Digitalism

What’s on the other side of the digital art equation?

By Alis Cambol, Design Analyst, frog design New York

The creation of digital arts is a natural evolution of artistic craft, requisitioning new media and technologies in pursuit of philosophical questioning and emotional experience. As with any sub-set of art characterized by craft and content (i.e. painting, sculpture), this one is no exception: it contains various movements and sub-movements, each applying its tools in pursuit of a different end. But perhaps more than any other genre, digital art has been defined by its choice of medium.

There is no doubt that artists throughout time have been fascinated by technology – yet the digital arts have allowed this element to dominate to a new extent, at times overshadowing and even eliminating other parts of the process. The result is an image of an obsession, and not necessarily a concept. In some cases, technology itself has become the point.

A simple formulation of process can be used to trace recent trends in the digital arts:

Digital Art = Concept + Craft + Use of Technology

“Weave Mirror,” by Daniel Rozin demonstrates a very powerful combination of these three facets of art-making: concept, craft, and technology. Hundreds of rectangular pieces of wood are animated by underlying motors to reveal an opaque “reflection” of their spectator based on different value readings from photosensitive sensor technology. The unexpected and contradictory use of wood beautifully replicates an every-day object, the mirror, by combining a natural element in fragments with technology. The material and craft are as essential to the piece as the technology that makes it possible, coming together to support an artistic concept that speaks to much more than the simple irony of a wooden mirror.

Digital Art = Concept + Use of Technology

In some cases, materials-based craft is set aside to lend greater emphasis to the concept itself. This pattern has already been seen in the conceptual art movement, famous for its ready-mades, and has recently extended itself into the realm of the digital arts.

New media artist Cory Arcangel proves that deconstructing an ordinary pop culture reference can stimulate a sense of nostalgia and loss with his “Super Mario Clouds”, which float on the familiar screen with beautiful isolation: Campbell’s soup, meet digitization! The use of technology is so seamlessly integrated with this simple idea that it’s impossible to separate the two. The experience is not mirrored or mediated by technology; rather, the interaction between self and technology is its very point, and the viewer comes away having learned something about him/herself on a visceral level.

Digital Art = Use of Technology

When material craft is pushed nearly out of the picture, and concept takes a back seat, all that remains is technology itself, a series of zeros and ones: the machine. The impact of such work is limited by the absence of any material or emotional context. Simon Heijdens’ “Light Weeds” is a good example of this phenomenon, when technology is valued before concept and craft. In the piece, high-contrast, silhouetted images of common weeds are projected onto the walls surrounding the viewer. At seemingly random moments, the weeds sway back and forth, and over long periods of time, one may even witness them growing. Often, viewers wave and touch the projection with high hopes of eliciting a response – and it is only later on, as the viewer approaches the title card, that we learn these movements are connected to weather readings and motion sensors outside the building.

The work’s reliance upon written explanation to help the viewer understand the projected images indicates a problematic underlying situation: the message obscured by, or foc-used upon, the technology itself. Without the help of a booklet, a title-card, or a “listen-and-learn” headphone set, the project becomes meaningless.

Its misleading choice of subject matter only makes matters worse, as the ostensibly “organic” visualization of weeds becomes dependent on its information tab. Faced with a representation of nature mediated by technology, mediated by language, the viewer is left with a sense of the system, but not the sign. The subject becomes an excuse to bring together some arbitrary capabilities of information-parsing technology.

Here, the technology becomes more than essential to the piece; the technology is the piece. As technology replaces the very heart of our art-making, the medium becomes a mirror into our unprecedented obsession with techno-logy, not so newly found, but unchallenged in its completion. As they say in sociology, but rarely in art: the medium is the message.