Leave No Trace

There are many artists using digital mediums and new technologies to produce art work, there have been for many years, as with any medium there is good digital art, bad digital art and some that should probably not be described as art at all; although the opinion will always be individual to the viewer.

Firstly I know of a local guy who has set up a website that has been set up solely to sell digital art generated with vvvv. This person is using his technical skills to produce decorations, not art, but he is happy with that, he’s not pretending to break any new ground he just wants to make some extra cash and I’m fine with that.

In March this year it was reported that David Hockney had started to produce paintings using his new Adobe Photoshop software, something that many people have been doing for years. He was quoted in the Times Online stating ‘You can actually mix the colours on the [screen]’ an embarrassingly naïve comment for someone who is meant to be professional and a leader in his field.

On the other hand there are artists using digital art and commenting on technology with their work in a more experienced and knowledgeable way. I recently went along to an open day at Jodrall Bank where artist Jeremy Wood was demonstrating how GPS technology could be used to create drawing on the landscape. Each visitor was given a basic GPS device and asked to walk a chosen shape across a field, when you returned the device you were given a printout of the path you had walked. Jeremy uses this in his own practice to create abstract drawings of cities

A recent touring exhibition ‘Trying to cope with things that aren’t human (part one)’ demonstrates a varying approach to digital art and technology, but my favourite piece was Alan Currall’s ‘Word Processing’, best described as on the official website:

‘In the video Word Processing Alan Currall offers us an image of a microchip placed on a desk with a furtive tapping finger and his own off-screen voice attempting to train it. The voice is initially calm, pedantic and meticulous in its instructions on what the chip should do if he presses a key. The lesson becomes more and more complete as the tone of the voice becomes more desperate in referencing our anxiety about computer usage and the problems we encounter with it. This anthropomorphic piece places the familiar discrepancy in the everyday relationships between machine and human into humourous and acute focus.’