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Steven Psyllos: In your opinion, what is the current state of affairs in the art world as it applies to digital art? How receptive are galleries to exhibit this form, and where else do you find support? |
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The Digital Age – Steven Psyllos on Andres Ramirez Gaviria
Steven Psyllos: In your opinion, what is the current state of affairs in the art world as it applies to digital art? How receptive are galleries to exhibit this form, and where else do you find support?
Andres Ramirez Gaviria: The terms “digital” or “media” art have come to encompass an array of practices so diverse in medium and intent that they have lost their usefulness. Galleries, however, are interested in exhibiting digital art for as long as it is marketable. Most of the skepticism the art world has shown towards digital practices stems from concerns related to this its marketability. In the past there has been much discussion about the demands the preservation of digital art entails for collectors, galleries and museums—both in the long term (when a specific technology is replaced by another) and in the short term (in the maintenance that digital systems require).
The art world has also been suspicious of digital art’s fascination with the new. This is not so much the case anymore, but the 1990s saw a proliferation in digital art practices as a result of the technical possibilities created by digital applications. The outcome was that several works were analyzed and praised for their technological prowess even if they did not engage in a critical media or art historical analysis.
By the same token, digital artists have shied away from collaborations with the art world—mostly over disagreements on the value structures of the art market. For example, where the art world places—for obvious marketing purposes—notable importance on the single author as the sole creator of an artwork, digital artists frequently collaborate in large groups. The art world also is obsessed with the production of art objects, an obsession that few digital artists share.
Regarding the second part of your question, here in Europe artists receive most financial support for their projects from the state. In Vienna the government has a section devoted specifically to financing media art. I know, though, that the reality in other parts of the world is not as encouraging.
SP: You mention that the term digital art is no longer relevant because there many new formats or mediums at play. Please describe (or list) some of the various subsections. In which do you stand?
I imagine that with each new step forward in science there are limitless uses of the technology that are aesthetically pleasing. Yet some creations don’t necessarily read as "art" to me but rather the retinkering of an engineer’s brainchild. Who is creating quality works in your eyes? What makes these artist’s works special?
ARG: Some of the most regularly cited subsections are interactive art, robotics, net art, data visualization, artificial life/intelligence, generative art telepresence, and sonic art. Still, it is difficult to categorize an artist under only one of these subsections since s/he often shifts between them, as well as between other more traditional forms of art making.
A recent exhibition titled “Postmedia Condition” in the Neue Galerie in Graz attempted to illustrate precisely this form of interdisciplinarity. This year the Transmediale festival in Berlin changed its program focus from “media art” to “art and digital culture.” There are similar examples that begin to suggest the field no longer regards it necessary to differentiate between the terms “art” and “digital art.”
Your comment about how digital art occasionally resembles frivolous deviations into science and technology rather than “art” is on point. After attempting for years to position their work in relation to developments in science and technology, many digital artists are finally realizing that neither of these disciplines is genuinely interested in what they have to offer. As a result, their efforts are veering towards a closer association with the art world. Although conflicts between digital and contemporary art (several of which I already mentioned) need to be settled, a dialogue here seems more promising than attempts towards an association with the “hard sciences” have proven.
Some ways in which an initial approximation might be successful from an institutional point of view is to first consider a more critical and rigorous engagement with art history; to build up exhibition programs with a mixture of contemporary and digital artists and cease sub-sectioning exhibition programs—especially in festivals—based on techniques (e.g., interactive art, robotics, net art) rather than on interesting curatorial concepts.
If photography and video art could to integrate with the art world—and at certain moments even dominate it—I don’t see why digital art can’t do the same. It is only a question of willingly giving up a little of the autonomy that digital art holds so dear. It would at first be a drawback for the institutions that have been set up to support and promote digital art, but I believe eventually on the gains would outweigh the losses.
As to which artists I believe are doing quality work…there are too numerous to list, but Mateusz Herczka, Jan Robert Leegte, Casey Reas, Dietmar Offenhuber, Angela Bullock, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller come to mind, probably because they consciously position their work within a media and/or art historical context.
SP:Your artwork is highly conceptual. Does this create a very fixed
manner of working?
ARG: Not necessarily. There are a number of related themes addressed in my work which manifest themselves as the culmination of much research. Nonetheless, I try not to fall into any sort of intellectual aridity, by keeping the method by which the research is structured and presented unsystematic. More often than not, the projects develop through obscure links that arise between some of the particular concepts I may be exploring. The presentational form that the projects eventually take—be that form tangible or intangible—conveys a re-contextualization of the concepts in question, in a manner that is best perceived as imaginative, rather than logical.
SP: You recently won the second place prize at transmediale.06 for your work "-./" Please describe the concept of this work.
ARG: The project -./ is a six-minute video that uses Morse code to visualize and sonify a section of the index from the book, Point and Line to Plane, written by Wassily Kandinsky. One of the proposed aims of this project is to interpolate of the visual or "cinematic" space generated in the video’s composition of abstract /aesthetic elements (e.g. line, plane ) with the informational space constructed in the Morse code translation, as a way to invert the commonly known method of narration in audio-visual media. By presenting an abstract or non-objective video sequence which linearly reads Kandinsky’s text using Morse code, the work reverts filmic strategies of narration to a paradox. The content and meaning of the video are not dictated by its visual narrative but rather by the time sequence in which the video and sound clips are edited. The video also parodies the often-applied test in media art of "manipulating" technology with the end result of creating unexpected visual and/or sonic effects—a conceptual and aesthetic practice which began in the 60s and early 70s, with such works as Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV. The work also recreates the impression of a Bildstörung yet not through a "re-engineering" of technology, but through a carefully constructed image sequence which attempts to concurrently operate within the codes of aesthetics and communication.
SP: What are you working on now?
ARG: I just recently finished a project titled composition for an exhibition in the BA – CA Kunstforum in Vienna that appropriates and deconstructs the "transatlantic paintings" of Piet Mondrian in order to form a critical comment on the phenomenon of abstraction as developed in the history of modern art, as well as in its relation to contemporary digital culture.
The project consists of recording and presenting in a digital format all the vertical and horizontal lines of each of the 17 transatlantic paintings. Projected and animated on a horizontally shaped screen, the lines move from left to right and from right to left at a continuous speed and in the same order and placement as they appear in the paintings, until any two lines intersect; at which point, the intersecting lines change the direction and speed of their movement. This interactive process runs uninterrupted, and eventually causes all lines to lose their original "order" and generate instead an unpredictable sequence of visual patterns.
There is also an audio component to the installation comprised a series of sounds (retrieved from George Antheil’s musical composition, Jazz Sonata) that are activated when the interaction between two lines occurs.
The project seeks to highlight how the ideological paradigms that characterized the cultural scene of the Modern period have been replaced by new ones in our present-day milieu. By subverting the systematic and rigid model of Modern art (exemplified in this case in the paintings of Mondrian) and employing the commonly used tactics in contemporary digital culture of retrieving, storing, archiving, mixing and randomizing access to information, the project underscores the move from Modernism to Informationism, from the importance placed on "purity" of form to the importance placed on information flows. The title of the work plays on the central theme of the installation. It is used to convey the divergent meanings of the word "composition," when placed in different contexts and circumstances but still analyzed within the discipline of art history. It is also meant ironically, and relates both to its literal meaning (i.e. the action of putting things together, of forming or constructing an artwork or a musical piece), as well as serving as a pun to the manner in which Mondrian titled most of his paintings (for example, Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red).
I have also been working on a data visualization project that will be presented in the Kunsthaus Graz later this year. Currently titled modal.patterns, the project is designed to translate textual data into abstract visual animation sequences that are displayed on light the facade of the museum. The textual data used (in this case an anagram that reads: "more than the sum of its parts / a misshape of truth torments") is encoded into a difficult to decipher system of representation that parodies the over exploitation of information aesthetics, while simultaneously partaking of such an indulgence. Instead of conveying the message hidden in the data through a visual metaphor that viewers can quickly and easily comprehend, the project underscores the importance of the interrelationships among the elements that define the whole by deliberately concealing them. In essence, the project assumes that a whole is always more than the sum of its parts.
