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There is a special class of physical Computer artwork that includes works as varied as Hébert’s Sisyphus and Ulysses, Shaw’s Legible City and Kaeko Murata’s Fisherman’s Café. These are works that need to be experienced in real-time and in the specific location of the artwork. Because they demand specialised hardware and a setting, they are not easily reproduced on either the computer or a physical medium. They could properly be termed unique works, due to the shifting sand in Ulysses and the interactive elements in the others. No viewing of them would ever be repeated exactly, and they cannot be transposed out of their physical or computational context. These pieces rest on the boundary between the digital and the physical; and in many ways are the most compelling examples of Computer Art for this reason.
[Plate XXIV: Kaeko Murata’s interactive installation Fisherman’s Café, which I saw – or experienced – at the SIGGRAPH ’99 Art Show.]
Fisherman’s Café has both a material presence and a digital malleability, which is achieved by projecting the shadows of fish onto the surface of the table. Viewers interact by moving the three glasses around, which in turn creates fish that swim from one set of ripples to another. Thus the active component of Fisherman’s Café is a dynamic image projected in real-time by the computer, which monitors the position of the glasses and participants. However, to fully achieve its effect, the piece depends on being situated in physical space, with physical objects to move around. Thus it sits comfortably between the physical and computational realms.
Like other interactive pieces at SIG’99, Murata’s piece had an artistic aura quite different from both static art and installations. In the sense that it had to be experienced in its own locale, it was “unique”; and the interactivity of the fish reinforced this. On the other hand, it suffered from little of the spurious theoretical interpolations that often mar interactive art. Without consciously trying to meditate on the nature of media, it succeeded in establishing itself as a work of experiential art.
The physical elements in these artworks make them seem closer to sculpture, and draw them out of the narrow field of activity that surrounds a personal computer. Indeed, the table in Fisherman’s Café and the sand-box in Ulysses invite group viewing – and participation – in a way that a computer monitor-based work cannot. Whereas much Computer Art relies on an element of visual fascination, watching as a process unfolds before our eyes and a sequence of events takes shape, physical Computer Art takes this fascination into the viewer’s material realm, applying processes to actual objects. Even if, like Legible City, the main action takes place on a huge projected image, its very dimensions and the physical actions of the viewer on the bicycle give it a material component.
Here the viewer takes part in the art, becoming a participant in a way that few previous have approached. It parallels Roy Ascott’s concept of an immersive telematic artform which involves:
[…]the transformation of the viewer into an active participator who collaborates in creating the work, which is never a static product, but always remains in process throughout its duration.[1]
When I visited the Barbican show “Game On”, the history of computer games, I discovered they had taken the obvious step of allowing visitors to play a selection of classic and recent arcade games. However, apart from a few large projections which brought the image out of the machine, in general they were presented in arcade cabinets or on standard monitors. The concentration of gamers on their particular machine, the intense focus on a small contained environment, made for a somewhat anti-social exhibition where all the activity was atomised. The organisers had missed a chance to expand the frame of video games to fill entire walls and ceilings.
Some computer artists have produced one-off physical originals, in part to get around the problem of duplication. This is because transitory computer graphics can be fixed or reified in a physical medium: printing, sculpture and film/video are the three principal ways of capturing Computer Art in physical form. If this is the goal of the artist, i.e. they are aiming for a physical medium as the end product, then this fixing is fine. If however it is done merely as a stop-gap solution then it presents problems, for each physical medium diminishes or removes some fundamental properties of Computer Art. All remove interactivity; printing flattens the image and fixes it in time; sculpture also fixes it and can remove other properties like colour (depending on the process); film captures motion + colour + sound but does so in a linear fashion, so reducing its potentials.
Of course, when Computer artwork is printed or produced as a sculpture, it then enters the physical world and can be judged accordingly. But the fact remains that the computer’s special properties of organisation, animation, transformation and simulation can only truly be observed when the art is in its malleable digital form, and not when the machine is used as a quondam darkroom for manipulating 2-dimensional images for printing on paper.
If a computer artwork is manifested physically, it is presented or generated whole. In other words, its imperfections result from the means of realisation: they are errors of transcription (or reproduction), rather than modifications made by the artist in the course of realising the physical work. This is because the physical realisation is done mechanically. Notable exceptions are Jean-Pierre Hébert’s plotter prints and Helaman Ferguson’s sculptures, both of incorporate the intrinsic imperfections of physical materials as part of the artwork.
Computer artforms are invested with visual form by the code of the graphics program they emerge from. The image we see displayed on the monitor is supported by hundreds of lines of code defining sequences of algorithms which remain invisible and insubstantial, unless we view them at the level of code itself, and in doing so lose the visual appearance which they result in. This is both the great advantage and the current drawback of Computer Art.
The visible section is the literal tip of the iceberg comprising the code structure. It is this supporting code which is lost when the object makes the transition into physical reality, when it gains form in the physical world and loses its mathematical description which was necessary for its existence in the computer-generated space. This code was the minimum requirement for its existence (shadowy though it might be) in the mini-universe generated by the computer, whether a sheet of virtual canvas or a chunk of virtual rock.
When the image is printed, these representations of shape, colour and texture are manifested into corresponding material forms that are external to the computer. The lines of supporting code are no longer necessary or useful – indeed, cannot be represented [as functions] – because what was previously only the visible representation of the object becomes its entire physical framework. However, the resulting object may be said to be their physical trace, and their final result.
The great tradeoff is the loss of digital malleability and non-physical properties. The printed object no longer exists as a simulation rendered by the computer and subject to the whims of its creator. Upon its emergence in physical reality, it gains the properties of the material it is executed in, or on, and ceases to be a virtual, quasi-imaginary object.
Previously, the computer gave it form and held it together within itself because the computer defined the entirety of its universe; now in the physical world, its form is inherent in its physical material and it can exist in and of itself because it is now external to the computer.
One solution to these problems is suggested by Hébert, who has long valued the physical realisations of his algorithmic artwork. Its algorithmic basis is very important, since the programs he writes are directly responsible for realising the art in its finished form.
[Plate XXV: Views of Jean-Pierre Hébert’s Ulysses]
In Hébert’s case, the working out of the image on the sand cannot be captured in any meaningful way: even video footage only records the visual imprint, not the tactile experience of the ball ploughing its intricate furrows. Hébert’s artistic work, in the holistic sense, is not contingent upon these records, even though they themselves might of aesthetic interest. Also, although his work has a “score” – the program’s commands to the ball – which is portable in the sense that any Linux system can run it, the art requires his custom-built sand table to become operational.
Thus Hébert’s art could be located in the centre of the triangle between his concept (or intention), the program (as codification of that intention), and the physical rendition of the work by the sand machine. So there is a strongly performative aspect to Hébert’s work. In fact, his sand machine is a work of true Computer Art, whereas his prints, intriguing though they are, are really computer-mediated art because they are not dynamic.
The use of the physical, indeed its critical importance to Hébert’s work, marks a change from the often ephemeral forms associated with Computer Art. Yet JPH unquestionably uses and captures such forms, by fixing them permanently on paper and temporarily in sand. As he points out, its physicality is also a drawback in that it needs installation and a physical presence to function as a work of art (in the case of Ulysses). That is the price of not remaining as a portable digital image – and yet the digital form generated as an example on the computer is only a representation.
Hébert values the physical outcome of the digital process and is an important example of this tension that underpins Computer Art. Many computer images are designed solely for display on the computer screen, and take advantage of the malleable, controllable and illusionistic properties of the computer “image space”. however, such displays are dependent on computer formats and the volatile storage of digital information. For this reason, most of the records we have of 1960s Computer Art are in the form of photographs, video recordings and film. In their “native state”, such works would require complex and archaic hardware to be displayed, so they are usually shown as animated sequences on a VCR.
Computer artist Deborah Sokolove comments on the necessity of producing a physical realisation of digital art, which gives artists a tangible piece of artwork:
By far the most common [solution to presenting computer work] is to record the image on the screen photographically and then present large Cibachrome prints. Some artists, recognizing that a photograph can never reproduce accurately an image drawn in light, treat these as documentation.[2]
The documentary aspect of the print is what Hébert stresses when he refers to his laser prints as “sketches”; they are less important than the fully realized images executed over several days by his plotter. Yet such documentation is a necessary way of circumventing the problems of digital obsolescence and the febrile nature of the computer image. Some artists accord the status of “original” to that image on the screen; others bestow this title on the print itself. Sokolove sees the digital original “unpossessable”, which recognizes its digital and ephemeral existence.[3]
Here the contradictory nature of the computer image becomes significant, for the reproductions of early Computer Art works, even on the Internet, are generally scanned in from books and thus have been transferred several times from the digital to the physical world. The same can pertain to films printed from the computer, or to computer sculpture, but not in the case of art that is displayed or projected directly from the computer that contains the original code of the artwork itself. So is there an element of uniqueness inherent in the computer image, even though it can be mass-produced and broadcast?
Sokolove considers that printing a single digital image presented the viewer with an “arbitrary instant of what for the artist is an ongoing process”. This belies the computer image’s mutability and makes the static moment the centre of the viewer’s attention. Of course, some artists aim for the printed final image, but Sokolove has to balance the requirements of display with the “developing aesthetic of computer-based art”, which requires the malleable image.
Hébert also needs physical realisation of his work for another reason. It provides an important element of chance, depending entirely on non-computer variables such as the resistance of the sand, the interaction of the ball, or the inkflow in the pens of his plotter. Straightforward laser prints are lack this tactile quality; he calls them “sketches”. His work demands physical realisation: especially the beautifully detailed plotter prints.
In a final irony, the distinctive textured images, built up by a single continuous line, are too fine to reproduce digitally and hence lose much of their magic when shown in the rough, compressed image space of the Net. They must be appreciated “in the flesh”, suspended in a gallery with enough space to contemplate their effect and meaning. They exceed the boundaries of the screen, allowing the image to work itself out on a larger scale.
Computer Art designed for computer display is not only hard to sell, but hard to experience. Its maximum display area is limited by the monitor and it is constrained by its location on a computer system. Hébert, on the other hand, takes great care to present his work in a format which can be appreciated at length, is not subject to data loss, and which captures the high-resolution strokes of his artistic vision. Moreover, it ingeniously overcomes the central objection to Computer Art – that it is too easily duplicated – by demonstrating that each plotter piece is unique in itself.
When Hébert’s sand-sculpture Ulysses was installed at an exhibition in Helsinki, viewers became fascinated with the slow, deliberate movements of the ball as it scored its images into the sand: sometimes they would sit for up to an hour as the drawing appeared. When Ulysses made its debut at the SIGGRAPH graphics fair, over 200 people came to see its opening performance. From my own experience, I am convinced that Ulysses exercises this fascination because it is operating in physical space, in a tactile medium. The simple actions of the ball in the sand surprise even those who are accustomed to complex computer graphics.
In Hébert’s case, it seems intimately bound up with the physicality of his work. There is a magical element in seeing these images appear in physical form, without any apparent assistance – after all, the viewer only sees the sandbox, not the computer controlling it. There is also the innate fascination of the mathematical shapes it generates and, as Hébert himself acknowledges, a microcosmic appeal, akin to the Zen garden, of seeing such intricate plans on a small scale. As one admirer remarked, when the Ulysses drawings are photographed at close range, it is hard to tell whether they are lines in a sandbox or dunes in the deep desert.
The documentary aspect of the print is what Hébert stresses when he refers to his laser prints as “sketches”; they are less important than the fully realized images executed over several days by his plotter. Yet such documentation is a necessary way of circumventing the problems of digital obsolescence and the febrile nature of the computer image. Some artists accord the status of “original” to that image on the screen; others bestow this title on the print itself. Sokolove sees the digital original “unpossessable”, which recognizes its digital and ephemeral existence.[4]
Hébert interests Cuba because he has combined a moving image with the process of generating a static image, and the actual image is built in physical materials before the onlooker. The piece has a mesmerising quality. Its compelling nature is shared with the time-lapse film: perhaps the appeal arises from the feeling of seeing a very gradual process speeded up in real time.[5]
Thus the print can either be the end product or a snapshot of the process, the closest material (and saleable) form of an intangible digital image. Yet prints are not the only means of making images physical, since lathing and sculpting machines, not to mention rapid prototyping printers, can build three-dimensional objects directly from digital data. And what of animated sequences recorded on video or film?
The documentary aspect of the print is what Hébert stresses when he refers to his laser prints as “sketches”; they are less important than the fully realized images executed over several days by his plotter. Yet such documentation is a necessary way of circumventing the problems of digital obsolescence and the febrile nature of the computer image. Some artists accord the status of “original” to that image on the screen; others bestow this title on the print itself. Sokolove sees the digital original “unpossessable”, which recognizes its digital and ephemeral existence.
In Computer Art, the print can either be the end product or a snapshot of the process, the closest material (and saleable) form of an intangible digital image. Yet prints are not the only means of making images physical, since lathing and sculpting machines, not to mention rapid prototyping printers, can build three-dimensional objects directly from digital data; and animated sequences can be recorded on video or film.
[1] “Telematic Embrace – A Love Story? Roy Ascott’s Theories of Telematic Art” Edward Shanken, Telematic Timeline, get website refs.
[2] The Image in the Magic Box By Deborah Sokolove p272
[3] The Image in the Magic Box By Deborah Sokolove p272
[4] “The Image in the Magic Box” by Deborah Sokolove p272
[5] Interview with Larry Cuba, iotaCenter, Los Angeles, August 2001.
