CHArt Twenty-First Annual Conference

 Ann-Sophie Lehmann , Utrecht University.
The representation of artistic practice in digital visual culture

Traditionally, artists have always reflected on their practice, technical achievements and representational skills. The genres of the self-portrait in front of the easel and the atelier-scene serve this self-reflective element of artistic practice. New media art it seems, has not yet generated a genre reflecting on its practical and technical procedures and skills.

Although process and technology are prominent features in many art works, the initial procedures of construction seem to be too 'technical' to generate interesting visual material. Although many artists use their own image as working material, and viewers might become active practitioners in interactive artworks, the ‘artist at work’ is seldom represented as ‘work of art’. As the creative space of the media artist is currently more often described as a laboratory than an atelier, practice even tends to disappear inside a black box: the laboratory traditionally evokes experiment and invention kept from the public view.

While new media art seems to exclude the representation of practice, other more applied domains of digital practice, like web design and computer animation, have created self-reflective genres in which practice is represented. Like their traditional precursors, the self-portrait at work and the atelier-scene serve to represent, celebrate and mystify professional skills of creation.

This paper investigates the representational status of artistic practice in new media art, and using examples from different genres of new media art, will address the following questions: When does practice become representational? How do artists conceive and describe their creative spaces? Have digital production modes rendered creation invisible by transferring practice to the virtual realm?

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