital drawing has been effectively excluded on the grounds that it is printed and so is not 'real drawing'. It is only in the past few years that galleries have recognised that inkjet prints are viable and sellable. In the teaching of fine art, the computer room is still labelled with the catch-all 'media', which these days means predominantly video editing. So this marvellous instrument often remains segregated and underused – though not for long, I hope.

What do I mean by liberating? In part, I am thinking practically of the speed of response, the immediacy, the ability to catch an idea while it is still in flight. For years I have had a digital camera in my bag, and in moments I am able to capture an image from a bus, or move between liquid and digital paint, or process a mark through a filter, a colour correction, a pattern. As I work with these 'instruments' every day, their use increasingly becomes second nature to me.

Before using computers my practice was to make many drawings and studies connected with a painting project, more as rehearsals than as 'working drawings'; I still make the drawings and the paintings, but my preferred medium for 'thinking visually' is digital. One reason for this is that snapshot photography allows a painting to have the occasional glimpse of the textures of the 'real world' – a counterpoint to the eerie 'otherness' of geometric abstraction.

So the longer explanation of why a practitioner would wish to join the conversation is that sometimes the wrong history may be under discussion. The genetic makeup of today's digital artist is thought to consist of just one stream of art: the history of 'machine art' and the history of computers. The 'early' works that make up this supposed canon are the pioneer 'experimental' photographs of Muybridge; Duchamp's spinning discs; Constructivism; and algorithmic art. From here was the onward march, like the Chinese dynasties, where a succession of technological art formats annihilate their predecessors: Artificial Intelligence, interactive art, Net Art, wearable Information Art, consciousness-enhancing art. It is really a Woody Allen script: New Media! New Art! It is not that I do not respect those achievements or feel the force of the counterculture. It is that they have no special relevance or priority in the vast seas of art history. There are so many additional influences that would enter my own equation: from Pollock, de Kooning, Dubuffet, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Beuys, Richter, to younger painters such as Neo Rauch. I cannot speak for other painters using computers except to say that most are not isolationists, purists or dissidents shut off from 'the art world' – whatever that is. They feel connected with the wider history and with the dynamics of contemporary art. If they are frustrated it is because they feel trapped in the ghetto of trade show exhibitions, under a 'digital' art label, as if the only art they ever look at is digital art. In their hearts they feel they belong in the bigger picture. Some no longer show at digital shows or contexts where they will be identified primarily by medium. Using a computer was once such an all-absorbing task that it probably meant letting the ArtForum subscription lapse, but now there is no excuse for being uninformed. It is a tough message, but these days your work has to hit the spot as art, not as 'computer art'.

If the next generation of books on digital art do not have a Muybridge 'animal locomotion' reproduction in Chapter 1, what would they have instead? A facetious answer would be they might begin with medieval digital and go through to pointillism, showing that even though they lacked the mainframes, artists were thinking digital, seeing digital, and arranging the structure of paintings with colour and spatial awareness that was centuries later customised in Adobe Creative Suite. That, I confess, is my approach. As a reader, I find the history of computer graphics itself (especially the anecdotes of Alvy Ray Smith)as interesting and certainly humane as the story of computer art. The trouble is that at every computer art conference I go to I tend to be as interested in the latest release of software, the new motion capture system, and the latest piece of interactive art. Then, after a few hours in the museum nearby, I come out wondering why my generation – myself included – is not producing works that can hold their own in that company. At the Frieze Art Fair I see the finesse, the lightness of touch, the confidence of a milieu aware of its cultural references, a place where painting and photography command most attention. In comparison, the world of digital art seems parochial, fixated on its own issues, speaking to itself, and preoccupied – some of it at least – with its family tree. Your work may be feeble, but leave it in a drawer for thirty years and, who knows, it could be Ph.D. source material!

The problem is not the lack of historical recognition so much as the lack of critical thought. Sometimes practitioners who use the model of an old medium – like painting – to get to grips with new technology are described patronisingly as lightweights, unable to come to terms with the real 'digital issues'. It is as if there is some agreed master plan that sets out the route a 'serious' artist must take once the laptop has been purchased. The 'Big Idea' is that digital art should be about 'digital things' – i.e. Artificial Intelligence, surveillance, the media, bio-feedback. Saying that digital art should concentrate on what cannot be done any other way sounds fine and hits the core. In comparison, using software to imitate paint is on a par with repro rococo. Speak about 'code' and you go deep. Speak about colour, pigment structures, compositional principles, decoration and you are messing in the froth.

I would prefer a more relaxed framework for interpreting what has taken place, not the tunnel vision of those who worship self-customised programming, much as Henry Tonks at the Slade a hundred years agosaw anatomy and the use of X-ray as the key to painting. English painting, dare I say, had an appalling record for a long time, repeatedly inhibited by the fear and dogmatism cultivated in its art schools. Perhaps that is one history that deserves to stay buried. Some of us prefer to use 'high tech' to examine leaves, insect wings, what lurks in the pond, or to make frivolous patterns in the air. In the literature on 'new media' there is not much criticism that reflects on the fact that there was plenty of art around before there were any electronic systems. It was possible to make art without a computer then, and it is possible now.

CHAPTER 2

Microanalysis as a Means to Mediate Digital Arts1

Matthias Weiss

From a German perspective, academically oriented art history generally ignores the fact that the computer is, and has been, both a tool and a component of art for nearly as long as the machine itself has existed. A reappraisal of this history which attempts to place it in an art history context is therefore still needed. This perspective shifts when the international art scene and the many varieties of computer art that closely follow developments in the technological domain are considered. In this paper, two stimuli are examined as a means to look at computer art in an art historical context. The first attempts to define the topic and clarify the historicity of the phenomenon in stages, the second examines the role that description (i.e. especially microanalysis) plays in order to show that close examination facilitates differentiation and that comparisons between older and newer works are possible. Thus, the potential for a more profound understanding of computer art is created. In the first section, I examine connections that have been neglected to date, in the second, I discuss two works from two different periods that are effective illustrations of the history of computer art. The term 'computer art' is used in the accepted sense to refer to the use of digital methods in the production of artworks.

Definitions

In order to be able to understand the phenomenon of computer art, a context is required. The term 'computer art' rather than 'software art' is used because the former implies a historically integrated factor that permits a comparative investigation of computer art. Using this approach, connections between the latest phenomena which have achieved great popularity in the field of New Media art and art works from the 1960s and 1970s will be established. By looking at the artistic use of computers from a historical perspective, these connections make it possible to assess their importance and role within art as a discipline. It is also important not to draw type distinctions categorically between immersive artificial worlds (or augmented reality projects), which are generated by using computers and 'software art' programs. In recent art history, this division has led to a less than fruitful connection between interactive environments and video art, which, as a supposedly logical consequence from the history of film, has prescribed the digital as the medium of the future. It is also necessary to draw a distinction between the different developments and impacts of video art as well as computer art, although intersections certainly exist.

I refer to computer art as a kind of artistic activity that would not be possible or have any meaning without computers. For example: a specific script that can run on any ordinary computer (and that actually requires it for the desired performance), or a remotely connected installation which generates artificial life forms in a projection room using distant computers over the Internet with local user input data. Both are determined by the use of computer systems and a communication structure, and both would be unthinkable without these components. All of these technologies contribute to meaning.

History

The history of computer art can be classified into three phases, defined by and dependent on what was technically feasible at the time. In the first phase, mainstream computer art fed back into aesthetics, which, in turn, developed into two models of non-representational art – abstraction and concretion. This phase ended in the mid-1970s. The output consisted of graphics along with works such as Videoplace by Myron Kreuger.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Futures Past by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, Hazel Gardiner. Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841501689
• ISBN 13: 9781841501680
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 140
• Herausgeber: Bentkowska-Kafel Anna, Cashen Trish, Gardiner Hazel
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar