Digital Artworks Research Articles

Algorithms for Social Curation: Designing and evaluating an embodied and subjectively situated visual art Interpretation and navigation system (VAINS)

VAINS, the <em>visual art Interpretation and navigation system</em>, is an interdisciplinary work in progress, an interactive website which offers repository, search and content recommendation tools for art content in an online environment. This paper will put the VAINS system into a historical curatorial context as well as explaining and analysing the VAINS project and its methodology, outlining our reasons for placing the body at the forefront of its navigation systems. The paper will also present a narrative of interaction with the tools we have created, showing their impact on a range of users and illustrating the value of embodiment in the context of online curation. VAINS, <em>visual art Interpretation</em> <em>and navigation system</em>, is an interdisciplinary work in progress, an interactive website which offers repository, search and content recommendation tools adjusted to art content in an online environment, drawing upon the Computer Fine Arts database of digital artworks. The site is a response to the expected changes in content consumption as part of the movement towards a more complex web 3.0 generation, offering a customizable and personalized art viewing experience. The VAINS system aims to be in part a text free environment, where visual experiences are interpreted through their contextual categorization and through the use of other sensual means, such as icons, sounds and textures. VAINS also deploys the embodied and situated nature of human users as core resources in its underlying computational structures, drawing upon enactivism and embodiment as core computational principals. The paper will put the VAINS system into a historical curatorial context as well as explaining and analysing the VAINS project and its methodology, outlining the reasons for placing the body at the forefront of its navigation systems. The paper will also present a narrative of interaction with the tools we have created, showing their impact on a range of users and illustrating the value of embodiment in the context of online art curation.

You Are the First Kid on Mars (review)

Reviewed by: You Are the First Kid on Mars Elizabeth Bush O'Brien, Patrick . You Are the First Kid on Mars; written and illus. by Patrick O'Brien. Putnam, 200932 p. ISBN 978-0-399-24634-0$16.99 Ad 5-8 yrs O'Brien directly invites the audience to imagine what it would be like to "ride a rocket" to a space colony on Mars and tour base and its environs. The first leg of the trip stretches from Earth to a space station, from which the wayfarer is launched on the four-month journey to the Red Planet. After a safe parachute landing, the child is shown to small, comfortable quarters and taken on tours of the greenhouse and visits to sites where scientists try to solve mysteries of the planet's genesis and morphology. Six months later, it's back to Earth, knowing you've "gone where no kid has gone before." The overt allusion to the Star Trek franchise is no accident: the arresting digital artwork strongly recalls Enterprise interiors and the stark, dusty sets of extraterrestrial worlds. Even the young boy whose adventure is portrayed here sports the awestruck wistfulness of a kiddy Trekker. Although two pages of Martian miscellanea round out the presentation, there's no commentary offered on the feasibility of many of the technologies proposed here: the Earth-to-space-station [End Page 33] cable elevator, the Nuclear Thermal Rocket, the construction robots, the MarsPlane designed for thin atmosphere. Youngsters who aren't too finicky about the science behind the journey, however, will find their imaginations piqued by this agreeable futurist exercise. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Transformative navigation: energizing imagery for perceptual shifts

A visitor's experience of immersion in projection technology accumulates over time with the navigational movements that are called for through the digital artwork. The visitor travels through the artwork to gain an understanding of space and a sense of place within the visual field. An engaging display envelopes the visitor and thereby enhances their sense of immersion. An explorative movement within the virtual environment garners understanding, facilitates decision-making and intensifies navigation. Abstraction and symbolism in the visual experience offer a metaphoric journey through the visual virtual experience. This article calls for a need to subvert and exploit rational imagery to stimulate the imagination in an effort to enhance immersion through the projection screen. The article will discuss how virtual environments fusing projection technologies with artistic imagery energizes experiential circumstances, promotes navigational movements and instigates perceptual shifts. In interactive media, the joystick navigates through a virtual environment as if painting the imagery of a place coincidently with its discovery. This self-referential journey shatters the sense of the fixed picture plane with a stable point of view established in traditional aesthetic engagement. The projection wall initially appears as a boundary for vision but acts, in essence, as a psychological screen for emergent experience.

Analogue and Digital Anecdotes and Artworks from South Africa

Based on personal experience and anecdotal accounts, this article critically reflects on a complex dialogue between the influx of the ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), their creative and alternative uses and the underlying experiences that are constructing a landscape of appropriated content, form and function. Addressing successes and failures of artistic and institutional approaches to the cultural and technological collaborations in South Africa, questions are raised around local relevance, global misrepresentation and attempts at intervention in an emerging system.

Going places sitting down

This article will explore the dynamic spatial perspective created by juxtaposing giant and miniature worlds in Hiraki Sawa's Going Places Sitting Down (2004). In Hiraki Sawa's digital artworks, fantastic miniature worlds are layered, illuminated, and exhibited across a triptych of digital screens. Sawa's works, particularly, Going Places Sitting Down (2004), but also Dwelling (2002) and Spotter (2002) reveal the proximity between human-sized and miniature worlds. Within Sawa's digital projections, imagined worlds are layered across ordinary spaces, often reinventing the home as a site of imaginary travel. A play with scale in these domestic spaces reveals miniature dynamic sites of fantasy. Sawa uses digital technologies in the production and exhibition of miniature worlds. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection , Susan Stewart draws from the publication of Micrographia; Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made By Magnifying Glasses, With Observations and Inquiries There Upon (1665), to reveal the inextricable link between the miniature and new technologies when she asserts that the miniature “speaks … from the invention of the microscope, the mechanical eye that can detect significance in a world the human eye is blind to” (Stewart 1983, p. 40). A similar dynamic is visible in the shift to the digital in the new millennium. Sawa uses processes of digital compositing, layering disparate worlds across the moving image triptych to uncover new worlds. Going Places Sitting Down provides a primary example of digital technologies that are used to destabilize, revitalize, and recreate space, investing magic in the ordinary that enchants and invites a reflective engagement across the three screens.

Field—a new environment for making digital art

This article will describe an environment for developing digital artworks, named Field, that has underpinned some of the most technically challenging real-time artworks made to date. This new tool was recently released by the author under an open source license. Created to specifically support exploratory and improvisory code writing, this environment, which hybridizes text-based programming with dynamic visual metaphors, stands in contrast with the dominant tools available to digital artists today—either the graphical data-flow programming systems or the more recent interest in “live” code-based tools. Field creates an environment where the boundaries between design, development, debugging, and deployment are explicitly porous and ready to shift as the process of forming the artwork out of its formal algorithmic conception demands. This article will articulate the philosophy of this tool by comparison with programming systems, old and new, and describe in detail the ways in which code can be written in it. Examples showing how the fusion of graphical and text-based programming representations can foster specifically the practices demanded by large collaborative artworks will be drawn from the recent work of the OpenEnded Group, spanning real-time graphics, interactive performance, music, and print media.

Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision

Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce's afternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas afternoon has an aesthetic and interface that recall print practices, Twelve Blue takes its inspiration from the fluid exchanges of the Web. Twelve Blue instantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linear sequences but by recursively cycling between associated images. Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia's digital art work and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter and its successor piece, The Error Engine, by Morrissey, Lori Talley, and Lutz Hamel.

Postcards and Supasigns: Extending Integrationist Theory Through the Creation of Interactive Digital Artworks

Integrationism is a post-structuralist theory of language and communication. The theory has been applied to a groundbreaking analysis of writing as a form of communication where writing is teased apart from speech and realigned with spatial configurations in general. Although it has many practical applications, this view can be extremely difficult to comprehend when expressed as a very specific form of writing, that is, as written words on paper. A solution to this problem is offered by the creative interaction design of two digital artworks, Postcard From Tunis and Postcards From Writing. The works are interactive multimedia pieces that creatively express the integrationist theory of writing and extend it into the transformations of writing that are possible in the human-computer interface. More generally, the unique rollover-based interfaces of these works both express the integrationist theory of communication and suggest that it is necessary in order to explain the creation of communicative signs that they demonstrate are possible.

Orientating voices in memories and spaces — Well I never…?

This paper is a dialogue between the artist and the analyst in the examination of a digital video art work as a piece of practice as research. The paper identifies and addresses the significant research questions that have arisen out of precisely such a dialogue about work in progress. Rather than focusing on the completed installation as a piece of research, this paper emphasises the artistic practice as experience and offers a concurrent academic debate, which complements the art work rather than substitute it as a research outcome. By embracing such plurality inherent in artistic practice as research, this article examines questions of authenticity of voice, narrative abstraction and interpretation and the effect low budget constraints have on film practice. Rather than offering certain conclusions, this paper is to be one in a series, discussing the research practice at various points in the artistic process.

Internet Web Logs as Cultural Resistance: A Study of the SARS Arts Project

This article examines an Internet project — sarsart.org — that features digital artworks created in response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in spring 2003. Qualitative methods including archival research, semiotic analysis, and interviews are used to examine the emergence and substance of this Internet project. The analysis identifies ways in which contributions by artists and bloggers (i.e., individuals with their own Internet site or Web log) contest institutional representations of SARS. The site challenges the representation of the outbreak on three levels: portrayals of citizens affected by SARS, portrayals of health professionals, and portrayals of the risk and panic associated with the outbreak. The argument is made that Internet projects such as sarsart.org can increase the capacity for cultural resistance by creating greater opportunities for the expression of political opposition to institutional authority.

On the Fate of Vanadate in Human Blood (Eur. J. Inorg. Chem. 18/2006)

AbstractThe cover picture shows a symbolic representation of the fate of vanadate in human blood. Since the transition metal vanadium is named after Vanadis, the Nordic goddess of beauty, she is represented by the famous Venus de Milo sculpted in metal. Her cloth is decorated with the functional groups of the ligands that can form a complex (“dress”) with the metal while travelling in the blood vessels, the latter being symbolised by the caverns in the background. The water in the caves represents the aqueous solutions in which speciation studies have been carried out in the group of Professor Lage Pettersson. Further references to these studies are found as cave paintings on the walls: a distribution diagram and a set of 51V NMR spectra. The studies have been carried out in the framework of the COST D21/009 working group. The geographical locations of the research groups within this working group are shown by illuminated dots on the map of Europe in the background. The goal of the studies was to better understand the ability of vanadium to lower blood glucose levels (represented by the sugar cubes washed ashore on the left) and thus its potential as an orally applicable drug against diabetes. A Microreview, covering the results of the above mentioned speciation studies dealing with the fate of vanadate in human blood, is represented by A. Gorzsás, I. Andersson, and L. Pettersson on p. 3559 ff. The digital artwork for this cover was created by András Gorzsás.

Low-res Bleed: Congealed Affect and Digital Aesthetics

The author draws upon work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to base his essay on the digital culture and aesthetics based on digital artwork.

Abbott H. Thayer's Anticipation of a Computer-Based Method of Working

This article describes the practice of Abbott H. Thayer (1849-1921) of working on several copies of the same painting, taking each to a different conclusion. It compares that method to the cur-rent computer-based practice of using the SAVE AS command to create copies of a digital artwork or design, which can then also be taken to different conclusions.

Fly's Eye View: Introducing Young Children to Digital Art through Virtual Reality

This paper describes ‘Fly’s Eye View', a project devised and directed by David Smith and supported by a grant from the UK Techniquest Pantechnicon Millennium Awards (intended to help bridge the gap in public perception between science and art). ‘Fly’s Eye View' was specifically aimed at young children, aged 7–11 years (Key Stage Two of the UK National Curriculum). The project used a low‐level VR fly‐by system to represent a garden scene as it might be experienced by a dragonfly. The analogy between the mosaic visual ‘perception’ of insects and image representation in computer systems allowed some interesting explorations into what may be involved in ‘seeing’. This analogy was used as the starting point for a series of exploratory activities using digital art work. The paper reviews the outcomes of the project and discusses their possible significance in the context of current approaches to art education and the stimulation of creative thinking in young children.

Øjenåbner – om projekteringen af Eyebeam Atelier i New York City

This paper offers an introduction to the planning of a new museum in New York City: The Eyebeam Gallery. The museum will evolve around the making of di- gital art. The ambition of the new museum will be to bring together artists and museum visitors, thus creating a polyphony of voices articulating art forms that are completely new to the world.The architects involved in the project are Diller + Scofidio. So far they have mainly been concerned with the production of experimental works both in Europe and the US. One important point in the building of the Eyebeam Gallery is that the development of new art forms requires the invention of a new form of museum building. With this in mind Diller + Scofidio will design a building which focuses on relationships between new media art and the spaces that will enable and support these relationships. In the building housing the Eyebeam Gallery we can expect a museum with a strong emphasis on the physical experience of digital artwork. Futhermore, we can expect a ”site-specific” (Diller + Scofidio) museum. A building which can be seen as an organic enlargement of the surrounding city and as a mental enlargement of the New York community.