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The Fabrication of Art and Beyond: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture |
Richard Hooper (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Portents, Catalysts, Barriers and Possibilities in the Development of Digital Sculpture
This paper will trace the development of digital sculpture form its origins in the 1960s to the present day and will relate this development to the contemporary theoretical milieu and how attitudes to technology and work involving technology and the development of technology itself have served to moderate the progression of digital sculpture. Such agentive developments, it will be argued, whilst anticipated by Aristotle, can best be understood by recourse to Rogerian Technological Lag theory and Jenkinsonian convergence theory. In art historical terms, the paper will provide a re-assessment of Duchamp’s Readymades arguing that they can be read as a tacit acknowledgement of the superiority of industrial production where geometric form fabrication is concerned. The paper will also provide a re-reading of Benjamin’s thesis articulated in his paper The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, arguing that his theory’s focus on re-production rather than simply production served to cast the machine in a negative light vis a vis artistic production as it over emphasised the mimetic as opposed to the creative application of technology. The paper will also explore the significance of Dickie and Danto’s institutional theory and the notion of the Artworld in regards to digital sculpture and Dixon’s argument that validation of digital work is often brought about by the late adoption of digital means by established traditional artists rather than by the early adoption by less well known digital artists.
The paper will conclude with some examples of recent work by the author exploiting CAD/CAM and CNC mediated sculpture demonstrating that such methodologies can afford the sculptor an extended material vocabulary (e.g. cast acrylic) and enhanced geometric precision amounting a neo-precisionist aesthetic. The paper will argue that such capabilities can permit a resumption of Formalist concerns consistent with Leach’s notion of the Tectonic turn which suffered from mid century analyses such as Burnham’s Beyond Modern Sculpture and his assessment of sculpture having reached a point of exhaustion.
Biography:
Richard Hooper lives and works in Liverpool combining academic life in the Fine and Applied Art Department at Liverpool Hope University and artistic practice. His research interest is in the development of a body of sculptural work in a minimalist geometric idiom involving the exploitation of digital methodologies in their construction. He is interested in the history and theory of digital sculpture which was recently the subject of doctoral studies as the Gladstone Fellow in Sculpture at Chester University. Richard has exhibited, published and presented widely in this field, including at a previous CHArt conference.