Uturn E-zine
Jan 2, 1997
Editor’s Introduction

Digital Art
by Claire Wolf Krantz

After several years of incorporating computer technology into my artistic concerns, I began to think about what circumstances led me to exploring this new medium in the first place -- one that seems, at first glance, antithetical to my previous interests and approaches. My usual way of working was to intuitively manipulate various images and mediums in relationship to each other. In this way I could emphasize their content and material characteristics as sources of sensual data as well as personal and historical meaning. The surface qualities of the mediums were crucial elements in the meaning of the whole. In contrast, my digital images are abstractly conceived in the sense that the visual and conceptual nature of the images are now more vital than any tactile or physical quality of the printed page. This printed surface resembles the uninflected flatness of photography or serigraphy in comparison with the variegated skin that is possible in paintings. Suspecting that my personal musings about digital art might be relevant to other artists and artworld specialists, I decided to examine how digital mania entered my life and how it has changed my writing and artwork, as well as my awareness of related changes in the world around me.

Digital art is not necessarily compelling for working artists such as myself, who have spent many years learning how to draw and paint, to use the camera and other technical media, and who are committed to the primary value of art as an important element of being human. For many of us, the negative aspects of computer technology can overwhelm the positive ones. For instance, I have no emotional or intellectual investment in technology as an end in itself. In fact, machines -- even simple printing presses -- intimidate me. Moreover, I consider those who valorize technology, with all its masculine associations, as naively pursuing worn out ideas, ideas which are periodically hauled out of storage to be refurbished in a new guise. Furthermore, any equation of trendiness with significance bores me. I view with dismay much of the artworld's obsession with youth-oriented novelty, and I retain what I suspect is an old-fashioned suspicion of many slick, expensively produced artworks that too often cost more than they signify -- even worse, their costly presentation can substitute for meaning. Seemingly, if a thing looks immaculate, well behaved, or expensive, it must be profound.

 So why do I find myself immersed in digital art, the newest trend in town? Why divert precious reading time from literature and theory to MacIntosh magazines, replace software manuals for books, talk about RAM and upgrades, and run to see the newest digital exhibits (which are often disappointing)? Spend a lot of time and money on equipment and technical help, while comparing notes with my buddies on commercial labs to output my works -- me, who has always gained so much pleasure from the physical and mental challenge of doing the work myself?

This dangerous diversion was gradual. Like many others, I began with word processing. The Apple hooked me when I found that I could write almost as fast as I could think, correct mistakes without much pain, cut- and-paste without a scissors, and -- most importantly for an artist-writer -- manifest my thoughts in easy-to-read type. Since I think visually, the computer facilitates the retrieval of these thoughts from a somewhat inchoate, interior form to the precision of cognition and language by processing the material quickly in a concrete, visual configuration, a process that feels organic to me.

But it wasn't long before I became aware that my twenty-year love affair with all kinds of images could be extended with the new technologies: the ease I was finding in playing with words on a computer seemed attainable and desirable with pictures as well, and the methods I had developed for constructing my artworks seemed particularly relevant to computer use. By now, I had spent years manipulating various photographic, printing, and copying processes, sometimes combining them with texts and painting. I have experimented in many media, using words and images, layering transparencies, juxtaposing, repeating, reversing, and recombining elements, and observing how context modifies and even creates content. I have cut and pasted various images and mediums on a micro and macro level (placing words and phrases interspersed with large cutouts and relief paintings on the wall, and small ones in books). These approaches have always aimed at questioning how we create meaning in our lives, and what part art plays in this search -- both for artist and viewer. By means of this artwork, I explore how an idea or feeling can be developed, understood, communicated, and expressed, and how the created object (even so-called ephemera, like digital images, are communicated as "objects") is transmitted to other people. As my work continues to change, I focus on different aspects of these concerns.

Finally, I decided that I would have to go through the pain of breaking through the considerable barrier of computer technology, learn its new grammar, and see how all the things I have learned as an artist could be re-explored anew. However, even as late as the early 1990s, I could see no way of gaining entry to expensive equipment and hermetic knowledge, a condition which changed with the appearance of the new Power Macintosh at relatively affordable prices, and the proliferation of non-university introductory courses to ease me into its language. Consequently, in 1994 I bought a Power Mac and some software. My son-in-law helped me get started, and after learning the basics, I felt ready to explore its possibilities for art. I enrolled in a beginning Photoshop class and seriously began to learn what a complicated ocean I had entered technically, intellectually, and artistically.

After roughly two years of struggling with graphics programs on this machine, I became increasingly sensitized to the impact of  proliferating digitalized images and sounds on our perception of the world. By connecting all kinds of different visual and auditory experiences into momentarily singular, but always changing forms, many artists, musicians, and the like, have created viable expressions of an extremely fluid lived experience. This newfound ability to radically and seamlessly juxtapose images, surfaces, techniques, styles, and differing spatial and temporal dimensions to appear as though they represent "reality" reflects emerging social and interpersonal conditions that are unresolved, fluctuating, and difficult to define, and affects our understanding of them.

Without my consciously willing it, my own work has gradually reflected these changes. In my earlier mixed-media paintings, I exaggerated the disjunctions between mediums by emphasizing the borders separating them to stress that experiences are composed of many disparate factors. While I still combine many ingredients in my work, the computer images and mixed-media paintings have changed. The paintings have become larger, surface differentiations are more exaggerated, and the paint quality is thicker and more painterly, even as the photographic and linear elements remain flat, crisp, and specific. However, the borders between the media have become increasingly indeterminate; it is unclear in many sections of a given work which medium I am using. The focus is at once specific and ambiguous, depending on where the viewer is standing and what part of the work he or she is looking at. Yet the tension implied by these disjunctive elements remains. The variegated surface textures of the discrete media and the works' demands for tactile and proprioceptive responses (the viewer must move around them physically in order to comprehend them) allude to the myriad kinds of stimuli in the environment and of our physical responses to them. These paintings are rooted in a feeling state: a sensual, proprioceptive, tactile and often wordless record of experiences and places that are meaningful to me.

But the computer-generated images are different. They are small, printed on paper, and comprehendible with a single focus of the viewer's eye. The proportions among elements are also modified. The painted elements, along with their allusive, sensuous and passionate connotations,  are now either scans from earlier paintings and drawings or done directly on the computer -- broken apart and so integrated into the photographic whole that their meaning has altered and can be understood by the viewer in a new way. Now, a vocabulary exists for understanding multiple, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory experiences in one space and one moment in time. The very seamlessness of my new juxtapositions and the flat, even surface of a computer printout suggest the ubiquitous, fragmented, visual glut of today's popular culture. But the works can also generate an alternative reading: that of imaginative exploration; of manipulating known materials (I.e., of photographs, completed drawings and paintings) to arrive at unknown and ephemeral conclusions; of entering into a world in which the parts seem familiar, yet their meaning becomes ambiguous through unexpected connections. While this work certainly owes a debt to Surrealism, its feeling state is not the "uncanny" of this earlier art. The strangeness of my images lies in the fact that its indeterminacy and fluidity seems natural.

It seems to me that the disparities among some bodies of my work, reflecting different aspects of myself, can be also paradigmatic of the great variety of art being produced today. This multiplicity of art production can be understood as representations of the radically diverse life experiences of their artist-producers and complementary visions of a larger world. My increasing involvement with computers has also led me to thinking about larger cultural issues related to computer use which are increasingly attracting critical attention; for example, I question recent claims for computers as a democratizing force. I wonder what percentage of our total population actually uses them and who constitutes this segment. The class of people who participates in computer culture remains an aristocracy of individuals who are either wealthy enough to support a very expensive habit or who are connected -- and indebted to -- institutions such as corporations and universities. What are the implications of the limited availability of this expensive equipment and technical knowledge to particular components of our population? Can we assume that a general level of information, let alone education, will increase for everyone just because some people have computers? And in this regard, who is controlling and exchanging knowledge?

Yet, what if computer technology did become democratic? If its availability crossed class lines, or permeated those divisions still separating people? Such an event would require that our society becomes democratic. Do we really want that? Does any elite want to be just like the "great unwashed"? Or do the intellectual, financial or artistic gentry want to use the computer to train the rest of our society to think as "we" do and to act as "we" do? Do men and women want to share power and abundance or do they continue to desire mastery and control over others? Will those who are immersed in these new technologies share resources with those who are not? Or will computers become a new tool in their users' never-ending jockeying to be on top of newly forming hierarchies? Additionally, can divisions among generations be overcome through the "democratization" of computer culture? Will the young allow their elders into their world? And will aging generations open their narrowing concerns and entrenched spheres of authority to other generations? Certainly, computers are a powerful economic device -- enhanced access to information and communication arms its users with assets that are important in our competitive, fast-moving culture. But when I hear President Clinton and Bill Gates promoting the Internet as a solution for basic human problems, or artists and critics attributing significance to one form of expression (this decade it's technology and industrially-made objects) over another, I see culture wars instead of democracy.

But there is hope. A wider availability of technology through public resources such as libraries -- now only a dream - could ameliorate some economic exclusions. For artists who are not affiliated with computer-rich institutions, a drop in prices for sophisticated technology has allowed access to the Internet and for experimentation on computers with images and ideas previously unheard of. We have new tools with which to reflect upon totalizing ideologies and conceptions about the world and to re-examine the nature of learning, communication, and creativity. To take only one example of such reexamination:  questionable, muddy assumptions linking creativity to computer use underlie the promotion of certain software programs created as interactive demonstrations, games, or art, in the guise of generating creative viewer participation. In fact,these programs operate as sophisticated multiple choice problems. Where is the creativity operating? In the process of inventing the software, or in its pre-programmed use?

Related to these distorted notions of the nature of learning and creativity are inflated claims for the technology's ability, in itself, to generate radical changes in human potential. Computer use has certainly changed many of our daily activities, but is it alone responsible for changing us? Or is the relationship reciprocal?  What is the causal relationship between the development of the computer age and the society that spawned it? To illuminate this question, we can look at earlier periods in which major changes in technology were inextricably linked with the era's art and way of life. The Camera Obscura was developed at a particular moment in history within the context of societal transformations from a religiously based, cosmic world view to that of the Enlightenment. These changes foregrounded the importance of naturalistic images and scientific inquiry, and enabled the use of perspectival devices for portraying the static and central position of the viewer.  Later nineteenth century developments of the camera as well as beliefs in the transformative effects of industry and the railroads were reflected in the then-contested art of their time.  Subsequently, when early Modernist artists questioned this static and perspectival view of reality through Cubism, Surrealism, and the like, their images were as shocking to their viewers as their meanings, and the disjunctions between the public's assumptions about reality and those posited by avant-garde artists were as yet to be popularly accepted. These modernist works changed our ways of seeing and organizing the world around us. Now, as we incorporate digital images and technologies into our world view, we must remember that these devices and their references would have no use or meaning in any other time but the present, a time when our experiences are perceived as fragmentary and imprecise, and many people no longer hold the view that the world is entirely knowable or controllable. Although our most basic human concerns probably remain fairly stable, I see the radical transformations in our society that involve computers as existing in a continuum of larger, reciprocal cultural changes that occur periodically.
 
If we don't confuse the mechanical nature of the computer, in its ability to gather and store "facts" and to sort, list, and compare them in certain preset ways, with the human ability to analyze information and to judge its facticity and relevance, we will be able to evaluate its data more effectively, and to use its potential benefits. In fact, our new computer-generated abundance of "facts" has mandated that we enhance our skills in distinguishing different sorts of facts from each other, unearth their sources, and analyze their importance. Another matter -- this time related to the Internet -- which can be divisive and further polarize our already fractured society, is our new ability to "publish" our opinions anonymously. This phenomenon sharply contrasts with the characteristics of a debate, which always entailed face-to-face encounters. Moreover, the unsigned nature of bulletin board messages may enable people to express opinions honestly, but it also allows for the dissemination of frivolous opinions before they have been thought through, and for people abdicating the responsibility for what they say, a factor in the proliferation of untrue and hate-producing material.

Yet, I do believe that these expanding domains of computer access into the lives of more ordinary, working people, including artists, can help to undermine institutional monopolies over knowledge and images and breach some of the boundaries people create for themselves across lines of race, class, gender and age. I see older people learning from young computer whizzes. In the process, I see very young people forming new kinds of relationships with adults who are not their parents -- perhaps stepping outside of the Oedipal attitudes that can be so destructive to relationships and to Western society in general. I personally find myself engaged in conversations with established artists such as Irene Siegel, Claire Prussian, and Edith Altman, who have long been known for their drawings, paintings, and installations, and who are now exploring how to extend their artistic concerns via computers. But I also have new relationships with young computer buffs such as my son-in-law, Andreas, who is into the new field of digital map-making. He, as well as tech wizards and teachers like  David and Shiro have become the experienced advisors, and I, the neophyte. In the process of exchanging information, we also have also become visible to each other as people. The images I am producing with their help lie in domains outside their experience - yet I'm hearing words like "cool" instead of the glassy-eyed stare of so many young people as they avoid contact with anyone older.

The computer age is in its infancy - we all know that. And while the developers of its technology are also young, its users are increasing to include people of many generations and walks of life, thus enriching the stew. Computers can help us in changing our world, but it is we who determine our goals. I look forward to seeing where we will go next.