CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Frieder Nake and Kolja Köster, Informatik, University of Bremen, Germany
Behind the Canvas, an Algorithmic Space. Reflections on Digital Art
No longer is visual space restricted to the space defined by canvasses, prints, sculptures, or video we find museums. Visual space has, of course, always been more than this, even in traditional times. Canvasses, graphics, and sculptures always only defined the obvious boundaries of such spaces, their trivial visible surfaces. Those tangibles never reach the deeper layers that make up the essential dimensions of space. True space is full of stories, biographies, styles, theories, successes and failures, happiness and despair. The artist contributes to the making of visual space when he or she delivers a work in form of a painted canvas; the cultural processes and institutions of society, however, let emerge visual space in uncontrolled and uncontrollable ways along a multitude of paths we know and don’t know at the same time. Artists of the 20th century, notably Marcel Duchamp, have understood this situation. The situation could be described as the meeting of canvasses in a cognitively and culturally determined abstract space. Without constantly newly appearing canvasses, nothing would happen in or to that space. It would remain largely stable and static although re-evaluation, re-organisation, and re-description of old works would create some momentum towards development of visual space.
Recently, however, the situation has changed in a most dramatic way. By the advent of the computer and of the algorithmic principle, the objective space of canvasses and the subjective space of art appreciation have been amended, enhanced and hyperised. New corners, rooms, areas, fields, landscapes with roads and pathways have been added to traditional spaces. Each work of algorithmic origin first exists in the same way a canvas has existed before. But it also exists in an objective algorithmic space. The double mode of existence of the algorithmic work distinguishes it critically from traditional works. It is true; each traditional work may also be viewed as existing in some objective space of measurement, and not in subjective spaces of valuation only. Whatever data are taken off a traditional painting, in order to turn them into entities of a data base, may become the source of new visual experiences along algorithmic paths, and this is actually happening.
We suggest studying this point by way of example. To this end, we will use the algorithmic art of Manfred Mohr, and a recent interactive installation of our own. Mohr's art can be opened to a totally new viewing experience by putting it into an appropriate virtual space. The interactive example demonstrates how several people can „walk’ on a projected image thus changing it in surprising and, in part, random ways.