Digital Salon Chair’s Statement: Digital Art: A Glass Bead Game?

LEONARDO, Vol. 32, No. 5, pp. 349–351, 1999 349 In the formal game, the player sought to compose out of the objective content of every game, out of the mathematical, linguistic, musical, and other elements, as dense, coherent, and formally perfect a unity as possible . . . [O]ne can be a musician or Glass Bead Game player and at the same time wholly devoted to rule and order. The kind of person we want to develop, the kind of person we aim to become, would at any time be able to exchange his discipline or art for any other. —Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi [1]. Ivery often reread books that have made an impression on me. Several years ago, while on my way to the SIGGRAPH 94 computer graphics conference, I brought along a copy of Magister Ludi (also published under the title The Glass Bead Game) by Hermann Hesse to read on the plane. The above quotes stood out from the rest of the text and prompted me to stop and reevaluate my creative work and the field of digital art in general. Having a background as a musician, producer, photographer, and visual artist, I have long thought of myself as a Glass Bead Game player. As digital art continues to become the new art form of the next millennium, I am now even more convinced that Hesse’s remarks were indeed prophetic. (After all, this book did win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1943.) When I reread Hesse’s novel, I was in the process of curating the Second Annual New York Digital Salon, and it struck me then that digital art has a Glass Bead Game component to it. In the intervening years, there have been considerable advances in digital imaging , animation software, digital audio/video, and the global explosion of the Internet. Access to this technology has become almost ubiquitous, and artists are now frequently branching out into media that were not their original primary focus: painters are creating Web sites with interactive and textual components, while photographers are experimenting with video and 3D animation. The Internet is also acting as a means of leveling the playing field for artists. It is an inclusive medium that allows text, images, sound, and video to be contained within a single artist’s Web site. This branching out has both positive and negative connotations for art. It is allowing artists more creative freedom and giving them access to new tools, but it runs the risk of enabling individuals to create work in media in which they do not have a well-developed vocabulary or esthetic foundation. The question then arises of whether the work created by these artists is a form of the Glass Bead Game or simply a byproduct of the curiosity of the creative imagination. Despite the current sophistication in hardware and software, the fact remains that the Digital Salon Chair’s Statement Digital Art: A Glass Bead Game? fundamental element of digital art is data. All images, words, sounds, video, and text are ultimately reduced to a string of ones and zeros, stored in a digital file on the computer. On the transistor level, the circuit is either closed or open, in a sense coupled or uncoupled. Depending on the type of media stored, when the data is read by the computer it is converted by ASCII code to make it text, image file formats to make it visible, or digital audio formats to make it aural. Hesse’s reference to the “formal game” can also be interpreted as referring to the computer, which makes visual, aural, and textual data as “dense, coherent, and formally perfect a unity as possible,” not in the symbolic or intellectual sense, but in a practical way—to allow it to be stored and transferred from machine to machine. One of the benefits of digitizing creative work is that it provides artists with a way to access and manipulate this data and to reinterpret it within the context of their individual creative work. Paul Hertz states in his article in this issue that “synesthetic art is a deliberate contrivance, a product of an artistic aspiration , and we should not confuse...