Panel Statement
Panel: The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging
Photography is one of the creative fields in which technological advances influence artistic expression the most. The ease of manipulation brought by software and extra features available in cameras made artists (using photography as an articulation tool) reconsider their visions, themes, narration, syntax and ways of sharing their artwork. Sharing sites like Flickr, which expedite encounters of various individuals from different cultures, help in changing the perception of the vital notion of time and enable artists to get faster feedback. Digital tools allow photographically based artists to think in a more daring and free way. In addition to the regular montage and collage methods remaining from the analog days, digital imaging techniques allow artists to work with notions of augmented perception, chronophotography, subreal encounters, pictorialism, palimpsest-like superimposition, interlacing, simplification / minimization, creation of new worlds, delusion, synthetic realism/artificiality, appropriation. 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.
- Murat Germen is an artist / architect using photography as an expression / research tool. He holds the BS degree in city planning from Technical University of Istanbul (T) and the MArch degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US), where he was a Fulbright scholar and recipient of the AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence. Currently a professor of photography and multimedia design at Sabanci University in Istanbul, he previously worked for various state and private universities including Bilkent, Yeditepe, Istanbul Technical, Yildiz and Bilgi University. He has published articles and photo series on architecture / photography / art / digital design at various magazines and books, and has presented at several seminars, symposia and conferences including SIGGRAPH, ISEA2009, Mutamorphosis, Towards a Science of Consciousness, CAe 2008-9, CAC2, EVA-London’08-‘10, eCAADe, ASCAAD, and exhibited at over forty inter/national (Turkey, USA, Italy, Germany, UK, Mexico, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Greece, Japan, Russia, Iran, India, France, Canada, Bahrain) exhibitions. Germen’s works are in the collections Istanbul Modern’s and Proje4L Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul), in addition to numerous private collections.
Full text (PDF) p. 945-948 [Title slightly different]