The Stone Age of the Digital Arts

Abstract

© 2002 ISAST When Tim Binkley of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) contacted Leonardo with the idea of collaborating on the Digital Salon, we quickly accepted the proposal. This issue celebrates the many years of collaboration between SVA and Leonardo, a collaboration that has brought a new generation of digital artists to the attention of the international Leonardo audience. When Leonardo first started publishing the work of pioneering computer artists in the late 1960s [1] it was far from obvious that computer art would become the powerful means for contemporary expression that it has become today. Most new technologies do not prove to be suitable for art-making. The change in the situation has been dramatic, seen from the point of view of the Leonardo editorial office. Our first book related to the use of computers in art–Visual Art, Mathematics and Computers [2], published in 1979–found a small but receptive audience. At that time, few art schools had programs that addressed the use of computers in art-making and only such visionary centers as Gyorgy Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT provided environments where artists could access the latest tools and devices. Our latest book to address the use of computers in art-making is Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media [3]; it has now appeared in paperback and is reaching a large international audience. All major universities now have or are starting to have new programs in art and technology, or art and new media. There are schools dedicated to the new art forms, such as the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. SVA in New York now has one of the leading programs in the field. In July 2002, Leonardo co-organized a workshop at the Schloss Dagstuhl Center in Germany on the topic of Aesthetic Computing [4]. The workshop was led by a computer scientist, Paul Fishwick [5], and brought together artists, engineers, designers, and computer scientists. There was a new urgency. The discussion did not address how one could produce computer output that was considered to be of artistic or aesthetic interest. Instead, the heart of the debate was whether we could bring new ideas from art theory and contemporary art practice into computer science, engineering, and design–and beyond this, whether we could reimagine the internal structures and processes, the very metaphors of how computers are designed, made, and used. Some of these are burning issues in computer science and engineering: there is an increasing interest in the personalization of computers to adapt them to individual use and preference. The computer is now a mass market device whose future use and evolution depends in large part on social acceptance and cultural desires. The computer is still a very primitive device, and its cultural appropriation has barely begun. At an early ISEA conference, William Buxton, then of Xerox PARC, made an impassioned plea for re-imagining what computers could be. He compared the use of a computer keyboard as a human-machine interface with the musician’s use of a trombone or trumpet. A trumpet player uses eyes, ears, breath, saliva, body movement, and touch to such an extent that the trumpet truly becomes a seamless extension of the artist’s will. A jazz ensemble achieves a level of interactive creation that remains unmatched by any computer-mediated system. Even today’s handheld devices are still foreign objects to the body and mind of the user. A number of experimental computer-machine interfaces and immersive environments–many developed by artists–now exist, but none are in large-scale production, nor do they achieve the jazz ensemble’s seamless integration of human and tool in group work. The computer has not yet entered the biological age. The artists at the Dagstuhl workshop included pioneers in computer art such as Frieder Nake and Ernest Edmonds, but also artists from the more recent generation of practitioners such as Jane Prophet, Christa Sommerer, and Jon McCormack. The early computer artists were either scientists or engineers interested in creating artworks, or artists working in close collaboration with engineers who translated the artists’ ideas into concrete form. Today