Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice in Art and Technology

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DIGITAL VISUAL CULTURE

THEORY AND PRACTICE

COmPUTERS AND THE HISTORY Of ART Volume 3

BENTKOWSKA-KAFEL/CASHEN/GARDINER

intellect | www.intellectbooks.com

Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner

9 7 8 1 8 4 1 5 0 2 4 8 9 ISBN 978-1-84150-248-9

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Digital Visual Culture

Theory and Practice

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Digital Visual Culture Theory and Practice

Computers and the History of Art, Yearbook 2006, Volume 3 Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner

The papers by Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith, Dew Harrison, Ann- Sophie Lehmann, Hamid van Koten and Ralf Nuhn were originally presented at the CHArt 21st annual conference, Theory and Practice, held at the British Academy, London, Thursday 10–Friday 11 November 2005 and are published online at www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005. The papers by Karen Cham, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Anne Laforet and Elaine Shemilt were originally presented at the CHArt 22nd annual conference, Fast Forward. Art History, Curation and Practice after Media, held at Birkbeck, University of London, Thursday 9–Friday 10 November 2006 and are published online at www.chart.ac.uk/chart2006.

The papers have been refereed by the CHArt Editorial Board and Jim Devine of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, and Peter Main of the British Museum. CHArt would like to thank all the reviewers for their help.

Disclaimer: The articles in this collection express the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the CHArt Editorial Board. Articles © individual author(s) and reproduction is with their permission. Illustrations © individual authors unless stated otherwise.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.

CHArt Committee:

Christopher Bailey, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, King’s College London, UK Trish Cashen, The Open University, UK

Rupert Faulkner (Treasurer), Victoria and Albert Museum, UK

Francesca Franco (Student Member), Birkbeck, University of London, UK Hazel Gardiner, King’s College London, UK

Charlie Gere (Chairman), Lancaster University, UK Marlene Gordon, University of Michigan, USA

Neil Grindley, Joint Information Systems Committee, London, UK Michael Hammel, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Colum Hourihane, Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, USA Mike Pringle, Swindon Cultural Partnership, UK

Phillip Purdy, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, London, UK Jemima Rellie, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA Tanya Szrajber, British Museum, London, UK

Suzette Worden, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia

CHArt, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 26–29 Drury Lane, London WC2B 5RL. Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2013, Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980,

www.chart.ac.uk, [email protected]

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Digital Visual Culture Theory and Practice

Computers and the History of Art Series

Edited by

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner

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First published in the UK in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover Design: Holly Rose Copy Editor: Rhys Williams

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-248-9 EISBN 978-1-84150-299-1

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

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Contributors

Anna Bentkowska-Kafel is currently a research fellow for the 3D Visualisation in the Arts Network, 3DVisA (http://3dvisa.cch.kcl.ac.uk), funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. She is also Associate Director of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (www.crsbi.ac.uk) and is responsible for the creation and long- term preservation of the project’s digital archive. Her research, teaching and publications have been mainly on early modern visual culture in western Europe, with special interest in cosmological and anthropomorphic representations of nature; as well as the use of computer graphics in the study and interpretation of art. She holds an MA in the History of Art (Warsaw), an MA in Computing Applications for the History of Art (London) and a Ph.D. in Digital Media Studies (Southampton). She has been a member of the CHArt committee since 1999.

Trish Cashen has been involved with integrating computing into university-level humanities teaching since working with the UK Computers in Teaching Initiative in the early 1990s. She works at The Open University, where her role involves exploiting a range of new media for teaching arts subjects. Her main areas of interest lie in developing blended learning environments to facilitate resource discovery, formative assessment and communication. She is currently investigating the use of social networking tools for learner support. She has been a member of the CHArt committee since 1994.

Karen Cham is an artist, lecturer and researcher. She is Principal Lecturer in Digital Media and Development Director of the Digital Media Institute at Kingston University, United Kingdom. She has been working with audio-visual technology since 1987 making performance, installation and screen-based works. She explores the poetic potential of media technologies within a critical context. Current research interests include digital semiotics, computational media aesthetics and design for interaction.

Maria Chatzichristodoulou, aka maria x, is a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is based at Goldsmiths’ Digital Studios. Her background is in theatre and digital media arts. She worked as a performer, curator and producer, and has been the initiator and coordinator of interdisciplinary events and cultural activities in Greece and the United Kingdom. She co-directed the Fournos Centre for Digital Culture and Mediaterra Arts and Technologies Festival in Athens, 1996–2002 and has collaborated with the French Centre International Creation Video et Multimedia (CICV, 2000–2003) as curator and researcher; and with the Machinista Festival in Glasgow, 2004. She has worked as Community Participation Officer for the Albany Centre in London, 2003–2005, and has lectured at Goldsmiths College, Richmond American University in London and Birkbeck, University of London.

Elizabeth Coulter-Smith (www.coultersmith.com) is a new media artist and lecturer and has worked in the visual arts in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

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She is Head of Fine Art at Staffordshire University. Prior to this appointment she was a Senior Lecturer in New Media at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD) 2003–2006. From 2001–2003 she worked at the University of Southampton, School of Computer Science and Electronics. She is currently working on a site specific ‘locative’

commission. Her work can be found in corporate, public and private collections in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Graham Coulter-Smith (www.coultersmith.com) is Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art in the Faculty of Media, Art and Society at Southampton Solent University, and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Staffordshire University. He is the author of The Postmodern Art of Imants Tillers: Appropriation en abyme 1971–2001, Paul Holberton Publishing, 2002; and Deconstructing Installation Art: Fine Art and Media Art, 1986–2006.

Madrid: Brumaria, 2009. He co-edited, with Maurice Owen, Art in the Age of Terrorism, published for Southampton Solent University’s Centre for Advanced Scholarship in Art and Design by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005.

Hazel Gardiner is an editor for the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (www.crsbi.ac.uk) and coordinates the visual culture module of the MA in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. Prior to this she was Senior Project Officer for the ICT Methods Network, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. She is a researcher for the CRSBI and also for the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (www.cvma.ac.uk). She has been a member of the CHArt committee since 1997.

Dew Harrison is a researcher and practitioner in digital and computer-mediated art currently working as Reader in Digital Media Art at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. Within her practice she undertakes a critical exploration of conceptual art, the non-linear narrative and multimedia mind-mapping. She often works collaboratively and considers curation a form of digital media art practice. She continues to show internationally and has presented papers at diverse conferences spanning digital art, consciousness studies, art history and museology. She also works as a co-director of PVA MediaLab‚ LabCulture Ltd, a supportive agency working across UK and international media centres to enable artists to engage with new media.

Hamid van Koten is the programme leader for Contemporary Media Theory at the School of Television and Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland. In this capacity he teaches students from the departments of Animation, Illustration, Time-Based Art and Interactive Media Design.

Born near Rotterdam, he came to Britain in 1977, initially to study Middle and Far- Eastern philosophy. He graduated in 1993 from the Glasgow School of Art in product design. Before taking up a full-time lecturing post at Dundee University, he worked for ten years as a design consultant in diverse media.

Anne Laforet is a doctoral candidate in the Culture and Communication Department at the University of Avignon, France. Her Ph.D. thesis is entitled Preservation of Net Art in Museums; an Analysis of Moving Practices. Since 1998, her research has mainly been on Internet art and the way museums approach, collect and preserve such artworks. In 2003

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Contributors9 she participated in the Preservation of Electronic Records symposium in Ottawa and the International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM) in Paris. In 2004, she wrote a report on Net art preservation for the Délégation aux Arts Plastiques of the French Ministry of Culture. In May 2005, Leonardo Electronic Almanac published her article ‘Preservation of Net Art’. In parallel to her academic research, she explores network-based art as a practitioner, event organiser and writer.

Ann-Sophie Lehmann is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at the University of Utrecht. She read the History of Art in Vienna and Utrecht where she obtained her Ph.D. She serves on the editorial boards of the Netherlandish yearbook for the History of Art, NKJ and Kunstschrift. Her research is concerned with the theory, history and practice of image-making in old and new media cultures. Her recent projects include The Brush in the Computer, concerned with the history of early computer graphics and paint programmes, and The Impact of Oil (www.impactofoil.

org), both funded by the Organisation for Scientific Research of the Netherlands.

Ralf Nuhn is a German-born, London and Lille-based intermedia artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. He is currently working as a practice-based researcher at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, London, where he has also obtained a Ph.D. in Media Arts. His current installation and performance practice is mainly concerned with relationships between the physical world and the virtual world of computers, and has a strong focus on audience participation.

Elaine Shemilt is an artist and academic, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Shackleton Scholar. She is Professor of Fine Art Printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, the University of Dundee. She studied Sculpture at Winchester School of Art and Printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Her artistic practice involves sculpture, installation, printmaking and digital media. She has an international reputation for innovation in the use of printmaking across forms. In her early career she exhibited at The Hayward Annual Exhibition in London, The Bradford International Print Biennale and the Video Show in the Serpentine gallery in London.

More recently her work has been shown at the Imperial War Museum, London and in Warsaw, Berlin and Singapore.

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Introduction

Hazel Gardiner

The papers in this volume are drawn from two CHArt conferences. The first of these, Theory and Practice, was held at the British Academy, London, on 10–11 November 2005.

This conference reflected upon the relationship between theory and practice across digital media and technology in the visual arts, with a particular focus on art practice.

The second conference, Fast Forward. Art History, Curation and Practice After Media was held at Birkbeck, University of London on 9–10 November 2006. This event placed particular emphasis on the issues faced in contemporary curation, especially with regard to new media artworks. It also addressed the impact that technological advances, as well as new art practices, are having on visual culture disciplines.

A number of the papers in the volume incorporate some analysis of the standing of practice-based research, pointing out the lack of recognition within academic and other institutions of the research process within art practice, particularly when this incorporates advanced technologies. This was a prominent theme in Theory and Practice.

Various aspects of contemporary practice are represented here, including locative and object-oriented art environments, as addressed by Elizabeth and Graham Coulter- Smith. They investigate the contribution of such adaptive or ‘intelligent’ work to changes in the spatial awareness and role of the viewer, no longer a passive observer.

Another type of collaborative association is detailed in Elaine Shemilt’s paper. Her work with the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) has led to some remarkable discoveries and cross-fertilisations between art practice and advanced scientific methods and is indicative of a growing number of such collaborations. The SCRI proposed the above collaboration as a means of outreach, to help them communicate their complex scientific investigations to a broad public. The fact that the artworks made visual valuable scientific data which had previously been overlooked, was an exciting and unexpected result.

Laforet’s archaeological approach to the preservation of Net art demonstrates another aspect of cross-disciplinary potentials. In seeking to identify an effective model for the curation and long-term preservation of new media, Laforet has taken the archaeological museum rather than the art gallery as her exemplar. She identifies that the curatorial focus within institutions has now shifted slightly away from preservation toward documentation and proposes that the gathering and assembling of evidence about Net art, rather than an attempted re-envisioning or reconstruction, is a more appropriate model to follow.

Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka maria x) examines how the concepts of presence or absence may become blurred in digital telematic practice. This is addressed in the

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context of the work Can You See Me Now? by the British group, Blast Theory. This installation, which is also a performance event and a game, takes place online and simultaneously in reality, in a real city. This work raises a range of questions about postmodern and posthuman art practice, echoing Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles and others, in addressing relationships between the corporeal and the virtual, time and space.

Subtle changes in the perception of what is understood as art practice are also explored in this volume, and suggestions are made toward a further expansion of this understanding. Considering the creation of the art archive as a form of art practice, and as a curatorial project or an artwork in itself is one such example, proposed by Dew Harrison. She argues this point in line with Derrida and other contemporary art theorists.

Hamid van Koten examines the social and philosophical implications of the digital environment, drawing on modern philosophical and media theories such as Marshall McLuhan’s notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media, while Ralf Nuhn explores the tensions between the real and the virtual, in the context of his own practice which aims to bridge the gap between the digital and the physical world. Karen Cham dissects the traditionally-accepted concept of the ‘aura’ of the ‘original’ in her analysis of the aesthetics of interactivity. This paper also highlights the importance of developing a sense of theoretical continuity between historical and contemporary art practice.

Ann-Sophie Lehmann investigates the representational status of artistic practice in new media art, putting forward the idea that electronically-based contemporary art has not yet reached a point at which it is able to be self reflective, in terms of making the creative process part of the work of art. This paper demonstrates in the very consciousness of this lack that such matters are now ready to be addressed within the art practice community.

In all, this volume comprises an excellent set of papers, addressing matters which continue to resonate ever more strongly. The papers are grouped under four distinctive themes, but the reader will discover a number of common threads. CHArt is privileged to be the forum for such important and fascinating debate.

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Digital Creativity

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Aesthetics and Interactive Art

Karen Cham

Introduction

Any discussion of aesthetics and interactivity must first transgress the divide in modern western Art History between art and technology. Despite the fact that technical principles have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion and the golden section for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalised in art-historical dialogues. The mechanically-reproduced artefact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity and originality anchored in production techniques.

For example, whilst video art has been part of the art world since the 1960s when artists such as Nam June Paik brought the TV set into the gallery, the aesthetics of video is still neglected in art theory. Not only can video artefacts be mechanically reproduced, but the potential for mass access or worse still, mass appeal, is assumed to negate the exclusivity essential to establishing an aesthetic value.

Digital artefacts manifest these two problems of reproduction and access to an even greater extent. A digital artefact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and original than a mechanically-reproduced one; a true simulation, a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artefact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive, i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ itself.

These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In media studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artefacts clearly demonstrates that, whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone, there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context.

Art, technology and aesthetics

The inherited divide between art and technology is mapped out comprehensively in Mick Wilson’s paper, How Should We Speak About Art and Technology? where he describes their radical separation as a recent phenomenon, enmeshed within the complex historical process of modernisation. He cites Kristella’s demonstration that the (fine) arts per se were constituted as a separate arena of human endeavour only as late as the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. It is even later, when the term art becomes ‘Art’, associated with creativity, expression, the affective and subjective, that the practice becomes diametrically opposed to the technology. The evolution of technology, whilst encompassing the craft of making, has come to include the tools as well, which have become increasingly scientific.¹

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Walter Benjamin’s seminal treatise on the convergence of art and technology, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was published in 1936.² After tracing the history of reproduction from founding and stamping, through woodcuts, engraving and etching to lithography and photography, he argues that by 1900, technical reproduction had become an artistic medium in its own right. However, he also argues that the presence of an original is a prerequisite to the concepts of authenticity and value, and therefore authenticity and value are outside the realm of technical reproduction.

Whilst it is easy to anticipate such a conclusion in the early part of the twentieth century, this paradigm has left a tangible inheritance. Video art, for example, has consistently striven to be as different as possible from television in terms of aesthetics, very often to the detriment of the work itself and the absolute alienation of the televisually-eloquent audience. Often this difference has been an unspoken prerequisite of being understood as art at all, the maintenance of the distinction between art and mass culture becoming the key means of ensuring that the work was understood as having value. This type of authenticity and value were then further maintained by ensuring a limited distribution and access giving rise to such conceptual incongruence as video artworks labelled ‘tape 2 – edition of 10’ andscreened within a gallery for a limited time.³ Here conditions of production and distribution take precedence, allowing the capitalist dynamics of supply and demand to supplant aesthetics.

The term aesthetics actually comes from the Greek ‘aisthetikos’ and was coined by the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735 to mean the science of how things are known via the senses.⁴ How then are aesthetics determined? An aesthetic can be driven by the senses, emotions, intellect, will, desires, culture, preferences, subconscious behaviour, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.⁵ As we can see from the previous example, an aesthetic value can be driven by a complex and convoluted cultural code, and it is probably true to say that all aesthetic judgements are to some extent culturally-conditioned, i.e. linked to judgements of economic, political or moral value. In this way they are also almost always established or upheld by some form of consensus. Aesthetic judgements might then be best understood as based on a consensus about desirable or preferred qualities. For example, whilst the Victorian audience saw African art as ugly, the Edwardians found it beautiful.

Digitally-interactive media is a recent development and is defined here as a machine system which reacts in the moment by virtue of automated reasoning based on data from its sensory apparatus.⁶ Interactivity is most commonly an attribute of server- based multimedia on the Internet and is a specific attribute of digital media, although interactive systems are not necessarily screen-based. This type of interactivity is new, and the core critical debates centre on how existing paradigms play out in the light of interactivity.

How might the paradigms of the past embrace an aesthetics of mechanically- reproduced artefacts, of the media and the new interactivity? What methodologies can accommodate a trans-disciplinary aesthetic not only to include the Lascaux cave paintings and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, African art and Japanese woodcuts, but also Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and the avatars of Linden Lab’s secondlife.com (est. 2003);

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Aesthetics and Interactive Art17 Ihnatowicz’s Senster (1970) and Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987); Pac Man (Namco, 1979) and Toshio Iwai’s Resonance of Four (1994); Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1992) and Big Brother (Endemol, 2005). Mechanical reproduction has indeed seen Benjamin’s

‘feared art of the proletariat’ come to fruition.

In order to overcome this divide and see old and new cultures as a continuum, Lev Manovich proposes in Post Media Aesthetics (2001) that we should use categories that describe how a cultural object organises and structures users’ experience of data.⁷ For example, Giotto is not just an early Renaissance painter but an information designer demonstrating new ways to organise data within a static two-dimensional surface.

This approach to visual artefacts is in fact pre-dated by the New Art History of the 1970s and 80s as represented by BLOCK magazine.⁸ This school of thought aimed to promote a new perspective of understanding art as a social practice, conditioned by social, economic and ideological factors. It was to be studied within a broader anthropological notion of culture, where all forms of representation are understood as a structure and process of ideology.⁹ Visual Culture, as this field of study came to be known, is now conventionally where art, design and media artefacts are seen as part of a larger cultural history and the whole of cultural production and consumption is subsumed into particular instances of the dialogic sign systems of society. For example, a television show, painting or traditional costume could all be addressed from a common methodological basis.

The common use of structural analysis to deconstruct and analyse the social/

communicative function of cultural artefacts gives particular focus to the reader’s experience of the structure of a text (Manovich’s ‘user’, ‘organization’ and ‘data’

respectively). So does this mean visual culture already accounts not only for Manovich’s post-media aesthetics but also for interactivity?

Media negation

It is clear how both of these approaches, focusing on generic attributes of artefacts, could offer a methodological approach to underpin a coherent assessment of the socio-cultural/communicative aspects of the aesthetics of interactive art. However, one major difficulty stands in the way; both share a common ground in rejecting the tradition of an aesthetic anchored in material qualities. Manovich argues that the traditional aesthetic divide of art production on the basis of medium (i.e. painting, sculpture, drawing), is based on differences in materials, and that as digital technology has erased the differences between photography, painting, film and animation etc.

and established the multimedia document as a new integrated standard, the key concept of an artistic medium is rendered useless. He concludes that as all Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is interactive, ‘interactivity’ itself is a meaningless category, stating a basic fact about computers. This presents a huge problem, right at the heart of the matter. If an aesthetic is something ‘apprehended by the senses’ then it necessarily has a material base, even when that base is ‘virtual’ (digital). How can one legitimately address an aesthetic without to some extent addressing the medium?

Corbett goes so far as to state that it may mean that it is impossible to assess the work as a visual artefact at all.¹⁰

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The common rejection of media-based taxonomies appears to stem from a misapprehension of structural analysis as a type of formalism where an intrinsic, fixed and universal relationship between the artistic sign and its referent¹¹ is insisted upon. We know from structuralism, and not least our own experience, that this is patently not true; the meaning of an artefact is in constant flux, synchronically and diachronically, across different groups of people and across time. An image of an aircraft, for example, prior to September 11, had a dramatically different body of connotations to the same image since that date and for some time afterwards. In Post Media Aesthetics, Manovich himself adopts a formalist perspective when he describes the medium (paint) as the sign and its representational capacities (paintings of things) as the referent.¹² In my understanding of post-structuralist semiotics the paint is not the sign and the painting is not the referent; the sign is what the medium (paint) is used to physically represent (painting of an aircraft) and the referent is the attendant concept (the aircraft) of that sign. Furthermore, if one eradicates the notion of the medium in this way, ironically, one eradicates the possibility of a workable notion of interface.

So, whilst it is not difficult to appreciate Giotto’s contribution to information design, what cannot be addressed by Manovich’s proposal is the specific fact that Giotto organised aesthetic data using the medium of paint; that Giotto was a painter. This by definition means that we cannot address the specifics of the medium of interactivity at all as it is not here recognised as having any material specificity. Indeed, by only recognising (machinic) mediation¹³ from lithography onwards, even Benjamin fails to account for the already-mediated nature of art.

The void between aesthetics and interactivity is where the medium should sit. The void is there first because photography, cinema, television, video and interactive media have been excluded from originality, authenticity and aesthetic value by nature of their material. Second, it is reinforced by a will to break from the traditions of the old Art History and its concern with material, and finally it is compounded by the very nature of digital media that according to Manovich have no material quality. How is it possible that theoretically there can be no aesthetics of interactive art when in practice there quite clearly is?

Rebooting media aesthetics

The underlying issue here is that when technological innovation, such as has been witnessed during the last century, reaches the velocity of the last ten years then theory must be willing to learn from practice. The paradigms of the past are no longer driving artistic production; technological innovations are. Examples of soft and hard technological determinism are multitudinous from across the spectrum of society, industry and the arts.

How can we legitimately explore aesthetics and interactive art without making any reference whatsoever to the innovation of new aesthetics for interaction in the field for applications such as computer games, websites, and mobile phones? It is work that lives out the aesthetic paradigms of Dada and Surrealism, Futurism, Jazz, Fluxus, Punk, Situationism and Pop Art amongst others. How better to bankrupt our own discipline

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Aesthetics and Interactive Art19 at this crucial time? These technically-driven aesthetic innovations are most definitely within the field; the ‘old’ field of fine and applied visual arts.

Contemporary cultural producers are ‘within the sign’ (Derrida) in that we create new artefacts from ‘secondary’ (mediated) sources rather than primary ones; this is the postmodern condition and is inextricably linked to technologies of reproduction, distribution and interaction. As Benjamin pointed out, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. Does this absence of the original hinder the apprehension of the aesthetics of a photograph, a television advertisement or a computer game? Hardly.

Techniques such as collage, montage, assemblage, sampling and remixing have driven new aesthetic concepts such as simulacra, immersion, networks and embodiment. It is an aesthetic that traverses and includes the aesthetics of the commercial media and the new media (Bolter’s remediation). Benjamin’s insistence on an artwork’s aesthetic value stemming from its ‘presence in time and space’ has been extended to encompass a virtual presence; the aesthetic qualities of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling are part of my aesthetic canon from the many reproductions I have seen. I have never been to Italy.

The Visual Culture approach is indeed pragmatic enough to meet the challenge of the diversity of aesthetic practices in the digital age. It is also insightful and useful to understand the function of an aesthetic in its social, political and economic context.

The only flaw of the ‘New Art History’ as an appropriate theoretical methodology for this purpose is in its rejection of the object. The old Art History’s idea of an aesthetic anchored in the object is invariably tied to practice, to process, to materials. However, in a postmodern culture the medium is no longer a quality of the object. There is no object, no original, no presence in space or time, only mediation. Whilst postmodern notions of simulacra account for such a position philosophically, ironically it is the oldest sense of art as making or doing (technology) that can perhaps facilitate the best attempt to accommodate such radical notions aesthetically.

Conclusion

Visual Culture still provides useful theoretical models for addressing the sociocultural context and function of such artefacts, irrespective of the material base and/or presence in time and space. Manovich’s work is important in that it acknowledges that something is definitely new about interactivity and that it is important for Art History, curation and practice to develop some form of theoretical continuum from painting to interactivity. Benjamin’s work is important here too in recognising some fundamental aspects of the mechanically-reproduced artefact.

However, there are now abundant autonomous theories of the aesthetics of interactivity across an entire spectrum – ranging from the stubborn conviction that all media have always been interactive which does nothing to assist serious analysis and understanding of the specifics of digital interactivity – to reasonable ideas of remediation (Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin) – to full blown radical ideas of cyberculture (Roy Ascott) and posthumanism (N. Katherine Hayles) which, whilst intellectually important, can be difficult to apply tangibly to the more basic questions of aesthetics.

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What can also be asserted is that the past does not need to be reappraised using metaphors from the digital age. To propose that we redress the whole of Art History through the myopic optic of computer terminology is perverse semantics. Equally, to attempt to apply the digital experience of interactivity to books and paintings serves no useful purpose.

A viable post-media aesthetics needs to be entirely focused upon the material of mediation in order to anchor art, design and media practice in creative processes and provide the continuum that transcends time, from red ochre to silver halides to hypertext, especially when the medium is not always a quality of the object but sometimes a reality in its own right. That is, a media-based approach to the aesthetics of interactive art, marrying the Visual Culture perspective to an art-historical concept of the medium, could apprehend divergent manifestations from the same material base in specific social contexts. Only in this way can I, for example, comprehensively understand my own work, the particular nature of the materials I work with and the context within which that work is conceived, created and apprehended.

Thus Ihnatowicz’s Senster, constructed from steel tubes and controlled by a Philips P9201 computer using input from two microphones and two radar sensors on its head, is an early prototype for the key aesthetics of interactivity in the field of transparency of interaction and anthropomorphism of the interface.¹⁵ It also incorporates aesthetic references to the contemporary cultural aesthetics of electricity pylons and science- fiction characters. These are generated respectively by the increasing industrialisation of the urban landscape and the prolific representation of scientific developments derived from the ‘space race’ in popular culture narratives since the 1950s.

Simple isn’t it.¹⁶ Notes

1. Wilson, M. (2001), ‘How Should We Speak About Art and Technology?’, Crossings: Journal of Art and Technology, 1:1. http://crossings.tcd.ie/issues/1.1/Wilson/ (active 21 April 2008).

2. Benjamin, W. [1936] (1973), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, Arendt, H., (ed.) translated by Zohn, H., London: Fontana, pp. 219–253.

3. Manovich, L. (2001), Post Media Aesthetics, www.manovich.net (active 21 April 2008).

4. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics (active 21 April 2008).

5. Korsmeyer, C., (ed.), (1998), Aesthetics: The Big Questions, Malden, Mass., Oxford: Blackwell.

6. Penny, S. (1996), ‘From A to D and Back Again: The Emerging Aesthetics of Interactive Art’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 4.4, April, available at http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_4/

lea_v4_n04.txt (active 28 May 2008).

8. Corbett, D.P. (2005), ‘Visual Culture and the History of Art’, Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Van Eck, C. and Winters, E. (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 209–241.

9. Corbett, D.P. (2005), ‘Visual Culture and the History of Art’, Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Van Eck, C. and Winters, E. (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 19.

10. Corbett, D.P. (2005), ‘Visual Culture and the History of Art’, Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Van Eck, C. and Winters, E. (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 22.

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Aesthetics and Interactive Art21 11. Aguirre, I. (2004), ‘Beyond Understanding Visual Culture’, Jade, 23.3.

13. Poster, M. (2002), ‘The Aesthetics of Distracting Media’, Culture Machine, 4. www.culture machine.tees.ac.uk (active 28 May 2008).

14. Bolton, J.D. and R. Grusin (1999), Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

15. The Senster homepage is at http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/senster/sensterelectronics/

index.htm (active 21 April 2008).

16. Boden, M. (2005), ‘Aesthetics and Interactive Art’, Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Creativity and Cognition, New York: ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), available at http://

portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056225&dl=ACM&coll=ACM (active 28 May 2008).

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A Blueprint for Bacterial Life: Can A

Science-art Fusion Move the Boundaries of Visual and Audio Interpretation?

elaine Shemilt

I am a fine art printmaker although my work extends to installation and film, often with the use of sound. In recent years I have worked in collaboration with scientific colleagues at the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) who have sequenced a bacterial plant pathogen for the first time in the United Kingdom. This is also the first inter-bacterial plant pathogen to be sequenced worldwide.

The analytical tool that was developed by the SRCI, GenomeDiagram, is probably the most advanced comparative genomics visualisation tool available worldwide and it is being adopted by an increasing number of genomics laboratories internationally, including the Sanger Institute in Cambridge and the Universities of Minnesota and Madison in the United States.

Initially I was approached by Dr Michel Perombelon with a view to collaboration, in the hope that artistic expression, communication and methodologies might help the wider community understand this complex scientific discovery and at the same time generally raise awareness of the research at SCRI. For my part, I was particularly interested in looking into the question of whether a science-art fusion could move the boundaries of visual and audio interpretation.

During a pilot study something occurred which made us realise that our collaboration reached beyond the initial objective into deeper research issues on the possible usefulness of artistic methodologies. That is, the role of the artist in the visualisation of complex data, and the subsequent impact upon scientific understanding and insights.

As an artist, I found the images that the scientists created in order to represent the genetic data very beautiful and without a doubt they lent themselves to artistic expression and exploration. Immediately, however, a question arose. Could the collection and visualisation of a huge amount of data derived from the study of a genome really enable the production of works of art with high impact and resonance? More generally, what are the effects of artistic expression, communication and methodologies on our understanding of complex scientific discoveries?

Science-art projects are commonplace now and there are various ongoing debates. I refer back, for example, to C. P. Snow, who proposed the existence of ‘two cultures’.¹ However, encouraged by our initial discovery, added to by our particular combination of expertise and now firmly-established teamwork, we believe that our collaboration contests this view and that is the basis of this paper.

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Printmaking has been referred to as the ‘poor man’s painting’, but this pejorative phrase indicates an underestimation of the discipline. Maybe, more correctly, printmaking should be described as a group of media, which utilise ancient and modern techniques and technologies. This would include my own definition of printmaking, which amongst other things attempts to convey complex ideas and insights or may simply present data as digital animation.

At the SCRI Dr Pritchard works at the interface between biology and computing. His first thoughts when this project was suggested concerned the aesthetic value inherently present in scientific information, even in the absence of a context. The presentation of scientific information has a deserved reputation for being literal and representational, with a minimum of embellishment and extrapolation. This is required for the clear and precise dissemination of information. The guiding theme in preparing scientific figures for publication is often that they should be interpretable without reference to the main text.

What exactly is ‘print’?

An edition, in printmaking terms, is a numbered set of identical prints. In commercial terms, the numbering is a safeguard of the value of the prints, and professional artists’

plates or blocks are cancelled after an edition has been completed. This convention adds the necessary ‘aura’ (in Walter Benjamin’s famous use of the term) to make each single print a work of art.² This tradition of limitation continues but seems barely relevant in what I have recognised through my practice over the past thirty years. For me, contemporary printmaking is neither defined nor confined by tradition or medium. The essence of contemporary printmaking lies in a process of empirical experimentation, discovery, analysis, resolution and critical reflection – the pursuit of the image – the unlimited image. The limitations placed upon the artist in this sense, therefore, are mostly technical. The best printmakers make art that goes beyond the limitations and Fig. 1 Elaine Shemilt, E. Coli 1.

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A Blueprint for Bacterial life25 continues to break with tradition. However, in order to illustrate the impact that successive technological breakthroughs have had on printmaking it is perhaps important to note the most significant breakthroughs in this tradition. I hope that the following potted history of printmaking will offer an insight into how artistic reinterpretation can enhance understanding and offer new insights into routes for the analysis of scientific data.

Mechanical western printmaking was invented early in the middle ages with the woodcut.

Printmaking quickly developed as the first efficient way of imparting information and ideas, and especially by the Christian church for the motivation of piety and reflection.

However, the woodcut, which was the primary early print medium, was a rather crude vehicle. The very nature of the process meant that the viewer was not provided with much more information than an iconic or simple graphical representation of the object depicted. Further information such as perspective or temporal issues was restricted. It would take the ‘new’ concepts of the Renaissance to ensure that new techniques and technologies were developed in order to transmit more complex information.

As time went on the means of printmaking developed to include copper engraving, then etching, then wood engraving. The world was changing even though Galileo might recant his ‘heresy’ that the earth was not the centre of the universe. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan claimed that ‘the increasing precision and quantity of visual information transformed the print into a three-dimensional world of perspective and fixed point of view.’³

The next major printmaking breakthrough came at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Aloys Senefelder (1771–1834) developed lithography. Over a period of fifteen years, through a wonderful mixture of chemistry and physics with art, craft, skill and luck, Senefelder made it possible to print multiples of an illustration drawn upon a perfectly flat stone surface. He was a Bavarian dramatist who found it too expensive Fig. 2 Elaine Shemilt, E. Coli 2.

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to make enough copies of his plays for his actors. Lithography is the result of his search for a cheap means to do this. Lithography is a natural process for the draughtsman as of all the printmaking processes it is most like drawing. The artist could work with pencil, ink or crayon. Unlike etching, where the artist uses a needle to draw through a wax ground onto metal before putting the plate into acid, with lithography the artist makes the tonal variation and nuance of the mark at the time of drawing.

Stone lithography became widely popular towards the end of the nineteenth and right through the twentieth century. As a result of this breakthrough, a revolution in the dissemination of images became possible, including offset lithography, utilising thin metal plates and high-speed printing machines, along with the photographic transfer of images.

This dramatic development in the pre-electronic age is repeated by the new ‘stone’ of the latter half of the twentieth century (the digital age): silicon, with the opportunities it gives to combine art with electronics, algorithms and binary code. The silicon chip has reinvented print and brought with it the next revolution in image production, manipulation, dissemination and distribution; in short – contemporary printmaking.

It is important to recognise that the basis of artists’ printmaking still relies on the traditional crafts of woodcut, linoleum block, etching, stone lithography and screen- printing. But the artist-printmaker’s knowledge, skill, artistic integrity and determination means that at the beginning of this new century many are using these techniques combined with digital imaging processes to address new dimensions and contexts.

Photomechanical techniques were a printmaking mark of twentieth century art. In the twenty-first century we are in an age of electronic and digital technology, new media, and installation strategies.

Fig. 3 Elaine Shemilt, Etching.

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A Blueprint for Bacterial life27 Currently artist-printmakers define themselves in many different ways. There is now renewed interest in traditional techniques such as mezzotint, chine collé and photogravure, whilst simultaneously there are rapid developments in the field of non-toxic printmaking technologies. Again, remembering those early experiments by Senefelder, printmakers now appropriate materials such as photo-polymers and commercial silicon to develop new methods of printmaking.

So we have established that from the medieval period (in western art), artists have made prints. With the advent of digital technology contemporary printmaking incorporates ancient and modern techniques and allows for an increasing precision and quantity of visual information to convey complex ideas and insights. In the past I have created large- scale installations using printed elements on different materials. Various printmaking methods (including digital media) were used in an attempt to continue and develop the work of the installations, rather than to record an event simply by documentary photography. To refer again to Walter Benjamin, this relates to his comment that ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.’⁴

Although the installation ‘event’ is inevitably lost, the creative dynamic continues as themes and subjects occur and re-occur through the various media. In scientific terms this might be thought of as a transition or ‘tipping point’ where new possibilities open up.

This is where the science takes precedence. Dr Ian Toth is an expert on bacterial pathogenesis, molecular approaches to host/pathogen interaction, genome sequencing and functional genomics. Dr Leighton Pritchard, as mentioned before, is a scientist working at the interface of biology and computer science (and the

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creator of GenomeDiagram) concentrating on how micro-organisms cause disease in plants. Both scientists won the international race to sequence a plant pathogen from the same family as E.coli and the Black Death bacterium. They pioneered the software GenomeDiagram, which enables simultaneous visualisation of billions of gene comparisons of hundreds of fully-sequenced bacterial genomes, including those of animal and plant pathogens. The results have helped to identify the acquisition of foreign DNA by pathogens, potentially representing novel mechanisms involved in disease (represented by clearly defined white ‘spokes’ radiating from the centre of the image. They have also helped to trace the evolution of this gene acquisition (and loss) over millions of years. Black Death (Yersinia pestis) and Blackleg (Erwinia), diseases of humans and potatoes respectively, seem worlds apart but without this foreign DNA these bacteria are remarkably similar. At root, DNA transfer is the single most significant source of the outward differences between the diseases caused by these closely-related bacteria. The acquisition of foreign DNA may culminate in a microbe changing into either a human or plant pathogen, the point at which this occurs again being a ‘tipping point’ in that microbe’s evolution. This foreign DNA in turn leads to novel biological traits being introduced into the microbe and incorporated into existing regulatory circuits such as quorum sensing. As pathogen populations grow in their host, they produce a regulatory hormone that gradually increases in concentration. At a critical (or quorate) population, the concentration of that regulator hormone becomes sufficient to trigger a series of events essential to symptom development and disease initiation. The point at which this trigger occurs and true disease begins is yet again a ‘tipping point’, this time dividing invasion from the successful outcome of disease. Thus ‘tipping points’ in both the visualisation of biological data and in the biology itself can be related to the artistic event.

Genome diagrams, even in their scientific context, are fairly abstract figures. These

‘maps’, after all, represent biological concepts that do not really exist. Most of the processes and entities with which modern micro-biology concerns itself are invisible Fig. 5 Elaine Shemilt, Installation.

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A Blueprint for Bacterial life29 to the naked eye. Aspects of genomics are similarly invisible. Each genome is the result of four billion or so years of evolution.

My first experiments began with a series of prints where I removed all trace of the relationship of the GenomeDiagram to the thing it described. It was a scientific image stripped of its contextualising information. In other words the image, a circular map of genes and their relationship to other bacteria, represented something essentially invisible that could only be ‘seen’ in an abstract representation. Then I concentrated on subtleties of colour and tonal variation. I began by focusing on the precision and quantity of visual information and I created a series of etchings, screen-prints and animations. With the screen-prints I used a very subtle range of silvery blues and greys and worked with some very specific inks (known in the trade as interference inks – these have a slight three-dimensional quality.)

It was from looking at those prints that the scientists noticed the occurrence of new elements and a very specific event of gene acquisition. My approach was to simplify the diagram into a tonal variation and in so doing I re-contextualised the data in such a way that it revealed information that the scientists had completely overlooked. Their scientific approach to the data was systematic and empirical. Purely by chance, my artistic re-interpretation of the scientific data contributed to a new insight. Rather than simply identifying genes unique to a pathogen, the screen-prints revealed the presence of other genes in all of the bacteria, possibly representing genes essential to all forms of bacteria.

As far as we were concerned this was a breakthrough. It was as though our project drew a comparison between the genome diagram and the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. I refer again of course to Walter Benjamin’s essay.

We had taken this scientific visualisation tool outside the fields of biology and medicine and placed it in the context of interdisciplinary art. Inspired by this we are now exploring the dynamic nature of biological systems using both visual and sound disciplines (and their associated media), and we are going beyond obvious interpretative frameworks.

Our goal is to ensure that the relationship of the artwork to the data is reflected and maintained not merely as content but also as elements and structural process.

Walter Benjamin used the term ‘aura’ to refer to the feeling of awe created by unique or remarkable objects such as works of art or relics of the past. He argued that the proliferation of mass production and reproduction technologies harboured the potential elimination of reflection and imagination causing the decay of the ‘aura’. As a printmaker I use current reproduction techniques that allow for a rich diversity of visualisation in order to address this idea of the ‘aura’.

In recent years the rapid development of computer technology and computer graphics has enabled advanced visualisation techniques; an essential part of the huge data- generating potential of genomic technologies. Both scientists and artists are exploiting the latest technologies. Our project enables scientists and artists to share and resolve problems surrounding current uses of visual and audio-visual techniques from different perspectives.

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In the pilot stage we dealt with the linear data of the genome sequence, creating images, animations and simple sound based upon the data translated through MIDI. We aim to progress to more complex systems arising from the sequences’ emergent properties.

I noticed that the DNA image resembled a score of music. It was a tenuous idea, but as Dr Leighton Pritchard trained originally as a chemist and has a view of biological information that is correspondingly physical and chemical he was ready to engage with such a concept. By using a series of mathematical notations he translated the different amino acid letters into sequences of musical notes. I quote:

Aside from the biological and physical meaning of this letter ‘A’ inside the computer, it is not even represented as a letter. When my finger hits the ‘A’ key on the keyboard it initiates a series of electrical pulses. These pulses are interpreted by the computer as a binary number. When we need to ‘write’ the character to the screen, a different series of electrical pulses is used. These represent not the letter itself, but an image – patches of light and dark on a larger canvas. The use of different font types will result in different patterns, and so different pulses, but still the same recognisable symbol. These representations are at once inexact but precise.

My daughter Genevieve, who is a music student at the Birmingham Conservatoire started to work on Leighton’s musical note sequences. By developing the scale, tonality and starting octave of the melody, and the intervals for each base transition she succeeded in translating it into the auditory sphere. We used the findings from my prints and this new work to gain our first art-science grant from the Mylnefield Trust.

When the data is set out in a linear way it has a musical appearance whereas genomics are non-linear or may perhaps be better described as simultaneous events – with very Fig. 6 Elaine Shemilt, Linear

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A Blueprint for Bacterial life31 different ‘musical’ or time structures. This leads to the idea of soundscape(s) where all component elements are present at any point on a timeline (structurally more like a painting or print than music) but fluid or not fixed. As well as the animations and music, we are now developing the concept of GenomeDiagram into a multimedia installation event based on the genetic plasticity and evolution of bacterial pathogens. To further develop this we have recently involved the soundscape artist David Cunningham.

David Cunningham works with the creation and manipulation of sound by electronic and acoustic processes with a particular emphasis on the integrity of the materials, their innate structure and context. This emphasis on process is a key element in this project, an approach that can creatively maintain the precision of the source data. The primary motivation for developing the installation is to introduce sound and spatial aspects through open, interrogative and responsive modes of thinking, experimentation, processes and techniques, involving time and space.

A unifying thread of our research is that by de-contextualising scientific data, we obtain a complementary viewpoint to the scientific interpretation. Fine art practice emphasises subjectivity and ambiguity whereas science practice attempts to identify objective truths. Despite the contrast between the two approaches they can be unified because both disciplines thrive on lateral thinking and observation.

As well as refining our mechanisms for creative development, our collaboration aims to enhance scientific visualisation of complex data, and for it to impact upon scientific understanding and insights. Common to both artists and scientists is the use of advanced visualisation tools and the principles of new media as defined by Lev Manovich: ‘Numerical representation; modularity; automation; variability; and cultural transcoding.’⁵

Research development will also continue to involve production, analysis of visualisations in print, digital imaging, high definition 2D and 3D animation and sound. By using animation to create time-lapse video clips we will create new dimensions for the expression and interpretation of the data. Our test animations already show movement and uptake/deletion of foreign DNA.

The impact of hybrid technology on the language of the artist has been profound. If the computer outputs from the analysis of the genome sequence are translated into art, we think that we can show that it is possible to aid in the discovery of new pathogenicity determinants. At the same time my challenge as an artist is to make sure that the data – derived from the study of a genome, the scientific process, and analysis – enables the production of works of art.

By way of a conclusion I would like to offer this thought. The development of printmaking has enabled a reinvention of the artist’s language. What does the aesthetic manipulation of the image look like in the twenty-first century? To a greater or lesser extent in a culture such as ours, artists will always continue to strive to communicate on social and psychological levels. With the advent of digital technology printmakers can go as far as any artist is capable of going. They can create continuous experiences of moving time and space: a simulation of human consciousness through technology. ‘A blueprint for bacterial life and art.’ So much for the ‘poor man’s painting’.

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Notes

1. At the 1959 University of Cambridge Rede Lecture, C.P. Snow delivered a paper lamenting the cultural divide between scientists and non-scientists in western society. Snow, C.P. (1993), The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press; contains Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture, and The Two Cultures: A Second Look, originally published in 1964.

2. Benjamin, W., [1936] (1973), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. by Arendt, H., trans. by Zohn, H., London: Fontana.

3. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media, Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, p. 173.

4. Benjamin, W., [1936] (1973), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. by Arendt, H., trans. by Zohn, H., London: Fontana.

5. Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 20.

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Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture

Ann-Sophie lehmann

The construction of digital artworks demands a wide range of expertise. Conception, production and technology are closely intertwined; existing technologies have to be adapted to new artistic concepts, and new technologies inspire and create new meanings, iconologies and contexts. In order to realise a work of art – be it an installation in a gallery or museum, or an online work – an artist has to be engineer, programmer, graphic designer, and hardware constructor all at once, or has to have access to others who are able to shape technologies and materials as required. In the case of Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror (1999) for example – a work that produces the reflection of any person facing it by slightly shifting the polished wooden blocks of which the surface of the mirror is constructed – the cameras, motion sensors, software and wooden blocks were all custom made.¹ In a sense, the construction of such complex, interactive works returns the digital- media artist to an era before the pre-manufacturing of artist’s supplies. Before the invention of metal paint tubes in the nineteenth century, before standard-sized canvases or marble blocks were available, artists depended on custom-made materials, and workshops with trained assistants, just as the media artist today might depend on programmers and engineers to provide custom-built technology. Even when artist and programmer are the same person, for example the Net art practitioners Jodi (http://text.jodi.org/) or Olia Lialina (www.artlebedev.ru/svalka/olialia/), the procedures of art-making are no less intricate or complex.

Thinking about the versatile practice of new media artists leads to the question of what this practice might look like. One way to find out is by studio visits or reading and listening to interviews with artists.² Another way is to look at the ways media artists represent their own practice. Throughout history, artists have always taken care to display and advertise their art-making skills in genres specifically created for this purpose. Some of the first representations of artists at work may be found in illuminated manuscripts and in the early Renaissance the representation of St. Luke painting the Madonna became a way to depict artistic practice and skill. Within a century the Christian iconography of the painting apostle evolved into the independent self-portrait at the easel, and the atelier scene. Both genres were still widely popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adapting their specific iconography to changing artistic practice or new technologies. Considering today’s multi-faceted media artist as described above, one could expect a continuation of the iconography of ‘the artist at work’ into the digital age. But is practice represented in the age of digital art?

Do artists draw attention to the processes and procedures of their work? The question about a contemporary iconography of the representation of practice raises more general questions about the spatial, material and theoretical aspects of contemporary artistic