CHArt Conference Proceedings, volume seven
2004

Editorial

The papers published here were first presented at CHArt’s twenthieth annual conference, held at Birkbeck College, London, on 11-12 November 2004. To mark two decades of CHArt conferences, the chosen topic was ‘Futures Past: Twenty Years of Arts Computing’. Not surprisingly, many papers focused on past projects, highlighting the disparities now clearly visible between earlier visions of the future and present reality, and the ways in which issues first raised as far back as the 1960s and 70s have persisted, remaining relevant to practice in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Some conference presentations (not published here) analysed the beginnings of ‘computer art’, from an automatic haiku generator to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). James Faure Walker’s paper ‘Painting Digital, and Letting Go’ recounts the special status originally awarded to digital art, from ‘the first clatterings’ at Cybernetic Serendipity. He draws attention to the fairly routine integration of digital methods by many practising artists today, with reference to his own evolving practice, noting that digital art is still somehow regarded as ‘special’ – it has not been absorbed as just another technique available to artists. He argues that new methods might be employed more effectively if critics focused on the artistic quality of the end products as much as on how they had been produced.

Matthias Weiss in ‘Microanalysis as a Means to Mediate Digital Arts’ is similarly concerned to promote a better understanding of art produced by interventions with computing, but in contrast to Faure Walker, he focuses on examples of software art such as Georg Nees’ Schotter and Alex MacLean’s Forkbomb. Weiss argues for a more profound understanding of the techniques behind the production of digital art: whereas most art historians have a good grasp of the modes and practices associated with the production of more conventional art works, few are in a position to appreciate how a knowledge of the code which generates a digital art work can amplify our understanding of it. Unlike Faure Walker, he wants computer art to retain a special status and to be studied with an awareness of computing methods.

Pierre Auboiron, while asserting that many artists use digital technologies in an ill-considered way, celebrates the successful partnerships between digital artists and architects. In ‘Indexed Lights’ he explores the contribution made by the projects of Toyo Ito and Kaoru Mende in Japan and Jean Nouvel and Yann Kersalé in France. The case studies demonstrate how a thoughtful use of digital technology can enhance both the urban environment and social spaces, contradicting popular misconceptions which associate computers with a cold and sanitised view of the world.

Catherine Mason’s paper ‘A Computer in the Art Room ’ traces the early development of computer art in the UK by examining the role played in the 1960s and ‘70s by art schools and polytechnics. She credits the resource arrangements at polytechnic colleges with facilitating fruitful collaborations between artists and technical staff and documents a range of seminal collaborative projects which continue to have far-reaching implications for contemporary practice.

One ubiquitous theme at CHArt 2004 was the fate of projects which had generated so much excitement at previous conferences, promising great advances but now apparently vanished without a trace. Christine Sundt’s paper ‘Digital Projects Past and Present – Survivors or Fossils?’ (not published here) considered a list of projects featured over the years in Visual Resources. Happily, one project described in Visual Resources and showcased at previous CHArt conferences – the Princeton Index of Christian Art – not only still survives but continues to flourish. It was represented by a pair of complementary papers, one delivered by its Director, Colum Hourihane the other by Andrew Hershberger, a photographic historian who had worked on the Index. Hourihane’s paper ‘Sourcing the Index: Iconography and its Debt to Photography’ considered how the Index had been forced to adapt first to using a database rather than manually produced index cards, and more recently, to enter a new phase as a resource available on the Internet. Hourihane characterises this change as essentially from being a passive repository to becoming an active publisher. While the benefits are indisputable, such a change inevitably poses many challenges to a project conceived when the most technologically advanced equipment employed was a photographic copy stand device. The secret of the Index’s continuing success lies in its ability to remain flexible enough to adapt to new methods.

Hershberger’s paper, ‘The Medium Was the Method: Photography and Iconography at the Index of Christian Art’, investigates the role of one technology – photography – as an underlying model for the Index’s methodology. He points to the general lack of self-awareness in the use of photography as an ‘objective’ source of information, but it can also be argued that the photographs are in many ways more accessible and informative than any text entry and by providing detailed, high-quality visual information, allow scholars more scope to pursue their interests directly. Hershberger’s paper raises the question of how new technologies may impact on the Index’s methodologies in the future.

Three papers described case studies which highlight the importance of agreed standards in order to ensure continued access to shared resources. A focus on education and the dissemination of new methodologies is a primary concern of Vickie O’Riordan. Her paper ‘This is the Modern World: Collaborating with ARTstor’ describes the digitisation of a slide library as a collaborative project with ARTstor, a provider of digital images. O’Riordan’s paper describes a case study at the University of California, San Diego where a variety of stakeholders had to learn to compromise and work together in order to bring about a successful outcome. This paper provides useful background on what can make or break a collaborative project, particularly one involving several stakeholders from different communities of practice.

Similarly, Melanie Rowntree in ‘Successes and Failures in the Web Delivery of Object Information at the V&A’ provides a frank and detailed account of a single large institution’s repeated attempts to enhance their outreach programme by making materials available on the web. Rowntree’s paper traces the development of four major projects and, with the benefit of hindsight, identifies the decisions which made later repurposing of the data all but impossible. She proposes a project management process which combines good practice in content creation with closer management of communications between members of disparate teams.

Sian Everitt in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Accessible: 30 years of using new technologies in BIAD Archives’ provides a longer perspective on attempts to employ new technologies to modernise the archive of a single institution. Her descriptions of a range of innovative but now defunct initiatives reinforce the need to develop strategies for digital preservation and migration at the initial planning and design stages.

While it was almost inevitable that presenters felt the need to address difficult issues, warning others of potential pitfalls and passing on lessons learnt through their hard-won experience, the tone of the conference remained positive, with many speakers celebrating what had been achieved so far. Wayne Clements in ‘Computer Poetry’s Neglected Debut’ (not published here) showed that it was possible to revive ‘lost’ programs by re-programming Margaret Masterman’s (1968) Computerized Haiku in the PERL scripting language. Masterman’s written account formed the basis of a new interactive program which is now available online (see http://www.in-vacua.com/). In ‘Fifteen Years of Art Imaging’ (not published here) Kirk Martinez demonstrated the huge advances that have been made in the area of digital imaging in a relatively short time, confirming that better quality results can now be achieved more cheaply and easily than ever before.

With the growing ubiquity of computing, particularly use of the Internet, projects which once would have been unthinkable have become commonplace. The pervasiveness of computing at the start of the 21 st century will continue to provide new opportunities in all areas of society, not least in the creation and study of art. Perhaps the most exciting advancements hinted at in these papers are the ways in which communities of interest are developing shared resources and cultivating a richer use of common vocabulary to transmit an abundance of knowledge and experience.

Trish Cashen

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