Text in Interactive Digital Art (Part 1) - Jade

New technology is constantly developing, growing and providing innovative means of conceptualizing and creating art. In this Information Age, common media including film, video, audio, installation, performance, texts and computers are practiced by the collaborative artists and are collected as a broad range of practices under the term Digital Art. British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead express their concepts on human foibles and society through digital media that features text as well as making use of all manners of interactive features that require the involvement of the viewer. These London-based artists are known for working with multiple media such as video, sound, installations and online art using communication systems and technology in their creative practice.

Artists are the foremost to reflect on the culture and technology of their respective times. They have been adopting and adapting the use of technology to express their concepts prior to the 1980s. The Digital Revolution was officially ignited in the 1990s.[i] During this period, the emergence of the World Wide Web and the increased availability of personal computers led to a new form of expression with a global platform for exchange and communities of interest. Technology’s constant progress with enhancement, speed, and affordability is the driving force behind the computer revolution. Consequently, it has seeped into the entire culture and currently provides fast access to information. This is an invaluable avenue that artists can utilize to take their message to the public, mass produce, mass- circulate and distribute their concepts.  Thomson and Craighead are fascinated by the breakdown of the boundaries of the global communication networks and its transformative effect on the individuals to perceive and comprehend the world around us.[ii]

Thomson and Craighead’s Attributed Text (1997) was created in the earlier years of the web featuring text. It expounds the use of text with hypertext links which were supported by web browsers.  It consists of the paragraph,“All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author of this text.”[iii] Each underlined word has a link to parallel information ranging from all facets of society. For example, “All” links to European Ice Age and the threat of global warming while the other words link to news relating to murder, conflict and a guide to making any woman your platonic friend.

In Attributed Text, reading is an integral part of the interactivity. No single word has one exact interpretation and  the meanings change with time and the context. Thomson and Craighead investigated that text with a poststructuralist and postmodernist frame can reveal that language has internal contradictions and hidden ideologies. [iv] According to the postmodernists and poststructuralists there are many truths and many realities because different readers have their own worldviews and biased interpretations. Thomson and Craighead use text to stimulate commentary about real-world issues and explore language as a tool of authority and power. The combination of bold visual graphics and text allows these artists to challenge the ideas on specific issues and instigate critiques of society and human foibles.   

Subsequently, Triggerhappy (1998) is a gallery installation and online art that features the French philosopher Michael Foucault’s “What is an author?” (1969). It is similar to the early and popular arcade game from 1978, Space Invaders. The opposition aliens are replaced with quotes taken from Foucault’s essay. Thomson and Craighead referenced a game-like structure that combines a peculiar quest for information with a classic shooter game. The audience of Triggerhappy becomes part of the art and the concept.  The reader’s focus on the text is constantly distracted by the flashiness of the game and destroying the “What is an author?” text before it destroys the player.  Postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists have shared and recognised with Foucault’s belief on the importance of controlling language.  The control of what is put into words and who has the authority to speak publicly is an important means of gaining and wielding power. Also, the players are either in the role of attacking or defending themselves from the “What is an author” text which ultimately depends on the individual. The destruction of Foucault’s text has a powerful impact on the user that can relate to the censorship of the public and media and can also provide a sense of empowerment. Triggerhappy explores the affiliation between the author, audience and hypertext and gestures towards the electronic culture in which we coexist and interrelate. Thomson and Craighead employ an underlying sense of humor and irony as the user participates in the work.  The game also reflects on the scarcity of attention and the aesthetics of the narcissism of games and entertainment. In addition to using text to make statements about real-world issues, the artists have explored how language in culture is used to assert authority and power.

Conclusively, artists who incorporate words in a work of art often have a purpose beyond provoking an aesthetic and superficial reaction. Artists have employed text with the aim of examining the truth or authority of public issues. Thomson and Craighead’s combined strategy of language and interactivity helps to highlight the social, environmental and political issues and to ensure a strong impact is made on the viewers.  The user’s involvement with a work which features the interplay between the context and the production meaning of the viewer is part of the art-making process. Thomson and Craighead are using the computer and the internet as a mechanism for their realization of ideas rather than a medium in itself. Internet art has become diverse and complex but it is still in the early stage of development and is a growing art form in the contemporary art world.

 -Jade Achoy

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

1.       Cason, Nancy F. “Interactive Multimedia: An Alternative Context for Studying Works of Art.” Studies in Art Education 39, no. 4 (July 1, 1998): 336–349.

2.       London, Barbara. “Digital Art Takes Shape at MoMA.” Leonardo 34, no. 2 (January 1, 2001): 95–99.

3.       Paul, Christiane. Digital art. London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

4.       Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of contemporary art : visual art after 1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

5.       Rush, Michael. New Media in Art. London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

6.       Tamblyn, Christine. “Computer Art as Conceptual Art.” Art Journal 49, no. 3 (October 1, 1990): 253–256.

7.       Thomson and Craighead. “Installation.” Accessed October 2, 2012. http://www.thomson-craighead.net.

8.       Thomson and Craighead. “Online Artwork.” Accessed October 2, 2012. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/docs/webworkbcom.html.

9.        Vague Terrain. “Thomson and Craighead Interviewed by Martin John Callanan.” Accessed October 5, 2012. http://www.vagueterrain.net/journal08/thomson-craighead/01

10.    Weil, Benjamin. “Art in Digital Times: From Technology to Instrument.” Leonardo 35, no. 5 (January 1, 2002): 523–537.

11.    Wong, Chee-Onn, Keechul Jung, and Joonsung Yoon. “Interactive Art: The Art That Communicates.” Leonardo 42, no. 2 (January 1, 2009): 180–181.

---

[i] Paul, Christiane. Digital art. London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

[ii] Vague Terrain. “Thomson and Craighead Interviewed by Martin John Callanan.” Accessed October 5, 2012. http://www.vagueterrain.net/journal08/thomson-craighead/01

[iii] Thomson and Craighead. “Online Artwork.” Accessed October 2, 2012. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/docs/webworkbcom.html.

[iv] Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of contemporary art : visual art after 1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Text as Art, Part 1 - Brittany

Text as Art, Part 1 - Brittany Heiner
[Edited 11/11/12]

One challenge of art is to find ways to express abstract concepts in a way that conveys the artist’s thoughts to another person or audience, or to approach those concepts in a different way than the audience has done before. Rene Magritte used text in his piece The Treachery of Images to express the concept of the difference between real objects and art as a representation of such objects. In Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 piece One and Three Chairs, he employed a printed copy of the dictionary definition of the word “chair” as part of his presentation of the concept of a chair. In both of these pieces, the artist uses the text to suggest his artistic concept in a way that the visual representation alone could not do. However, the text is still used as mere text, and its value is in the message the words together communicate to the reader. Many artists have used text as a component to conceptual art pieces, but the digital frontier has altered the way we use text as a human society and has opened up new applications for text itself to be used as art.

 

People use language and words to communicate ideas and information both simple and complex. As an interface between people and computers, codes such as ASCII, Bell, and Unicode were developed for programming and to represent language characters for human users. One of the first artists to use digital text characters to create art was Kenneth Knowlton. In 1966, he and Leon Harmon scanned a photograph and converted the analog voltage data via computer into binary numbers, and then used another program to interpret those numbers into text characters according to their halftone densities in order to suggest value and contrast.[i]

Knowlton and Harmon’s work, groundbreaking as it was, still was rudimentary in the way it used text in art in the digital medium. The art was created first, the text after, and the text was used only as a shape to convey the overall image, with no meaning of its own.

Of course, there was room for improvement in the medium. An artist is limited in his scope by the capacity of his tools and his own mastery of them. In computer art, this manifests itself in the computer’s software and programming, and the artist’s familiarity with them. As software evolves, and as people become more familiar with the advantages and limitations of the computer, the tools can become invisible and the focus moves away from the media and onto the concept itself. While limited in some ways, such as not having tangible manifestation of the art, digital art has other benefits over traditional media.  As stated by Christiane Paul, “the employment of digital technologies as a medium implies that the work is produced, stored, and presented in digital format and makes use of the inherent possibilities of the medium.”[ii] Particularly through networking and the Internet, these possibilities include such distinguishing characteristics as interaction with an audience beyond mere experience, its capacity to respond to changing data, and the fact that these changes and participation can be done remotely and immediately in contrast to the finite limitations of a physical work in a fixed space.[iii]

 

One such piece that produces text-required art using audience input is Apartment, by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak.[iv] The piece builds a visual blueprint-style apartment based on the words the user inputs. Upon the typing of a sentence, words fly across the screen into the layout of the “apartment,” a floor plan that alters according to the user’s additional words. It assigns words to a room according to the word’s function and the room’s function, and grows that room according to the volume of words assigned to it. In the experiment performed by this writer, words like men, she, family, talk, and them were housed in the “living room.” Words sexism, my, loves, and you went into the “bedroom,” contrary to the context of the source sentence. The “closet” was filled with find and things. Way became a “hall.” Know was put in the “library,” but complex, works, and opinion drifted between the “library” and the “office” areas, apparently because of similar use of the words. A “window” was formed and included words such as looking, country, views, world, and sees.[v]

A second experiment with it, this time using the first few sentences of the Declaration of Independence, produced the following layout:

In the Apartment applet are contained past “apartments” with more purposefully artistic layouts. (From the website, click "Apartment," then "See all apartments" in the new window to see past pieces; it is uncertain whether the archives are static, or if they keep changing, because it has been difficult to find the same pieces again.) One called “please please please” contains a two-room apartment with a revolving circle of the word please in the “dining room” and a “bedroom” full of the word desire circulating in a slow trail around the room.[vi] This writer's analysis is that the program interpreted the word desire into the sexual meaning, but the word please as a food-related meaning, perhaps suggesting that food is a cyclical pursuit, and sex is a more complex one.

Martin Wattenberg explains that Apartment was inspired by an old memory technique called a memory palace, which involves mentally associating items with specific locations.[vii] He says, “Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.”[viii]  Through analysis of the semantics and linguistic usage of the audience’s input, the piece gives the audience visual feedback on underlying themes in their language.

Art pieces such as Apartment could never have been done before the digital era. Evolution of computers, programming, and software, and people’s familiarity with them, has enabled us to produce works that transcend the medium of digital art and allow us to look for deeper meaning in our text than as simple shapes on a screen.

---

[i] Frank Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975),” Leonardo 19, no. 2 (1986): 160.

[ii] Christiane Paul, “Renderings of Digital Art,” Leonardo 35, no. 5 (January 1, 2002): 472.

[iii] ibid.

[iv] Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, “Apartment,” Net Art Commissions on Turbulence, http://turbulence.org/Works/apartment/ (accessed October 8, 2012).

[v] ibid.
[vi] ibid.

[vii] Martin Wattenberg, “Martin Wattenberg: Apartment,” Martin Wattenberg: Data Visualization: Art, Media, Science, http://www.bewitched.com/apartment.html (accessed October 8, 2012).
[viii] ibid.