Funda Zeynep Auyguler

This paper contributes to the books Digital Art (2015) by Christiane Paul and Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age (2018) by Omar Kholeif to serve as an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary culture. It poses a survey of contemplations and opens up questions on the status of contemporary art after the Internet. It includes a short history of digital art as well as a variety of examples of artists working with the digital medium, and finally, an example of my own artistic work.

The terminology for technological art forms has always been extremely fluid. What is nowadays known as ‘digital art’ has undergone several terminological changes since its first emergence: once referred to as ‘computer art’, then ‘multimedia art’ and ‘cyberart’ (from 1960-90s) and ‘digital art’ is often used as with the term ‘new media art’, which at the end of 20th century, was used mostly for film and video, sound art and other hybrid forms. What is in fact ‘new’ here are the novel possibilities for the creation and the experience of art. Perhaps the most commonly used phrase was ‘new media art’, which was first intended to encompass all media that used technology. ‘Electronic art’, or ‘electronic media’ were two phrases that were intended to encompass those works that were both technology based and user interactive. The notion of ‘digital art’ has become an umbrella term for such a broad range of artistic works and practices that it doesn’t describe one single set of aesthetics. ‘Digital art’ is a term that emerged to reference to form of art made for the virtual sphere, then later co-opted by the media to discuss everything from graphics to product design that engages with emerging technologies.

Thinking in definitions and categories in order to understand art can be misleading, particularly when the examined form of art still evolving, as in the case of digital arts. Many artists, curators, and theorists have already declared an era of Post-Media and Post-Internet. One of the most intriguing terms related to internet-art is what artist and theorist James Bridle calls the ‘New Aesthetic’. He first used the term in an often-quoted article from 2012, within which he states: “There truly are many forms of imagery nowadays that are modern, and unique to this period. We are surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We build them, we programmed them but they do some unexpected and provocative things.” (1)  

The notion of ‘New Aesthetic’ now functions as one of the key terms to describe how the spaces and environments we are inhabiting are more than ever before devised by software, which can generate the formal features of the ‘real world.’ As cultural historian Norman M. Klein describes: “Art seeks to compound the real world into the virtual world. So, what we have here is a condition that is ever evolving, constantly shifting, a world of ‘cross-embedded media’.” (2)

A Short History of Digital Art

Following the first three chapters of Christiane Paul’s book Digital Art, the history of Digital Art has been determined as much by science and technology as by art history. Indeed, it can be shown that technology and science have shaped and guided the discipline, especially over the last century. Yet, these seemingly distinct disciplines are currently interlinked more than ever before, with technology being a fundamental force in the development and evolution of art. Digital Art did not occur in an art historical vacuum, but has strong connections to previous art movements such as Dada, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. The importance of these movements for Digital Art lies in their focus on the conceptual aspect, the event and audience interaction rather than on the material. This is also the case when the notions of ‘interactivity’ and ‘virtuality’ come into place – as concepts. The shift from object to concept can be regarded as precursory ideas of ‘virtual object’ or ‘virtual reality’.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s light sculptures and Marcel Duchamp’s Rotary Glass Plates are the principal examples of interactive artworks which have been extremely influential in the realm of Digital Art. Events and happenings of the Fluxus group, John Cage’s Controlled Randomness, Nam June Paik’s installations, John Whitney’s first generative art and motion graphics, for which he worked with analogue military computing equipment, are also prominent works. (3) Particularly Duchamp’s oeuvre has been extremely influential: the shift from object to concept in many of his work can be seen predecessor of the virtual object. As Christiane Paul describes in her book Digital Art:

“Dadaist poetry aestheticized the construction of poems out of random variations of words and lines, using formal instructions to create an artifice that resulted from an interplay of randomness and control. This idea of rules being process for creating art has a clear connection with the algorithms that form the basis of all software and every computer operation: a procedure of formal instructions that accomplish a result in a finite number of steps. Just as with Dadaist poetry, the basis of any form of computer art is the instruction as a conceptual element.” (4)

Raymond Quenean and Francois Le Lionnais argue that “all creative inspiration should be subjected to calculation and become an intellectual game”. (5) Ted Nelson refers to the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’ to describe the situation, when text, images and sound are electronically interconnected, which was the first idea of transferring files and messages over the internet. During the Cold War, ARPANET – which was actually the first World Wide Web – was developed and used as communication network by the US army.

The 60s turned out to be a particularly important decade for digital technologies. In 1967, the collective “Experiments in Art and Technology” (E.A.T) was founded by, amongst others, Billy Klüver, from the desire to develop an effective collaboration between engineer and artist. Klüver collaborated with artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, John Cage, Jasper Jones and David Tudor. The group aimed at bringing engineers and artist together in order to support pioneering forms of art. Headed by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver and artist Robert Rauschenberg, E.A.T. made messy, often inscrutable work, experimenting with sound, light and the kinetics of invisible and visible matter, radio waves and the human body. In 1968, the show Cybernetic Serendipity was one of the most important exhibitions in the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The works on display ranged from animated graphics, light and sound environments to sensing robots. Douglas Davis’s satellite telecast work, developed 1977 in the scope of Documeta VI in Kassel, is yet another important work, including performances by Nam June Paik, Fluxus artist and musician Charlotte Moorman as well as Joseph Beuys.

In Germany, the theoretical background for the discourse on Digital Art has been provided by Max Bense, Professor of Philosophy and Science at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. When Bense began to produce computer graphics in the 1950s, his work was at first considered nothing but an experiment. Back then, computers were not used by artists as they were too big, too difficult to operate and, of course, very costly. Many of the pioneers of Computer Art have been working in big companies or at universities where they had access to computers, being at that time still gigantic machines. Max Bense, together with Abraham A. Moles and Frieder Nake, has been a pioneers of Computer Art, inventing potential links between arts and computers.

During the 70s and 80s artists began to experiment with new computer imaging techniques. During this period, object-oriented works shifted to process-oriented, dynamic and interactive works. Rather than being the creator of a work of art, the artists often played the role of a ‘mediator’ or ‘facilitator’ for audiences’ interaction with the artwork. In 1984, William Gibson published the legendary novel Neuromancer and introduced the term ‘cyberspace’ to describe a world of data that people would experience as an organic informational matrix. Neuromancer as well as Neal Stephanson’s novel Snow Crash have already mentioned virtual spaces decades ago.

It was only in the late 1990s that Digital Art officially entered the art world. There had been a number of media art exhibitions over the decade, but back then, museums and galleries increasingly began to incorporate Digital Art into their shows and to dedicate entire exhibitions to the new medium. Digital Art shows in intuitional contexts mostly took place at media centers and museums such as the Centre for Culture and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Canada, the Europan Media Art Festival (EMAF) in Osnabrück, Germany, or the Transmediale in Berlin.

Digital Art poses a number of problems in the presentation, collection and preservation of the artworks. Generally, it is quite expensive to show Digital Art works and they require consistent maintenance. Moreover, Digital Art projects often require audience engagement and very often, they do not reveal their content at first glance. On the other hand, Internet Art has been created to be seen by anyone,  anywhere and at any time, and it actually does not need any physical space to be screened. The collection (and therefore the sale) of Digital Art is yet another issue, which has been debated since the art form began to emerge. Then, the process of collecting art also entails the responsibility of maintaining it, which may be the biggest challenge that Digital Art has faced. Digital Art is always referred to as ephemeral and unstable. What makes Digital Art ephemeral is the rapid development in hardware and software, from changing the operating systems to increasing screen resolutions and changing web browsers. Marc Spiegler,  the Global Director of Art Basel, notes that “it takes a pretty pioneering spirit to be a collector of digital art (…). For the entire history of the art market, what was sold was a physical object — a sculpture, a painting, a drawing.” (5)

It has often been argued that the digital image is not representational as it is encoded and would not record nor reproduce physical reality. Digital images consist of pixels that are based on algorithms and they do not by nature require any physical representation. Many digital images focus on artistic experiments that may visualize a process, which would otherwise – by only translating or encoding visual information – remain unseen. In his work Digital Scores, German artist Andreas Müller-Pohle translates the oldest preserved photograph, Niépce’s view out of his studio, into a digital form, by converting seven million bytes into an alphanumeric code. The panels represent a complete binary description of the oldest surviving photograph. Digital Scores points both to the fluid transition of information in the digital realm and to the different forms of encoding inherent in the digital and photographic media. This work was made in 1998 and was one of the first works showing that visual information ultimately represents a calculable quantity. His Face Codes series are selections from several hundred video portraits recorded in Kyoto and Tokyo. The artist opened the image files as ASCII text files, and the ASCII code has been translated into a kind of sing system used in Japan. The translated alphanumeric code appears under the portraits, inscribing the ‘genetic’ makeup of the image itself onto its surface.

Warren Neidich created a series called Conversation Maps in which he captured sign-language and converted the gestures into an artwork through light, long exposure and digital photo manipulation. (6) He photographed artificial setups of everyday conversations conducted in sign-language, in which the participants had lights being attached to their fingers and arms. The black and white pictures were taken with long exposure and in black and white. The final artwork consists of five to thirty layers of conversations, which has been colored by using image manipulating software. Neidich’s work documents and visually translates a process and represents conversational patterns.

A very different digital technique has been employed by Joseph Nechvatal, whose robotic-assisted computer-paintings and videos have been created by means of a virus-like program. In 2002, he extended his experimentations on viral artificial lives in form of a work called the Computer Virus Project, which has been inspired by the John Horton Conway (Game of Life) and the general cellular automata work of John von Neumann, by the genetic programming algorithms of John Koza as well as by the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger. (7) Nechvatal  introduced the term ‘Viractualism’ in 1999. As he explains:

“Viractuality is a theory that strives to see, understand, and create interfaces between the technological and the biological. The basis of the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer technology has become a noteworthy means for making and understanding contemporary life (and thus art). And that this virtual brings artists to a place of paradox where one finds increasingly the emerging of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This fusion motif – which tends to contradict some central techno clichés of our time – is what I call the viractual.” (6)

Digital technologies as an artistic medium implies that the work exclusively uses digital platforms, from production to presentation, and that it exhibits and explores the possibilities offered by these platforms. There are a few key characteristics of Digital Art: interactivity, the participatory quality (it requires audience engagement), the dynamic nature and customizability. Interactivity in Digital Art describes different forms of navigating, assembling or contributing to an artwork. Any experience of art is interactive, but regarding to traditional art, interaction remains a mental event. In more traditional art forms, contributing to an artwork is a purely mental event. Yet, when it comes to Digital Art, there are more complex possibilities as those of remote and immediate interaction, which are unique to the digital medium. Digital Art is participatory and generally relies on multi-user input. In some artworks, viewers interact with the parameters that have been set by the artist. In others, the viewers set the parameters themselves or become remote participants in time-based live performances. The digital medium is dynamic and can respond to a changing flow of data. Moreover, it is also important to point out that the digital medium is not always visual. Basically, it consists of a ‘back end’ – a code or script that mostly remain hidden – and a visible ‘front end’ that can be seen by the viewer.

Digital Art is a very wide field and can appear in many different forms. From large-scale video installations that include multiple channels, and immersive installations to site-specific works; they are all concerned with the possible relationship between physical and virtual space. Digital art installations are based on the balance between the physical and the virtual and they create methods to translate the one space into the other. A good example for a digital installation is the well-known project Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw. (8) The project allows the viewers to navigate through a simulated city, consisting of computer graphics of capital letters, which are projected on a screen in front of the viewer. The project establishes a direct connection between the physical and the virtual space. Additionally, it allows the user to control speed and direction. In the work, the city becomes an ‘information architecture’, telling stories of immaterial experiences that are not immediately accessible through the tangible form of the building itself. Erwin Redl’s large scale LED installations such as Matrix, by contrast, seems to translate the virtual into the physical space by allowing the viewer a direct experience of an immaterial space. (9)

Architect Marcos Novak has described cyberspace as a ‘liquid architecture’, in which all structures are programmable and fluid. (10) The ultimate intelligent environment has first been mentioned in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris – where the whole planet Solaris is an intelligent organic system which reflects human emotions and thoughts. It became a direct inspiration for the project Polar by Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan. (11) The artists created an intelligent database in a physical environment. Here, the space can be used by two people at a time, each equipped with a device that allows them to record and collect sensory information – such as images, sounds, temperature and cultures of microorganisms that respond to the actual temperature and light conditions in the space. Each visitor is able to change the space, thereby creating a new starting point for the following couple.

While virtual space creates new forms of worlds, it is also related to the history of the Moving Image, which has been affected by our assumption on the representations of the world. Among the earliest interactive narrative films is Lynn Hersmann’s Lorna (1974-84), in which the narrative on the television screen is navigated by viewers by means of a remote control. Another important interactive video-work is Grahame Weinbren’s Sonata (1991-3). In this work, the viewer is able to modify the narrative. Viewers can move from one story to another, creating their own stories. Toni Dove’s interactive video installations is probably the best known live cinematic live performance. Her work Spectropia was performed as a live-mix cinematic event with live performances orchestrating onscreen characters using motion sensors as a playable cinematic instrument creating a narrative form that combine characteristic of fictional film, video game and VJ performance. (12)

Animation, another form of Digital Art, has continuously merged disciplines and the techniques and is still existing in-between the entertainment industry and the art world. Presumably the most famous animation work in the art world is Phlippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s No ghost, just a shell. The artists purchased the copy rights of an animation character from one of the major Japanesse agencies. The character ‘Annlee’ has only a few facial attributes, no history, no life: she is just a fictional shell with a copyright. Parreno and Huyghe created some animations with Annlee and distributed them to other artists, who created additional interpretations of the character.

The last form of Digital Art, the World Wide Web, has been conceptualized in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee and the CERN, with the intention to build a distributed collaborative multimedia information system. The early WWW is largely unregulated space for free information. The commercial colonization of the internet started in late 90s with ‘dot.com’ craze and found its culmination in the Social Media. Internet Art is in many ways characterized by the tension between the philosophy of a free networked space and its extension in a commercial context. In the mid 90s, a group of artists Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin, Vuc Cosic and Jodi, connected through the online mailing list, drew attention to the genre of ‘Art on Net’ and together formed the ‘net.art movement’. The early WWW was not very sophisticated and mostly textural, and respectively, early Net Art has been very conceptual, driven by a sense of community and a spirit of spontaneous interventions. Vuc Cosic popularized ASCII art, creating still images and videos that are made entirely out of alphabetic and numeric characters. The duo Jodi turned desktop elements and the common Web interface inside out. One of the most radical forms of Internet Art was the project Blackness for Sale by artist and composer Keith Obadike. In 2001, Obadike began selling off his ‘blackness’ on eBay. eBay did not care about Obadike’s intention and took the auction down in four days which would have been a ten-day auction. They marked the auction ‘inappropriate’.

Another well-known artist collective of this genre is the Austrian artists duo Übermorgen. They were part of the 1990s digital avant-garde and the front runners of ‘Digital Actionism’. Using dark technology, pop- aesthetics with a conceptual rigidity, Übermorgen do have an impressive track-record of works. They are willing to take risks and push the boundaries of art, technology and aesthetics. One of the most outstanding media-hacking works of Übermorgen is Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) of 2015. They generated money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden Websites. With this money they automatically buy Google shares. As they explain on their web site “We buy Google via their own advertisement! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!”. One of their most polemic projects is [V]ote-auction. During the 2000’s election campaign in the US, opposing Al Gore and George W. Bush, this online auctioning platform gave voters the opportunity to sell their vote to the highest bidder. The project gained enormous media attention, and the legal system started an investigation in 14 States, so did the FBI, the CIA. Übermorgen calls this type of action “actionism” and “media-hacking”.

The idea of a human that is half organic, half mechanized is no longer the province of science fiction. Many of these creations owe their existence to ongoing conversations between scientists about how to invent them and artists, about who can humanize them. Artist Aleksandra Domanović, for example, creates works that addresses the question how technological advancement engages with historically marginalized bodies. Domanović looks at the history and development of technology through a gender-conscious lens. In her work Alan’s Apple (2013), an apple shape fruit is held in a tight grip, as a reference to the tragic figure and founder of modern computing, Alan Turing, who committed suicide after consuming a cyanide-laced apple following persecution by the British government for being gay. Omer Kholeif comments in his book: “In the artist’s sculpture, the apple remains uneaten, an utopic allusion to the growing acceptance of homosexuality in the mainstream culture.”  (7)

The term ‘virtual reality’ is commonly used for any space created by or accessible through technology. It refers to a reality that fully immerses its users in a three-dimensional world wholly generated by computers. ‘Virtual reality’ or ‘augmented reality’ are forms of entering into a virtual environment since it puts the screen in front of the viewers’ eyes by means of a headset. These technologies immerse the user in an artificial world and eliminate or augment the physical one, promising the possibility of leaving the body behind and entering the data-space as a cyborg. However, the concept of ‘disembodiment’ has not come true yet as the user must wear the physical headsets, which still works like any other interface.

Art in The Age of Virtual Reproduction

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. (13) Walter Benjamin’s renowned study on the mechanical reproduction of art, of the ‘aura’ in particular, has served as theory to come to terms with the potential of emerging three-dimensional (3D) technologies. However, the notion of ‘aura’ has varying interpretations. According to The Chicago School of Media “aura refers to the authority held by the unique, original work, which under modernity is liquidated by the techniques of mass reproduction”. The Oxford dictionary defines ‘aura’ as “the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing or place”. The term ‘presence’ is also used in a related way, as a perceived presence provided by technology that may not correspond to the ‘real’ physical world. Thomas Sheridan, on the other hand, mentions a number of variations of the term, including ‘virtual presence’, which he defines as a “sense of being physically present with visual, auditory or force displays generated by a computer”. (14)

To turn back to Benjamin’s seminal article on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, written in 1935 and first published in 1936, Benjamin conceives of the ‘aura’ as the ‘original’, the ‘magical’ or ‘supernatural’ force that was created by artists’ hands. For Benjamin, the presence of an artwork in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be, constitutes the ‘authenticity’, the ‘authority’ and eventually, the ‘aura’ of an art object. In his book Ways of Seeing (1972), Berger further developed this notion and discussed the power of the ‘bodily encounter’ with an original work of art, as well as an authentic state of being and how it played with the hermeneutic senses of each being. For Benjamin, the presence of an artwork in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be constitutes the authenticity, authority and ‘aura’ of the art object. (15) As Jan Mieszkowski states in respect to Benjamin’s essay:

“Scarcely any twentieth-century author rivals Walter Benjamin’s influence on the contemporary understanding of art and the aesthetic implications of new media. His thought has left its mark on all areas of contemporary theory and practice, from architecture, painting and sculpture to installation art, photography and film (…). Benjamin investigated the formal, historical and political dimension of visual phenomena with unparalleled creativity.” (16)

In the 21st century, a new mental space has been created partly by the Internet and 3D reproduction technologies. 3D scanning and printing have taken mechanical reproduction technologies beyond photographic images into the sphere of objects. Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog has been sold for $52,000,000 and has previously been considering the most expensive piece of art by a living artist. To create this work, Koons hired a company to scan an actual balloon dog, and to hand back a digital CAD model. Koons used 3D cad models in the production of his multi-million-dollar Balloon Dog, but most interestingly, he made the 3D models available for free. Anyone could freely download a CAD model and import it into and 3D software in order to create his/her own digital renderings and 3D scans. This is probably the best example of a contemporary artwork with regard to the idea of aura, authenticity and physicality, as it demonstrates the relationship between physical artworks and their digital/virtual reproduction.

Yet, what are the implications of Walter Benjamin’s influential ideas on the aesthetic and political impact of art and its reproduction for our purpose and our understanding of 3D technologies? How might VR’s unique offering of virtual/spatial presence serve as a conceptual tool to help us navigate through the ambiguity of Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’? How shall we consider the ‘aura’ of originality when its intent is to be replicated? Is the digital artwork the archetypal example of an object lacking ‘aura’ due to its innumerable reproduction? And how do we have to conceptualize ‘data’ in the context of digital objects? Is the ‘purely digital’ object simply an idea? I keep these questions open ended for further discussions.