Panel Statement

Panel: Compumorphic Art: The Computer as Muse

This paper seeks to ad­dress the is­sues in­volved in cu­rat­ing Dig­i­tal Art: From SIG­GRAPH to ‘Sec­ond Life’, which is an on­go­ing con­flict be­tween ma­te­ri­al­ity and im­ma­te­ri­al­ity of both the medium and the art­work. This is a cu­ra­to­r­ial co­nun­drum in con­tem­po­rary new media, that chal­lenges the role and con­nec­tions be­tween dig­i­tal art and tra­di­tion­ally based art prac­tice such as paint­ing, print­mak­ing and in­stal­la­tion art when it is ex­tracted from a dig­i­tal art­work.  In this new land­scape of dig­i­tal cul­ture, old tra­di­tions and new prac­tices are both in con­flict and sym­bio­sis: con­tem­po­rary artis­tic prac­tices re­flects the so­cio-cul­tural land­scape cre­ated by new tech­no­log­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tions, de­fy­ing no­tions of dis­ci­pline, bor­ders, bound­aries and jour­neys.  Dig­i­tal in­no­va­tion can be seen on the one hand as a growth in ef­fi­ciency and power, an emer­gent source of en­ergy and a test bed for the in­tro­duc­tion of new knowl­edge and em­pow­er­ment. Which ac­cepts a leap for­ward in speed and cost-ef­fi­ciency, using so­cial net­works and vir­tual cul­ture to in­ves­ti­gate and chal­lenge the ex­ist­ing no­tions of the re­la­tion­ships be­tween ‘the artist’ and ‘the au­di­ence’. An­other is to fa­cil­i­tate in a new com­put­erised net­work and col­lab­o­ra­tive world that opens up op­por­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate, re­ceive and in­ter­act with con­duits of in­for­ma­tion and data. Al­low­ing for the ex­ploita­tion of tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial pos­si­bil­i­ties through the use of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, to en­gage in new forms of prac­tices, using in­no­v­a­tive spaces for view­ing and re­ceiv­ing work both vir­tu­ally and phys­i­cally, in what can be per­ceived as new and emer­gent art forms.

• Sue Gol­lifer is the Di­rec­tor of the ISEA In­ter­na­tional Head­quar­ters, and a Prin­ci­pal Lec­turer at the Uni­ver­sity of Brighton, UK. She is the Course Leader for the MA in Dig­i­tal Media Arts. Gol­lifer’s pri­mary re­search is on ‘the im­pact of new tech­nol­ogy within the prac­tice of Fine Art’. A pi­o­neer of early com­puter art, she has con­tin­u­ously ex­plored the re­la­tion­ship be­tween tech­nol­ogy and the arts and has writ­ten ex­ten­sively on this sub­ject.  She has been a pro­fes­sional artist/print­maker for over 40 years, ex­hibit­ing work reg­u­larly through­out the world and her work is held in major na­tional and in­ter­na­tional pub­lic col­lec­tions. She has been a cu­ra­tor of a num­ber of In­ter­na­tional Dig­i­tal Art Ex­hi­bi­tions in­clud­ing, Ar­Cade, the UK Open In­ter­na­tional Bi­en­nale Ex­hi­bi­tion, of Dig­i­tal Fine Art Prints 1995–2007 and the ACM SIG­GRAPH Art Gallery Chair ’04: Synaes­the­sia and 2010 HOT PLATE.  Gol­lifer is on a num­ber of na­tional and in­ter­na­tional com­mit­tees, in­clud­ing a mem­ber of the Cre­ators Coun­cil of the De­sign and Artists Copy­right So­ci­ety (DACS), the Com­puter Arts So­ci­ety, (CAS), the New Media Cau­cus and Light­house Brighton. She is the as­sis­tant ed­i­tor of ‘Dig­i­tal Cre­ativ­ity’ a re­ferred jour­nal pub­lished by Rout­ledge.  In 2006, she was the pre­cip­i­tant for an In­ter­na­tional Dig­i­tal Media Arts Award (iDMAa) for her ‘Ex­cep­tional Ser­vices to the In­ter­na­tional New Media Com­mu­nity’.