Twenty Years of Arts Computing
CHArt Twentieth Annual Conference
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FUTURES PAST: Twenty Years of Arts Computing |
James Faure Walker, London, UK
Painting Digital, and Letting Go
There was a time when paint software really did look spectacular. Audiences at trade shows gasped at the silky airbrush of the Quantel Paintbox, even at a colour printer. It didn’t matter what the image was, but the fact that you could scan and print a colour photo was amazing.
Among the many currents of contemporary art it no longer makes much sense to speak of ‘computer art’ as a special category. Painters know all about PhotoShop and inkjet prints. A ‘digital’ artist now has to produce images that hold their own in a less protected exhibition space, alongside paintings, prints, photos, videos and installations. In the past digital art was given an easy ride; it was a novelty, a niche art unpoliced by native commentators, hosted by cosy academic enclaves. If it was dismissed by the ‘art world’ this only reinforced the isolationist thinking, the sense that it was a secret underground whose day would come. It was actually riddled with clichés of geometric abstraction, and ideas of art so naïve as to make a seasoned critic wince. Equally, paint software developed by imitating the look of ‘natural media’, appealing to a hobbyist market – all portraits and seascapes - where any post-modern irony would fall flat.
As a painter who has been integrating digital and painterly methods the author of this paper has found it frustrating that connections are not made, that definitions and principles seem hard to grasp. This spectacular technology has not yet been properly absorbed. It could be time to let go of the idea that digital art is special just because it is digital. There remains the question of how to ‘paint’ with the technology, and this presentation will show some of the provisional answers that have emerged.