Review

From Critical Practice Chelsea

Digital Aesthetic 2, Preston, University of Central Lancashire, 16-17 March 2007

Organized by Dr Chris Meigh-Andrews, Reader in Digital and Electronic Art at the Electronic and Digital Art Unit, University of Central Lancashire, with the Harris Museum, Digital Aesthetic 2 consisted of a two day conference, an exhibition in four venues across Preston and a website – www.digitalaesthetic.org.uk . Chaired by the artist Prof Jane Prophet, the conference brought together eighteen artists and critics from nine countries.
This event follows from the first Digital Aesthetic conference and exhibition organized by Dr Meigh-Andrews in 2001. Chaired by Prof Malcom Le Grice, one of the first British artists to produce art works specifically for the computer and pioneer experimental film maker, Digital Aesthetic 1 centered on issues of convergence from analogue film and video in relation to the specificity of digital technologies.
In the last 6 years, the digital domain has multiplied in size and complexity and Digital Aesthetic 2 was a very different conference. Larger in scope and organized more closely with the Harris Museum, DA2 was opened by David Garcia (Professor of Design for Digital Cultures, University of Portsmouth and Hoogschool voor de Kunst, Utrecht) with a reminder of the question that had haunted DA1 – ‘Is there a digital aesthetic?’. But in this occasion Prof Garcia did not hesitate in answering yes and went on to define the aesthetic quality of the digital as relational – Anna Munster’s ‘distributed aesthetic’ – and to analyze the different kinds of freedom impacted upon by this pervasive connectivity. Several contributors concentrated on the relational potential of digital technologies, demonstrating a variety of approaches that reflects the complexity of the digital domain. Although some issues inherent to the specificity of digital tools were considered, the on line domain of the Internet was the main concern of the majority of the speakers. Among the practitioners, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead discussed some of their elegantly produced on line art works. The two artists make use of the enormous quantity of data available on the World Wide Web as materials. They employ the dynamics of search engines, news feeds, random access and digital time to articulate and, literally, animate series of these data. Thomson and Craighead integrate a more traditional gallery based approach to art making with a practice informed by the specificity of the technology.
The artists invited to present and exhibit represent a variety of permutations of this relationship. On the one hand, Gary Hill and Robert Cahen remain anchored in the gallery and in the framework of video art. They both use digital tools out of convenience, but do not engage in their practice with the specific qualities of the digital domain. At the other end of the spectrum, Blast Theory’s latest project – Day of the Figurines – mainly exists in the connections and relationships it constitutes in its collective making. The audience/participants physically meet in the gallery space, choose a figurine and assign her/him some personal and social characteristics. From then on, a scenario develops through exchanges of SMS on mobile phones, with the players deciding on their figurines’ behaviour and the organizers introducing events and variable such as ‘An Arab army settles in the town’.
In his presentation, Matt Adams (a member of Blast Theory with June White and bob black) played down the role of the gallery in this project to a convenient location, perhaps thus reducing contemporary art to a convenient framework for their practice.
Lori Zippay, Director of Electronic Art Intermix in New York City, presented the case studies of two more artists – Cory Archangel and Seth Price – who have made use of the qualities of different frameworks within their practice, both producing different iterations of the same piece of work to articulate these differences. This highlighted a powerful interface between philosophical and economical constructs within the digital domain, which other contributors had only superficially touched upon.
In this context, the Vasulkas occupy a position apart, having maintained a unique and fluid relationship of dialogue with all their tools, building the majority of their equipment and ‘dealing with the states of the machine’. Woody Vasulka remarked that ‘a computer is a state-machine’, where states 0 and 1 have to be multiplied, organized and animated to become anything other then themselves. This threw a new light onto the relationship between moving image and digital tools, as anything digitally produced can be framed as animation
Steina and Woody Vasulka started using digital tools in 1976, when they commissioned a student to build a computer to control some of their analogue video synthesizers. As they delved into the principles of Boolean logic and algorithms, they became fascinated with the idea of using the Bit as a basic component of an artwork, and started exploring the possibility of constructing a grammar of basic combinations.
Prof Sean Cubitt’s eagerly awaited paper – Prof Cubitt is Director of the Media and Communications Program at the University of Melbourne and contributed to Digital Aesthetic 1 via video link – was expected to contribute to the debate around the social interface of the digital domain, but focused on light and colour instead. During the first plenary session, Prof Cubitt explained that, having examined the social implications of emerging technologies from many angles in his career, at the moment he was more interested in discussing the issues through commodity.
In the last presentation, David Surman (Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at Newport School of Art) examined the reciprocal influences between cinematic and gaming aesthetics and production, adding a different strand to the discussion about the complex relationships between the digital domain and the moving image. In a dense and thoughtful paper, the speaker introduced philosophical and technological issues that left many questions opened, giving, perhaps, a feeling of how Digital Aesthetic 3 might sound.

Overall, the combination of conference and exhibition offered an overview of a digital landscape with a history and with a capacity to interpenetrate every aspect of cultural and social production. Of the many stimulating ideas shared during the event, one in particular stands out for me – David Surman commenting that we are still caught in discussions about the ‘total image’ of the digital domain, allowing the specific social qualities of separate uses and productions to remain obscured.
Echoing this, in the remark closing the last plenary session, Jane Prophet suggested a shift from a digital aesthetic to a multiplicity of digital aesthetics. This is a good premise for a third Digital Aesthetic conference and exhibition.

Return to Art: Technologies and Knowledge