What even is digital art

The mighty river of social media recently brought an essay to my attention, The Arts Electric by Tom Uglow. His central point is that the computer has not yet fulfilled its potential as an art medium.

A piece of digital art, by me

I started out agreeing with him, and ended thinking he’s missing the point. Let’s dissect!

While it is almost inconceivable that computers do not play a role in your daily life, on stage, in galleries, in literature, the computers lurk at the edges: digital is a tool rather than a medium.

This is true, but there are good reasons for it. Theater, visual art and literature are all technologically mature art forms. The platform for literature (the book) achieved technological perfection a couple of hundred years ago. The platform for theater has benefited from technological advancements in amplification and lighting, but it’s still basically about people on a stage doing things. There has been a lot of cool visual art made with computers, but almost always in the context of interactive and/or multimedia experiences, not “stand silently in a museum” experiences.

I’d like to suggest what might happen when digital becomes the form as well. When an exhibition unfolds around you, wherever you are, or a performance uses the huge quantities of data we generate to choreograph dancers; when dramatists allow their plays to seep off the stage into online social platforms, or poets perform inside video games.

I want to find this inspiring, but I don’t see how big data would improve choreography, or how social media would improve theater. I most certainly do not want to go to a poetry reading in a video game. The video game itself is the art experience.

We use our phones, tablets and computers as a place to catch up with reviews and trailers, and as somewhere we buy tickets, or find parking. We understand that we can interact with creators, actors and stars. We can like them, friend them, follow them, speak to them, or just watch them. So far, though, the contents of mainstream ‘culture’ – the art, design, music and film that are the usual stock in trade of the Barbican Centre in London, the Lincoln Center in New York, or the Sydney Opera House – are remarkably unaffected by the digital revolution taking place in our daily lives.

Maybe those institutions are not home to the really interesting and groundbreaking creative work out there? Or even the truly mainstream stuff? When I think about the most significant works of art from my lifetime, I think about Super Mario Bros, Thriller and Mad Men.

Walk into any major gallery, music hall, theatre or bookshop and you’ll find the conventions of popular culture being transmitted the same way they have been transmitted for the past 100 years.

True. But my phone is loaded with apps that offer experiences inconceivable in any other medium. Tumblr alone is a bottomless source of visual and sonic inspiration that knocks the stuffing out of any art gallery I’ve been to in the past twenty years. I mean, the science Tumblrs! The more specific science Tumblrs! The funny science Tumblrs! The math Tumblrs! It isn’t even just their content. The decontextualized juxtapositions are key to the experience. And we haven’t even started talking about the creative and generative apps.

Even at the very cutting edge of theatre or art, you won’t find shows that take willing audience members, dissect their online profiles and create one-off bespoke monologues.

And a good thing too, that sounds awful.

It’s a challenge for art schools to see the creative plasticity inherent in the new tools. It is physically challenging for galleries and theatres to show, hard to explain, and really, really hard to sell. In fact, since the format makes it so difficult to create unique artefacts, there is, often, nothing to sell.

So really, we’re not talking about the challenge for art, per se. We’re talking about the challenge for institutions and the art market. Those are legitimate issues to consider, but they’re peripheral to creative experience.

I suspect, too, that we will see a huge rise in authenticated art; that is, cultural experiences related to our physical proximity and personal history within a particular artwork or experience. And whether that happens within the physical boundaries of a ‘gallery’ or simply out in the real world, art might well come shopping with us.

Your experience of art already depends completely on your personal history. Ew, who wants art to come shopping with you?

There will be a comprehensive split between work that is artist-led, purely passive and experienced as a broadcast experience, and the idea of engaged culture.

This happened thirty years ago. Or does this guy not consider Pac-Man and Tetris to be art experiences? He works for Google, how could that be?

The real artists of today will not find favour with us, or with our institutions, maybe not even in their own lifetime, because their work is not for us. It is for our great grandchildren.

Maybe some artists think this way. I don’t. I’m not making art for my great-grandchildren. I’m making it for myself, for my friends and family, for my students, and for any internet strangers who care to look or listen. If my great-grandchildren have access to it and get something out of it, great, but that is not the point at all.

I’m a true believer in the computer as a tool for art-making. But I don’t see much value in shoehorning it into existing media. I want to explore entirely new forms and practices that aren’t possible in any other way. I want cool blogs, video games, electronic music, infographics, and data visualization. I want the up-goer five text editor. I want SoundCloud communities and Spotify playlists. I want work like this animation of DNA being replicated:

Or this one, of a synapse forming in a mouse brain:

Or this one, of hemoglobin molecules getting built:

And even the deadpan scientific language can’t blunt the tragic power of the life cycle of malaria.

Here’s some work I made that I’m proud of.

A visualization of the harmony in John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.”

Giant Steps map

A tree of life I found on the University of Texas’ Department of Integrative Biology web site, to which I added the “you are here.”

you are here

Screencaps I made of Paul Falstad’s spherical harmonics applet.

Spherical harmonics

A giant fractal rendering I found on Flickr that I ran through some Photoshop transformations.

Fractal transformation

Thinking about how to graft computers onto existing art forms remind me of how in the early days of cinema, filmmakers could only think in terms of theater. They would set up a shot like a stage and position the camera as an audience member, framing the entire scene. Film only became an art form in its own right with the emergence of camera movements and editing. The computer similarly finds its full creative potential in experiences that are specific to the computer.