We live in a time of unparalleled technological optimism, when it is assumed that applied science will transform every aspect of our lives, including the arts. A new exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, “BitStreams,” asserts that digital technology is the biggest thing to come along since photography, that it has revolutionalized the ways artists work and perceive the world.
Really? Are we truly in the midst of an artistic revolution? Or are the claims being made for digital media something akin to the Internet stock bubble, a faith in change that is so strong – a sort of evangelical futurism – that it gets way ahead of reality?
This and its companion exhibit, “Data Dynamics,” on Internet art, are by no means as far out as they could be. You’ll find none of technology’s flashier tricks – virtual reality or holograms – here. Anyone who has ever played with the paintbrush tool on a computer, or watched the toasters fly by on their screen saver, will feel comfortable. There’s a lot of bleeping and blinking. Plasma screens display chips of color flying about like bees in a hive. Light grids flicker in patterns to suggest movement and form. There are headphones to put on, dark rooms to go into, and mice to click.
Underneath it all are bits. Bits, paradoxically, are what hold this show together. Bits are what make things “digital.” A quick refresher: Computers reduce all information to a series of zeros and ones, a binary code. A “bit” of information is one digit in that series. String them together and you get a set of instructions for the words on this page, or music, or images.
There are lots of different media in this show: videos, audios, computer graphics, installations, prints, even sculpture. But beneath the surface is the hidden digital structure, the “bit stream.” Dipping into it, and fiddling around with the signals, is theoretically what digital art is all about.
It’s the ease of manipulation that gets people excited. Digital is an art of flux, of transformations. Nothing is fixed. You don’t like a photograph? It can be altered. Don’t like two dimensions? Add a third. Want to turn sights into sounds? No problem.
All this power is dazzling, so much so that it seems a little unfair to point out that the art generated by it seems a little, well, feeble.
Some of it is no more than digital doodling, such as the artist who drew the letter N with a mouse, expanded it with a series of concentric lines, then multiplied the image into a wallpaper-like pattern. Or the one who transforms letters into cute, bug-like characters.
Another group is fascinated with erasing things from photographs. Jon Haddock takes famous news photographs from the Sixties – the woman kneeling over the slain Kent State student, Vietnamese children running from a napalm attack – and removes the people. The empty landscapes, still vaguely recognizable, demonstrate how indelibly imprinted these photos are on our minds.
Inez van Lamsweerde erased her boyfriend. The result is a large self-portrait, a woman passionately kissing an invisible man.
With other artists, such as Carl Fudge, it’s a scrambling game. He scanned a Japanese cartoon character, gave her a digital makeover, and wound up with a kaleidoscopic jigsaw puzzle of circles, diamonds, and other symmetrical shapes. It’s not a bad abstraction, but the appeal is mostly in knowing what it used to be.
One of the most curious effects in the show belongs to Robert Lazzarini. He laser-scanned a human skull, stretched the three-dimensional digital image, then hand-sculpted a skull from the distortion. Gazing at this frozen special effect can give you vertigo, because the mind is being given the cues for an object in motion.
Bit streams ignore the traditional boundaries of art and music, and so does the Whitney in deciding to include 25 “sound artists” in the show. They are eased into the visual environment through a listening “Sound Channel” in which visitors don headphones while leaning against a padded wall. From outside, the partially visible listeners create a row of bodies and gaps that echoes the sequence of ones and zeros in a bit stream.
The Sound Channel at the Whitney Museum.
Many of the sound artists use an old avant-garde trick of incorporating real-world noises into their compositions – street sounds, rolling coins, sloshing water. But that’s only the beginning with digital music, which can alter those sounds in unlimited ways, play them backward, and layer them over other sounds. They can even turn visual imagery into bits and reconfigure those bits, so that they are translated into sounds.
The Iranian performance artist Sussan Deyhim weaves her own guttural cries and incoherent incantations with shortwave radio broadcasts from Turkey. The San Francisco group called DISC scratches CDs, then plays them, so that the skips, screeches, and stammers produce music they call “glitchwerks.”
“Data Dynamics,” the Internet show, has only five works. In Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg’s “Apartment,” visitors type words that are then translated into bizarre three-dimensional rooms, in which the vaguely recognizable walls of the rooms are distorted pictures drawn from the Web. A similar idea is at work in Maciej Wisniewski’s Netomat, which hunts the Web for associated texts and images in response to words the visitor types.
Calling these works “art” is something of a stretch. All they tell us, really, is that there are a lot of images on the Internet.
But, in a show such as this, guided by a fervent futurism, the technology itself is the message. That art will come from it is a matter of faith. Artists, we are led to believe, are just beginning to tap the expressive power of computers and digital media. This is the wave of the future. The old methods – putting paint on canvas with a brush, that sort of thing – will go the way of the typewriter and the slide rule. It’s inevitable.
There are some good arguments for why this may not be true. One of the show’s questionable assumptions is that artists respond to new technology by adopting it. Take the example of photography, touted as the last great innovation that transformed art. Some artists picked up cameras, it is true. But from an art historian’s point of view, art’s most important response to photography was modernism. The artists people love the most – the impressionists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse – ran as far from photography as they could get.
Second, much of the art based on new digital technology is an art of movement, an art expressed in videos, animation, music, and combinations of those. It’s an art driven by mouse clicks. This art may have a place, but it ignores what brings people to museums in the first place. Art fulfills people’s need for the handmade object. Objects provide a special type of experience, just as music or books do. Computer screens and videos don’t provide objects, but events. And, even when the product of the digital manipulation is a photograph or a print, the intervention of the machine is felt. Art is about a direct communication between people. It’s intimate, like conversation. With Internet art there isn’t even a human being at the other end – just information.
It seems unlikely, therefore, that the picture frames in museums will be housing plasma screens any time soon. Certain things are fundamental to human nature and aren’t going to change, not until the next phase of evolution at least.
Whitney Museum of American Art
2001
