Physically Digital, Digitally Physical

As new media artists living in South Africa, we are continually confronted with issues of accessibility and understanding, as well as our own keen senses of social relevance and human, not digital, communication systems.

The GetAway Experiment (Fig. 1a), first realized just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, as one iteration of an ongoing project, was our attempt at using traditionally inspired methods of collage and frottage ironically to explore textured, off-screen re-presentations of data, images and human communication. In this body of work, which began as zeroes and ones and ended up as large-scale works on paper, we placed emphasis on complexities that the computer does not understand: metaphor, physicality and dialogue.

Marcus Neustetter's digital frottage (Fig. 1b), inspired by the surrealist process of frottage, "got away" by using analogical methods of screen capture. In two of his processes, Neustetter photocopied and scanned animations and abstract icons directly off his laptop screen. In the final process, he used his laptop as an enlarger in the darkroom, placing photo emulsion paper straight onto the screen. The results, printed out as 1-square-meter photographic prints, are abstract, evocative images, capturing movement over time on the virtual screen. In the installation, this movement evoked the space of a digital Rothko.

In Stern's serial faces—the scientist series (Fig. 1c), he used his computer to remove data from iconic images of scientists and philosophers. The resulting patterns were blown up and used as guidelines to re-texture the images out of other media as layered collages. Each viewer's bodily presence and movement plays a major role in his or her engagement with the artworks and gallery setting. The closer one is to any piece, the more texture is made visible; the farther away, the more complete the image. The work addresses computer processes themselves; no matter how complex our image manipulation and filtering systems, a computer does not see texture and cannot understand or recognize representation; only human understanding can reveal to us, for example, the face of Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam War memorial.

In addition, Neustetter and Stern's site-specific collaborations use the more traditional methods of tracing, rubbing and collaging in order to capture technological remnants. The "dead media" of the floppy disc and drive became paintbrushes, stamps, traces of themselves.

The GetAway Experiments will continue as a second exhibition at Franchise (in Johannesburg, opening 22 April 2005) and a web site commissioned by turbulence.org and the Greenwall Foundation (launching mid-January 2005). These will explore sending signs, bodies and objects through "the crucible of The Digital," asking us to "look again."

Fig. 1.

(a) Marcus Neustetter and Nathaniel Stern, unnumbered GetAway Experiment, mixed media on paper, 2004. (b) Marcus Neustetter, digital frottage Photopaper001, laptop screen exposed to photo paper, durst lambda print, 1 × 1 m (edition of 10), 2004. (c) Nathaniel Stern, Six Easy Pieces (Richard Feynman), paper, 800 × 900 mm, 2004.

© Marcus Neustetter and Nathaniel Stern © Marcus Neustetter © Nathaniel Stern