Panel Statement

Chair Per­son: Helen Sloan
Pre­sen­ters: Vicky Isley, Paul Smith, Susan Collins, David Cot­ter­rell, Si­gune Hamann & Susan Sloan

The panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate and re­visit the po­lit­i­cal role that art can play in sub­vert­ing stan­dard­ised vi­sual form and lan­guage. Data ma­nip­u­la­tion and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion con­tributes to a large part of con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal arts prac­tice. A ten­dency to sep­a­rate out frame­work/plat­form and con­tent has meant that analy­sis of the ma­te­r­ial of vi­sual forms that arise from artis­tic processes can be over­looked. This panel ex­am­ines di­verse ap­proaches to the ma­nip­u­la­tion and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of data ap­pro­pri­ated by vi­sual artists. While the works pre­sented by the pan­el­lists are not overtly po­lit­i­cal, there is a strong pres­ence of chal­lenge to the vi­sual tropes used by those en­gaged in pro­duc­tion in an in­dus­try con­text such as film, gam­ing, jour­nal­ism and mar­ket­ing.  The panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate and re­visit the po­lit­i­cal role that art can play in sub­vert­ing stan­dard­ised vi­sual form and lan­guage.  Pan­el­lists will be drawn from artists in the con­cur­rent Bro­ken Still­ness ex­hi­bi­tion at ISEA, who are in­ter­ro­gat­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween his­tor­i­cally em­bed­ded forms of image mak­ing, es­pe­cially paint­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy, with those dig­i­tal prac­tices that are still in de­vel­op­ment or rel­a­tively un­ex­plored such as com­puter an­i­ma­tion, mo­tion cap­ture/track­ing, mod­el­ling soft­ware and high de­f­i­n­i­tion.  The work pre­sented and the pan­elists will ex­plore the new forms that are emerg­ing from an in depth ex­plo­ration of dig­i­tal tools com­bined with an un­der­stand­ing of more es­tab­lished forms of im­age­mak­ing in the vi­sual arts. Be­yond the con­cen­tra­tion of the dig­i­tal on speed, col­lec­tivism and band­width in much dig­i­tal work, the panel will call for a sub­tle ap­proach to mak­ing work.

• Helen Sloan has been Di­rec­tor of SCAN, Dig­i­tal and In­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary Arts Agency since its launch in 2003. SCAN is a net­worked or­ga­ni­za­tion and cre­ative de­vel­op­ment agency work­ing on arts pro­jects and strate­gic ini­tia­tives in arts or­gan­i­sa­tions, aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions and fur­ther as­pects of the pub­lic realm. Helen’s ca­reer spans over twenty years dur­ing which she has cu­rated, com­mis­sioned and con­vened over 200 ex­hi­bi­tions, new works, and events. She has writ­ten and re­searched a num­ber of key strands in dig­i­tal arts in­clud­ing wear­able tech­nolo­gies, the in­ter­sec­tion be­tween art and sci­ence, and arts pol­icy. She has di­rected fes­ti­vals such as Across Two Cul­tures in New­cas­tle 1996 (an early event on the over­lap­ping prac­tice of cre­ative think­ing in arts and sci­ence), Meta­pod, Birm­ing­ham 2001 – 2, and  Pub­lic Do­main, Bournemouth 2010. Cur­rent areas of in­ter­est dig­i­tal arts and place; high-speed net­works and on­line re­sources/spaces; mod­els of prac­tice and the cre­ative econ­omy; and data vi­su­al­iza­tion.  scansite.org

Full text (PDF) p. 2268-2270  [title slightly different]