Structure in Art Practice: Technology as an Agent for Concept Development

Abstract

The exhibition Constructs and Re-Constructions provided a survey of the author's artwork and formed the basis for this paper. It included four prints, consisting of notes based on early documentation, representing four different conceptual stages in using computer technology. As each is discussed in turn, it is shown that the computer provides a significant enhancement to our ability to handle and consider the underlying structures of artworks and art systems in the many forms that they may take. In the work discussed, while the conceptual developments are the key issues, the role of the technology in encouraging, enabling and inspiring them has also been central.

It could be said that I am trying to understand how to generate interesting works. Aesthetic understanding, if we put it in these terms, comes not in understanding, for example, the color patches used in a work, but in understanding the underlying laws that led to their selection.

The notion of structure is used often in Systems Art in the U.K. Stephen Bann relates this concept to a linguistic one:

It is not the recurrence of the rectangle in Van Doesburg's work which needs to engage us, but the series of relationships between rectangles and the extent to which those relationships can be adequately formalised [1].

An Overview of Conceptual Developments

At the center of my current art practice is time-based digital video work: video constructs. At the beginning of my practice, my only use of the computer was to solve problems. Interactivity was another early concern. Later, my emphasis changed to the use of computers as part of the final work, which was delivered on screens. Video projection followed, and since then, I have developed other forms of presentation and also incorporated music. The exhibition Constructs and Re Constructions provided a survey of the work and formed the basis for this paper [2].

In practice, my enterprise began in 1969. I had recently seen an exhibition of Charles Biederman's work in London and studied it in more detail when it moved to Leicester, where I lived [3]. One particular outcome of this experience was to focus my attention on the problem of limiting the variables that I was trying to manipulate. Following this, in order to try to understand what I had been doing in the previous decade, I made the piece Nineteen (Fig. 1), which brought the images and attributes of the decade's work together. Thus, a variety of elements had to co-exist in a single work. I introduced certain organizing principles and tried to apply them to the task of handling that co-existence. A "solution" was hard to find, until I noticed that the problem was quite similar to one that I had recently faced in mathematical logic. In that case, I had solved it by writing a computer program to do the searching for me, resulting in a short paper that I had published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic [4]. Applying the same method, but using much more computer time, I completed the composition of Nineteen. The piece served its purpose in my explorations but was, unfortunately, destroyed during the removal of an exhibition in which it was included. However, I had achieved my first use of a computer in my art practice as a problem solver.

Directly arising from this work was a much simpler piece that concentrated on the organizing principles and constraints arising from the co-existence of different elements, such as an edge at a given angle. The work was Jigsaw (Fig. 2), and its novel feature was that its elements were rearrangeable. While shown, therefore, this work changed in time, within the constraints of the structuring rules, which were, in this case, imposed by the physical construction of the piece. I also explored film at this time, but I only produced an experimental study, which I showed privately. Participation and interaction also became significant for me at that time [5]. One particular form of interaction I explored was that between people through electronic networks,