Digital aesthetic 2012

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Welcome to Digital Aesthetic3 2012, a major international exhibition which celebrates some of the ways in which artists use digital technologies.

Digital technologies have become part of everyday life - from mobile phones, cameras, sat navs and gaming devices, through to personal computers, laptops, tablets and the internet – in the last 30 years digital technologies have revolutionised the way we communicate, shop, watch TV, and get from A to B. Throughout history, artists have experimented with and embraced new technologies.

In the 1960’s artists such as Nam June Paik and Steina and Woody Vasulka embraced the advent of the first portable film cameras – a tradition now continued by artists across the world pushing the boundaries of what the latest technologies can do.

The Digital Aesthetic3 2012 exhibition showcases recent artwork by some of the most significant international artists of our time, as well as emerging and mid-career artists. The exhibition explores our relationship with digital technology, and how it affects the way we see ourselves and the physical world.

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Many of the artists challenge the relationship between the artwork and the audience, blurring the lines between what is real and what isn’t.

Others relate to historical painting and art history, or use digital forms of collage.

Digital Aesthetic3 2012 is not a self-contained exhibition – it spills out into the whole museum in an attempt to help visitors make the connections between art history and cutting edge contemporary art. Look out for works

by Terry Flaxton and Lee Yongbaek in the Fine Art Gallery, Pat Flynn on the stairs, and Mark Amerika’s Museum of Glitch Aesthetics throughout the building, as well as the work in the exhibition galleries.

This guide provides an introduction to each of the artists and artworks however there is much more information on our website: www.digitalaesthetic.org.uk Digital Aesthetic3 2012 is the third and final manifestation of the Digital Aesthetic Project (2001-2012), a collaborative venture between the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston and The Electronic & Digital Art Unit (EDAU) at the University of Central Lancashire.

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Mark Amerika

The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA) is an online archive of the artwork and history of a fictional web-based practitioner called Artist 2.0. Through Artist 2.0, Amerika is able to create an alternative reality and a whole new body of artwork. Artist 2.0 is in effect an avatar, similar to many personas that have been created and exist only online. Through his avatar, Amerika is given greater artistic freedom. By using everyday technologies such as mobile phones or Google Earth to make movies and other artworks, Artist 2.0 deliberately highlights and celebrates the limitations of digital technology.

A selection of artworks by Artist 2.0 is displayed in the exhibition but also around the Harris building and amongst the collections of fine and decorative art, creating new physical anomalies or ‘glitches’, in addition to the virtual ones online.

The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, 2012 Website and interventions (framed jpegs, books, projections, old mobile phones, screen based work, QR Codes, artist quotes, sound piece).

Courtesy the artist and AND Festival

Mark Amerika lives and works Colorado and Hawaii, USA Amerika has exhibited widely including at the Whitney Biennial, New York; The ICA, London and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. He is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado and Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at La Trobe University.

MOGA is an ongoing artwork that has been co-produced by the Harris Museum & Art Gallery and the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival.

markamerika.com @markamerika

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Peter callas

Postscript, 2004 Digital print on photographic paper Courtesy the artist Our Potential Allies, 1980/1999 Video Courtesy the artist

Postscript is a collage of both historic and contemporary imagery. It is one of a series of prints entitled Circle of Confusion, based on the 14th century fresco Trionfo della Morte (‘The Triumph of Death’), from the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa, Italy. The fresco was badly damaged during the Second World War and the Trionfo is one of the only surviving parts.

Postscript shows a section of the monastery wall covered in carved crucifixes and overlaid with images of hands cut out from the fresco.

By manipulating the photograph, Callas aims to re-imagine history and bridge the gap between the two periods of time; the hands appear to be both literally and conceptually breaking through the cracks of the 21st century.

Our Potential Allies is a dual screen video installation created in 1980 that was adapted for a single screen in 1999. It deals with the subject of Western colonial digitalaesthetic.org.uk

intervention, by comparing and contrasting the masked face of Callas on the left, with archive news footage of tribal and Asian people on the right. Callas’ face is painted in black and white paint, representing the stereotype of ‘primitivism’. He then reacts, through facial expressions, to the changing images on the right.

This presents an ironic analysis of the West’s perceived world view of itself, in relation to ‘others’.

Peter Callas b. 1952, lives and works Sydney, Australia Peter Callas is a pioneer of the artistic use of the electronic image in Australia.

Over the last three decades he has utilised a wide variety of electronic and digital media to create an ongoing series of cultural ‘portraits’, responding to different and sometime challenging locations around the world. scanlines.net/node/1963

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sophie calle

Unfinished is a video installation made in collaboration with Fabio Balducci. The installation developed from a series of images from an ATM security camera that were given to Calle in 1988.

Calle, who is known for her ‘sleuth like’ investigations, was unsure what to do with them. Over a period of 15 years she interacted with bank employees, a pawn shop merchant, and strangers, to create a yet unresolved exploration into the anonymous photographs taken at a cash machine.

Through this work she is questioning security, data protection, and authorship as well as the actual processes of making and finishing an artwork.

in collaboration with Fabio Balducci

Unfinished, 2005 Video projection, 30min 14sec Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2012

Sophie Calle b. 1953, lives and works in Paris, France Calle is a highly acclaimed conceptual artist who has exhibited widely internationally. She constructs stories from images, sounds and found or solicited materials to make installations of varying scale and content.

Her investigations explore intimate human emotions, such as love and desire, and often blur the boundaries between what is public and what is private.

She also questions the relationship between her subjects and herself, as both an artist and an observer of human character and behaviour.

Works from the series The Hotel (1981) are currently being shown in Thresholds at Tate Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial.

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Peter Campus

i have brought a bit of ponquogue bay to you. one foggy morning i set up my camera to record 12 minutes 30 seconds of image. the tower stands there, its function only to be guessed at. the old bridge was only partially taken down, the center portion was removed, the ends left standing.

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Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York

my camera’s experience is different than mine. it is fixed, compared to the constant motion of my eye. it takes a sliver of landscape, a small bit of time, a restricted field of view. the images implies what is outside, but must express what is within its boundary. the camera is foveal, set within the larger field. it is selective and simplified. it is limited and only my intentions expand its view.

phantom,

in my studio, surrounded by computers, i slowed the images down to half speed. i worked on the color as i always do until it seemed closest to my intentions. i add a brownish tint in deference to my cataracts.

phantom, 2012 Video Courtesy the artist and

Peter Campus b. 1937, lives and works Long Island, USA Peter Campus is a seminal figure in the history of video art whose work is among the collections of many major galleries and museums. He is known for his pioneering video work in the early 1970s. After a long break Campus returned to the medium in 1995, employing experimental methods to create digital videos dealing with the exploration of themes, including the passing of time, death and memory.

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Terry Flaxton

‘I took a 24 to 297 Angenieux Optimo lens and zoomed in 6 miles and held my breath for thirty seconds. During the time I held my breath, I knew that I could digitally zoom into the image 1000 per cent and slowly zoom back – then, when my digital zoom had expanded back to the shot I had been silently holding, I could release my breath and slowly physically zoom back until I had revealed the image that Adams had seen’.

In Re Ansel Adams re-presents, in video format, a high resolution photograph by the famous American photographer Ansel Adams, who produced many beautiful and iconic images of Yosemite National Park during the early to mid 20th Century.

In Re Ansel Adams, 2008 Digital video Courtesy the artist

Terry Flaxton b. 1953, lives and works in Somerset and Bristol Video artist and cinematographer, Terry Flaxton’s recent work explores developments in both the making and experiencing of artworks with the application of High Resolution Imaging.

His work is held in numerous international collections, and he has had solo exhibitions around the world.

He is currently an AHRC Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the University of Bristol.

www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk

Flaxton pushes the capabilities of highly sophisticated digital photographic equipment to investigate how high resolution technology can affect the way that artworks are experienced.

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Pat flynn

Cold Children, 2012 Lambda print behind glass Courtesy the artist and The International 3, Manchester

Cold Children is an installation of digital prints that uses the repeated motif of an empty photoframe constructed using CGI technology (computer generated imagery).

At first glance the empty domestic looking frames appear to be reflecting the lights from the space in which they are shown, but closer inspection reveals that the reflections are also manufactured; the artist is playing with concepts of reality and fiction. The artist has explained that the title makes reference to a conditioned behaviour in response to the expanded and pervasive influence of television.Â

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Pat Flynn b. 1972, lives and works Manchester, UK Flynn takes influence from Hollywood films, computer games, and consumerism. He uses photography, film, and installation work to then examine the language of mass production, and the human ‘need’ to believe.

He has recently exhibited at 84 Clifton Street (Cardiff), Marion Scharmann (Cologne), Vermilion (Manchester), and at the Waterfront Art Gallery (Suffolk). Pat Flynn is represented

by The International 3 (Manchester), Mermaid & Monster (Cardiff), and Marion Scharmann (Cologne).

patflynn.co.uk

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Yuan Goang-ming

City Disqualified Ximen District in the Day time, 2002 City Disqualified Ximen District at Night, 2002 Digitally Altered Photography, Lambda print Courtesy the artist and Tina Keng Gallery, Taiwan

City Disqualified is a series of largeformat, high resolution digital prints depicting a major road intersection in the Ximen district of Taipei. The images, photographed from a high angle, are of usually crowded urban scenes in which there are no people.

Each image is made up of photographs taken by the artist over a period of one month.

Over 70 frames were selected from more than 300 mediumformat (film) photographs. These photographs were then scanned into a computer and gradually superimposed on to each other.

All traces of people and vehicles were systematically erased, the final images being carefully constructed to give the impression that it captures one moment of time. Yuan Goang-Ming likens it to working with video describing them as - ‘ the simultaneous representation of different moments of time’.

The presence of life in these works is seen through the details of the images, the road markings, the traffic signs, the advertising boards, the open shops. Their stillness is unnerving, even without knowing the city of Taipei the lack of human presence does not remove the feeling of movement within the images.

Yuan Goang-Ming b. 1965, lives and works Taipei, Taiwan Yuan Goang-Ming has an international reputation for his video works, and for being one of the leading Taiwanese artists in world of International Media Art. He also currently holds a post as Associate Professor at the New Media Arts program of Taipei National University of Arts.

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Harrison & Wood

Paul Harrison b. 1966 and John Wood, b.1969 live and work in Bristol, UK

The HD projection DIYVBIED is the latest video work by the collaborative artistic duo John Wood and Paul Harrison.

The work has been commissioned especially for Digital AestheticÂł 2012.

DIYVBIED plays on the familiar normality of a British supermarket car park, and the cultural detachment from the horror of car bombs. The artwork displays one hundred vehicles, half of which are detonated in an unpredictable sequence following the explosion of a single vehicle in the opening shot.

The film is about fifteen minutes long, which reflects the average call out time of the police. The sounds of the explosions are loud and powerful. Coupled with the relative serenity of ambient supermarket sounds, they contribute to the overall unnerving and thought provoking qualities of the video.

DIYVBIED stands for Do-it-yourself vehicle borne improvised explosive device.

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DIYVBIED, 2012 HD video projection Courtesy the artists and Fletcher Carroll Gallery, London

Harrison and Wood have been making single screen and installation based video works together since 1993, most of which explore the relationship between architecture and the human figure. Within these there appears to be an established method of formulating and resolved actions within a time period of 20 seconds to 3 minutes. Folllowing on from Fire (2004), DIYVBIED forms the second in a longer series of works which departs from this formula.

Their work is highly regarded, and exhibited and collected internationally.

They have recently exhibited works in France, Switzerland, Australia, Japan and the UK. The artists are kindly gifting an Artist Proof of DIYVBIED to the Harris collections. harrisonandwood.com

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Takahiko iimura

Interactive: A I U E O NN, (1993/2012) Interactive video installation, six screens, touch screen, projector Courtesy the artist A game of words which starts with letter A Computerised word game, MacMini Courtesy the artist

Iimura’s multi-screen touch panel installation and projection piece Interactive: A I U E O NN is a new interpretation of his video A I U E O NN Six Features (1993). The work displays seven versions of the artist’s face pronouncing the sounds of six Japanese letters, but in the wrong order. The artist’s facial expressions have been exaggerated and distorted by digital technology. On the surface this makes an entertaining attempt to teach the basics of Japanese, wrongly. However it also presents ideas about identity, language, communication, and the feeling of being foreign.

The second artwork, A game of words which starts with letter A, is a computerised word game that uses video. It deals with similar issues and also highlights unpredictability in the relationship between different languages.

Two participants are invited to construct Japanese words using six faces/colours, which represent

Japanese characters/letters.

Each player takes three alternating attempts to produce a word that begins with the Japanese characters for the letter A. The results are shown at the end; the longer the word is the higher the score. It is a difficult yet amazingly simple game that is fun, thought provoking, and entertaining.

Takahiko Iimura b.1937, lives and works Tokyo, Japan & New York, USA Iimura is a pioneer of Japanese experimental film and video. Working in film since 1960 and video since 1970, his recent work has involved the use of computers to publish multimedia CD-ROMs/DVDs which showcase a combination of photos, text, video, and graphics.

He has had many major individual international film and video exhibitions, lectured, and received numerous awards and prizes, over the past six decades. takaiimura.com

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mary lucier

North Dakota Mandalas, 2004 4 screen video installation Courtesy the artist

North Dakota Mandalas is part of a series of work which began in 2004 entitled MANDALA. The word MANDALA comes from the historical Indo-Aryan language Sanskrit, and means ‘circle’.

The MANDALA form, which often looks like as a plan or grid, appears throughout many religions as an aid to meditation, or spiritual image. It also acts as a generic term that describes any chart that presents the universe from the perspective of humanity.

The MANDALA series explores the theme of landscape as a place for personal and technological experimentation and meditation.

North Dakota Mandalas consists of four monitors arranged in a grid formation on the wall. Each one of them plays a looped video that is named after a different location in the state of North Dakota where the footage was filmed: Mandala #1: Corinth, Mandala #2: Grand Forks, Mandala #3: Lewis and Clark, Mandala #4: Lignite.

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The video footage has been digitally manipulated to create an installation that pulses with psychedelic imagery.

‘The video image is articulated as color, geometry, and texture, loosing almost all semblance of the “natural” or “real” environment.

The colors are keyed to objects in the scene and are manipulated kaleidoscopically, moving as the camera originally moved’.

Mary Lucier b. 1944, lives and works Ohio, USA Mary Lucier is a highly acclaimed, seminal figure in the history of video art. She has been making sound, video, and multi-media image works since the early 1970’s, and her work is exhibited and collected internationally.

Her work has been exhibited and collected by many major museums around the world.

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Lee Yongbaek

At first glance, this video performance appears to be a still image of brightly coloured flowers.

However, closer observation reveals a three-dimensional optical illusion, in which camouflaged soldiers move slowly though the composition.

The video is accompanied by a soundtrack of relaxing natural sounds. This, along with the peaceful imagery of flowers, presents a powerful and thoughtprovoking contrast when compared to the images of war.

Angel Soldier, 2011 Single channel video Mac Mini, LCD Monitor, Headphones 23min Courtesy of the artist and the Hakgojae Gallery, Korea

Lee Yongbaek b. 1960, lives and works in Seoul, Korea Yongbaek is regarded as a leading figure in technological and new media art in Korea. He has had recent solo shows in China, Korea, Italy, and Japan, and has contributed to group shows in Norway, Singapore, Germany, Turkey, Russia, and the UK. leeyongbaek.com

Through simple but powerful imagery, the artwork considers individual identity and the human body’s place in artificial, digital and physical reality. As the soldiers disappear and reappear in the constructed environment, their personal identity becomes indistinguishable from their surroundings.Â

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Artists at PR1 Gallery Until 19 October 2012

Brendan Dawes, UK Apollo 11 Transcript Static, 2009 Digital Image printed on Somerset paper Courtesy of the artist Apollo 11 Transcript Static is a digital image created by digital artist, designer, author and maker Brendan Dawes. The artwork was produced for the 40th anniversary of the moon landings and presents the entire transcript of the mission, apart from Neil Armstrong’s now famous line, in an incomprehensible way. brendandawes.com Alexa Wright, UK A View From Inside, 2012 Manipulated digital photography This project was funded by an AHRC Fellowship Courtesy of the artist Alexa Wright uses photography, video, sound and interactive digital media to examine human identities. These two works are from a new series of portraits of people who experience psychosis. alexawright.com

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Marilene Oliver, Brazil/UK Orixa, 2010 Foam rubber and seed beads Courtesy of the artist Marilene Oliver is a sculptor whose work explores the relationship between the physical human body and our increasingly digital world, and how we might need to evolve because of its impact. Orixa represents a goddess from Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion. It is composed entirely from the MRI scans, and constructed out of 3mm foam and white seed beads. marileneoliver.com Keith Brown, UK Magic Carpet, 2010 Digital Prints Courtesy of the artist Magic Carpet is a series of two digital prints that utilize both digital and physical technology to create an illusion of three dimensions, and depth.

The images are all created from digitally manipulated ‘torus forms’ (donut shapes) and coloured to look like a Persian carpet.

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Paul Coldwell, UK Points of Reference I, II, and III, 2011 Screenprint Courtesy of the artist Points of Reference I, II, and III is a series of prints that demonstrate the relationship between the traditional processes of printmaking and digital technology. The prints depict connections between objects in a map like structure. paulcoldwell.org

Stefanie Dykes, USA Placing and replacing, 2010 Digital prints on Kozo papers, on wooden newspaper sticks Courtesy of the artist Placing and replacing is a print installation that explores the artist’s own self identity, and outdated gender roles, within the cultural context that she lives in. saltgrassprintmakers.org

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David Henckel, UK Golden Gum, 2012 Passive Infra Red sensors and laser triggers, Speakers, Chewing Gum and Gold Paint Courtesy of the artist Golden Gum is an interactive audio-visual installation by Preston-based artist David Henckel. The installation uses the chance placements of discarded chewing gum on the floor outside Preston’s PR1 Gallery to dictate a live composition of sound. davidhenckel.com Ingrid Ledent , Belgium Continuum Ininterrompu VIII, 2009 Lithograph and Computerprint Courtesy of the artist Continuum Ininterrompu VIII is a lithograph and computer print by Ingrid Ledent, professor of lithography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. It is part of a series which explore different perceptions of time. ingridledent.be

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Katsutoshi Yuasa, Japan Pseudo Mythology #3, 2011 Oil-based woodcut print Courtesy of the artist Pseudo Mythology #3 is an oil-based woodcut print. Katsutoshi Yuasa uses the traditional woodcut technique to depict digital photographs.

He explains: “While woodcut is a very traditional Japanese printmaking technique that is a long process of production and all carving and printing all by a hand, I think there contains many interesting questions regarding the origin of photography�. katsutoshiyuasa.com Jo Lansley/ Neeta Madahar, UK Scape, 2007 Digital Prints, retouched from photographic negatives Courtesy of the artist Scape is the result of a commission by the University of the West of England that encouraged the artists to collaborate for the first time to produce a digital artwork. Jo Lansley and Neeta Madahar construct sets that are filmed, or photographed to evoke a psychological response.

Scape explores ideas of escape and fantasy within the notion of a landscape. digitalaesthetic.org.uk

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Harris Museum & Art Gallery Market Square, Preston, PR1 2PP T. 01772 258248 E. harris.museum@preston.gov.uk www.harrismuseum.org.uk More Digital Aesthetic at: