[spectre] abroeck: Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture

[Andreas Broeckmann]

(last week, we opened the exhibition 'Deep Screen 
- Art in Digital Culture' at the Stedelijk Museum 
in Amsterdam, which runs until 30 September 2008; 
below is my introductory text which, I hope, will 
contribute to the ongoing debate on art and 
media; in the 'Postscript on Media Art', I 
diagnose 'the liberation of artistic media' ... 
Comments are, of course, welcome. -ab)

exhibition info: http://www.stedelijk.nl/oc2/page.asp?pageid=1808
introdution text also available at: 
http://www.mikro.in-berlin.de/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=texts

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Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture. An Introduction

Andreas Broeckmann


I. Preparations

The initial idea for this exhibition grew out of 
the Stedelijk Museum's wish to dedicate one of 
its periodical Municipal Acquisions Exhibitions 
to art that uses digital and electronic media. In 
our discussions last autumn we decided that it 
would be interesting to take as a selection 
criterium not the technical media in use, but to 
focus on the ways in which artists respond to the 
cultural and aesthetic changes afforded by 
digital technologies. Importantly, we wanted to 
open up the exhibition to artists who deal with 
these cultural changes, even though in their 
works they may not be using the most recent 
technical inventions.

A call for proposals was published early in the 
winter, inviting artists living and working in 
the Netherlands to submit artworks that reflect 
on the image as process, or event. The underlying 
idea was that contemporary images, whether 
digital or analogue, are neither static, nor 
fixed once and for all. They are characterised by 
generative processes and transformation over 
time: in digital environments, even still images 
are performed and experienced as events. 
Moreover, we ascertained that visuality is no 
longer a necessary condition of what constitutes 
an image: sound and touch are increasingly 
important in the new image realm.

In the advertisement, we attempted to offer an 
inclusive definition of this expanded field of 
the image as process and the image as event, a 
field which encompasses generative computer code 
as well as video screens, paintings that reflect 
on their condition in the digital era, as well as 
interactive and non-visual installations. We were 
looking for works that tell stories and that 
trace new routes of abstraction. Art projects 
that are shared and cast across networked and 
mobile devices. That manipulate our sense of 
present, past, and future. Works that are agents 
in the digital media ecology of images and that 
approach, reflect and construct reality.

Another, often decisive criterium that the jury 
applied, was that the selected works would 
actively reflect on digital culture, and at the 
same time imagine art beyond the digital.
As a result of this call we received, within only 
a few weeks, submissions from around 200 artists 
of quite different age groups and backgrounds, 
and with a wide range of artistic media in use, 
from painting and photography, through 
interactive and software-based installations, to 
typographic design and sound art. It is a matter 
of course that the jury had an almost impossible 
task to compare and select from such a variety of 
approaches.

What the jury was most interested in was artistic 
quality; while we were at times teased by cute 
ideas and clever applications of hardware and 
software technologies, we were really looking for 
artistic substance in the proposed works and in 
the oeuvre of the artist in general. What we had 
to keep in mind was also the logic of a renowned 
museum collection that, even if it is willing to 
take risks, expects durability in the items it 
acquires. Two questions thus became the basis for 
the discussions of the jury: does this work 
reflect, in an interesting and unique way, on the 
cultural and aesthetic condition of our time, so 
deeply influenced by digital technologies, and 
the social practices associated with them? and is 
this a strong work of art that we recommend for 
acquisition by the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam?

While the jury finally agreed about the artists 
that we selected for the exhibition, there were 
of course many discussions about these, as well 
as about artists who did not make it into the 
show that will run throughout the summer of 2008, 
as one of the last exhibitions in the Stedelijk's 
temporary exhibition space in the Post CS 
building. The jury decided to emphasise the 
thematic focus of the call, which meant that some 
strong works which did, however, not deal with 
the exhibition theme, had to be excluded. In 
cases of doubt, we tried to take a daring 
approach, selecting work that would challenge the 
museum and its audience to rethink their frames 
of reference.


II. Into the Deep Screen

William Gibson's cyberpunk novel 'Neuromancer' 
(first published in 1984) famously begins like 
this: 'The sky above the port was the color of 
television, tuned to a dead channel.' This 
enigmatic image has fascinated many critical 
technology afficinados, conjuring up a dystopian 
post-medial world in which the spectacular mass 
medium of television would merely be a faint 
memory, a phenomenon as dull as a hazy sky. It 
suggests a TV set, placed in an awkward position, 
suspended from above, showering light and 
electronic noise onto the landscape. Buildings, 
roads, cars and people are reflecting the pixel 
snow, the boundary between the hissing screen, 
the glittering points of light, and the world 
below, blurred beyond recognition.

A second historical deep screen goes back another 
twenty years and presents not an expansive image 
of the physical world swallowed by media, but to 
the contrary, points to the very representational 
limitations and technical idiosyncracies of any 
medium. After abandoning music, the artist Nam 
June Paik discovered the conceptual potentials of 
electronic media. In 1963, he was the first 
artist to use a TV set in an art exhibition, and 
unlike others he was less interested in events 
shown on the screen, than in the fact that the 
technical and the social medium of television 
could actually be manipulated. One of the most 
direct interventions were Paik's experiments with 
the magnetic field in which the cathode ray of 
the TV tube is guided to draw the lines of light 
that make up the image, onto the screen surface. 
Magnet TV (1965) was an interactive setting in 
which the audience was invited to move a strong 
magnet around the exhibited TV set, twisting and 
turning the screen image. Paik's own favourite 
subjects for this playful 'demagnetisation' were, 
a little later, US president Richard Nixon, and 
the guru of the new media age, Marshall McLuhan, 
whose belief in the liberatory potential of 
television in the hands of artists encouraged 
Paik to test this on McLuhan's own talking head.

The 'deep screen' which this exhibition takes as 
its cue is thus not a new phenomenon. One could 
also trace it to the broken surfaces of Cézanne's 
late impressionist paintings, or to the 
Renaissance and, for instance, Hans Holbein's 
1533 double portrait of The Ambassadors, in which 
a strange anamorphosis in the foreground, 
camouflaging a skull, elucidates both the 
material, painted surface, and the 
multi-dimensional space of representation that 
the painting opens up.

The 'deep screen' that the exhibition title 
points to, implies a transgression of the 
illuminated image surface; it is a dynamic, 
spatial and temporal field which connects the 
presence of the artwork to the process of 
perception and interaction. An hypothesis that 
the exhibition puts forward is that, while the 
deep screen has distinct art historical 
precursors, it is a phenomenon that has become 
more complex in the age of electronic and digital 
media. Like all good artworks, the individual 
pieces in the show of course do a lot more than 
illustrate a curatorial concept. However, as one 
of their aspects, and in order to offer a red 
thread for exploring the exhibition, the 
presented works probe 'screen depth' in relation 
to the construction and deconstruction of space, 
in relation to the screen as a space of action 
and interaction, and as a complex field of 
perception.

The fluidity with which we can today imagine 
virtual spaces as physical ones, and physical 
spaces as virtual ones, is determined by our 
experiences with digital image spaces which are, 
by their very nature, temporal, fluid, and 
endlessly modifiable. Digital imaging has not so 
much physically transformed the material world, 
but it has drastically changed the way in which 
we look and imagine the world around us. Here's 
an experiment: imagine a room in your home; think 
of the furniture and things that you have in that 
room; now imagine that you have a virtual model 
of this room before your eye and you can fly 
through this space while it is, at the same time 
being stretched so that you cannot reach the end, 
then contracting again to be rolled out onto a 
flat surface, the virtual camera eye being 
trapped somewhere in the middle of the plane. The 
claim is that anybody who has experienced 3D 
virtual spaces through goggles, in a projection, 
or on a computer screen, can easily follow that 
experiment and imagine the transformations of the 
imagined space.

Oscillating between space and image, the 
environments of David Jablonowski include 
three-dimensional, sculptural objects, 
two-dimensional images and graphic structures 
which are sometimes bent and curved into the 
third dimension, and they include one-dimensional 
points of colour, pixel objects which have a 
spatial extension only when viewed at a certain 
angle. Otherwise these pixels become part of an 
image space that we can walk through yet that we 
can also, before our computer-trained inner eye, 
collapse into a two-dimensional composition.

The reverse process can be observed in Erica van 
Loon's photographic installations which show flat 
images whose graphic structures have been 
composed in physical spaces. The size and form of 
the presenation defies the realism of the 
photographic medium and tease the observer to 
reconstruct the physical space which, in the 
artwork, is forced into flatness.

In Gabriel Lester's installation of landscape 
videos, Choreography, the camera person's 
foresighted eye is replaced by robot cameras. 
Their movements, each pan, each zoom, each turn, 
seem devoid of any romantic intention which would 
normally guide the human gaze in such an 
environment. The rhythm of the music that plays 
to the images is used as a functional trigger, 
rather than as an emotional augmentation of the 
mediated experience of nature. A similar 
frustration of expectations is relayed by Persijn 
Broersen and Margit Lukács' Hinterland #2 series. 
The artists derive these images from the mass 
media and clear them of any referential objects 
or scenes, leaving only the backdrop. Like an 
empty computer monitor, or a white sheet of 
paper, these empty pieces of scenery hold the 
potential for any event, and for any degree of 
mediated boredom.

One such scene is the Lost Paradise in Meiya 
Lin's video installation in which a postmodern 
Adam and Eve, lounging in the mellow, virtual set 
of a non-descript culture, devoid of guilt, 
responsibility, or identity. While the earlier 
large-scale drawings of Jasmijn Visser reference 
a similar iconography of comic strips and 
computer animations, her more recent works go 
beyond the diagrammatic and use the same visual 
language for the composition of dynamic, almost 
cinematographic tableaus in which the animation 
of space is being re-invented.

Luna Maurer's design strategies often include the 
active involvement of the visitor or user. In her 
Blue Fungus project for the Deep Screen 
exhibition, she turns the entire museum space 
into a potential image surface that the visitors 
can fill, structure, and thus appropriate, with 
an immense number of blue stickers. Here, the 
exhibition space becomes identical, and 
congruous, with the interactive screen of the 
designer.

Any standard computer with a graphical user 
interface teaches us that, whatever we see, can 
be manipulated, clicked on, cut and pasted, 
transformed, deleted. The extent of that 
manipulation will in part be dependent on the 
skills of the user, and in part on the degrees of 
freedom that the software in use allows - a 
realisation that is responsible for the 
association of open source software with the 
notion of liberty, and of the free software 
movement with a particular type of social 
liberation. We can see this effect of the image 
space turned into a space of interaction in Luna 
Maurer's project, which can also be read in 
relation to the multi-user virtual worlds, like 
Second Life, where users can design their 
personal avatars as well as the collectively 
visited virtual spaces. The (constructed) 
pictorial realism of such worlds, as well as the 
'natural' behaviour of the avatars populating 
them, is put to the test by the modified Quake 
levels which JODI are offering in their Untitled 
Game hall. The spatial coordinates, as well as 
the effects of our interaction seem largely out 
of control, even though the event logic of the 
games still appears to be in tact. In the same 
way as Gabriel Lester undermines any romantic 
notion of landscape, JODI undermine the naïve 
assumption that virtual worlds are made of 
anything but highly volatile digital code.

And while JODI seem to mock the seriousness of 
1960s minimalism, the software-based, generative 
drawing machines by Jochem van der Spek mimic the 
action painters of the 1950s and replace their 
spectacular gestural theatre by an independent, 
rule-based yet lucid virtual mechanism. Equally 
independent is the process that leads to the 
detailed little sculptures of Erwin Driessens and 
Maria Verstappen. The artists define certain 
rules for the mathematical calculations which 
simulate a form of natural selection to arrive at 
three-dimensional, structurally open and strong 
topological objects. The sculptures, 
consecutively realised with a 3D-printer, are 
based on an almost autonomous, machinic design 
process, almost devoid of aesthetic 
considerations.

Artworks like these tend to beg the question: who 
is in control? Interactive art can dramatise that 
question and turn it into an aesthetically 
powerful proposition, like in the rotating 
sculpture Spatial Sounds by Marnix de Nijs and 
Edwin van der Heide which has the independent 
behaviour of an angry, menacing animal. This is 
an artwork that is neither a passive or benign 
mechanism, nor one that will accept submission 
under a self-assured observer. The screen here 
becomes a tense battlefield in which the human 
actor must admit defeat. - A defeat that has 
already happened in Remco Scha and Arthur 
Elsenaar's Face Shift which is predicated on the 
idea that an intelligent machine has adopted the 
human face as an interface, a screen for 
expressing the its complex emotions.

If all of this was experienced in the waking 
state, Nathaniel Mellors takes us into an uneasy 
dream world where the loaded relationship between 
human and machine is played out as an absurd and 
psychotic piece of performance. As the narrative 
unfolds, it becomes more and more difficult to 
decide whether this nightmare has sprung from the 
mind of a human, or from that of a machinic Time 
Surgeon.

In its exploration of the way in which digital 
media have transformed mediated perception, the 
exhibition also asks whether, in the course of 
that transformation, the domain of art has been 
shifted, or whether that domain might in fact be 
continuous with earlier or non-digital artistic 
practices. An interesting example upon which this 
question can be pondered are the painting and 
video works by Roland Schimmel which present 
seeing as a dynamic process. The activation of 
images and after-images on the retinal screen of 
the human eye is done no less effectively by the 
still image of the painting than by the moving 
image of the video. In contrast, Geert Mul's 
SN.X4 offers an opportunity to look into the 
parallel 'retinal' effects in the 'eye' of the 
video apparatus. The same scene, shown in four 
different ways by careful manipulation of the 
optical and digital production technologies used, 
hints at the metaphorical 'depth' of the systems 
that bring forth these dynamic images.

The most fundamental question as to what 
constitutes a 'screen' is posed by Gert-Jan 
Prins' Make Before Break: the Cavity version, a 
visually neutral space of pure, 
non-representational sound that is, however, rich 
in associations and acoustic structures. The 
continuum between the sound sources, the spatial 
distribution of the sound waves, the human ears 
and the listening minds form the perceptual field 
in which the sonic artwork takes shape, and makes 
sense. Mark Bain, in a different, yet equally 
radical gesture, turns the inside of our bodies, 
especially our skeleton, into the resonant 
surface on which his work, StartEndTime, is 
presented. The event of the September 11th attack 
on the World Trade Center in New York, documented 
as seismographic waves, has been transformed into 
an event that reverberates in the medium of our 
body.

Like Bain's installation, a number of the works 
in this exhibition are, even though they may have 
been produced with the help of a computer, not 
dependent on digital technology for their 
presentation. Nevertheless, they mark significant 
aspects of a contemporary art practice that tries 
to come to terms with the aesthetic and cultural 
conditions of a time in which digital techniques 
and apparatuses have become a quasi natural part 
of the environment we inhabit. Therefore, even 
the almost archaic techniques, layered on top of 
each other in Pierre Bastien's installation 
Somewhere in the Dark, characterise a 
contemporary media ecology in which light, 
shadows, the human voice (here that of Robert 
Wyatt) and acoustic music continue to be crucial 
means of artistic expression.


III. Postscript on Media Art

The present exhibition makes no particular 
commitment to the display of digital technologies 
or of current trends in techno-culture. This is a 
decision that might be looked at critically by a 
media art scene that defines itself in contrast 
to the contemporary art field. The underlying 
potential for disagreement emerges from different 
evaluations of the cultural field characterised 
by interests in art, technology, internet 
culture, design, electronic music, open source 
software, game culture, and many related issues. 
This field, which we can call digital culture, 
has over the last four or so decades been growing 
from a marginal subculture to a diverse and 
fractured stratum that cuts right across 
contemporary society. As the first generation 
grows up that has a more intimate relation with 
the personal computer than with television, it 
will become less and less relevant to even 
distinguish between digital culture and 
contemporary culture in general. This is also 
why, for artists like Jablonowski, J. Visser, 
Broersen & Lukács, Maurer, and others in this 
show, the distinction between digital and 
analogue artistic media no longer seems relevant, 
and why for them there is no ideological 
obligation to submit to the aesthetic limitations 
of the epoch-making technologies. For an earlier 
generation of artists, it was a decisive step to 
'go digital', or not. Entire artistic careers 
were ruined by the stigma of doing 'art with a 
plug'. (Others were made by the exclusivity which 
that stigma offered in certain circles.)

It has been one of the grave misconceptions of 
'new media art' to assume that the new 
technologies would break with the paradigms of 
representation, perception and cognition to an 
extent that the effects of that break could 
exclusively be articulated by means of these very 
technologies. However, as this misconception 
withers, only the label Media Art - in the sense 
of 'art based on electronic or digital media' - 
will be a thing of the past; a past when it was 
also aesthetically decisive when one chose for 
the artistic programme determined by those 
'technologies formerly known as new media'. In 
the same way as contemporary artists are free to 
use drawing and painting, photography and film, 
video and sculpture, they are also no longer 
risking their art market career if they develop 
an interactive 3D-environment, a generative video 
projection, or a sound installation. This will 
mean, on the one hand, that part of what has been 
produced as Media Art in the past, will at some 
point be re-evaluated as important pre-cursors to 
later contemporary art developments - or as 
idiosyncratic variations of other possibilities 
that were not followed up on. On the other hand, 
the described liberation of the artistic media 
will require a further broadening of art school 
teaching and art funding, in which the 
high-ceiling studios for painters and sculptors 
are consistently matched by well-equipped studios 
for digitally based art production in image, 
sound, space, and movement. Artists must have a 
choice, and they ought to be as critically aware 
of the politics, the historical background, and 
the aesthetic potentials and limitations of 
software, as of oil and acryllic paint, HD video, 
or bronze.

The overall submissions to our call, and 
hopefully also the exhibition itself, are 
testimony to the fact that artists in the 
Netherlands are doing quite well in terms of the 
liberation of artistic media. It is now time for 
the museums, for public and private collectors to 
acknowledge a change in the arts that has been 
going on for decades and that is a challenge for 
gallerists, art historians and conservation 
experts, much more than for the artists 
themselves. In that respect, the strategic 
ambition of Deep Screen is to show how much can 
be gained for the appreciation of contemporary 
art from such a broadening of the horizon.


Further reading

Marie-Luise Angerer: Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2007
Departement Kunst & Medien (eds.): Media Arts 
Zurich. 13 Positions. Zürich: Scheidegger & 
Spiess, 2008
Matthew Fuller: Media Ecologies: Materialist 
Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT 
Press, 2005
Max Imdahl: Farbe. Kunsttheoretische Reflexionen 
in Frankreich. München: Fink, 1987
Maurizio Lazzarato: Videophilosophie. 
Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus. Berlin: 
b_books, 2002
Arjen Mulder, Maaike Post: Boek voor de 
elektronische kunst. Amsterdam: De Balie / V2_: 
2000
Frieder Nake: "Vilém Flusser und Max Bense, des 
Pixels angesichtig werdend. Eine Überlegung am 
Rande der Computergrafik." In: Gottfried Jäger 
(ed.): Fotografie denken. Über Vilém Flussers 
Philosophie der Medienmoderne.  Bielefeld: 
Kerber 2001, p.169-182
Hans Ulrich Reck: The Myth of Media Art. The 
Aesthetics of the Techno/Imaginary and an Art 
Theory of Virtual Realities. Weimar: VDG, 2007
Martin Seel: Ästhetik des Erscheinens. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2003
Yvonne Spielmann, Gundolf Winter (eds.): Bild - 
Medium - Kunst. München: Fink, 1999
Peter Weibel: Gamma und Amplitude. Medien- und 
kunsttheoretische Schriften. Berlin: Philo, 2004