As reported on Wired.
BY DRUE KATAOKA
Like writers embracing digital platforms, musicians embracing digital music, or photographers embracing digital photography, art based on new media often just did – still does – old things in new ways.
Art critic Claire Bishop also made this observation on the “digital divide” in art, further noting that:
While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?
Let me focus on one word here for a moment: affect. Because regardless of what form it’s in (paint, web, print) or how it’s made (hand, manufactured, individual or team-produced), new art – in anymedium – has to resonate at a deeper level than simply provoking the viewer to think “Oh this is weird!” or “Oh cool!” or “Oh how pretty!”
A lot of new media art evokes one or more of these exclamations … but it doesn’t also make the viewerask questions. And as John Maeda has argued previously here, that’s just what art should do.
The only way art can ask questions is if it has both originality and meaning. That meaning doesn’t have to be embedded in or derived solely from what you can see (paintings or words on a screen), hear (music or podcasts), and touch (textiles or sculptures) – it can also be in the form of “negative space” that strategically leaves “visual silence” in the artwork.
The concept of negative space is central to the millennia-old Japanese brush painting technique known as “Sumi-e”, which I was trained in as a child of two worlds: born in Tokyo to a Japanese father and an American mother, growing up as an artist in Silicon Valley surrounded by technology and technologists. It’s this space between worlds, the visual silence, I’d argue, that invites the viewer to fill in the blanks and ask questions — essentially becoming a collaborator with the artist. This blending of worlds mimics how other media has been evolving as well, especially when you think about how much content is created today. Whether the omission is purposeful or because the media now welcomes (almost requires) interactivity, meaning is created.
Building on these themes of bridging worlds, my above art installation (“The Tree of Pascal”) consists of traditional paintings, EEG brainwaves recorded with a personal brain-computer interface,smart glass, and a live tree — to be exhibited and presented in Davos this week as part of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum.
Yet … are brainwaves a legitimate art medium? Yes, when incorporated meaningfully. I believe such artworks can help bridge Bishop’s “digital divide” since art is, at the end of the day, visual code that gets transcribed inside our minds (like brainwaves) into thoughts and emotions. It may actually help us “reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence.”
But perhaps most importantly, this artwork invites the viewer to “think, see, and filter” affect. It’s the result of my experiment to offer commentary from the space between worlds — not just between digital and analog, but between race and identity, platform and meaning, and technology and art.