Essays from the Art & Computers Catalogue

Computers have been used for the production of images for many years now but computing bas yet to become a normal part of the production of art. This may weU be the result of the apparent difference in the context in which many computer images have so far appeared and the contexts that are normal to the art world. This exhibition is another step in the merging of these two cultures and, as such, allows the opening of a window onto this confluence.

The history of computer images is such that the main body of work bas been part of a much larger programme that might be loosely characterised as ‘the push towards realism’. Now the use of the term ‘realism’ is worth examining, in order that its special characteristics, here, may be understood. Realism is easily used as a blanket term to cover a multiplicity of approaches, many of which are mutually exclusive. One of the weakest notions suggests that realism is the mimetic reproduction of the world; a mirror held to the natural world. This weak realism has often been called naturalism. It is this weak real.ism that is the dominant force in the generation of computer images for the scientific and military domains. Embedded within this notion is the assumption that holding a mirror to the world, is a simple one to one process.

There is a further underlying assumption that this is unproblematic and that this is the most straightforward understanding of images and their function. Weak realism is the natural bedfellow of simple empiricism and, in consequence, has played a large part in the early developments of science, especially since the seventeenth century, and in the exploitation of that activity in the development of industrial technology.

At this level, clearly, weak realism has its strengths. In the twentieth century its problematic nature has become all too clear for real science. Holding a mirror to the world alters the world; the observer is pan of the experiment. This realisation has not precluded the use of simple empiricism or weak realism in the progress o, what Kuhn called normal science, and its part in the technologicisation of our society. Indeed, at this level, weak realism has been a powerful tool in the armoury of the technologist and has been the driving force behind the development of computer graphics. Its modes of visualisation are presently the naturally dominant ones in the production of computer images. This is important not only for the understanding of the nature of the images generated but also for the comprehension of the paradigms that have structured the technology tbat allows the images to be produced. The push to realism (weak realism) is still a large growth area for computer graphics and will be for some time yet. There are many new technological developments that must occur for the fuU potential of weak realism to be made manifest.

The strong healthy development of weak realism associated with the expansion of the technology belies its many and significantflaws as means for the re-presentation of the world, flaws which are only too plain in the face of an understanding of the hist0ry of art. Indeed, a quick look at the dominant modes of operation witbin art since the late nineteenth century, soon indicates the nature of the radical problematisation of this notion that has been elaborated by artists from a wide range of ideologicaI standpoints. Realism is never raw and undifferentiated; it is always complex and ideologically structured.

In art since the 1950’s two major strands of development can be dete<-ted, and it is these two strands and their intersections that form the background for the placement of computer images, within art. This placement and its critical ratification wilJ only be made clear historically but, for now, we have to grapple with its possibilities.

The first tendency is the reductive form of modernism most usually associated with Greenberg, which celebrates the creative aspect of art practice and views intuition as the determining factor in the production of images. The images themselves are seen as autonomous and their generation prior to any theoretical or critical discourse. The second views this a11empt at the separation of theory and practice as strategic in a covert campaign to disable the critical purchase of arl. Whilst the first promotes the image qua image, the second combines creativity with criticism to enable the transformational potential of images. The former may well show signs of epistemological doubt, without threatening its privileging qualities; the latter uses irony to elucidate both ontological and epistemological doubt.

There has been little attempt at the location of technological/electronic art witbin this spectrum of debate, despite a certain amount of excitement in the late 1960’s. Certainly most technological/electronic art practice has celebrated either the technology itself or the status quo. If we are to progress the possiblity of a genuinely transformational practice then some historical examination of the epistemological and ontological parameters of electronic art and its forebears is timely.

The work that can be produced using computers is potentially so wide ranging as to defeat delimination, but some broad provisional outlines could be drawn that would suggest the historical resonances which it might be fruitful to consider. Computers can produce images, generate images, be used to manipulate images and in this aspect the results can be located within the history of images as such. The same may be said of computers with respect to text and the resultant location within the history of text, and similarly for sound and history of sound. Further, computers can function dynamically and combinatorialy to produce a confluence of all these areas in a form without previous parallel. However, such confluences have appeared, at various moments, in other forms. Indeed it could be argued that most cultural practice involves the integration of these various practices in radically varying amounts. Whilst we read, images and sounds are fleetingly present; whilst we Listen to music, images and texts are flooding our consciousness; whilst we watch television yet another proportionate conjunction occurs. But the computer empowers a new management of these bondings and codings: just as the advent of printing procured new devices and models that brought forth new forms of discourse and cultural practice, from the scientific paper to the novel. There is little possibility that at this juncture any clear view of the new electronic formations is going to emerge: it is just too early in the process. However. there are areas of previous cultural practice that can enliven and enrich the new by the range and depth of their example.

One of the significant features of the computer is its use and exploitation ofmemory. ln our literate society in the west we have become heavily reliant upon the printed text, and much of our culture is remembered only in the printed text. Gradually, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the photographic image has frozen om visual memory. In pre-literate medieval Europe memory played a different and important role in the cultural practices of the time. It was especially important for the church in its promotion of belief and didactive narrative. If people could not read, they were dependant upon the visual and oral world for their instruction. For those that could read, books were in extremely short supply and, therefore. very expensive. Some artificial method was required for the remembrance of texts and ideas, that would allow the literate to instruct the illiterate without the requirement of costly books.

It was for this reason that the art of memory, which had been devised by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, tlourished. Cicero had described in his De Oratore how Simonides had invented the art of memory. Present, as guest at a banquet, when the roof of the banqueting hall collapsed. Simonides. who had been fortuitously called outside by Caster and Pollux, was able to identify the mangled bodies of the other guests because he could remember the order they were sitting in. He realised that order and the formation of strong mental images were vital to the articulation of the memory. This cue was taken up by Quintilian who suggested that the most e[fective method was to locate each idea or thing to be remembered in a particular or
striking place. Recall simply required the journey. either physical or mental, from one locus to the next in the correct order. The next step was the devising of buildings, memory houses, especially suited 10 the enhancement of these mnemotechnics. Some or these were actual buildings. like Camillo·s theatre, others were mental constructions and yet others were images of agglomerated loci.

The art of memory became an important part of culture and a significant feature in the production and use of images with texts. This lead lo specific elucidatory conjunctions: the priest using his memory to recall biblical texts, indexing them to the mural painting, depicting striking corporeal scenes, which. in turn, formed mnemonic loci for the audience. In the oral/aural culture, the preacher. using the powerful rhetoric of speech, articulated the image and the artificial rememberance of texts to produce a new dominance. As printing appeared. the nature of the artificial art of memory changed to take accounl of the new means of representation that the technology allowed. New forms of memory system involved the elaborate use of diagrams, liberally emblazoned with texts: eventually. the printed text became. the prime mnemonic device.

However, for lhe centuries that it endured, the art of memory, with its connuence of parallel forms depicting intersecting worlds, was a potent means of representation. Its map like qualities have immediate resonance in the contemporary use of computers for conceptual modelling and representation. Printing tended to replace this mapping ability with a linear form, the trace. The trace and its structuring aspect became the dominant mode of modern science and, until recenlly. of Western culture as a whole.

Presently, confronted with the possiblity of weak realism driving electronic art into an ideological backwater of picturing frozen traces, we may do well to consider the lessons that might be learnt from the medieval art of memory for the dynamic mapping that computer technology can foster. Modernism has been characterised as embodying epistemological doubt (‘Js this the correct trace?”) and postmodernism as embodying both epistemological and ontological doubt (‘What is this map and wha1 is it of?”). [f the critical and transformational drive is to be suscained in an electronic art, then its dynamic mapping potential needs to be cultured in the heat of the postmodern condition. This must not be a case of the Emperor”s new clothes but a radical rethinking of the dynamic intersection of criticism and creativity, and its purchase on the intensional aspect of art mediated by the means of representation elaborated within the technology. Otherwise the art practice associated with computers will become marginalised and trivialised as another art historian’s ·movement’, ‘Computer Art’.

• Graham Howard (UK) Principal Lecturer in Electronic Graphics, Coventry Polytechnic.