Inform,
Challenge, Engage: Digital Art in Interesting Times
“
May you live in interesting times!”—an
old Jewish curse
Turn of the century information technology has provided
artists with new tools of communication allowing
access to audiences that far exceed the possibilities
of traditional art media. Although only a small percentage
of the population in 2003 is equipped to use the
internet (only approximately 10% have home computers
with internet access and an even smaller percentage
have DSL lines), the numbers grow daily. While its
potential for diseminating commercial product information
and generating sales has driven the development of
the internet, the possibilities for other uses have
created a fertile ground for artists’ explorations.
Digital media create metaphors for reality that
challenge traditional illusionism in art and provide
potential access unimagined until recently. In this
new digital world the passive viewer can become an
active participant. This feature of the technology
has spawned numerous interactive games (sometimes
a new obsessive addiction) and chat rooms on any
subject imaginable. Ryan McCormack, one of the artists
represented here, describes “blogging,” a
recent digital phenomenon that is “a highly
social and often very creative form of digital interaction.…encompass[ing]
an ambiguous space of creative writing, political
discourse, opportunistic news reporting, and online
diary-keeping. It is just another example of how
technology is facilitating changes in the ways people
communicate, create, and interact.”
The San Francisco Bay Area has been a major center
for the creation and dissemination of digital media.
Influenced by the counter-culture of the 60s, a generation
of young, technologically savvy entrepreneurs created
a new culture which dominated the economic and artistic
life of the Bay Area until the recent collapse of
the dot com industries. Leaving aside the Net’s
enormous commercial potential, perusal of various
web sites suggested to me that the internet’s
most powerful function today is its amazing capacity
to communicate information. The possibilities for
interactive processes enhance the Net’s value
as a communication tool.
However, at the present time, the potential of the
technology is not equal to the equipment used to
access it. Issues such as poor resolution on screen,
uniformity of scale and the ever-increasing need
for computer equipment upgrades to effectively use
the medium limit the satisfaction afforded the art
viewer (participant), and challenge the creativity
of artists. Additionally, as Ryan McCormack pointed
out to me, “the lack of regulations and standards
in content and delivery are both a strength and a
potential weakness of the medium.”
In spite of current limitations, many artists have
chosen to explore the aesthetic possibilities or
philosophical implications of the medium. My interest,
however, was in artists who use the medium to inform,
challenge and engage the participant. Thus, I selected
California artists who use their skills to create “electronic
flyers, pamphlets or interactive activities (games)” to
lead us to continue to seek truth, question received
wisdom and better understand our situation. I feel
that these artists represent a uniquely West Coast
perspective—playful, humorous, irreverent,
direct, uncomplicated. I asked them to consider their
audience, present social or political information
and to try to keep their projects simple. I hoped
that material wouldn’t take too long to load,
and could communicate to a large and diverse audience.
A particularly 21st Century feature of the World
Wide Web is the non-linear nature of information
gathering and exchange. Accessing information using
key words affords a more global approach. Bits of
information are scattered across the field like so
many stars, yet links are easily made, so that unusual
and sometimes seemingly unrelated items form constellations
of new meanings. Each of the artists has created
message-laden material with links to other sites,
so that a person navigating this site will be able
to find more related material.
With the exception of Ryan McCormack, the artists
in this exhibition are not strictly digital artists.
While they have used this technology extensively,
they have been involved in other media over many
years, including printmaking, painting, sculpture,
performance, video and installation.
Katherine Aoki says about her work: “ I create
provocative, post-modern narratives that explore…issues
in a humorous way…. I use cartoon-style drawing
and sometimes advertising formats to invite the viewer
in.” Aoki has long been interested in the way
advertising shapes our response to visual material,
and influences our perceptions. In this exhibition
she works with interaction designer, Ryan McCormack
to explore the way technology, society, and current
political events interact to impinge on personal
privacy—an increasingly fraught issue today.
They have created three characters with differing
perspectives, ages and life histories, each of whom
confronts the use of electronic media to compromise
personal privacy (racial profiling, surveillance,
identity theft, etc.). The least partisan of the
three pieces in this exhibition, these young artists
leave the viewers to draw their own conclusions.
They provide links to sites where viewers can get
more information and become involved, if they choose,
in the issues raised. The Patriot Act, and changes
in the way the US Government responds today to the
Freedom of Information Act make this a timely subject.
Aoki’s animé-inspired imagery emerges
in her fine-art prints, artist books, papier maché sculpture
and installation as well as her digital work. Much
of her content deals with gender issues in a humorous
way—creating situations where roles are reversed
or gender is exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
She teaches digital media at Santa Clara University
in California’s Silicon Valley. This is the
first time Aoki and McCormack have collaborated on
a digital media art project.
The most interactive of these presentations is Nancy
Buchanan’s “Sleep Secure” The 2004
Tax Dollar Quilt. A Los Angeles-based artist who
has worked in video, performance, installation and
traditional media, Buchanan has been producing digital
art for a number of years. She invites users to construct
their own quilt patterns, using the current War Resisters
League figures for US spending of tax dollars. Basic
quilt-making instructions are included, which can
be printed out by the user. For each wedge of the
pie chart, she can choose a repeating pattern constructed
from linked images posted to the web that correspond
to a given tax category (human resources, current
military, etc.). If the user doesn’t like the
look of a selected design, he can click on another
part of the wedge and select a new design. Once the
quilt is assembled on the screen, users can add their “pie” to
a growing on-line virtual quilt or print out the
fabric patterns for each wedge to make a literal
one. With a color printer the user can print out
on iron-on transfer paper to reproduce a unique quilt
as arranged and displayed on-line.
Recognized as one of the important feminist performance
artists on the west coast in the 1970s, Nancy Buchanan
has experimented with new genres ever since. Content
is central to her work which almost always deals
with contemporary political and social issues. Her
commitment to present messages with content is always
apparent in her artwork as well as in her work as
a teacher, community activist, and curator. For a
number of years she has investigated the meaning
of “home” as both a physical and a metaphorical
reflection of self, especially as it displays the
inhabitant as a product of society. The current project
uses an important home furnishing item, the quilt —especially
a pieced quilt, with its references to domestic craft
and continuity—to provide commentary on US
government spending priorities. She teaches video
and other media arts as well as criticism at CalArts
in Valencia.
Jos Sances has always been a political artist. He
says he is not a computer artist but makes his living
as “a graphic artist who would rather carve
and paint than sit in front of a computer.” He
describes the relationship of virtual reality to
actual reality as the relationship between a real
tree-picked cherry and Cherry Kool-Aid— “The
Kool-Aid can quench your thirst, but it’s not
a cherry.” His goal for this project was to
use digital media as an efficient way to provide
and exchange information. “Don’t DeLay” takes
a portion of the text of “Be Not Afraid.” House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s recent speech to
the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). Sances feels that
this speech demonstrates the emotionalism and stereotyping
which informs US foreign policy in the Middle East,
especially as it relates to Israel.
Deeply disturbed by the fanatical tone of the speech
and the Christian fundamentalist perspective on Israel,
Sances wanted to make related information prominent
and call into question DeLay’s assertions and
point-of-view. Certain phrases or key words in the
speech are highlighted to create links to various
sites, such as Christian Zionist and Hezbollah websites,
with the intention of letting the user browse information
which either expands DeLay’s message or provides
counterpoint to it. Sances’ iconoclasm is evident
in some of his “commentary” in the pop-up
windows (George W. Bush as Moe of the Three Stooges,
for example, or Sances’ mascot, “Daddy
Capital” a combination of Jesus, Santa Claus,
Mickey Mouse and the Monopoly logo character, saying “Rats
No More Democracy”). Like Katherine Aoki, Sances
uses humor to score his points. Less good-natured
than Aoki’s, his mordant wit oozes sarcasm
and indignation with little concern for the offense
it might give.
A screen printer with over thirty years of experience
making posters with political or cultural messages,
Jos was co-founder of Mission Grafica in San Francisco
and founder with Charlie Lubin of Alliance Graphics
in Berkeley, a union shop that produces t-shirts,
caps and graphic art. In recent years he has turned
his hand to sculpture and painting. Last year an
exhibition of his work at a city-sponsored gallery
in Vallejo, California, had the mayor calling for
the resignation of the gallery’s director.
All of the artists in this exhibition use their
aesthetic and technical skills, digital tools and
access to the internet to critique our culture and
offer antidotes to some of its excesses. In this
time of eroding civil liberties at home and US support
for brutal abuses of human rights abroad, it is not
surprising that artists—whose work depends
on freedom of expression—feel called to involvement.
Until we live in less interesting times, we will
need to hear their voices.
Robbin Henderson
Director, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California
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