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Painting with numbers The death of painting was first proclaimed when photography was invented, and this cry was heard again in relation to film when television came along. Yet people are still painting and making films today. The established art and media forms respond to subsequent developments.Both avant-garde and mainstream have greatly affected each other in terms of both media technology and aesthetics since the early days of Modernism. The radical conclusion to be drawn from this is: ?All modern art is media art.?(1) I have spent my four years at the Art Academy doing al kinds of different things. I took photos, made etches, painted, made drawings, designed websites, did a bit of sculpture, made videos and more. Although the use of different media influenced the eventual outcome of the work I didn't really see them as very different forms of art. I think this had to do with the fact that I approached most of the media as a painter and used them in such a way. As time progressed I learned that painting itself (for me) was not so much the use of paint anymore, but more a way of working/thinking. With that knowledge I began exploring ways in wich I could use my interest in other media, including music/sound and computers in my work. I ended up making a computer animation, based on and incorperating my drawings/paintings and creating a mood that was very much like a painting. But you could clearly see that many shapes were created using 3D rendering software. This combination of traditional media with modern day tools touched a subject I was interested in since I saw an exhibition of Rob Scholte. Scholte painted manipulated photos of supermodels on a canvas, and thus took an aspect asociated with the digital age back to the world of oil painting.For me it was quite interesting to see someone using the computer and traditional media to make work and it inspired me greatly in exploring this further. I wanted to continue doing that after I finished at my art school. But when I started this year at the Frank Mohr institute, I noticed that they made a distinction between the media department and the painting department. So I started thinking about what kind of artist I was. How and where did my work fit within this art world. I started learning about the new media art world, but I still couldn't quite connect my knowledge of the (traditional) art world I knew with the new field I was studying. So I started thinking about the way in wich the media art world was connected with my world of painting. I talked about it with a philosopher, who was interested in art, and he told me he thought it was very important that Media Art distanced itself from the traditional arts. He argued that it was better to let it develop on it own and that's why there was such a seperation between them. I wondered if that was the case, and I still disliked the idea for the most part. The big difference between painting in the traditional sense and New Media Art, is that the painting technology is developed to such an extent that there is no room for improvement anymore, whereas the computer and all that is linked to it, is still in extensive developement, with no end in sight. But what is new becomes old quite fast. I myself encountered this phenomenon, when I had my first lessons at the Frank Mohr. It appeared that Computer Animation was already considered a somewhat established and therefor less interesting technique. So is it possible that in a few years New Media Artists become 'just' artists? As I was reading and looking for texts I could use to think about this subject, I stumbled across a quote from German paiter/filmmaker 'Walter Ruttman'. Ruttman made one of the first abstract films, named 'Opus 1', and with that he expanded the possibilities of what one could do with film. He talked about: "an art for the eye that differs from painting in that it is time-based (like music). ... And so a type of artist will emerge who is quite new and previously only latently in existence, placed somewhere between painting and music." (1) An interesting project on this topic is one of the Czech artist Daniel Pit?n as reaction on film from the field of classical paiting. He made paintings of film stills from the Alfred Hittchcok movie 'The Birds'. He not only paints the stills, but also the dirt and other imperfections in the film still. It is unknown wether these imperfection are present in the original still, but it makes the painting all the more interesting. This 'tape noise' is of course also a subject handled in the current New Media Art and it touches questions about preserving art works. It also can be done the other way around. I've forgotten his name and couldn't find it on the internet, but there is an artist, who began filming paintings. He just filmed the canvas and what was happening there. And it worked. It was an interesting way of looking at painting. There is an interesting process going on there. You have Ruttman and co. bringing abstract painting to film and ont the other hand you have artists like Pit?n who translate the properties of film back to painting. Photography has of course the same position. When photography was introduced it had much influence on painting. It was even declared as the 'death of painting', but after a while painting began using photography the same way as photography used painting. A good example of this is the work of Teun Hocks, an artist who makes photos of himself in painted landscapes. Interesting to see is, that the computer influenced photography in an important way. It effected the way people look at photos. Before the digital photo manipulation came along, photographic images generally were showing 'the truth'. A fact wich was used by regimes to manipulate peoples opinions. After the coming of the computer his radically changed, and I think photography has become closer to the field of painting then ever before. And now Rob Scholte brought the field of image manipulation back to painting. So it is evident that the different arts/media influence each other. "Ruttmann wrote about the modern condition and proposed that a new art must be found to help modern man cope with the changing face of life, with life's ever increasing tempo. The art form able to do that in Ruttmann's eyes was "painting with time" or abstract film. Film was seen by many as having the essential properties of motion, rhythm, and the articulation of time: properties which seemed to make it singularly suited for contemporaneous artistic expression since they seemed to parallel the defining characteristics of the era.(3) As film as a technology was fitting for the time, I think the media of the present (including film) are appropriate for the current times. In addition to 'helping modern man cope with the changing face of life' it also helps put a perspective on the media and what it can mean. But I don't think we should forget the media that we already had and how they (still) affect and influence us and the art we make. ...And this new art "can definitely expect to reach a considerably wider audience than painting has".(3) I think Media Art and it's achievements can also greatly add to the art world. The TV and internet can take Art works to places where it could reach almost every person on the planet. So where a work could before only be exhibited in a gallery or museum, nowadays one could show his work on the internet, on television. An important issue for me about the art world of today, is that the established exhibition spaces have lost their 'spark', but with new technologies and media it is possible to combine media it is possible to show work on place where it never could go before and bring the art works back to the public. I think because of this art (and media art in perticular) is become more engaged with the present world and that is something I found lacking in the past. Another issue where Media Art is contributing is the position of the artist in the making of an art work. With the arrival generative Art, wich has an important role for the computer, there came an interesting new developement in this discussion. Where normally the artist is responsible for most of the work, he now writes a program/algortythm and let's the computer make the art work itself. In essence, the computer make the artwork and the artist gives the 'rules' within the computer can work. So the medium becomes more of a collaborator then a tool in the hands of the artist. So who makes the art work then? Is it the artist, who made the program? Or the computer? This resembles a project of a painter, who is painting by using products like beer, milk and vegetables to grow mushrooms on a canvas. This generates patterens and imagery and you could consider this to be a kind of generative art. In this case the image is generated by the products and the parameters for the 'program' are set by putting the beer on certain places and by letting the mushrooms grow a certain time. There are also other artists who experiment by using growing plants or other nature products. But it was also done with paint and many other traditional materials. You can hardly call it 'mid 20th-century technology', but it's not that different from a computer algorythm. One of my favourite writers, Douglas Adams, once described a computer as a modelling device. It can be everything we want it to be, and also everything we yet don't know it could be. We shouldn't be afraid to model the computer into a canvas and brushes, but we also should model new possibilities, drawing from everything we've learned in (art) history so far. -Siebe de Boer 2005 (1) Forerunners of media art in the first half of the twentieth century (3) Art 172: Foundations of Computer Graphics Animation |