Essays from the Art & Computers Catalogue
Twenty years on from the heady optimism of Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA, and Computer Art has obstinately refused to come of age, either as an acceptable discipline for the majority of Fine Artists or as a new mass art bringing visual culture out of the gallery and onto the video screen. Claims may vary. but there have been only a handful of exhibitions in Britain dedicated to computer-generated imagery.
Before asking why this sorry state of affairs should continue during a period when computers have turned from expensive institutional machines to fast. cheap and friendly ones with universal ownership (extending their influence into every area of life), it might be useful to draw a parallel with the early days of photography. Like the computer. photography rapidly developed a vast array of commercial applications using its qualities for recording and analysis, as well as a popularity with hobbyists. It led directly, by replacing the recording aspects of art. to a new freedom of expression. From Impressionism to Modernism it proved to be a revolutionary catalyst (ironically. as art moved away from representation it also became less accessible to a mass audience: the avant-garde becoming the province of a few intellectuals and dealers).
It took photography itself a hundred years to mature as a Fine Art medium, moving slowly from apeing the structural conceits of oil painting to a new language derived from the inherent constraints of the process itself and an understanding and subversion of its own clicbes. II is scarcely surprising then that Computer art is still in its formative years, still on the verge of adolescence. Today one can trace a wide variety of approaches ranging from the committed
mathematician/programmer to the painter using an electronic paintbox as ao extension of traditional techniques. While this variety is a sign of health. it can lead to confusion in the audience.
Why use a computer to make images? Originality may have been sufficient answer in the 1960s. but since then a distinctly critical press has accused computer an by turns of blandness. garishness, imitation of other media, intellectual remoteness and lack of humanity. All these criticisms have some substance, since by definition machine art places the artist at one remove from his work, interposing a programme or a glass screen or indirect output. But artists who avoid these dangers fall into the other sin of artificially emulating perfectly good traditional autographic methods. To some degree Computers cannot avoid their big brother associations of an oppressive and invasive ethos, used as they are by a military industrial complex for precisely these ends.
What then are computers good for? We all know that they are fast, accurate and tirelessly repetitious, able to transform images in two and three dimensions at will, to change colour displays in milliseconds, offering infinite choice with second and third chances to modify the final output. Because io the final analysis, a computer can only manipulate numbers as directed by a programme, it could be said that it is only as sophisticated as its programmer. The machine is a neutral agency. A computer artist/programmer is merely codifying his or her visual understanding and experience, breaking it down into a series of separate steps. Taken to an extreme it can conjure misleadingly eerie visions of independent machine intelliegence, as in the work of Harold Cohen (a sucessful painter before his conversion) whose programme Aaron embodies his visual knowledge to such an extent that it can precisely emulate his drawing style and will continue 10 do so long after 1he artist is dead and buried!
Interactive graphics systems mean that computers become an extension tool, a device for speeding up production. The Quantel electronic paintbox created for television designers was recently featured in the BBC ‘Painting with Light’ series. Hockney and Hodgson, seduced by the luminous colours. floundered into parodies of their normal style, partly through unfamiliarity with the medium, but also because the paintbox precludes the painter from relying on the series of con•rolled ‘accidents’. the organic accretion of paint which leads to the intuitive development of an image, Everything is reversable or alterable. You are quite literally spoilt for choice, since there is no definite final physical state beyond which you cannot go.
Computer graphics also grew out of a need for military simulators and control systems. The drive tc, ever greater realism has continued into television graphics and animation, with often dire results. Yet the same algorithms as those used in a flight simulator enable the artist to enter a world of hyper-realism where mathematicalJy generated objects reflect their surroundings using techniques based on the laws of optics, such as ray-tracing and texture mapping. Again the artist can choose his expressive emphasis; compare, for example, the lazy Californian donuts of David Em. floating through star wars country, with the protosculptures of William Latham, whose extraordinary objects twist in a deep and sinister space with a tangible sexuality.
The mathematician Benois Mandelbrot opened the door on the symmetry of fractals, where as in nature, self-similar shapes replicate worlds within worlds. Artists like Ken Norton and Yochiro Kawagushi were quick to tum such discoveries into their own unique universe.
The fascination of computers can lie in their unpredictability. The collaborative project for ‘Feeling to See – sculpture for the blind’, where Mark Dunhill and myself used the technique of
‘inbetweening’ 10 transform everyday objects into each other through protean stages, was only possible because the computer was too unimaginative to say it couldn’t be done. It simply added the numbers and displayed the results.
Computer Art is a misleading term since it spills out into so many discrete areas of experiment, but it is here to stay and we are entering ao intensely exciting stage in its development where the technology is catching up with its early promise. This is particularly true in tirnebased media where traditional barriers between live action and animation are breaking down and the potential for a new mass art like Disney’s early animations is a real possiblity. The growth of Desk Top Publishing with high resolution printers and intuitive intedaces at affordable prices is attracting a new generation of artist/printmakers who worry only about the end product and not the means by which it was achieved. The advent of Hypermedia too offers to develop into a new artform combining words, music, video, animation and still pictures on video or hard disk offering the audience a self directed choice of performance.
The taste of fantasy and escapism still clings to the public perception of Computer Graphics from macho arcade games to spinning golden logos. The world of computer imagery remains a
synthetic medium in another wordly dimension. But the potential for serious and committed work is enormous. Perhaps humour and humanity will appear as the medium matures and the technology ceases to dominate the artist, but becomes as fluent as Michelangelo’s chisel, tracing the inevitability of a form emerging from the solid marble block.
- Martin Rieser (UK), Senior lecturer in Electronic Arts. Department of Art and Design. Bristol Polytechnic