Digital Arts

Andy Lomas is a self-confessed code junky, saying, ‘I write it for my own pleasure.’ His Morphogenetic Creations on view earlier this year at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, has just been awarded one of the best artworks at the Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) conference

Usman Haque, working under the art collective Umbrellium, creates his first artwork for an indoor space, Assemblance.

Gustav Metzger is an artist with a socially-engaged conscience who has become famous for his concepts of auto-destructive and auto-creative art.

George Mallen remembers his friend and colleague Alan Sutcliffe and his contributions to the computer arts.

James Faure Walker’s art is fundamentally about painting; the act of applying paint, whether it be digital or physical, to a surface.

This month we are considering a truly extraordinary use of the digital. Artist and creative entrepreneur Anna Hill is exploring how immersive art can communicate the human experience of space travel and, in her words, ‘bring space down to earth’.

Interactivity has become one of the defining characteristics of new media installation art and the use of the iPad allows a convenient, compact and user-friendly interface for a mobile audience.

Rob and Nick Carter’s art is a memento mori with a twist, because what appears initially as a painted panel in a wooden frame (of the kind favoured by Dutch 17th-C masters), upon sustained looking reveals a screen playing a looped animated image

Bizarre, strange mutated forms looming out of computer space; this artist is a gardener steering and evolving forms within a kind of virtual evolution.

Welcome to our annual end of year special - a celebration of work submitted by readers of this column, BCS & Computer Arts Society members.

The superb exhibition surveying 12 centuries of Chinese art currently on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum (to 19 Jan), showcases a culture that values continuity, tradition and repetition.

I had the great pleasure recently to spend the afternoon with this month’s artist Barbara Nessim, a pioneer in digital art and illustration; it was fascinating to hear first-hand about her career spanning six decades.

With an estimated 500 million internet users, the web has been called the most creative space for self-expression in China. In particular social networking and blogging on the internet is hugely prominent. What are the challenges facing Chinese artists who use this technology within the free market / communist state contradiction that is China?

Paul Coldwell, one of the finest printmakers working in the digital medium in Britain today, calls his ‘a layered practice’. Since 1995, Paul has been concerned with the question of how to integrate the computer without relinquishing the knowledge he has gained from twenty-plus years of traditional practice.

Definition of a glitch: A short-lived fault or malfunction in a system, a sudden disruption to the normal running of a network; the frustrating by-product of technology gone awry. Can a glitch ever be art?

The 55th International Art Exhibition, commonly known as the Venice Biennale, takes as its title this year The Encyclopaedic Palace - a theme full of the promise of universal inclusion.

The UK artist and Royal College of Art graduate Emily Allchurch creates complex photographic images which draw on art history to make contemporary re-creations of iconic works.

Jennifer Steinkamp’s beautiful tree moves as though blowing in the wind and transforms over time as the seasons change from spring in full, green leaf through autumn as the leaves fall, to winter with bare branches.

This month, to compliment the previous two discussions of Manfred Mohr and Ernest Edmonds in this column, we feature new work by another of the great pioneers of algorithmic art - Herbert Franke. Franke has called his practice, ‘an active challenge, to develop different methods for producing pictures.’

This month we investigate an interesting commission from the University of Dundee Museum Services who have been working on a £100,000 project funded by the Art Fund, to explore the influence of Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in the visual arts.

This winter in the UK we have been presented with a marvellous opportunity to see two of the great pioneers of the use of computation in art, allowing a rare chance to evaluate this type of work and consider its relevance for us today.

In what looks set to become an annual end of year event, for December we are once again celebrating with a selection of images submitted by readers of this column and members of the Computer Arts Society.

For those readers interested in the history of this genre we have a treat this month - Manfred Mohr, a pioneer in the use of algorithms and computer programs for art-making.

Alan Turing Year 2012 continues apace with a variety of events inspired by the great contribution made by the mathematician and code breaker to the history of computer science and modern biology. This month we continue to explore Turing’s influence on the strand of art that is interested in the intersection of arts and technology. Due to the secret nature of the work Turing (and others) did during the Second World War, and the prominence of American mega-systems and companies subsequently, Britain’s contribution to computing innovation can only too easily be overlooked.

Alan Turing, the centenary of whose birth we are celebrating this year, had an important influence on artists. He has often been called one of the greatest minds Britain has ever produced - his theory of computation and formalisation of the concept of the algorithm laid down the scientific basis for the digital age.

Seemingly hundreds of human figures float, come together, cluster, drift in and out of focus, ever-changing, never repeated. Three-dimensional bodies, without gender or individual features, almost like clones, float in a zero gravity environment. This is Core, the work of Chicago-based artist Kurt Hentschläger.

The red planet as we’ve never seen it before – littered with the detritus of long-forgotten expeditions, evidence of mankind’s once optimistic future reduced to scrap. It is an image inciting both trepidation and fascination in equal measures. This is the highly creative work of Kelly Richardson, our artist this month. Featured here is a still from Mariner 9, a 12 meter-long panoramic digital video installation of Mars perhaps a century or two from now and a battlefield of real and imagined spacecraft in the centre of a dust storm. The work has an extraordinary amount of detail, too much to do justice to on a webpage. This image shows a small detail; it is the NASA space rover Curiosity in an (imagined) semi-defunct state.

We are thrilled to bring you a striking new work by one of the great pioneers of computer art, Charles A. Csuri, which references and expands one of his original ideas from the 1960s

To mark a year’s worth of writing about the world of computer arts and as an end of year special, for December we are celebrating with a quartet of images submitted by readers of this column.

This month’s image by Turner Prize-winning Grayson Perry shows that he has more strings to his bow than pot-making. Hold Your Beliefs Lightly is a computerised textile work (really a small flag) inspired by African Asafo flags in the British Museum’s collection and features in Perry’s current exhibition The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.

This month’s artist turns pop art on its head and gives us a digital take on painting that forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth about modern life.

A ghostly, lone figure appears out of the mist as if something half-remembered from a dream in this month’s artwork by Orly Aviv.

Alsos*, meaning ‘sacred wood’ in Greek, is an installation of a recreated imaginary forest which allows the audience to interact with it. This is the Computer Art Image of the Month for August 2011.

It was the early 1980s Disney film Tron that first introduced French painter Anne-Sarah Le Meur, when a child of only 12, to the world of computer art.

Professor Harold Cohen is undoubtedly one of the greatest pioneers of the relationship of art to software architecture. He is the only artist I know who is tackling the problem of building a program that actually makes art, rather than modelling human art-making.

This month’s image is a still from Vermilion Lake, an interactive artwork comprising 3-D computer graphics inspired by the artists’ travels to the snow-driven mountains of the Canadian Rockies and developed following research at The Banff Arts Centre.

In Cynthia Beth Rubin’s hands the medium of technology becomes a means to explore concepts of memory. Our image for April comes from a series of digital paintings entitled Glen Memories which span some 40 years of Cynthia’s career - leading to her work being described as ‘a conversation between the artist’s younger and current selves’ by Amy Rahn, Seven Days newspaper, 2010.

This month’s image by Paul Brown is not just an image, it's a living work of art. For more than a hundred years a certain type of artist has worked to overcome what they see as one of the limitations of traditional art - that is its intrinsically static quality.

There are many art works that are only made possible by modern information and communication technologies and this column aims to explore at least some of them. But occasionally one comes across a work that, in its depth (to paraphrase a famous beer advertising slogan) reaches the parts others somehow fail to reach.

This month’s computer art image is a digital inkjet print by Mark Wilson (b.1943), an American artist who has used the computer for thirty years in art making. The computer has, in his words, the power to become a ‘democratic art making machine’.

What comes after 'computer art' depends on revisiting past concepts not fully explored. A true revolution involves seing the past before returning to change the present

"The Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the world’s leading museums of art and design. The V&A’s Word and Image Department holds the Museum’s Western collections of prints, drawings, paintings and photographs, plus books, archives and manuscripts. The Department has more than 2 million objects in total, including some 750,000 prints, drawings and paintings and a similar number of printed books. Any works that are not on loan or display can be consulted in the Museum’s Prints and Drawings Study Room or the National Art Library. The V&A is currently engaged in a research project with Birkbeck, entitled Computer Art and Technocultures and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. One of the outcomes is this symposium and another is Digital Pioneers, a book and associated display based upon the Museum’s computer-generated art and design collections. The following sections provide more details about the Museum’s collections, the project and the display."

The space represented within the computer screen exists at one remove from physical reality but subsists within its own environment. The computer image is the dynamic result of a process, held in stasis at times but with the potential to be wholly altered without leaving any material record.

Over the past fifty years, artists have explored the computer’s potential to create both virtual and physical art forms that embrace the concept of space. Through the use of immersion, interaction, and manipulation of both virtual and physical space, computer artists have created powerful aesthetic environments that enable audiences to experience alternative realities. Immersive installations that respond the human body and online multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life satisfy the viewer’s inherent desire to escape physical reality and become part of the art experience itself.

Between 1979 and 2009 the author has produced several series of digital sculptures, some of which have broken radically with existing concepts of sculpture. His first digital sculpture was a series of screen-based real-time interactive virtual sculptures produced between 1979 and 1981. He subsequently used the computer to compose and fabricate several series of sculptures, while also working in a variety of other artistic media. Since 2007, he has been using the computer to design and fabricate a series of large-scale sculpture installations that combine more traditional sculptural concepts with contemporary multimedia approaches.

A formative journey from encounters with signals intelligence and cybernetics to work with colleagues, students and engineers between March 1968 and June 1972 on interactive art systems that seemed (40 years ago) to be significant. Though widely exhibited, in once case at the VI Paris Biennale, the programme was aborted in 1972 for the lack of arts research and development funding. Two conceptual frameworks: the artwork as a system; and what an engineer termed the art work's 'logic engine'. The paper asks whether the time of these ideas did, should or ever will come.

The paper discusses early work that predated Internet Art and that was concerned with active audience participation in electronic art and describes the path of development of the first author’s artworks that have looked at human to human communication through electronic (computer) systems from 1970 until today. The fundamental concept has been to make artworks that explore human communication through conversations using restricted languages. The initial inspiration was a set of studies of early infant language development. By 1990 Edmonds showed much more elaborate work using computer-based local area networks.

Ravensbourne will be uniquely placed, within its relocation strategy, to develop its role as a London-based centre promoting excellence in digital design and media, within specialist higher education.

Scientist Vladimir Bonačić began his artistic career 1968 under the auspices of the international movement NewTendencies (NT), at the Gallery for Contemporary Art of Zagreb, which had pushed for his inclusion. From 1968 to 1971 Bonačić created a series of “dynamic objects” - interactive computer-generated light installations, five of which were set up in public spaces. The author shows the context of Bonačić's work within the Zagreb cultural environment dominated by the New Tendencies movement and network (1961 - 1973). The paper shows his theoretical and practical criticism of the use of randomness in computer-generated art and describes his working methods as combining the algebra of Galois fields and an anti-commercial approach with custom-made hardware. It seems that Bonačić's work fulfills and develops Matko Mestrovic´'s proposition that “in order to enrich that which is human, art must start to penetrate the extra-poetic and the extrahuman.”

This paper considers the issue of digital output in the light of the author’s early experience of observing plotter drawings at the Slade School of Art in the mid 1970’s. The paper proceeds to discuss the author’s own work in terms of a range of outputs and their implications in forming a relationship between old and new technologies. Other artists referenced in this paper include Michael Craig-Martin and Kathy Prendergast. The paper draws on research from the AHRC funded project, The Personalised Surface within Fine Art Digital Printmaking.

The Digital Atelier: For 50 years artists have been utilising the convergence and combination of different technologies to produce visually and intellectually challenging artworks. These artists create compelling artefacts that engage the pragmatics of technology and the free invention of art and bring them to a successful synthesis. A close examination of work from the past and present reveals how advanced digital design methods and subtractive fabrication processes have been used to make physical things from virtual data.