[ISEA2011] Panel: Anne Mor­gan Spal­ter – Cre­at­ing with the Cam­era, Can­vas, and Com­pu­ta­tion

Panel Statement

Panel: The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging

Vi­sual com­put­ing has ir­rev­o­ca­bly blurred the lines be­tween rep­re­sen­ta­tion and ab­strac­tion. Just as pho­tog­ra­phy with its in­no­v­a­tive re­al­ism changed the na­ture of paint­ing, so dig­i­tal image cap­ture and com­pu­ta­tional cre­ative processes are chang­ing the re­la­tion­ships be­tween pre­vi­ous tra­di­tional art media and di­rectly in­flu­ence our frame­works for in­ter­pret­ing new media works. In my work, I begin by tak­ing dig­i­tal pho­tographs, ma­nip­u­late them on the com­puter, cre­ate tra­di­tional draw­ings based on these works, re-dig­i­tize the works, and then cre­ate geo­met­ric, com­pu­ta­tion­ally based com­po­si­tions that could never have been drawn by hand but re­tain the hand-drawn mark­ing of the orig­i­nal draw­ings. The works are often fur­ther de­vel­oped by adding a time-based el­e­ment to cre­ate com­pu­ta­tional video draw­ings. The final com­bi­na­tions of old and new media, rep­re­sen­ta­tional el­e­ments and math­e­mat­i­cally in­spired ab­strac­tion, and still and time-based ex­plo­rations take ad­van­tage of the new vi­sual re­la­tion­ships and ways of think­ing made pos­si­ble by the com­puter.

  • Anne Mor­gan Spal­ter is a grad­u­ate of Brown Uni­ver­sity and The Rhode Is­land School of De­sign (RISD), US, and cre­ated and taught the first fine art dig­i­tal media courses at both schools. Her book, The Com­puter in the Vi­sual Arts, has be­come a stan­dard ref­er­ence text. Spal­ter has lec­tured around the world and in 2010 was in­vited to speak at the Vic­to­ria and Al­bert Mu­seum in Lon­don, UK, the Boston Mu­seum of Fine Arts, and at her alma mater, RISD. Spal­ter’s tra­di­tional and dig­i­tal work is in­cluded in lead­ing con­tem­po­rary col­lec­tions in New York, Paris, Dubai, Geneva, Sin­ga­pore, Boston and Prov­i­dence, RI. Spal­ter is also a prac­tic­ing mar­tial artist and has a black belt in Kenpo Karate.

Full text (PDF) p. 2293-2295  [Title slightly different]