| “Digital-Natural Art” is a multifaceted and reciprocal process—making digital 3D images through primitive technology and materials, and making primitive rawhide/wood-art through digital technology and equipment. My hope is that the “digital-natural art” can transcend the traditional and modern uses of art elements, and result in integrating digital and primitive values in one manifestation. |  |
Tan Li-Qin
“Digital-Natural Art” is a multifaceted and reciprocal process—making digital 3D images through primitive technology and materials, and making primitive rawhide/wood-art through digital technology and equipment. My hope is that the “digital-natural art” can transcend the traditional and modern uses of art elements, and result in integrating digital and primitive values in one manifestation.
One way in which I think about the relationship between primitive and modern technology can be symbolized as “Digital < (Finite) and Primitive (Infinity).” I would suggest that any modern technology would be changed or replaced; however, the primitive systems of signification retain their significance. As the ideologies and technologies of society change, today’s state-of-the-art technology will be tomorrow’s primitive skills.
As a digital naturalist, I chose the burl as the natural art form to explore this “Digital-Nature” theme in search of applications for the products of digital evolution. The term “Burl+4” refers to the natural “Five Elements”, which are Water, Metal, Fire, Wood (burl), and Earth. The artwork specializes in digital woodprints and animation clips featuring effortless movements of the natural elements, incorporating a LCD TV display. It transforms ordinary materials, such as burl wood, lighting, texture, and digital debris, into “Unison-Installations” inspired by Tao principles.
“Digital-Nature” artwork should unite human spirit, natural beauty, and digital-prettiness created through digital 3D simulation. Humans have to free their minds and spirit from what they are used to before they can use the complete capability of digital space to create and appreciate digital nature.
Our work ethics and life attitudes determine the degree of slowness to which we rust. With digital animation technology, Rusty series presents a contemporary artistic interpretation of the deterioration of mind, body, and spirit by harmful and self-destructive human behavior constantly and gradually.
Rust, a chemical and time-consuming process involving the corrosion of iron in the presence of oxygen and moisture, defaces metal bodies. We as humans can similarly degenerate. When we fail and slow down to maintain our minds, bodies, and spirit, we too can rust and lose what keeps us physically and mentally healthy with quality life, just as the solid metal corrodes into something else entirely.
Pioneering two techniques, Rusty series models different rusty faces on numerous large digital metal prints and animates corrosion through a small digital simulation of rust in long-drawn-out motion, which portrays the physical and mental regression of human rusting through animations, transforming embryonic cells sluggishly into fetuses, solid bodies into rusty bodies, and an energetic brain deliberately into a rusted, flaky shell.
In addition, my current research focuses on a series of large digital animation-installations, which emphasized China’s “great-leap-forward” (1958-1960) and “cultural-revelation” (1966-1976) through ancient Chinese agricultural devices interactively, such as a large waterwheel, a winnower, or a medium-sized grindstone. It explores an artistic interpretation of how Chinese agricultural society has been changed through digital animation.
