Juror’s Statement: The Semiotic Ghost

386 ©2000 Victor Acevedo T he ready-made is dead, and, yes, it’s more than OK to be retinal—in fact, to be graphical. Painting has been reborn as the semiotic ghost muse, embedded in a spectrum of digital practices and their resultant cybernetic artifacts. One thing I noticed in reviewing this year’s selections is how often the visual language from the past is still referenced and continues to operate within the context of the new media in varying degrees, even while unprecedented modalities of expression and metaphor are manifest. It is exciting to witness a cultural and aesthetic revolution up close. True to form, this year’s Digital Salon presents an impressive collection of work representing many styles and strategies, in a variety of forms, which together give a robust sampling of current digital art. I will comment about each form represented in the gallery and highlight a few of the artists whose works seem especially to embody the voice of the ghost. Digital printmaking is, in a very direct sense, a new form of the old medium of painting . In fact its main characteristic is a pervasive and organic blend of the once-distinct media of photography and painting. In the digital realm, these two are now simply aspects of one large body of imaging language, so you often see either subtle modulations or extreme juxtapositions of the two forms (many times within the same piece). Taken separately , painting and photography each possesses its own way of being realistic or abstract. Digital painting allows an intermixing of every combination of realistic or abstract graphical metaphors taken from both forms. Of course it still takes an artist to craft a coherent aesthetic message out of this ocean of potential. Xavier Roca’s X/Y Machina is a particularly fine example, and the works of Robert Smith and Kevin Mutch show how 3D software can open up new channels of exploration. If to the media synthesis described above you add a toolset that deals with time, motion, and sound, in essence you’ve got digital video. It is one of the engines that’s driving the new cinema, and has radically enhanced approaches to storytelling and narrative. We’re also seeing the emergence of a form that could be best described as “ambient painting ,” in which motion can exist graphically as a loop or as a slow transformation. In the gallery this type of work is “prototyped” via monitor, although it will ultimately be best Juror’s Statement The Semiotic Ghost VICTOR ACEVEDO LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 386–87, 2000 387 viewed on flat screens. Much like traditional painting, it’s environmental, ambient, and nonnarrative (in a traditional film sense). It can have its own soundtrack, or it can be soundtracked by ambient sounds from the immediate environment in which it’s being experienced. It can support the extended gaze or be available to the eye every once in a while, for a split second. Alberto Ferreiro’s Graphic Tango (without sound) and Karen Kuslansky’s Cromagnonmus (with sound) offer content that suggests this diversity of approach. Now add interactivity and multinodal telematic distribution, and you really start to leave traditional media behind. The works for the Web are quite strong this year as the bandwidth, authoring tools, and understanding of the form keep getting better. David Crawford’s Lightofspeed.com, a Flash animation site, is clever and elegant. Andy Deck’s Artcontext.org is an insightful critique of the institutions and conventions of Web culture, while Andruid Kerne’s CollageMachine uses found Web graphics as raw materials. CD-ROMs function as mediations of designed informational, pictorial, or graphical space, bringing content that you access or activate through familiar mouse navigation. Scott Furman’s interactive geometric paintings offer an inkling of what could happen if you bring “point, click, and drag” to explorations of the nonobjective. Chang Lee Sun’s cute, playful approach to hybridized children’s fairy tales illustrates the medium’s prowess in nonlinear storytelling. Diane Field’s Metamoment is like an album of ambient motion (photo)graphics. Deeper and more complex levels of cybernetic ecology become accessible in the gallery’s installation works...