Panel Statement
Chairs: Kris Paulsen & Meredith Hoy
Presenters: Zabet Patterson & Laura U. Marks
This panel will investigate the history of abstract moving image work from early computer films, to the first video synthesizer images, to current work in generative, algorithmic art. Unlike typical images derived from film and video, which capture indexical traces of the scenes and objects in front of their lenses, these works generate imagery without referents and often without cameras. Early computer animations experimented with the translation of code into graphics, video synthesizers mapped electric impulses directly onto the scrolling field of the cathode ray tube, where as generative art uses computational algorithms to define a set of rules which automatically set into motion and ever changing visual landscape. The papers on this panel challenge the particular model of visuality proposed by a traditional understanding of film. They trace out a long history of generative art, rooting new media practices in experimental work of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The work of John and James Whitney, Stephen Beck, and Casey Reas model an alternative history of moving images that privileges abstraction over representation, and procedure over mimetic capture of the natural world. In an effort to make something radically new, these artists refer to older histories of knowledge and make explicit reference outside of the lexicon of Western visuality to the Eastern figures of arabesques and mandalas. Like these spiritual motifs, the artists aim to create types of imagery that exceed the visible material world by making works of pure light. In doing so, they not only author an alternative history of film, but also hypothesize a metaphysics of the screen. The papers on this panel challenge the particular model of visuality proposed by a traditional understanding of film.
- Kris Paulsenis Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Film, Video and New Media in the History of Art Department and Program in Film Studies at The Ohio State University, USA. She studies contemporary art with a specialization in time-based media. In particular, her work traces the history of technology in the arts and the rhetoric of “new media” from photography to computational art. Her current research addresses artistic engagements with television and experiments with telepresence. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, film theory, and semiotics, she examines the phenomenological and epistemological effects of technologies on space, time and bodily presence. Additionally, Professor Paulsen is interested in the legal and philosophical stakes of forgery, reenactment, appropriation, and copyright in the digital age. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, “Mass Medium: Artists’ Television 1965 to the Present” and “Real Time over Real Space: Telepresence and Contemporary Art”.
- Meredith Hoy is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. Her dissertation, entitled From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, traces links between contemporary digital art and modern painting. Drawing on theories of visuality, space and spatial practice, cybernetics and systems theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism and semiotics, her research focuses on the impact of technology on art and visual culture. She has written on modern and contemporary art and architecture, generative art, information visualization, and the phenomenology of networked space.