Little Review: Digital Art, Christiane Paul

Digital Art
Christiane Paul
$14.95
0—500—20367—9
224 pp.
Thames & Hudson

Probably no birth of a genre has been celebrated as much as that of “digital art”—in some quarters known as “new media art” and others the “information arts”—and Paul does an impressive job where many of her bigger-budgeted, theoretically-enthralled predecessors have failed, compressing the activity of a huge field in which there are no obvious heroes, no single aesthetic line, into a readable pocket-sized book.

She is especially deft at laying the groundwork for such diverse practices as "telepresence" (the transferring of an artist’s or user’s activities over telephone to other parts of the world) to “browser art” (the creation of alternative browsers to navigate and present web data) and “hacktevism”—political art, often aimed at corporations, that is also a guerilla warfare enacted through hacking, viruses, and other forms of maverick programming.

Paul adequately explains why certain analog arts, such as photography, sculpture and even literature have been so impacted by digital technology as to spawn entirely different genres.

For those who have been following this fast developing field—it grew exponentially in the nineties, though had been thriving in video and sound art much earlier—everybody you’d expect to see is here: from the Barcelona-based web art team jodi (Joan Hemskeerk and Dirk Paesmans) to new York's Asymptote architectural team (founded by Hani Rashid), from Robert Lazzarini’s 3D anamorphic skulls to Eduardo Kac’s weird experiments with animal genetics (he once bred a glow-in-the-dark rabbit).

In fact, there are so much art covered that Paul is often forced to contain her discussion of an artist’s (or team’s) entire body to a few sentences; occasionally, she is able to grant a paragraph, but in many cases, the most information is found in the capacious captions that accompany the many illustrations (many of the artists, luckily, are under 35, several under 30, and so have only a few major pieces under their belts).

If there is a flaw to this book, it is in the uneventful prose style and recourse to abstract postmodernisms to explain the meanings of an artwork. A sequence called The Bone Grass Boy by Ken Gonzales-Day “challenges differences and boundaries between cultures, race, and class, as well as those between the photographic and digital media, both of which raise questions about their relationship to representation” (37)—not the kind of thing to make you jump and say “ah.”

But in general, Paul doesn’t get lost in this language (which is really endemic to the culture, and so her parroting of these phrases doubles as a sort of reportage) and one learns to appreciate the brevity of her style, along with the lack of evaluative affect, as the image of a burgeoning new art culture—independent of the gallery system, infused with the spirit of innovation and even a jingostic attitude toward the new media—takes focus.

Posted by Brian Stefans at June 11, 2003 03:50 PM | TrackBack