Computer Art Without the Computer

The forms such art takes on become increasingly varied as more and more money is invested into the research and development of digital technologies. Iris prints have been rapidly accepted by the world of fine art. They are collected by museums including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Iris prints, an ink jet technology using special watercolor dyes, are fitting in quite nicely alongside the traditional printmaking technologies like lithography and intaglio. Witness the recent founding and success of Los Angeles-based Muse X Editions which has published and printed editions for internationally known and collected artists John Baldessari, Erika Rothenberg, and new-comer Uta Barth, to name but a few. Artists have tried CD-ROM's with varying degrees of acceptance. Networked sites of exhibition are considered by those in the field to be a promising new media for the interested visual artist. Since the invention of the Graphic User Interface, or GUI, in 1993, which allowed for the transmission of image files over existing telephone network lines, there has been an explosion of interest and investigation. Acceptance has come at the speed of light, as institutions make room for the instruction and exhibition of web art. One has only to visit the School of Visual Art in New York or browse through the most recent addition to Germany's controversial Documenta X to notice the ascendance of digital art in the art world.

The acceptance of technology art and monitor-accessed art has not been unanimously embraced by artists and collectors around the world. I believe there are two key issues involved here: archival life and presentational aesthetics. Archival life is, admittedly, a greater concern for the collectors, whether individuals such as Mr. Bermant, the first serious American collector of technology art, or institutions with ostensibly unlimited resources , the Getty Museum for example, than it typically is for the artists/authors producing the work. These concerns are valid and any artist working in the area of technology art must consider the implications. Obsolescence of access technologies assures a finite lifespan as viewable art. While all art is lost in time, the accelerated rate of new hardware, software, operating system, and transfer protocols almost certainly guarantee that today's art will be lost in twenty years time to the average person. Museums will be required to commit ever-greater funds to maintain and operate out-dated technologies. Can a board of executive directors be relied upon to adequately fund the conservation of such high-dollar maintenance works. Eventually, the accessing technology will be non-functional. And if Mr. Bermant will state, "If it don't work, you don't got art!", how might an executive director with less personal investment in the medium react to the seemingly non-stop breakdowns inherent in electronic media?

The import and impact of images on Western citizens has clearly been demonstrated by the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. Although the possibility to transmit data in text form over networks has been around in various levels of accessibility since 1969, it was not until images could also be downloaded with the arrival of the first GUI that the Internet subset known as the World Wide Web grew geometrically in use, availability, and development. The second objection monitor-centered presentations must overcome is the restrictive size and quality of image resolution. Movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Earth Art, and the entire history of cinema are not possible in the current desktop monitor size. Scale of an image is extremely important to visual artists. The ratio of the viewer to the image viewed influences in an unquantifiable degree the viewer's perception of the image. This brings one to suggest the use of projectors, such as those produced and distributed by In Focus Systems above others. While these screens do allow artists to begin thinking of composing larger scale visual events, the quality is still some years away from rivaling that of a photo-realist painting, a duratrans film box, or projected 16mm and 32mm film. For artists wishing to present a static image of high resolution larger than 17" diagonal, the computer is not an attractive medium. Artists like myself are attuned to the technical growing pains of this fascinating technology, awaiting the arrival of a satisfactory presentational format.

Agreeing that a computer monitor is unacceptable for the aforementioned reasons, does this lead one to dismissing the computer as agent, site, and/or content of visual art? Absolutely not! The computer's strength is found in the ability to process data, reconfigure it, and execute commands of the artist or programmer at the speed of light. An additional characteristic, of paramount significance to some, is the extension of the ego beyond the confines of the corporeal body. This theoretical concept currently being developed and practiced as "telepresence" is demonstrated in the web site project by the foremost artist's collective Bodies, Incorporated. The ultimate expression of the computer in my mind is the transmission of thought data, i.e. ideas, of which images are substituting abstractions in the same vein as language. Therefore, the computer is the site of a re-vitalized or second-generation conceptual artform engaged through necessity to privileging the linguistic abstraction, due to the visual restrictions stated previously, above the optical expression of the concept. An interesting visual arts proposal, extremely difficult to execute and mastered by few to date.

When the computer is unsatisfactory to an author of images, should this revolutionary device be dismissed, ignored, or ridiculed. No. The concepts which the computer operates upon and the physical manifestations of those concepts, which includes the symptoms and situations computers create in our society, are vital content issues for all media, from the oldest known to the most recent. The information theory developed by Claude Shannon, a student of Vannevar Bush, and the resulting image compression algorithms are of particular interest to this visual artist/author working with abstract visual elements and configurations.

Information Theory was announced with the 1948 publication of Claude Shannon's essay, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Shannon's approach to communication was revolutionary. He determined to produce a set of mathematical laws which would allow one to universally communicate, control, and re-configure information. Since he was an employee of Bell Laboratories, he was chiefly interested in applying this new understanding to the transmission of data across existing telephone line. Central to Shannon's investigations was the measurement of the capacity to store and transmit a message over any given channel. A message was defined as both the desired data as well as any nonsensical or disruptive information termed noise. Shannon's goal was to describe a method and design a technology allowing for maximum movement of data from the source to the destination in the shortest amount of time while separating the target information from any unwanted noise, or unsolicited information, which may be introduced at any point along the path from source to destination. It was this groundbreaking theory and research by Shannon that laid the foundations of what would later be called the Internet.

As I have previously noted, it was not until 1993 with the release of the Mosaic browser that pictures could be transmitted over the communication network of phone lines and interpreted correctly at their point of destination. The problem of sending images over the Internet may be viewed as a two part process. First, how does one agree to interpret color in a constant manner and, second, how can the arrangement of color forms which are the basis of visual cognition be correctly assigned? The transmission of text and numerical data must encompass roughly 26 alphabetic characters, 10 numerical digits, and 3 dozen punctuation signs. The interpretation, transmission, and re-constitution of image data involves far more characters, if one can term a combination of hue, saturation, and luminosity a character. Millions if one is to attempt to substitute for human visual capacity! A color model was developed, similar in structure to that developed late in the 19th century by American scientist and artist Alfred Munsell, to include 256 colors in the spectrum and arranged on the six faces of a cube. Spreading across each face is a gradient running from pure saturated color to a neutralized hue to the saturated complementary color. Each position on the color cube has a corresponding hexadecimal value. These values can then be transferred through the information network, interpreted on the receiving end by a processor, which displays the color corresponding to the hexadecimal value.

The second part of the problem is how does one efficiently translate and transmit visual data. Although there are several current methods of doing this, most notably and Graphics Interchange Format, affectionately called GIF, and the Joint Photographic Experts Group format, or JPEG. Again, building upon the foundations laid in the 1940's by Mr. Shannon, the GIF format utilizes an algorithm that encodes the horizontal run length of similar and continuous strands of pixels. In other words, if five pixels of red are followed by ten pixels of yellow one after the other, the algorithm compresses this information to 5-red, 10-yellow and so on throughout the image. The image may then be transferred in a rapid and efficient manner and de-compressed when access by the appropriate software. The JPEG algorithm reduces file size through cleaving brightness values from color hues. In essence, the image is retained as quality black-and-white picture, to which the human eye is most sensitive, and discards much of the subtle color distinctions the eye can not differentiate between. Rather than doing it line by line, as GIF does, JPEG breaks the image into zones.

According to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. What then is the message of the technology of painting in the era of computer vision? Is it obsolete? Is the message malleable or fixed? Early painting, while it may have had a separate societal function, served to extend the reach of the human eye through time and space. As a storage device for visual events, painters were able to distribute information to a non-participatory viewer. That is, one need not be present to view an object or event; one could look at the simulation, the painting. Scientific knowledge, laws, social customs, historical events, all were transmitted through this technology for many centuries, allowing for the standardization or codification of the physical and spiritual world of the human. (I single out the human animal as the other life forms of this planet seem to be little concerned with the pictures and models we arrive at to understand our field of existence.) Continuing with my reading of McLuhan's theory of media, one must acknowledge that this function of recording the world in paint began to diminish with the invention of photography. After only one hundred years of research, the photographic camera could be said to more efficiently record events. Documentation of the visual experience in paint had suddenly become an obsolete endeavor at worst, nostalgic and romantic at best. This crisis in painting sparked many movements at the beginning of the 20th century depicting the non-visual and the non-static image, that is to say, documenting emotions in Expressionism, the spiritualism of Neo-Plasticism, the simultaneous visual experience of Cubism, and, later, the goal of Futurism recording motion through time and space.

Today, my studio practice focuses on the subject of vision and the formation of thought, whether logical signal or nonsensical noise. The translation of information from one format into another and the subsequent re-configuration and manipulation that it entails is specifically the area I research. A translation of data may be understood as the transubstantiation of an electronic image file to the concrete object engendered by an abstract oil painting. Or, it may be read as the coding of image elements, color, composition, size, and the like, into a computer language file for storage and transmission from one terminal to the next. In either case, I declare that information, it's proceeding collection and subsequent interpretation, is entirely relative, never absolute. The context and media filters employed to process all matter of data is a fluid arrangement. As no absolute interpretation or understanding for each object or data element exists, only relative understandings which sort themselves through logical argument and/or intuitive reaction, the viewer's individual perception and reception determines the "meaning" of the art. Some will argue that interfacing with these topics can only effectively occur through a direct engagement with the hardware such concepts are engineered by. Controlling the interaction of the viewer to the artwork in this manner certainly does serve to underline the content and determine the form, but I believe that subtly of a static image hung on a wall, signifying a seemingly infinite existence, argues equally and persuasively to this author/artist's agenda as would any web site construction, VRML world, or video. It is not better, ……just different. But the technology of painting, with it's low maintenance requirements and minimal peripherals, i.e. a wall, a nail, and some sunlight, will argue its position with a far longer breath than the top-heavy, hard-ware dependant production by electronic artists at the end of the 20th century. The time is now for computer art without the computer.