[Yasmin_an] The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging

[Hervé Fischer]

Hervé Fischer
http://tweetart.blogspot.com/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cynthia Beth Rubin" <info at cbrubin.net>
To: "YASMIN ANNOUNCEMENTS" <yasmin_announcements at estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2011 5:33 PM
Subject: [Yasmin_an] The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and 
Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging


> HI Ysminers
>
> The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in 
> the Age of Digital Imaging
>
>
> Panel Chair (and participant)
> Cynthia Beth Rubin USA
>
> Confirmed Panelists:
> James Faure Walker UK
> Teresa Wennberg, Sweden / France
>
> One of the most profound transformations of the electronic age is the 
> changing relationship of representational imagery and abstraction. Once 
> inexorably bound to painting, the advent of photography made it the medium 
> of choice for documentation, a split which in turn freed painting to 
> prioritize formal elements over representational content, creating a 
> vocabulary of meaning derived from color, form, texture, and gesture, and 
> setting artists down a path that eventually culminated in Abstract 
> Expressionism.
>
> When digital imaging developed, early commercial developers of software 
> envisioned that this split would continue, but this was hardly the case 
> for the early software artists, working in the days before easy scanning 
> and digital photography.  As they “painted” into the computer, they found 
> the same unique qualities of repetition and iterative transformations that 
> their programming colleagues found just a few years earlier, as well as 
> the ability to add gestural expression.  Over the slow decade in which 
> scanning and digital photography gradually became available to artists, 
> early digital artists took the next step of integrating photographic 
> content, jumping seamlessly from PhotoMac to PixelPaint and back again, 
> even if it took years for the software companies to catch on.
>
> As digital imaging becomes the ultimate recombinant medium, artists are 
> now digitally painting with photographs as another element in their work, 
> just as they use color, form, and gesture.  Imagine the artist in the 
> digital studio, being able to can pick up a flat red organic form or an 
> image of a building.  In this context, the symbolism of the color “red” 
> and symbolism of “the building” become similar elements - an artist 
> chooses to use red because it causes spatial tension, or because it 
> represents anger, or represents communism, just as the artist may use the 
> building because it is a heavy rectangular form with pointy tops, or 
> because it has a pattern of repetition, or because it references a known 
> historic site or geographic location.
>
> Is this merger the gateway to both a new aesthetic and a new public 
> engagement, as we integrate documentation of experience, cultural 
> heritage, and science into our work?
>
>
>
>
>
>
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