Twenty Years of Arts Computing
CHArt Twentieth Annual Conference
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FUTURES PAST: Twenty Years of Arts Computing |
Pierre R. Auboiron, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris, France
Indexed Lights
“The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything that’s eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy.”
Ralph Lombreglia.
We live immersed in a global visual cacophony. Visual Culture is here and now, born of technological and scientific advances. Neither the hegemony of visuality, nor the role played by computers in its affirmation, need now be proved.
Since their emergence, digital technologies have fascinated many contemporary artists, although most pounce on these new and promising tools in an ill-considered way. Their productions thereby generally denote a manifest misunderstanding of digital issues. However some artists have a more considered approach to computers. An obvious example is the current practice of lighting public buildings using digital technology, a collaboration between artist and architect.
The first section of this paper outlines two artistic partnerships, each between an architect and a light designer working on a new approach to light. The partnerships are between Toyo Ito & Kaoru Mende in Japan, and Jean Nouvel & Yann Kersalé in France. Using very complex lighting systems made of captors and computers, they can materialise and visualise surrounding ‘natural’ phenomena like noises, human activity, draughts and the current of a river on the buildings themselves. Thereby they intend to make buildings fit back into their historical and socio-geographical environment.
The second section discusses in detail this novel social or environmental indexation of light. Using computers to make concepts and aspects of our everyday life visible and more tangible, these artists fight against the lack of interpersonal communication in today’s urban life. Computers allow artists to materialise phenomena we can no longer perceive because we have developed our visual sense to the detriment of our other senses.
The central argument of this paper could be summarised by this quote by Wyndham Lewis: “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present”. Actually it shows that, with the benefit of hindsight, computers can help us live here and now instead of throwing us into a frantic individual rush to the future. This allows us to moderate the very widespread idea that computers are synonymous with cold and sanitised individuality.