RES / LO RES
Art from the Ends of the Digital Spectrum

Guggenheim Gallery / Chapman University
October 23 - November 21 2006
Curated by Rex Bruce

Hi Res / Lo Res: Connecting Extremes
by Rex Bruce

When co-directors Maggie Owens, Richard Turner and I embarked on curating an
exhibit featuring digital work, we began by looking through copious examples of
work representing a wide variety of genres within the burgeoning art and
technology scene. We became focused on the innovations of those pieces fashioned
by custom means, as opposed to being formed with "out of the box" software used
for the production and editing images and video. The pieces that fell into this
category consisted on one hand of those made possible only by artist written
software developed with intent of realizing work requiring much computational
number crunching, and on the other hand were low resolution pieces created by
the unusual combinations of optical imaging instruments, found images and
related data where the glitches of the "electronic" meshed methodically with the
ideas being explored by the artists.

Lo Res artists carefully cultivate the use of the artifacts of electronic
imaging, for example pixilation, banding, video noise, errors, and pictorial or
alphanumeric representations of data. These are brought to the foreground as the
raw materials for building artworks and often correlations are made between the
instruments of production and the subject matter explored. This type of work
almost always begins and ends with representational imagery, although sometimes
the images are degenerated beyond recognition.

The works of Hi Res artists have a distinctively digital quality driven by
high-end tools of production where images are computed algorithmically. Their
mathematical geometry exhibits a seamless perfection and glossy artificiality
that sometimes emulates the "lifelike." These artworks are almost exclusively
abstract in nature, although often the data or abstraction bears an association
to things in the "real world."

The irony that these works exist on the opposite end of the resolution spectrum
became apparent and posed itself as a cogent curatorial avenue. I observed that
this art differentiates itself from other forms of art not only in the emergent
means of its production, but also its consequent appearance having the "look" of
digital. A paradox that presented itself was that this selection of work also
bears more relation to traditional art and its long term history than I
ostensibly perceived, with the artists consistently exhibiting a propensity to
obliquely "sculpt," "draw" or "paint" from life (or more accurately those
things non-virtual or biological), to create "landscapes" and draw influence
from eras of the past.

Andy Lomas is a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning digital
effects supervisor. His Aggregation series explores the complexity of organic
form with what he calls "intricate sculptural shapes" generated by computer
simulated growth systems. Using his own software to create the forms, biases and
changes to environmental rules are used to create an incredible variety of
structural shape. His pieces mimic the growth of life, and often resemble a
virus, coral or other simple life forms. This work is presented in the form of
prints, animated videos, and also Stereoscopes (3D viewers) using the technology
that originated in the Victorian era, making a connection between this work and
the roots of three-dimensional imaging.

Pieces by Stephanie Damoff are "landscapes" executed with toy digital cameras
that mimic the biological often at an even more microscopic level than the Lomas
pieces. In the artist's words: "I call these mundane landscapes because they
are small bits of the everyday, the rarely noticed. The camera focuses on the
non-descript detail, transforming it and awakening the possibility of its being
something other. With the cheap digital camera, the visible pixels underline the
materiality of these small scenes, suggesting atoms and molecules - matter in
motion..."

The work of Thomas Briggs is often concerned with the mathematical
representation of fluid, lifelike gesture in a more literal version of
computational drawing. He realized that this notion could be inverted, that the
gesture could be generated from mathematics directly, and used to create
drawings that retain some connection to the scratch of pen on paper. He eschews
algorithmic, or procedural processes, instead using simple periodic functions
evolving over time. In a very different approach artist Ray Rapp fabricates
what he calls a "wall drawing" using wires, extension cords, video cables,
disassembled lcd monitors, electrical boxes and DVD players spread across the
wall to compose his pieces. The video on the lcd panels are figurative,
colorized images making a connection to the seminal work of Edwaerd Muybridge,
the pioneer of all things animated.

Milos Rankovic, PhD and professor of media studies at Leeds University (UK)
wrote software geared toward assembling images culled from networked
distribution systems, creating a series of artworks that are automated and
randomized, where meanings and forms contained within his pieces are
indeterminate. Their awkward appearance and his "over the top" academic approach
provide us with challenging pieces, in part based on Marcel Duchamp's 1914
"Network of Stoppages" one of the earliest works to consider networked systems
in aesthetic terms.

Nathan Selikoff has abandoned the predefined processes of production to more
fully explore the computational landscape of mathematics and it's inherent
beauty. He uses custom software to investigate strange attractors - visual
representations of chaotic dynamical systems. Fascinated by the diversity and
complexity of the raw images that come from simple sets of iterated functions,
he enjoys the interplay of technical problem solving and artistic spontaneous
creativity. The methods and consequent appearance of this work remind me of
mid-century modernists, particularly Iannis Xenakis (1921-2001). Xenakis
pioneered the use of computers and "stochastic" (random) mathematical procedures
to compose music and applied his musical systems to architecture. He worked with
Le Corbusier and designed the Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair in
1958. The swooping parabolic forms of the pavilion bear much resemblance to
Selikoff's swirling mathematical shapes.

Like artists Lomas, Briggs and Selikoff, Akihiko Miyoshi has created a software
program for the piece Reading the NY Times, Aug 13. The program reads an online
version of the NY Times, analyzing the grammar of each sentence. The program
then extracts words that are expressive of the meaning of the sentence. An
ellipse represents each word. The connection between the ellipses represents the
semantic connections among the words. The size of the ellipse represents how
many times it showed up in the article. ("Mr." was the largest ellipse in the
picture, and "Ms" was nowhere to be seen.) Each ellipse has a unique color. A
legend is therefore used to decipher which words the ellipses represent.

Thomas Eric Stanton's installation Aphelion features a video and related
drawings. Stanton's interest in foregrounding the technology employed in his
presentation echoes Ray Rapp's demystification of the equipment he uses. Stanton
says of his work "Events of a personal nature flow into natural occurrences and
evoke images. These images can be figurative or abstract. Form and ground are
often exchanged for glyph and image. Materials flow together in such a way that
there is little distinction between man- made and natural materials. Pigment can
be paint, but just as often it is a material derived from light [video/film]."

In much the same way that Akihiko Miyoshi uses a program to translate the text
of the New York Times into another symbolic language, Jeff Beall uses encryption
software to "translate" his imagery. Flatfooted traditional landscape
photographs are digitized into graphic files on a computer, and then the graphic
file is processed through encryption software. The encrypted ascii text form of
the image is then overlaid on the original image. If one were to type in all the
text back into the encryption software (the name and version of which is
included in the top line of the image) with the appropriate password, then it
would all be decoded to become the very image it is overlaying. Beall proposes
to "slow down the viewer's perception of the image by obscuring it with an
encrypted version of itself. The randomized text version of the photograph
beneath it becomes the cloudy haze that interrupts its perception. Mediation of
vision is one subject of these landscapes."

Charles Fairbanks calls upon friends for an introduction: their laconic
descriptions of the artist-ranging from "meaty" to "abstract dynamo"-lend
linguistic thrust to his Googled Self-Portraits. The descriptions become
keywords for a program to average the RGB data of the top fifty Google-Images.
Determined by linguistic, personal, and virtual connections, the appropriated
pictures become glowing painterly color-fields of information with specific
details lingering at the threshold of perception.

Patti Heid's latest works combine digitally composed imagery with areas of
acrylic airbrush as well as beads, sequins and gold bullion applied over
large-scale archival canvas prints. The semi-precious substances give the work
an historical look of European tapestry and painting with incredible detail and
sumptuous color. She often starts the pieces with images she runs through
obsolete video equipment to give the images more artifact, creating a hybrid of
contemporary technology and antique craft.

In Anneliese Varaldiev's work multiple generations of an image of her face are
re-dubbed, re-photograped and reproduced through a variety of means, where the
degenerative marks of replication are fore-grounded. A reverse in direction is
taken when the image is printed in large dimensions at a high resolution, and
mounted to slick perfection on plexiglass. Her self-portrait and identity travel
a similar journey where her countenance is transformed into a glamorous femme
fatale using make-up, lighting and poses harkening back to the golden era of
movie making. The multiple generations of the same photograph parallel
reverberating journeys image and identity take through the variegated strata of
contemporary media types, where degradation of image quality, and dissipation of
identity coexist with a real desire for physical beauty driven by historical
notions.

In my work I experiment with a variety of low-resolution digital cameras, using
the gritty imagery they generate as a starting point for inverting the
conventions of photographic art and digital imaging. After exploring these
possibilities critic Mat Gleason, editor of Coagula Art Journal, pointed out
their relationship to painting, where the marks of the digital artifact became
much like the marks and textures of paint. He humorously dubbed my style "Plein
Error" and recommended I take a look at the old landscape paintings at LACMA. I
made this odd trip to the museum, and his connection intrigued me with its
implications.

There is a long history of exhibiting art created with computers, the following
being the earlier of some of these shows: Cybernetic Serendipity curated by
Jasia Reichardt for the ICA and The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical
Age curated by K.G. Pontus Hulten for MOMA were both on view in 1968. Jack
Burnham curated Software, Information Technology: Its Meaning for Art for the
Jewish Museum in 1970 the same year that Maurice Tuchman organized Art and
Technology for LACMA. This succession of exhibits occurred about 20 years after
computers, as we know them, were introduced. The practice in these exhibits was
to present this work as a separate cultural entity from the rest of art. This
continues in many instances to this day, often in broad exhibitions of
"digital" or "new media," where belonging to this category is enough to
substantiate inclusion in an exhibit.

It is possible that what we are learning now are the wide range of connections
that the cultural opus "art and technology" has to the whole of art history.
Conversely those media considered not so new, actually as old as our beginnings,
can be considered as more related to the "new media" than we may have previously
observed. I sense this becoming a current in how this medium is regarded, and
this exhibit, amongst many other things, became for myself an exploration of
this direction of thought. In a more radical vision, there may come a day when
these disparate kinds of works are commonly collected, archived and exhibited
together side by side, where the discoveries of a more integrated historical
view and the value it brings to art utilizing emergent technology have the
opportunity to surprise and inform us in truly new ways.

"...a creative lull occurs always when artists of a period are satisfied to pick
up a predecessor's work where he dropped it and attempt to continue what he was
doing. When on the other hand you pick up something from an earlier period and
adapt it to your own work an approach can be creative. The result is not new;
but it is new insomuch as it is a different approach."

Marcel Duchamp, 1946
(the year ENIAC, the first computer built, was completed)

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