Anna Bentkowska

Editorial

The sixteenth annual CHArt conference explored the theme of Moving the Image; Visual Culture and the New Millennium. Hosted by the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the conference took place in the prestigious surroundings of Somerset House, its magnificent picture gallery and the elegant Edmond J Safra Fountain Court. The conference was attended by CHArt's longstanding supporters as well as newcomers, and drew speakers and delegates from different parts of the world, including Australia, Canada, the USA and continental Europe. British academic institutions, galleries and museums received the strongest representation.

Papers presented at CHArt conferences over the last sixteen years have always tended to mirror current practices in digital research culture. In the eighties, text processing and standardisation of data formats required by databases, represented the modest beginnings and the first challenges for humanities computing. The nineties saw developments in colour digital imaging, multimedia, 3D modelling and internet technologies. As the applications of computing reached new fields and territories, there became an ever-greater sense of urgency to discuss current computing practices and emerging theories. It has always been CHArt's aim to provide a forum for such discussions, be it through conferences and demonstrations, publications and more recently the email discussion list. Presentation of digital projects offers practical solutions to what frequently are common problems, while engaging in theoretical considerations helps in defining a framework for what might seem otherwise a chaotic pursuit of a technocratic beast.

At the dawn of the New Millennium, the CHArt 2000 conference was reflecting upon the past and looked into the future of digital media convergence, network communication in teaching and learning, and the role of interactive media in engaging wider audiences in the study of the past. Current digitisation techniques of art and architecture, as well as the challenges of exhibiting and documenting digital art were also discussed. More traditional art genres (such as video), their concepts and theories have been revisited and the ways in which digital media affect them assessed. Fourteen papers were delivered at the conference. A number of speakers considered specific projects, while others reflected on general tendencies in digital visual culture. They introduced a sense of order to the plethora of computing formats, methods and fashions, and hinted at the picture of things to come.

Art has been transformed by the introduction of digital media with even software claiming the status of an art form. More traditional art forms have also been changed by the use of computers. Video art is facing obsolescence, unable to compete with the better quality, greater flexibility and more stable preservation of digital films. Digital art imposes new demands on its curators. They are required to understand technical issues and tackle the complex organisation of displays that in some instances no longer involve the use of gallery space, nor even direct contact with an audience.

Digital media, alongside other factors, have changed possibly forever the static and hierarchical nature of knowledge systems. The convergence of digital media adds constantly to the ways in which information is created, gathered, examined, presented, disseminated and received. Resulting from the coalescence of television and computer networking, webcasting is a technology that facilitates online broadcasts of live events and their instant archiving for global access. Inhabited television is based on audience participation in content creation. The idea, dating from the mid-1950s is not new, but the more recent application of Virtual Reality and photo-realistic computer graphics enables the audience to engage not only with the present, but also with the past as if 'one was there'. Pompeii is a research project of this kind from the UK television company The Illuminations Group. Drawing on historic and iconographic records, recent research and live acting, this television production aims at recreating Pompeii prior to the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. It reconstructs the city's architecture and everyday life, inviting the viewers (equipped with three-dimensional DVD recordings of virtual worlds) to engage in the day-to-day activities of the inhabitants. The existing technical constraints limit the potential of inhabited television and the general audience finds it difficult to engage fully in what is still a promising experiment.

Participation and interactivity are becoming characteristic of many artworks and educational events that rely on digital technologies. As the one-to-many communication system is combined with the many-to-one system, the authority and control over the final product rest no longer solely with the creator(s). The creative process resembles a dialogue between the makers and the viewers, their roles not only expanding but also interchanging. Viewers' participation goes beyond the one-off event and single venue, spanning into space and time. The quality of a collaboratively-built content remains of crucial importance in attracting an audience. The interactive format alone is not sufficient to make the product interesting. Productions capable of creating worlds and realities that require active participation in the narrative seem to be the most successful.

The now common term 'cyberspace' was introduced in 1984 by William Gibson in the 'cyberpunk' science fiction novel Neuromancer to indicate the non-space of computer networks. The idea of characters inhabiting virtual spaces also goes back to the early 1980s and Philip K. Dick's stories about manufactured androids that are indistinguishable from humans. Punk subculture of the late 1970s and 1980s is best known for its fashion and style of popular music. Punk is remembered as the movement that fed on antisocial, aggressive attitudes and nihilistic tendencies, promulgating among its young fans boredom, pessimism and lack of prospects for the future. Of note are punk contributions to the digital aesthetic, especially to the movement's own genre of literature and graphic design. The developments in those fields reflected the heralding of the information society and coincided with deconstructionist modes of expression popular at the time. A distinctive graphic style of punk (maga)zines, record sleeves and posters was to some extent the result of the application of the Apple Macintosh computer which facilitated layered, fragmented and dislocated graphics.

The postmodern and deconstructionist critique of originality, as indeed that of the author/artist continues to feed on new situations. On the one hand, the artist's name is frequently hyped for commercial reasons, and on the other his authority and control over own products is questioned even by the medium he uses. Artificial Life (AL), a discipline of computer science, pushes the boundaries of art as human creativity to the extreme. Like cyberpunk literature and films, and some later 'inhabited television' productions, Artificial Life operates through virtual characters. The principle of AL software lies in automatic multiplication of participating 'avatars' whose behaviour is modelled on real life. AL images, or ArtLife, question the view that an artwork cannot have a life of its own. AL digital environments are three-dimensional, shared virtual spaces often used by computer artists in combination with other media. AL often resorts to aesthetic qualities that modern art has generally tended to renounce, such as beauty, sublime and decorativeness. It has, however, also been claimed that beauty embraces technology and is not a purely aesthetic criterion, as it can also refer to the harmony based on the perfection of numbers (digits) as well as the attraction of the algorithm.

The sense of "being there" that can be recreated through the application of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) is achieved by the user's interaction with an artificial world, but also through this software's ability to develop contexts. Despite technical complexity and laboriousness, three-dimensional Virtual Reality models are increasingly used in research and education, among others in the history of art and architecture, in urban and heritage studies and documentation. Virtual modelling has been applied to digitally reconstruct single objects and architectural elements, entire buildings and whole cities. The reconstruction of historic Heidelberg carried out at the local European Media Laboratory, made use of architectural drawings, old maps, photographs and other surviving records to create computer models based on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and to visualize subsequent stages in the development of the city over five centuries. The attention to historic details, specific to this project, can be seen in the extraction of data from historic architectural drawings in order to create a virtual storeroom of architectural elements and reusing them for constructing computer models, as if imitating the actual building process.

Computer models become an invaluable teaching aid when seeing the real object or site is not possible. Architectural models rendered on the basis of a photogrammetric survey give a more life-like result than Computer-Aided Design (CAD) because the stereopair photographs allow for plotting not only geometric data, but also for creating an immersive environment with an impressive illusion of depth. Accuracy of architectural detail, i.e. the faithfulness to the original is, however, sometimes compromised. In order to speed up the lengthy modelling process, it is often the case with repetitive features such as a window or column, that only one such element is modelled then copied the required number of times. The VRML model of the 9th-century Buddhist stupa on the Borobudur island, Java took two years to build. The model has been overlaid with over 3000 black and white photographs to represent the elevations, including elaborate reliefs of the Hidden Basement that no longer can be examined in situ. Reconstructions of architecture which cannot be examined directly is the main advantage of models of this kind, especially when the model is accessible on the Internet, as it is in the case of the low-resolution variant of the virtual Borobudur and models of monuments in the care of English Heritage. As a teaching tool the computer model is a welcome replacement for slides, which can only offer still, unscaled images devoid of context. The time and work involved in the modelling of a VR model can sometimes make other techniques, such as 360-degree QuickTime panoramas, a more feasible alternative.

While digitisation of existing hard copy resources continues on an everyday basis in museums and archives, increasingly digital photography (when possible) proves a quicker and cheaper alternative, even when of high resolution, to the slow process of scanning and editing of negatives and photographs. The immediate application of digital images for online delivery is an added bonus. Despite the popular view of CD-ROMs becoming obsolete, this format is still used in stand-alone applications and distance learning, and proves particularly well suited for the presentation of varied multimedia material, such as 'Five Windows Into Africa', a CD-ROM on art and culture of the indigenous people of Africa, which encompasses records of events as diverse as musical performances at funeral ceremonies and the presentation of social and political issues. The project is exemplary in demonstrating how contributing to a specific digital format has affected an interdisciplinary discussion between practitioners and scholars representing a variety of disciplines, in this case a historian, political scientist, ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, art historian, artist on one side and software developers on the other. They have all been forced to go beyond the established conventions of their own disciplines. The dynamic format of the interactive multimedia presentation demanded a greater emphasis on the visual aspect of the material and had to allow for flexibility in its examination.

Few digitisation projects are free from complexities of copyright. The experience of past projects does not make the issue any simpler. The assumption that photographs or other material older than seventy years is out of copyright may be misleading, even false if the said material remains in the custody of a third party. In some instances the custodian institution that houses the material does not hold its copyright. The ease of downloading material from the Internet may be inversely proportional to the difficulty of clearing the copyright. The website dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci's collectibles (www.leonardo-da-vinci.org) aims at the study of visual appropriations of the artist's imagery and uses images given and appropriated (copied) from other sites. Permission to use images was sought, but where the owner of a source image could not be traced or did not reply, its inclusion has been justified by the legislation on fair use. The law on the use of images for academic and educational purposes is more restrictive in some countries than others. The legal documents quoted on the Leonardo site and the list of art resources on the web that include fair use material invite a serious discussion of these difficult issues.

Conflicting tendencies characterise many aspects of art historical computing. Apart from the already mentioned ease of use and abuse of digital material and techniques, the conflict between the fidelity of reproduction and freedom of manipulation of computer graphics - images, 3D models - is particularly challenging to scholars. Issues related to computers and the history of art have been approached from particular positions, resulting in a variety of solutions and views, sometimes contradictory, dictated by specific experiences. We hope that the fruitful debate of those issues initiated by the papers presented at the 2000 conference will continue on the CHArt discussion list.