Renderings of Digital Art

Abstract

This essay identifies the current qualifier of choice, "new media," by explaining how this term is used to describe digital art in various forms. Establishing a historical context, the author highlights the pioneer exhibitions and artists who began working with new technology and digital art as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s. The article proceeds to articulate the shapes and forms of digital art, recognizing its broad range of artistic practice: music, interactive installation, installation with network components, software art, and purely Internet-based art. The author examines the themes and narratives specific to her selection of artwork, specifically interactive digital installations and net art. By addressing these forms, the author illustrates the hybrid nature of this medium and the future of this art practice.

Whenever a new art form comes along, it is usually accompanied by a classifier, such as "video art" or "digital art." Today's qualifier of choice, "new media," renders the newness of yesterday's new art form obsolete and already implies its own datedness. The new media of the late 20th century were video art and its hybrid forms and derivatives. Multimedia and hypermedia were terms applied to digital art forms, while intermedia was used to describe interrelationships between different forms of media (such as video and digital technologies). In the early 21st century, the term "new media" is mostly used for digital arts in its various forms. It takes a while until the "new" (insert video or digital) art becomes Art (with a capital A), integrated into thematic surveys and exhibitions that include all kinds of media. This doesn't mean that the qualifier forever vanishes, but that the art form moves beyond the medium itself and the way in which it complements, augments and/or challenges traditional concepts of art. This requires an introduction to the public.

During the past couple of years, there have been several major exhibitions dedicated to today's digital art. It seems an apt time for a survey show that offers multiple perspectives and establishes a broader context for this art form. The title of the New York Digital Salon's Tenth Anniversary Exhibition alludes to vector graphics, mathematical algorithms that describe the shapes, shadings, colors, and location of objects (as opposed to bitmap graphics, where the image is represented by pixels arranged on a grid). The metaphor of the vector suggests an algorithmically driven fluidity of forms, appearances, and positions that seem to be an appropriate approach to digital art.

Positions-Histories of Digital Art

During the past ten years, we have seen a technological development of unprecedented speed for a medium that was conceptualized and envisioned decades ago. It was in 1945 when army scientist Vannevar Bush published his seminal article "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly. The article described a device called the Memex, a desk with translucent screens that would allow users to browse documents in various media (from text to photography) and create their own trail to a body of documentation. The Memex was never built but can be seen as a conceptual ancestor of computers and the Internet. In 1961, Theodor Nelson coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" for a space of writing and reading where texts, images, and sounds could be electronically interconnected and linked by anybody contributing to this networked "docuverse." Today, the concepts of Bush and Nelson have found their physical and virtual manifestations in computer networks on various scales.

Digital art did not develop in an art-historical vacuum, and incorporates many influences from previous art movements (ranging from conceptual art to Fluxus and mail art) and experiments with art and technology. The year 1966 saw the foundation of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), which in the words of its founder, Billy Klüver, was formed out of a desire to "develop an effective collaboration between engineer and artist. The raison d'etre of E.A.T. is the possibility of a work which is not the preconception of either the engineer or the artist, but is the result of the exploration of the...