Last November he became the most expensive living artist as his canvas Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s postwar and contemporary art auction, New York. David Hockney, 81, is also a reference at exploring new technology. More than a move from physical to digital painting, the artist sees the two mediums as being complementary — a demonstration of how new tools can contribute to the artist’s creative process.

While some artists get variety from changing subject matters, Hockney is all about the medium, and, in a sense, that’s what makes his vision of digital art so empowering. He innovates within the traditional forms like still-life, portrait, and landscapes, making these subjects contemporary again. By exploring the same themes throughout his career, Hockney relentlessly renewed himself in the methods of representation, which eventually drove him to digital technologies. “Drawing was going out of style actually, it was,” Hockney jokingly explains, “I’m amazed that it’s the telephone that can bring back drawing.”

Digital tools are mobile and offer so much more flexibility than carrying brushes, paint, and pens for an outing. Grab your pocket-sized device, and here we go. For Hockney, this meant he could wake up and start representing his everyday environment — indoor — and as he progressively mastered digital brushwork — outdoor, moving from interiors, bouquets, and books on the bedside table, to the beautiful sceneries of the British countryside in Yorkshire and his love for painting en plein air.

Not much. Hockney is not interested in leading the race for technology. He uses basic software on iPhone and more recently iPad, and is, in fact, rather appreciative of the way it’s easy-to-use. His point is instead to use new tools as an opportunity to rethink representation. Drawing on a piece of glass, the sense of touch changes, altering your practice. Digital brushes have a different feel, and so you need to adjust your usual drawing techniques to new processes and learn how to do things over again.

How do you paint with your fingertips? Blend colors? Achieve thinner or thicker strokes? Set transparency and edges softness? How do you create effects like light reflection on materials such as white porcelain and polished brass? How do you give in the brightness of freshly-cut flowers or the autumnal tones and ambient humidity of trees? All this panel of settings took some time to master but as Hockney explains digital painting prevented the loss of color. Because of the accuracy obtained with fingers, the painter also felt the challenge and opportunity of using a limited number of marks on his representations.

One thing that is essential to Hockney is details. Each living being — may it be an individual or a plant — is unique, and by giving much attention to the representation of specific traits, the artist values each constituent of the (eco)system. By looking closely he sees things we don’t, and so we observe again, more intensely, and rediscover the beauty of multiplicity. Digital painting allowed this interest for observation to foster as he zooms in and out allowed for a more considerable amount of details than the change of views experienced when stepping back from the canvas. To maximize sharpness and color saturation, Hockney works with vector-based images, which, unlike pixel-based works, he can render in large-scale prints for the better display of his preciseness.

On top of iPhone and iPad drawings, Hockney also works with digital photography. Frustrated by the limitations of one-point perspective photography, the artist always thought of bringing multiple narratives, notably by representing artworks within the artworks — which ultimately result in numerous oft-connected descriptions. Works like Four blue stools include photographs of people taken from many angles and with multiple vanishing points, and that are then joined together digitally to form a single, unsettling, reality. Digital collage is a primary medium to capture the diversity of looks, but such pieces also include images of other artworks from the artist pointing to the importance that he gives to mixing media.

“The iPhone makes you bold,” says Hockney. You can go back anytime, and thus explore all possibilities, instincts, and drives. Digital art is not about fashion but about the risk-taking and experimental approach it gives to creation.

*Cover image: David Hockney, In the Studio: December 2017. Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted on Dibond, edition of 25. © David Hockney.

How Artists Connect with Digital versus Physical Painting: The Case of David Hockney

Copy-Paste. Today we take for granted this functionality on our laptops as if it had always been there. But the fragmentation, dislocation and recombination of visual and textual content only have a short history that finds all its meaning in art. Flourishing in the early 20th century through the movements of Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, collage and montage still have a visible impact on digital art. Beyond its actual process, the practice brought distinct aesthetics and new ways to represent society and technology. Highlight on the legacy of this revolutionary art technique.

Collage is the action of pasting (in French); montage is the action of assembling. Depending on your affinities, the artistic practice might bring about the vision of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s Papiers collés, the geometric compositions of Jean Arp, the photomontages of Hannah Höch, Raoul Haussman and John Heartfield, the Merz assemblages of Kurt Schwitters or the surreal narratives of Max Ernst. All these productions vary greatly. Yet they mark a shift away from the traditional art forms of painting and sculpture into a new media whose style and content both reflect changes in society.

The end of the 19th century set pace for an industrialised culture. Train and mail, cinema and radio, entertainment and consumption became reachable at an increasing rate. Images turned widely available with entry to museums and movie theatres, but even more so with the beginning of shutter photography. The commercialisation of portable cameras and roll films in the late 1880s made the recording of photographs accessible to the masses. Likewise, the arrival of autotypy allowed for the mechanical reproduction of images. Pictures and illustrated prints went mainstream for the first time, with an unprecedented boom of the press media in the 1920s.

This triumph of immediacy and mass reproduction marks for media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser the start of the information age and the telematic society as we know it today. Accelerated modern perceptions required art forms to reflect hectic lifestyles, and collage brought this dynamism. Artists sourced content either in photographs, newspapers, labels, advertisements, theatre tickets or other urban substance. When combining fragmentary images from different spatiotemporal situations, artists documented or altered an overarching vision of modern times.

The appearance of media for digital image processing and recording, as well as the use of computer software to edit verbal and visual content, changed the scope of collage dramatically. One process that encapsulates the move from mechanical to digital reproduction is scanning — scanners provided with the possibility to translate analogue information into digital data. Images could be transferred instantaneously without losing the sharpness of the originals; in other words, more copies, better, faster.

Robert Rauschenberg, who knowingly used collage as a technique to reflect on American visual culture, consumerism and the mass media, pioneered the use of scanners in his later works of 2000. The artist assembled photographs which he then transferred individually on paper before photographing and scanning the resulting copy.

Many contemporary artists such as Ria Patricia Röder follow this tradition in mixing analogue and digital through the use of scans. Her scanograms are digitally created with the scanner without any further manipulation after the exposure. As such, the scanner not only helps with creating a final, digital rendition but acts as a tool to manipulate 2D and 3D objects to provide effects of focus and blur, and intriguing perceptions of dimensionality.

Also alternating between software and analogue techniques, Chris Dorland operates montage from a voluminous archive of print and digital visuals that document our consumerist culture. After scanning, filtering and altering content through many digital manipulations, the artist prints out images which he reworks manually with various machines. A variety of outdated and old scanners, hand-held scanners, different types of printers and other obsolete technology inhabit his studio, making it a marvellous place for experimentation. “The studio is offline. Nothing is connected to the internet (including my desktop). I hate software updates, so in some cases, I’m running really old programs and hardware,” insists the artist who instead challenges devices to generate randomness, elements of glitch and other failures, defining his distinct aesthetic language.

Internet: A New Source of Graphic Traffic

Along with digital technologies, the internet revolutionised our approach to images, written material, and by extent, collage. Suddenly, press institutions and companies were not the only one to spread content (at a cost). All people could create, distribute, and access information for free as browsers advanced the democratisation of the web. With internet channelling vernacular knowledge, people could relate to, empathise with, and appropriate others’ content. The amount of data available gave artists a new breath in collecting and recalibrating existing material. An excellent example is Lorna Mills, who creates GIFs from online videos which she fragments and displaces out of their first interface. Her use of re-contextualisation offers a gripping portrait of online communities which parallels social depictions found in Modern collages.

While the illustrated press offered a configuration that assigned meanings to images through texts, captions and branding, on the web, purpose and context are up to personal interpretation and information is fluid, participatory and interactive rather than definite and site-specific. The notion of background on the web is therefore versatile, and the material that artists reframe often comes as already manipulated, de-contextualised or repurposed.

As digital artists alternatively fuel their montages with personal photographs or pictures from the internet, the source of information becomes irrelevant. In Alexandra Gorczynski’s compositions, for instance, both online and offline media come at play, drawing an intentional ambiguity on reality versus virtuality. But following Susanne Holschbach, this interchange is qualitative:

“ In the sense of an information society, “instability” can be regarded as a positive value: It stands for dynamic transmission, unobstructed circulation, and for communication that is not bound to real space; it stands for virtuality as the ability to experience what is possible.”

Continuing or Disrupting the Aesthetics of Modernist Collages?

Digital tools mark a shift in the perception of photography, which influences the purpose of montage today as images can be manipulated more seamlessly. In Modern times, photography had a documentary and irreversible nature and collage allowed for the connection of disparate events that assumably took place. But as digital photography came along, viewers started to wonder about the actual happening of action in space and time. To address this new photographic paradigm, digital artists either erase the boundaries and edges in their montages or exacerbate the fragmentary nature of the content they put together.

In the first scenario, post-photographic montages provide with visions of alternative realities playing on people’s awareness that the image has been altered. For Felicity Hammond, the digital collage composes a simulated form of existence that shows the precariousness of our post-industrial economy. Growth juxtaposes decay. Hoardings and lustrous large-format advertisements confront abandoned sites falling into landfills of detritus. While the composition departs from the scattered aesthetic of 20th-century collages, the content shares Modernists’ aim to describe society overall, as well as attention to advertising and consumer culture.

Meanwhile, other digital artists overtly show the fragments composing their images. Akin to Modernist aesthetics, Crosslucid assembles pieces from magazines, science and travel journals but also books, vintage catalogues and glossy periodicals. The art collective sees collage as “a medium in [its] practice [that] comes back to the idea of recomposing and fusing realities, re-assembling existing particles, a way of prototyping a speculative world”. Comparably, Carolyn Janssen explains, “Collage allows me to incorporate all forms of my practice — by photographing sculptures, tiny sets, costumes and drawings I’ve made IRL. The technique allows the digital canvas to act as an almost hyperlink to my physical world — with any cement texture, food leftover or doodle up for grabs.” In turn, the artist repurposes these scattered photographic elements as miniature objects which she combines in a Photoshop-y manner to construct meticulous and uncanny sceneries mark by mark.

Speculative or imaginary world: in digital montages, the idea is predominant. While in modern times, the city presented a new space for dreaming with the fantasy of a hectic urban lifestyle, professional possibilities, leisure activities, and social change, now artists’ imagination gives in to other-worldly places that merge real and virtual elements in an ethereal whole. This move away from grounded social possibilities into abstract social aspirations or predictions reveal hope for other realities or at least a wish to reconcile with beauty as we realise the crude being of our present and future existence.

*Cover image:  Crosslucid, Touchless S(t)Imulation, © courtesy of the artists. a visual poem, was created for FASCIA BLUES, a collaboration between deCode & Hervisions. The piece comments on connection as a relative means to facilitate new methods of communication, and was exhibited at CADAF during Art Basel Miami 2019.

Digital Montage: On Collage and the Legacy of Modernism

Traditionally speaking, the aura of an artifact grows with rarity, which may result from the provenance of the object, the medium used, craft, expertise, and level of recognition of the artist, as well as market trends, following the general law of supply and demand. Computer-produced artworks, however, inherently depart from this economic model, making it either painstakingly adjustable to the existing scheme or persuasively innovative in its consumption and usage.

If you look into digital art exhibitions as we do, you might have noticed that some artworks repeatedly appear, while exhibition themselves focus on the same trending subjects such as artificial intelligence and post-cyber-feminism. Conspicuously, these shows happen concurrently or close enough in time as to make evident that many versions of these artworks exist and that if not screened they could be produced locally for the show, bypassing the usual insurance, and transportation of a unique piece. This situation asks about the relationship between the artworks’ mother file and its physical copies. Should the physical versions be considered of high commercial value or should only the original file retain value? Does the object lose its aura as it is made more accessible to institutions, the web, and other networks? Or, is the definition of aura changing?

In the 20th century, sociologist and critic Walter Benjamin decried that art objects lose their aura as they become more easily accessible through mechanical and industrial production. While painting and sculpture retained rarity throughout the history of art because of their uniqueness, emerging fields of the time such as photography and design asked for new ways to create value so that they wouldn’t fall into anonymity and end up commodified like other everyday goods. The most common (yet partial) solution to generate value for such art was to limit the number of editions, that is, in other words, opposing the objects’ reproducible nature to make it appear more luxurious (and sell at higher prices). Of course, when galleries now present digital art such as the works of Jon Rafman or Tabor Robak, they rely on similar schemes, producing limited editions with high-quality materials and technology to support the idea of an — apparently — rare piece.

But digital art is primarily meant to be seen, experienced, and shared. When thinking of internet art, for instance, the art form was endemic, and its first intent was to reach small online communities with tech-savvies benefiting from more of privileged access than the elite ever did. Such works gained recognition through increased visibility on the web and social platforms, and endorsements from the general audience and institutions — all of which became more critical for attention than the notion of scarcity. This attitude marks a substantial shift in perception whereby the accessibility, previously undermined, becomes a source of value. As media and online networks reinforce the social power of the general audience, distinctiveness acts as more of a criterion than rareness in assessing the object’s aura.

The main concern linked to the original copy is thus not the lack of aura but the licensing and protection of artists’ copyright, asking how to help creatives earn from an art form which places openness and participation first. Several ventures rethink collecting in the digital age and disrupt the art market to embrace these new realities. At Danae HI, we stand to protect the mother file through a blockchain protocol which is subject to tokenization and trade. People can invest in the art by purchasing tokens of artwork which indulge them in receiving royalties anytime physical versions are bought, produced and exhibited. This way artists earn money from their artworks’ exploitation and the primary and secondary market of their artworks’ tokens. Because each art piece has a limited number of tokens, it can gain market value (just like a share would) while allowing artists to maximize accessibility to their art.

Licensing the mother file also allows for the varying of features in the physical versions of artworks. Editions can come in different sizes and involve various media (alone or combined) such as VR, AR, video, and prints. This complex set of parameters means that each edition provides with a new way of seeing the same work. It allows artists to make their project evolve through time as part of an ongoing process — something which might involve aesthetic changes but also technical ones as technological obsolescence requires artists to maintain the art pieces consistently. With mother files acting as work in process while physical versions present records or states at specific points in time, perhaps the two types of artifacts will one day be considered as complementary in forging artworks’ aura?

*Cover image: Zach Blas and Jemima Wynans, I’m here to learn so :)))))), 2017, as currently displayed at Transfer Gallery’s exhibition Forging the Gods, © Transfer Gallery. The work is also on show at La Gaîté Lyrique as part of the exhibition Computer Grrrls.

Building the Aura of a Digital Artwork

Who wouldn’t like to think — instinctively — that the link between art and technology is “so new.” With last week’s first Christie’s summit on Art and Technology (focusing on the blockchain, our favorite!), there is no doubt about today’s current trend in exploring the intersection of these two fields. This spring/summer season has also seen a booming number of exhibitions on digital art, with teamLab’s newly opened Tokyo museum, as well as its shows spreading across Singapore, London, Paris, Shenzhen, and soon in New York.

Displays now involve mixed media, immersive and interactive installations, as well as inputs on artificial intelligence and the incarnation of human bodily artifacts — a production utterly subversive to all museum visitors. But while the development of hardware — as in artificial intelligence complemented with physical reality — makes things a lot more concrete, the art-tech relationship is more historical than first meet the eye. We notably tend to forget about the impact of software, a form of communication, information and code processing which emerged as early as the 1960s and now governs our everyday life. More to the point is the question of what defines technology? How long and in what forms has the link between art and technology prevailed, and why is it still overlooked today?

Taking from scholar Edmond Couchot, Art is etymologically equivalent to the Greek word Techne as in technique, referring to the skills and mastership required for the use of a specific tool. Seeing technology as technique, the link between artists, engineers, and scientists traces way back, with making-processes taking an integral part in the canon of Western art history.

A lot of critical literature has been produced on the merging of art and technique or scientific discoveries, showing correlations from Romanticism to the late Twentieth Century. Among oft-cited examples, we find Renaissance’s introduction to one-point perspective, Monet, Degas, and Impressionists look at nature with regards to Darwin’s evolution theory, and Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s influence on Neo-Impressionists’ use of colors and light (Paul Signac, Georges Seurat). Critics like Linda Henderson and Christopher Green also played a crucial role in associating Picasso’s work with the scientific popular culture of his time, notably looking at the fourth dimension and non-euclidean geometry. Meanwhile, records show X-rays, radioactivity, thermodynamics, the theory of gases, classical mechanics, and Einstein’s theory of relativity all influenced Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).

Despite the incredible record of evidence until the end of Modernism, post-war and contemporary periods have seen very little art critics address the connections between art and technology. As explained Edward Schanken, the influence of technology on the arts can only emerge from a community of art professionals building a canon around this cross-influence, and learning from its historicity. The lack of literature and academic knowledge would thus explain the little visibility digital art gained in the second half of the 21st century.

Ultimately, this gap in knowledge might be the result of a change of meaning behind the word technology. When Bauhaus director Walter Gropius started claiming this connection in 1923 with his famed slogan “Art and Technology — A new Unity,” he referred to the potential for standardization and industrial production of art and design. But the German for technology translates as Technik — conspicuously highlighting mechanical ingenuity. On the other hand, techno-logy combines the terms Techne and Logos, that is both technique and logic. As Couchot said, electronic computing, software processing, and programming overall rely on a linguistic system that gives the machine a form of binary, structuralist reasoning. In that sense, digital technologies challenge the traditional dynamics between art and technique. Whereas tools used to follow a painter’s hand mechanically, artists now enter into a dialogue with the machine as part of a linguistic process. Because — yes — coding is nothing but a mathematical language.

*Cover image: teamLab, Installation from the exhibition Au-delà des limites, La Villette, Paris © designboom

Art and Technology: New or Old Paradigm?

Apple lost you last week when they announced the “revolutionary” feature of an A12 Bionic chip on their new phone? Tell me again, was it better for augmented reality, virtual reality or both? And, actually which is which, how do they function, and how are these technologies complementary? If you’ve been asking yourself these questions, here’s a clarification.

First of all, both augmented and virtual realities fall under the umbrella of what we call “immersive technologies” — technologies that connect a physical world and a simulated one, blurring the limits between what is real and what is fictional. Say scuba diving, skydiving or astronautical journeys are immersions, in this specific case the experience is provided through a device, as a user interface (e.g., screen, goggles, keyboard, mouse) which allows the viewer to interact with a given immersive environment. The latter draws to the concept of interactivity as media deliver different visual, textual or multi-sensorial information depending on users’ input through the interface. Users thus shape unique experiences through a sensorimotor exploration of an image which runs through both space and time.

Augmented Reality (AR). Yes, this is one you get on your phone and all sorts of screen displays. This technology adjusts just as well to 2D and 3D environments, moving or still image. We say a picture is augmented when it features information — textual or visual — that was not included on the original shot and is distinct from the context or environment it describes. Snapchat stands as a good example. If you wish to post an image of a life event and overlay it with a label or an emoji, then you’ve literally “augmented” that picture. AR has many fields of application, notably in advancing museums’ multimedia. For instance, instead of listening to an audio-guide facing an artwork, you could also enhance your experience by superposing digital elements — visual or textual — to what you see, using a phone or tablet as an interface. The said information is usually triggered by either a QR code or image recognition, and you’ll most probably be asked to download an app developed for the specific purpose and context of the exhibition.

Artists who adopted AR technology early include Joseph Farbrook, John Craig Freeman, Will Pappenheimer, and Zachary Brady, often collaborating and investigating public spaces as demonstrates Pappenheimer and Brady’s Drawing Constellations (2016), and Freeman’s Metro-NeXt, Grand Central Station (2014). Amongst other artists promoting this scene, we see Carla Gannis and her augmented book The Selfie Drawings (2016), Michael Mittelman and his digital enactments of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings in AR.Lewitt (2016), and Claudia Hart’s The Flower Matrix (2017), which consists of patterned wallpapers embedding QR codes for the enhanced display of three-dimensional animations of flowers. Similarly, Laffy Maffei’s Justine Emard works with AR in Intermissions (2016) as she augments drawings of US open-air cinemas with the screening of videos projected during intervals in the fifties.

Virtual Reality (VR). You can also get this one on your phone, but it’s usually for when you wear goggles, as by definition it consists of visually sealing viewers off from their external reality. More than just a panoramic view, VR immerses observers in a 360° environment while giving the visual impression of evolving around 3D objects. The technology works with both parameters of space and time, but compared to AR the spatial dimensions look way more real due to its hermetical and three-dimensional character. Simulations can either depict a real or a virtual environment, and some include additional sensory information, for instance, sound through headphones or speakers. Up to certain levels of immersion, VR can also be displayed through screens (computers, tablets, phones) in the sense of providing a 3D and interactive journey, although won’t be as persuasive as when using stereoscopic devices.

In the creative sector, VR mostly emerges from joining video and installation art. The technology, pioneered in the 1980s by Jaron Lanier, has been explored as early as 2002 by artists like Langlands and Bell, and later with Cao Fei for her installation RMB City at the 56th Venice Biennale. With works like Brand New Paint Job (2013) and Transdimensional Serpent (2016), and Legendary Reality (2017), digital artist Jon Rafman quickly became essential for 3D representations and VR art. Other significant protagonists include Jordan Wolfson and his controversial installation Real Violence (2017), Jacolby Satterwhite and his time-based animated narratives, and Rachel Rossin creating immersive paintings such as the stereoscopic 360° video Man Mask (2016). But the VR industry impacts more of the art world daily, which explains how acclaimed artists like Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor, and Yinka Shonibare now turn to the medium. Big tech players also take action, and just as Rafman and Rossin used Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Google’s app Tilt Brush influences the development of artists like Elizabeth Edwards and Stuart Campbell.

Hybridization refers to mixed realities and is becoming more and more frequent which probably explains the AR/VR confusion. When faced with both at once an excellent way to recognize AR is that it provides graphical information that is “disconnected” and additional to the reality you see (may it be real or simulated). On the other hand, the VR experience involves moving through a three-dimensions space and defines the actual environment you evolve in.

With evolving technologies, the scope of application could even get more substantial (and we shall keep updated). Mat Collishaw’s 2017 installation, Thresholds, is only a first example of what a fully immersive environment could be. At Somerset house last summer the artist restaged William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 photography exhibition not only using VR, but also including sound, touch while moving around physical objects, and other sensory stimuli like feeling the warmth from a burning fire. You might need to get yourself ready for improvements in immersive realities, not just more interaction, but even perceptions referring to all senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactive, and gustative.

*Legend cover: Will Pappenheimer and Zachary Brady, Drawing Constellations, 2016, © Will Pappenheimer. Participatory drawing installation where the application transposed visitors’ 2D pictures (AR) in a 3D environment (VR).

Augmented and Virtual Realities: Highlight on Immersive Technologies

Know of the visionary artist who anticipated as early as the 1960s the internet and interactive network exchanges as now found in social media? Meet British artist, teacher and theoretician Roy Ascott (1934 — ), pioneer of cybernetic and telematic art, who questioned the effects of telecommunications on human consciousness and its global influence on people relationships.

The first word to characterize Ascott’s practice is cross-disciplinarity. He gave vital importance to developing ideas as part of a process, making connections and synthesis between fields related or not to atistic discourses. This all-encompassing attitude towards art emerged early in his career as a student of leading postwar artists Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, both of whom mixed aesthetic and non-aesthetic sources and inferred an art practice that also included writing and teaching. As such, one should acknowledge Ascott’s educational work and theories as an integral part of his artistic practice, which as we will see is more concerned with immaterial processes than the production of physical objects.

In 1961 Ascott discovered the science of cybernetics through the works of Norbert Wiener, F.H. George and W. Ross Ashby who provided with insights on information, feedback, and systemic relationship. A good explanation for cybernetics is that it parallels the functioning of systems to that of the human brain, with neuronal connections and nodes feeding messages in a decentralized manner. In other words, given information wouldn’t be dispatched from one to all but from all to all.

Stemming from this definition of cybernetic networks, Ascott became increasingly aware of the impact that technology would have on knowledge and behavior and thought it was the artist’s responsibility to build socially useful schemes. In his essays The Construction of Change (1964) and Behaviorist Art and the Cybernetic Vision (1966–67), Ascott explained the educational purpose of all art, saying its value lies in generating mental, conceptual and conscious shifts in behaviors, altering the artwork-artist-audience relationship. Notions of duration and interaction emerged as he wished for the viewer to become an active participant and conduct aesthetic experiments which could result in numerous outcomes, transforming the artwork from a static object to a time-specific and unique activity that requires feedback.

Cybernetic art gave Ascott the opportunity to experiment with the making of events that result from a context of one or multiple interactions that the artist cannot control, instead just setting a framework as an educator would do. For instance, Ascott’s Change Paintings (1959) required participants to overlay different panels of plexiglass with oil-painted elements. The interchangeable layers become a fundamental part of the visual construction showing the need for interactivity and the Bergsonian concept of change, impermanence, and uncertainty. Other works like Change Maps (1969) highlight aleatory methods and early concerns for unpredictable yet statistically probable outcomes — something which will become even more predominant in his Transaction Set (1971) for the play-out of “table-top strategies.” Cybernetics also influenced his teaching as he asked students to create aleatory devices like Calibrator for Selecting Human Characteristics (c. 1963), an installation randomly assigning role play for the experimentation of behavioral interactions.

At the end of the 1960s, Ascott started focusing on interactions amongst geographically dispersed people and advanced the idea of telecommunication networks allowing artists to work together from a distance. This idea corresponded to what Alain Minc and Simon Nora coined “telematics” in 1978, bringing together the words “telecommunications” and “informatique”, the French for computer science. The duo explained telematics’ main issue: “Are we headed […] toward a society that will use this new technology to reinforce the mechanisms of rigidity, authority, and domination? Or, on the other hand, will we know how to enhance adaptability, freedom, and communication in such a way that every citizen and every group can be responsible for itself?”

No wonder Ascott opted for the second option — more adaptability. And while telematics promoted systems similar to cybernetics, the potential reach of computer telecommunications was significantly broader, bringing the actual technology to an until then theoretical concept. In the late 1970s, these technologies mainly worked as military equipment, satellite communications had limited access, and only a few artists had access to computer-conferencing networks, the earliest form of telematics. It is only between the late 1980s and 1990s that the use of internet spread. Ultimately, Ascott pioneered telematic art with his work Terminal Art in 1980, which consisted of organizing a three-week computer-conference connecting Ascott with seven other artists across the globe to generate ideas collectively from their respective studios.

The idea of a decentralized but collective state of mind grew on Ascott, as he developed projects like his well-known La Plissure du Texte (1982). The work relied on computers ability to function asynchronously and asked artists in different time-zones to contribute subsequently to the piece by writing texts or building ASCII-based images. The work’s value lied first and foremost in its interactive and communicative reach for Ascott believed “products or objects originating in telecommunications projects are merely documentary relicts of an activity that took place in the electronic realm.” In turn, Ascott showed the new media’s ability to transcend usual barriers of space and time and pledged for distributed authorship. Artists act here as mere participants, blurring the boundaries between the emitter and the receiver, with participants playing both roles as part of the systemic process.

Ascott also made a significant contribution to Robert Adrian’s The World in 24 Hours (1982) and in1985 participated in Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou. For this latter work, he developed a system for the audience to build a text in real-time from alternating quotations of the two distinct written sources: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and a scientific report called Organe et Fonction.

Planetary Network (1986) marked the advent of the internet and a turn in artistic endeavors for its attention to interpersonal communication. Telenoia (1992) — a 24-hour online performance connecting artists through the various networks of the telephone, fax, videophone, and internet — made further concrete Ascott’s wish to create a “planetary discursive community outside, or able to bypass, the institutionalized administration of discourse.” Reminds you of Facebook? Well, that’s no Zuckerberg, and it appeared some 25 years before.

*Cover image: Roy Ascott setting-up Plastic Transactions at the president’s office desk, Ontario College of Art and Design, 1971. © Roy Ascott.

New Media Precursor: Roy Ascott

With thirty years of exercise and more than a hundred solo shows to this day, Russian art collective AES+F has established itself as a key player in digital practices and the contemporary art scene. What’s most intriguing in their absurd parodies is how narratives look both shallow and buried at the same time. Driving viewers in a relentless quest for meaning is probably one of the group’s most successful and overriding strategy, and it all revolves around one term: allegory.

Before delving into AES+F’s approach to narration, let’s go back to the definition and traditional use of allegory. While you might think “Duh, I know this!”, the clarification provides critical elements to understand the Russian collective’s construct of satirical pieces.

Allegory is one of the most recurring devices in Western art tradition because of its ability to represent historical events and inculcate moral values. It can appear in both comic and tragic settings, and functions as a device rather than the attribute of a specific genre within art history. According to historian David Macey, the word accounts for:

“A form of narrative or visual image whose literal and obvious meaning masks one or more meanings often with a didactic purpose.”

Allegorical figures follow specific codes in the bearing of signifiers which allows the process of identification and dissemination of the author’s message. The metaphorical process also depends a lot on interpretations, as exemplifies the appropriation of images from pagan Ancient World by the Christian Church, notably in the depiction of the many Virgin and child. Most importantly, in AES+F’s case:

“A successful allegory is consistent and coherent at all levels.”

In AES+F’s environments, pleasures contrast with political correctness and taboos pass on, masked under humanist principles of democracy and maintained through the consented practice of surveillance and control. A method they describe as follow:

“In our brilliant world, a person is oppressed by the excessiveness and availability of pleasure. We do not deconstruct this but look at it through a magnifying glass that takes us to a new grotesque, hallucinatory level.”

AES+F use obvious references to communicate ideas of contemporaneity while setting their worlds in a-contextual, multi-cultural societies. Works feature diverse ethnic groups as well as a plethora of social signifiers taken from today’s fashion, video game, and movie industries. You might recognise white underwears and poses typical of Calvin Klein ads, or the realistic guns and camouflage from your favourite shooting game. These symbols of mass consumption and visions of idealised bodies and lifestyles reminisce of our present time in the form of a glossy, marketing stunt.

The collective also offers references to Western Art traditions, combining styles of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-classicism notably. These allusions appear in the form of media, materials and format. On top of their work as illustrate their use of 18th-century-like porcelain sculptures in Mare Mediterraneum (2018), friezes and triptychs — in print or videos — for Inverso Mundus (2015) and Allegoria Sacra (2011–2013), as well as Tondos and white enameled sculptures giving a Renaissance vibe to the representations of The Last Riot (2005–2007).

The content within the compositions also shows direct historical influences. Allegoria Sacra, for instance, initiates a dialogue with Giovani Bellini’s 15th-century painting of the same name. The three graces clothed as stewardesses, Virgin Mary, a Centaurus, a hipster-version of Saint-Sebastian in shorts all come together, most probably accompanied by the likes of St Catherine, Job, and St Paul. Similarly, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009–2010) is a visible tribute to the lavish reception that takes place in Petronius’ novel Satyricon. AES+F’s artwork bears the same name as the banquet in the essay, making the reference apparent. It frames this story of Roman decadence within a contemporary setting where the excessively-consuming and pervasive lifestyle of high-net-worth individuals prevail. As such, when using past references, AES+F eminently relies on the European art historical canon, which implies a continuous use of visual and narrative conventions.

As we know, an allegory acquires meaning with repetitive use in a given context– much like a contract between author and viewer. Each time we recognise a pattern or motif, it automatically wires our brain into thinking about the message left for us to uncover. But what if AES+F didn’t use this device to deliver a message? What if we, viewers, inferred meaning to these artworks instead?

Possible social commentaries on AES+F’s work are evident (therefore opposing allegory’s function of hiding an educational purpose). In Inverso Mundus (2015), the group recalls 16th-century engravings where the world goes upside down. Animals supersede humans, beggars are rich, white men are a minority group, and women torture men as a repeal on the Inquisition. Although the call for more equality sounds obvious, the link between all the figures portrayed is confusing. Metaphors barely connect, and paradoxes intensify. Same goes for the meaning of Allegoria Sacra. The presentation of the international airport, today’s crossroad of destiny, takes origins in a Renaissance depiction of the purgatory. Is this social criticism, voyeurism or fantasy? Is it inclusive or cynical? Hard to say.

Despite allegories’ function to articulate a socio-political message, AES+F’s depictions might hold more of a descriptive role. In the composition of The Last Riot, for instance, adolescents mimic the poses and gestures of Renaissance and Baroque figures, but they conversely show no emotional signs. This U-turn is all the more visible that AES+F depict intense scenes of lust and suffering. We expect faces and bodies to express feelings of love, pain and trauma. Still, all we see is young, flawless bodies with similar demeanours. Actors only retain a sense of identity through their appearance and set of movements — this lack of personality concludes in the non-existence of eye contact and physical interaction.

The process also contributes to the delivery of a detached discourse. AES+F photographs actors separately and repeatedly to depict their movements. This technique prevents models from gazing or interacting with each other. It gives them a distance with the artwork’s subject and helps convey both lethargy and excessiveness. Later, sequences of each figure are assembled to illustrate an action. But erotic and violent mise-en-scènes never lead to neither sex nor blood. Once the tension is visible, and the culmination is near, scenes go in reverse motion, preventing a definite ending. While figures repeat their movements in a controlled, slow motion, Classical music, on the contrary, delivers dramaturgy and ardour. In The Last Riot, for example, Richard Wagner’s funeral march Twilight of the Gods (1848) intensifies the action.

These devices can trigger varied and impulsive responses. They contain a plurality of oppositions: conformism and insurrection, negligence and tenderness, masks and extravagant displays. In perplexing the potential message, AES+F withdraws from the creation of meaning and reverses the metaphorical function of the allegory. The reader/viewer is free to decipher. Here lies the key to AES+F’s design: they use a traditionally discursive device to fulfil another function, an aesthetic one.

What drives the group’s decision making might be what Russian linguistic theoretician Roman Jakobson called the poetic function of communication. This practice stresses the importance of form in composing a literary text or image. When observing the group’s work method, curator David Elliott noted:

“Each project has a directory of visual references, mostly sourced from the Internet, containing diverse possibilities; each set of references has a place within a larger map of the project.”

The use of mapping critically shows the existence of an underlying pattern. It seems very likely that AES+F posits a visual language to govern their compositions. Elements such as tropes, paradoxes, parallelisms, repetitions, and disrupted metrical patterns repeatedly appear in their work. In which case, allegory becomes another tool in their visual vocabulary. AES+F displaces the emphasis away from the narrative and puts the poetic function in the foreground — a method which links back to Russian Formalism. Estrangement or Ostranenie, as Viktor Shlovsky outlined, consists of making the familiar appear unusual. Semantic shifts result in a defamiliarisation which slows down the process of interpretation and forces to observe the image. Art provides no more shortcuts in delivering content, but a time to appreciate fine visual details.

In tricking viewers into an endless, visual quest for meaning, AES+F enacts one of the most recurring taboos in our societies. All lives deserve purpose, but individuals mostly guess what their’s is. The performance of dissertating AES+F’s content when no direct answers exist becomes the metaphor itself, and compositions earn credit in their consistent convey of non-narratives. Similarly, AES+F’s ultimate focus on visual poetics echoes the “fake it til’ you make it” motto, where everyone pretends to achieve something. Excesses or lack thereof might not be a real deal, but the way we control events through appearances sure is. For all one knows, we vain to eclipse our shortcoming of purpose in a grotesque masquerade.

*Cover image : AES+F, Inverso Mundus, Still #1–02, 2015, pigment InkJet print on FineArt Baryta paper, 55,6x80 cm, edition of 10 © courtesy of the artists. In this fantastic world, chimeras reminiscent of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch are domesticated like pets.

How Allegory Enters the Digital Age: The Case of AES+F

“Every age has its own gait, glance and gesture.” Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1860.

Since the birth of web 2.0 in the early 2000s, interactivity has become the key to the construction of content and virtual networks. In this sense, culture and network find fertile ground for symbolic and symbiotic mutations in the web. Nowadays, can we think of a net without art and art without a net? How do artistic languages evolve within social networks? The terms «social media» and «social network» are often used synonymously. However, in their relationship with artistic creation, ‘media’ and ‘network’ are not exactly the same thing. In this context ‘social network’ constitutes the set of relationships between content and users on the web. The nature of the network could be both on and offline. On the other hand, the definition of «social media» highlights the nature of the web as a medium, as the device which supports virtual networks. In this sense, online social networks need social media to exist on the web. Following this idea, social media allows for social networking. How do contemporary artists critique, steal, and use social media and networks? How are artistic production and distribution changing in an increasingly networked era?

The emergence of the first online content streaming platforms immediately became an opportunity for artistic creation and reflection on the digital medium.

Artists such as Petra Cortright are well aware of this and propose projects dealing with the aesthetic and social dimension of the internet as a social media and network. Cortright’s first works use the aesthetic canons of Youtube, and in particular of the cam-girl genre, to distort them and overturn their meaning. In VVEBCAM (2007), the artist presents herself as an alternative cam-girl, who does not wink at her viewers but remains focused on the camera and visual effects, immersed in the graphic interface of the video platform. Deceiving the internet audience in vague search of explicit content, the artist appropriates spam keywords to betray the viewer’s expectations. Cortright uses Youtube and the webcam as a tool for artistic production and subversion of the media and social order of the platform. Through her work, she emphasizes a new perception of identity in the condition of the online user, the communal nature of online networks, and the redefinition and fluidity of private and public space on the web. Parallel to Petra Cortright, Gazira Babeli has been living and working as an artist, performer and film-maker in Second Life. Babeli joined the first native artistic community in Second Life “Odyssey”, and in April 2007 she staged on this same platform an exhibition entitled [Collateral Damage] (2007), which has been - virtually - visited by over one thousand people.

Today we are witnessing a true proliferation of virtual art experiences, and the art world is increasingly embracing network culture. Art in and for social networks meets the birth of a critical look at the digital, the new tools of artistic creation and the community dimension of the network, the new hub of the creative process, but not only. Social networking also becomes an opportunity to demonstrate a new way of understanding the artist. The net often corresponds for artists to the space of inspiration, creation and communication. The 5th Floor, the online space of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, presented at the beginning of March Domenico Quaranta’s curatorial project Studio Visit, which allows you to peek inside the computers of James Bridle, Petra Cortright, Aria Dean, Oliver Laric, Eva & Franco Mattes and Lu Yang. The artists film their screen during their research and creation work and offer us the chance to poke around inside the programs, emails and files they consult. The sharing of their creative intimacy brings into play a new paradigm of measurement of private and public, where the ethics of social networking tends to overexpose personal content. The computer, software and hardware, embodies the new artistic atelier.

“Instagram’s logically simple structure […] make us realize the older mediums we are used to discussing as singular entities are really just fictions of our historicizing imagination.” Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image, 2017

While the web and online social networking platforms offer the possibility to experiment beyond the constraints of traditional media, the use of social networking platforms presupposes compliance with other policies regarding form and content. The emergence of contemporary social networks has immediately highlighted new conditions for the content and ownership of the images we share online. For this reason, the constitution of a virtual self (users and avatars made out of data) points out the need to reflect on the new nature of identity in the digital world. 

Far from corresponding to a pure and transparent representation of the self, the user in social networks corresponds to a kaleidoscope of information, including images, dates, places and comments become the raw material for social profile management proper to each platform. In this sense, social media becomes a way of questioning the physical and virtual identity of an individual/user. In this scenario, our digital self is ruled by complex, hidden and constantly evolving algorithms, which have the power to enhance or censor content.

How do artists approach the problem of online self-representation? How does online popularity challenge both the social representation of the self and informational capitalism?

In April 2014, Amalia Ulman started a scripted online performance via her Instagram and Facebook profiles. The artist underwent a semi-fictional self makeover by documenting plastic surgery, extreme diets and random fashionable activities. Through a close study of the social algorithm, she deliberately adhered to the canons of excellence and perfection favoured by social networks (hence the name of the project: Excellences and Perfections). Ulman’s work highlights the marked aestheticization of everyday life through social networks, the tendency to overshare moments of intimacy, joy or pain. For the artist, the social network becomes the ideal stage for a distortedly perfect self.

Around Amalia Ulman’s work, in her article “The Theatre of the Selfie: Fictive Practices of the Instagram Artist” researcher Sara Sylvestre writes that: “In a world where presentation of the self-performed through ‘selfies’ have become everyday expressions, portrayal of the Self is being redefined by contemporary feminist artists. Building upon the legacy of artists such as Hannah Wilke, Lyn Hershman Leeson and Cindy Sherman a new generation of feminist artists through technology and particularly social media continue to explore gendered representations of the body by using their own bodies in their creative process.”

“The new feminism must be a form of stealth feminism.” Leah Schrager

Can the appropriation of the creative and technological dynamics of social networks correspond to a new (cyber) feminist instrument? Sylvestre adds that: «The artists in this research use their own bodies and those of others in order to express individual and particular cultural positions as a fictional persona, namely that of the artist.» Staging and manipulating online self-representations become for the artist a way to explore and criticize the mainstream media representation of the female body. 

Similarly to Ulman, artist Leah Schrager plays with her digital alter ego, Ona Artist, questioning the very notions of identity and fetishization of online images. Through her ongoing performance, Schrager explores themes of sexuality, identity and self-representation via social networks. Appropriating the canons of contemporary web celebrities, the artist investigates the limits of appropriateness and inappropriateness of female images, using social networks as a platform for showcasing her fictional self but also as a medium of artistic creation.

Social networks are today more than ever, the cross and delight of artists and art institutions. Working on and with social networks means taking note of the economic policies and aesthetic limits that these platforms offer, but also of the virtual possibilities of artistic creation and distribution.

The very high degree of accessibility to content on social networks allows for possible artistic democratization and a break from traditional institutional artistic canons. Social networks are often the cradle of new artistic proposals, which intersect design, fashion and digital creation. Artists such as Ines Alpha and Andy Picci are paradigmatic example of how a new generation of artists emerges and feeds on the culture of social networks.  Through the creation of filters and AR works, born-digital artists play with 3D modelling on and beyond the screen. On the border between the photographic and the virtual, artistic creation through and for social media embodies an idea of art as a process, interaction and virtuality as an expressive possibility. From Youtube to Second Life, passing through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all of their ancestors, artists on social networks is committed to the appropriation of codes of network culture and highlights their artistic agency on the border between private and public information, between the intimate and the collective, between the virtuality and the materiality of digital media. The artistic creation and diffusion through social networks enhance digital performativity in a virtual and networked art world.

Artists Network-Ed: How Social Media Is Changing Art And Vice Versa

Today, the Internet is an extremely fertile ground for the proliferation of new agents and new forms of artistic production. On the other hand, the Net is quiet of a challenging environment, full of political, economic, and social controversies. For this reason, the Web from its most embryonic stages has been cross and delight for artists and researchers who investigate its forms and functions, in strokes of codes and pixels. The Internet as a device for cultural creation and diffusion is evolving, in an exponential, accelerated and inconstant way, artists on the Net have to build their legitimacy around a cloud made of bigger and bigger data.

As an art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta would say, « Art is the first to envision the change and the last to change ». If, on the one hand, the artist holds, now more than ever, the responsibility to face the mutations proper to the digital world, his role does not change: the artist questions contemporary codes, he appropriates and reinvents them. He becomes a collagist of the virtual, a remixer of cultures, an honest plagiarist by profession. In this perspective, the figure of the artist is associated with that of the hacker. 

This article wants to evoke some key nodes of the link between art and computer piracy as aesthetic practice and socio-political statement, proposing a contemporary rereading of some examples of net hacktivism from the 90s to now.

How do today's practices of artistic hacking assume legitimacy in an on and offline art world? Hacking, as a practice with a modern form and ancient values, as the spearhead of network (sub)culture, demands this very legitimacy.

A hacker is in its current conception a computer scientist capable of finding unconventional - and often illegal - solutions to infiltrate software or the Web. Artists who deal with software and Net.art often behave like social hackers, in the sense that they overturn the semiological structure of commonly used technological devices, with consequences on their social use.

In this sense, as the Dutch theorist Florian Cramer, says, it is possible to speak of poetry, elegance in programming but, above all, in hacking. According to Cramer, «a ‘hack’ describes this very activity itself, be it as a trick or deception, as an efficacious, but conceptually unclean intervention (...), or as a solution that is at once ingeniously simple and elegant, absorbing an abundance of issues in the densest possible form». For Cramer, a hack is like a Trojan horse: an ingenious, simple, and elegant solution that condenses problems and solves them. On the other hand, the hacker is the sophist, a philosopher of persuasion who deceives and/or convinces by combining the elegance of logical construction with the rhetorical force of the Latin stupor. Cramer argues that «In the Renaissance, ‘stupor’ became a crucial term for the rhetoric and poetics of ‘acumen’, that is, a wit driven by ingenium. While seventeenth-century theory was still conceived of ingenium as engineering, something that, like all rhetoric, could be taught by instruction, 100 years later the term mutated into the romanticist ‘genius’, which could no longer be learned but was a gift of nature. What happens then if hackers became the new role model of the artist?».

Piracy, plagiarism, and theft of content as an artistic statement is as subversive as it is classical and derives from a tradition of appropriation, détournement, and ready-made that goes back at least a hundred years from now. In this sense, the artist as a Net-hacktivist plays with the web, with his interface design, with the construction of alternative scenarios where (almost) everything is allowed. In this context, the verb 'play' is more relevant than ever, since playing means inventiveness, lightness, and passion in artists’ serious game. Playing is a necessary condition for hacker ethics, as the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen explains in «The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age». Moreover, the artist as a hacker inherits his mainspring from the figure of the pirate, who, even before being a copyright thief, is by his etymological nature an explorer, the one who attempts, assaults, and, above all, navigates. The architecture of the web and its interface stubbornly use the metaphor of maritime navigation: the web route is cybernetic (κυβερνητικός, kubernētikós, means 'good pilot', 'good navigator'), and the icon of the Safari browser is a blue compass. In the metaphor of the maritime navigation, the hacker artist claims possession of the rudder.

How did we get here? Hacking heritage from the 90s

The 90s are a key moment for the history of information technology as well as for art history. New forms of archiving emerge that are increasingly compact, performing, and accessible to the general public, and with them new forms of production and consumption. New sounds and new images circulate on CDs, cassettes, on the first laptops, and it is these same advances in communication (in its efficiency and speed) that feed a post-modern artistic panorama: the primordial broth of internet-based art.

Among the pioneer artists of Net.art we find for example Russian artist Olia Lialina, her husband Dragan Espenschied, Net.art pioneer Alexei Shulgin, and the artistic duo JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans). These artists share the trend towards an aesthetic that digs into the newborn potential of website creation and questions the aesthetic and narrative potential of interface design. A trend that, moreover, often leads to strident audiovisual scenarios, full of bugs clicks so dear to glitch aesthetics. In particular, JODI's works remix the visual codes proper to web interfaces by staging improbable, destabilizing hypertext paths, where commands cause errors and frightening (though harmless) dysfunctions. One of their ongoing project (from 2008) takes its name from the concept of "Folksonomy", a cataloging system based on social tagging and proposes a sort of live juke-box in which artists manipulate found footage found on youtube, creating an audiovisual montage sometimes strident and cacophonic, symptom of visual distortion, forced and psychedelic. In reality, aesthetic unpleasantness plays a fundamental role in the process of visual construction. The disproportionate, disproportionate, de-hierarchized (and therefore, 'folksonomic') amount of visual material on the web, can certainly not be summarized in a placid narrative with pastel tones. At least, not for JODI.

The first generation of hacktivists has a cyberpunk imprint, both techno-enthusiastic and techno-critical, but also, and above all, feminist. The web immediately becomes the insidious but fertile ground to claim socio-political struggles and the ideal playground for Donna Haraway's artistic daughters. The cyberfeminist imprint of hacktivism is affirmed thanks to artists and researchers like Cornelia Sollfrank, and Tatiana Bazzicchelli (founder of AHA, Activism, Hacktivism, Artivism, 2001). How do artists hack a both technical and institutional gender gap?

In 1997, the Hamburger Kunsthalle announced the first Net Art Extension design competition. Sollfrank simulates the registration of 289 female net-artists, assigning each one a name, a nationality, an email address, a website, and a phone number (Female extension, 1997). She entered each of these fake artists in the competition by submitting for each one a work of art automatically generated by a software program that the artist will then develop for her Net art generator. Sollfrank is delightfully surprised by the results: no female winner among the three finalists, but a huge media chaos around the female majority in the show. Those of Cornelia Sollfrank is a classic example, but still the world of art and technology does not seem to often wear skirts. Since gender equality in digital society is not guaranteed, activists, hacktivists and artivists invent counter-histories dripped in feminism, embodiments of the (disregarded) utopia of cyberspace at least a little more egalitarian.

In the last 20 years, the Internet became more and more important for social and economical exchanges, and the web became a (hyper)object of global data exchange more than actual material goods. Since 2018, the artistic collective DISNOVATION.ORG has been working on a project entitled Profiling The Profilers, which proposes a reversal of the policy of micro-profilation by the big tech-companies (GAFAM: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft; NATU: Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber; BATX: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi). The user profiling system, which normally occurs through the decapitation of patterns and correlations between elements of large databases (behaviors, affiliations, connections based on clicks and likes), is overturned and used on the same profiler agents thanks to the extraction and analysis of hidden correlations from publicly available big datasets (ie. Wikipedia). In this way, their custom-made algorithm allows graphical visualization of the ethical-political inclination of the same companies that, without making it a secret, their clients know many things. DISNOVATION.ORG hack-reviewers are engaged to expose the correlation of information that is already present and accessible on the web, but whose form is modeled according to criteria of visibility and popularity, following a scheme that is usually hidden from a ‘basic’ user.

As visibility in the internet age detains at least as much power as secrecy, many artists focus their interest on cyber-surveillance or, as Eric Sadin would describe it “data-panopticism”, overturning the paradigms of who’s watched and who’s watching (and why). At the 58th Venice Biennale, Net.artist Shu Lea Cheang presents 3x3x6, an interactive and site-specific installation curated by Paul B. Preciado and staging the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni as a hyper-surveilled space. The Taiwanese artist and director is, among other things, a Net.art pioneer, a veteran hacktivist, and queen of the Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> (2001), an open online platform for free sharing of digital content. In 3x3x6 the visitor is invited to join an experiment of auto-surveillance, speculative fiction, and the construction of alternative storytelling, with a Foucauldian and cyberpunk flavor. The artist infiltrates the surveillance of his cells (measuring 3x3x6m) and then manipulates visitors' faces, making them cross-racial, cross-gendered, and, more importantly, resistant to surveillance. Shu Lea Cheang's prisons embody a new, unsettling the vocabulary of ancient and modern criminology, to create a queer and anti-colonial counter-history, in which the very concept of truth is subject to the laws of digital. Cheang's hacking practice deals with surveillance, image property, and the redefinition of roles, genders, and mechanisms in the information society. Where online identity is multiple and fragmented, the artist affirms the need to subvert today's network paradigms. In this sense, Cheang investigates and questions the iron curtain that constitutes online privacy today, and not only. Cheang’s artwork is, therefore, part of a rather traditional scheme of power hijack, and the artist is finally a David who questions one of his personal Goliath revealing and exposing the contradictions of a network society that exposes and tags everything and everyone.

The web has been from his birth the playground of artists who experiment by appropriating the visual and conceptual codes proper to the world of the Internet, deconstructing and reassembling them according to new and provocative configurations. The artists as hacktivists are, yesterday and today, the cursed poets of Html language, the creators of distorted narratives in binary code, the thieves who are not always gentlemen, the navigators, and the cultural remixers. In this sense their aesthetic action becomes political, questioning the pre-existing hierarchies of power, which in the web correspond to dates but also their exposure (or secrecy). Hacking as an artistic practice turns out to be a tool at the same time docile and subversive, and probably the aim of these Davids is not to defeat a Goliath but to tease its weak points and highlight its dysfunctions, its dis-novations, appropriating a virtual space, space where the artist has the legitimate responsibility to use, create, discuss, invent.

Quaranta, Domenico. In Your Computer: Or How I Learned to Love the Art That Comes to You through Your Computer Screen, and Why You Should Learn to Love It as Well. Brescia: LINK, 2011, p.5

Cramer Florian, Anti-Media, Rotterdam, Nai Uitgevers Pub, 2013, p. 221

Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. London: Vintage, 2001.

http://www.ecn.org/aha/English/index_en.htm

http://www.artwarez.org/femext/index.html

Sadin Éric, La vie algorithmique (Algorithmic Life. Critique of Digital Reasoning). Paris: L’échapée, 2015.

http://www.mauvaiscontact.info/kop/html/index.html

What is hacktivism ? The artist as hacker in the digital age

In the post-digital and internet-aware era, the cultural palimpsest in its networked dimension of images, words, ideas quantified and put online, becomes the rich repertoire for many artists, engineers, and activists of post-modernity. In this context, a hacker is an anti-net-surfer who seeks unconventional solutions and exits from the pre-established routes of the web. We have selected a series of texts that deal with the figure of the hacker as an artist, and vice versa, drawing what is still current in hack-tivistic practices. The hacktivists’ philosophy does not accept historicisms or reductions to linear storytellings, nevertheless here is our Net-anthological selection: a playlist of classical insights on hacker culture.

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen (London: Vintage, 2001)

“The first guiding value in hacker life is passion, that is, some intrinsically interesting pursuit that energizes the hacker and contains joy in its realization.” (139p)

The Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen elaborates a manual of nethics, mapping the relationships between ethics and technological development, and taking as reference the figure of the hacker. The manual, introduced by the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds, and commented by the author of “The Information Age”, Manuel Castells, presents three fundamental axes for the construction of hacker ethics: work ethics, money ethics, and net-hics.

Himanen repeatedly analyzes the similarities between Protestant ethics and capitalist economics, as well as the consequences of hacker inscription in a world where 'time is money'. In this sense, hacking would correspond to a creative alternative that questions the dominant Protestant ethics and which is impregnated with the architecture of information on the net.

From this point of view, Himanen places the hacker in a grey and hybrid zone between work and leisure, between Friday and Sunday, suggesting that free creativity is both a responsibility and a pleasure and that hacking is a serious game, even today, in vibrant evolution.

Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age by Domenico Quaranta  (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011)

“There is no way around it: whatever is digital is copyable and can be manipulated by whomever gets possession of it.” (p12)

In “Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age”, theorist and curator Domenico Quaranta curates a review of reflections on the artist as an accumulator, cataloguer, remixer of online cultural material. The artist online in the Internet Age faces a new dimension of memory - quantified, dematerialized, if not eternal subject to the law of obsolescence of its own support devices. The fact that the artist/archivist's tendency towards documentation explodes simultaneously with the massive adoption of computers and the Internet by consumers is no coincidence for Quaranta. On the contrary, the internet world of professional-amateurs, collectors, and image recyclers is a symptom of accessibility to the net and, with it, all its contents.

The author collects in his book the writings of art critic and theorist Josephine Bosma, art writer and curator Gene McHugh, and senior editor of Rhizome Joanne McNeil. A second part of the book is dedicated to the presentation of 25 collectors: artists and art collectives who are masters in the appropriation, collection, and détournement of online codes and cultures. Among them, we find artists such as Cory Arcangel, Petra Cortright, Eva & Franco Mattes, and other cultural net-appropriators.

Now that post-internet culture is fermenting and accelerating, are forms of storage, human and digital memory compatible? Are they, today, complementary or contradictory?

Anti-media: ephemera on speculative arts by Florian Cramer (Rotterdam: New York, NY: nai010 publishers, 2013)

"In both anti-art and anti-media, a love/hate relationship is undeniably at work. And both perhaps signify twentieth-century nostalgia, since the notion of creative industries may be about to make both terms obsolete." (p.14)

Florian Cramer is a practice-oriented theorist whose research deals with new communication technologies and their cultural impact. Cramer states that if there is anti-art and counter-culture, there are also anti-media, in which everything is changeable, speculative, and often provocative. The author defines his speech in four parts that follow the structure of the book title: Anti, Ephemera, Speculative, Arts.

Cramer's text, with its personal but always skilled style, proposes a sociological investigation of his contemporary artistic production, always imbued with a magma of data and pixels, where computer engineering is also socio-cultural engineering. Cramer's online cultural actor is put into perspective concerning pop culture, as well as folk culture, contesting the fact that the universality of language, even if computerized, is not possible (and perhaps not even desirable). In this sense, anti-media (appropriation, speculation, theft, remix, etc.) call into question the alleged neutrality of technology as a means of creation and socio-cultural sharing.

THE PIRATE BOOK by Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska (Ljubljana: Aksioma; Clichy: Pavillon Vendôme Art Center, 2015)

This book could not have been made without the help of: street vendors, photocopiers, bootleg recordings, double cassette decks, cracktros, .nfo files, VHS recorders, CD burners, scanners, BBS, copy parties, game copiers, Warez, keygens, Napster, eDonkey, Soulseek, The Pirate Bay, UbuWeb, Library Genesis, Karagarga, Megaupload, FilesTube, and many more…

The pirate book by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska is not an online pirating manual, nor a hymn to computer anarchy, but a logbook for explorers, researchers, net-surfers, and, therefore, pirates. The book, introduced by art theorist and curator Marie Lechner, collects multiple stories that include research from multiple environments and then shows us a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the world of hacking.

The publishers propose historical, internal, industrial, and geographical perspectives, as well as an opening to new research projects and artistic speculation. The collection highlights a dimension of hacking that has a strong link with the serendipity of knowing how to arrange, DIY, and informal sharing of resources. Which pirates do we need today?

Hacktivism Reviewed: Selected Books On Hacking, Net-Art and Activism in The Digital Age

Cao Yuxi (JAMES) is an artist and coder who explores the fields of sound-visualization, programming, and computing. The artist invests in public space by realizing numerous projects combining creative art and technology in the form of space design, immersive mapping projection space, installation, live A/V performance, and video.

Cao Yuxi（JAMES ) has exhibited extensively in China and the U.S.

" Cao Yuxi explores the contemporary significance of QR codes in Dimensional Sampling, a series of audiovisual works that take the geometric design as a digital totem emblematic of the modern age." 

Interview by Henry Bruce-Jones |  Factmag

" Cao Yuxi created MACROCOSM as a self-generating programming system, producing digital artifacts that (...) will ‘survive and evolve from simple to complex organic creatures based on their own immanent laws of interaction’, as explained by the artist. "

Claire Malrieux has developed a practice in the field of visual arts placed at the frontiers of sculpture, installation, and drawing. The artist combines form and narrative in a space oscillating between collaboration and tension in the form of code, graph, and 2D/3D printing.

Conditioned by scientific knowledge, Claire Malrieux explores the possibilities of a new syntax for drawing data and algorithms. She creates generative, parametric, and hybrid digital tools bringing together the hand and the machine. Combining her drawing practice with digital technologies, the artist questions the meaning of drawing space in the digital and post-digital age.

Since 2014, Claire Malrieux has been developing the Hyperdrawing project, focusing on the production of graphic artworks that involve drawing in narrative and speculative perspectives of algorithmic thinking. This project includes climatological data (General Climate, 2017), the neurocognitive processes of dreams (Dreambank, 2019), and stock exchange algorithms (Vibratory Economy, 2015).

Talents Contemporains | Claire Malrieux, 2019, Fondation Francois Schneider

Claire Malrieux has exhibited in various institutions including the Museum of Decorative Arts (2014), the space Khiasma (2015), La Terrasse à Nanterre (2016), Hyperpavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017).

Installation views include shots from the Venice Biennale and College des Bernardins.  

Claire Malrieux's artworks, first produced in an editorial form and then in digital installations, focus on giving form to stories inspired by scientific knowledge.

George Vitale is an artistic director, exhibition maker and curator based in Berlin. His area of focus is the impact of technology and the digital on society, through the lens of art and the artist’s eyes. In 2017 he founded the first VR-based art gallery called synthesis. synthesis is an immersive blend of technology and art displayed under one roof, showcasing cutting-edge experiences by new wave artists and visionaries through virtual reality. In synthesis’ first three years, the gallery has produced about fourteen exhibitions of VR art in Berlin and abroad and participated in several art festivals such as Transmediale and re:publica, with its exhibitions regularly selected and recommended by Berlin Art Week.

https://fadmagazine.com/2018/03/23/virtual-reality-art-gallery-opens-berlin-exhibition-renowned-swiss-artist-marc-lee/

https://www.gallerytalk.net/out-of-the-box/

https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/gallery-brings-vr-contemporary-art/4563

http://digicult.it/articles/science/feelings-new-models-of-interaction/

https://www.clotmag.com/oped/vr-experience-does-not-mean-art-by-george-vitale

https://www.instagram.com/synthesis.gallery/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVC51f3nIVeoULvzWI3Y49Q

Mathieu Merlet Briand is a post-internet artist working with digital sculptures, prints, and installations to explore how technology challenges our perception of contemporaneous reality. Using big data, search engines and algorithms as media, he translates images and words into ethereal compositions.

Internet materiality and its representations are fundamental to Mathieu Merlet Briand’s approach. In analogy to nature, the artist shapes data flows through recycling processes, ultimately resulting in relics, crystallizations, fragments or abstractions of the world wide web. In binding the real and the virtual, he points to the environmental issues in the (im)material consumption of technology

Exhibits such as #iceberg (2017) or Environnement (2017) derive from this attachment to reality. In modelizing the outcome of the data cultivation in the form of sculptures, these installations make us physically close to the deterioration of the planet due to the impact of supposedly dematerialized technologies.

“Just as a biologist in his lab, Mathieu Merlet Briand collects his raw material on the internet before he starts cultivating it. (…) After the protocols and algorithms invented by Mathieu Merlet Briand sifted through the indistinct swarming of these raw data, something resembling a new perceptual texture arises.”

Mathieu Merlet Briand participated in numerous solo and group shows in France and internationally, including the Kerkennah01 festival in Tunisia, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art at the New Tretyakov Gallery, the exhibition "the Synchronicity of  Elements" at the Contemporary Art Center of Nîmes, and "Parallel Call" in the collections of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Installation views include shots from EP7 in Paris, International festival of visual art & photography in Tunisia, Playground for All, Variation Media Art FAir - Cité Internationale des Arts, 7th International Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, University of Paris-Dauphine and Artplateforme in Paris.

Just as a biologist in his lab, Mathieu Merlet Briand collects his raw material on the internet before he starts cultivating it.

Alexandra Gorczynski creates two-dimensional, sculptural and video works that investigate the overlap of virtual and actual states of being. Layering together paint, photographs, and moving images, Gorczynski reframes the technique of collage and celebrates the formal potential of new media.

Her work questions the representation of the female body within the digital era as she opposes ideal nudes with the depiction of existing women. Her investigations on identity point out to new representational possibilities, as well as the gap between physical and virtual realities. In exploring the fluidity of identity, she shows the sensuous and corporeal limitations of the virtual and the real.

“Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the work is its play upon the continuum that exists between traditional painting and new media. While the use of new media is not insignificant in itself, only the most hubristic of artists is not cognisant of what has gone before. as t. s. eliot said “What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.”” Alexandra Gorczynski

With solo shows across the United-States and in London, as well as group exhibitions in Vienna and Paris, and participation in Art Basel and Pulse fairs, Alexandra Gorczynski has asserted her role in the digital art scene.

Jeremy Couillard’s practice involves 3D animation, poetry, video games and digital paintings. His videos bring fictional universes alive with a psychedelic color palette, cartoonish aesthetic and a gimmicky, absurdist feel, positing his scenarios as utopian futures. Drawing reference from comics and video-games, convention, his on-screen interactions provide meaningless quests, driving non-aware online gamers to complete mundane actions.

Just like with a third-person video-game, viewers hover over towns and alien, liminal spaces. When travelling seamlessly into these supernatural worlds, biases of the physical world are nomore, revealing the recess and relief that digital universes can offer.

#ALIENS #ARCHITECTURE #FICTION #VIDEO #GAMES #ONLINE 

“Worlds built in software exceed their maker’s intentions; Couillard describes his work as a kind of collaboration with the software itself. This collaborative aspect makes the project of worldbuilding much less predictable and perhaps gives digitally constructed worlds a privileged relationship with the social realities they aim to experiment with.”

“The video-game is an exercise in rapid world-building. I love using a video game engine because you can fairly quickly create an entire world that has its own physics, look and logic. My background is in painting so I approach world-building in a similar way, also understanding that the medium has its own history. I like to make worlds that I like to be in so making a sort of Utopia is pretty cathartic. I can get rid of all the things that give me anxiety in this world.”

Jeremy Couillard | Exhibition of HOTR Home Furnishing, Phillips nyc.

Jeremy Couillard has exhibited internationally including group presentations at The Rotterdam Film Festival and the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, and solo shows at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Zhulong Gallery, Louis B. James, and Yours, Mine & Ours Gallery. He also recently completed a virtual reality video presented by the New Museum and Rhizome.

 I love using a video game engine because you can fairly quickly create an entire world that has its own physics, look and logic. 

Tamiko Thiel investigates how AR and VR can allow the exploration of non-linear storytelling. Acting upon the merging of the body and device, she sees the interface as a window into another dimension that overlays our everyday world. 

Similar to a microscope, the screen reveals invisible layers of life and matter that coexist with us. In correlating these different realities, Tamiko Thiel reminds of the existence of other ecosystems, the flaws driving the anthropocene and the potential for techno-organic mutations. 

Tamiko Thiel has exhibited internationally in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Istanbul Biennial, the International Center for Photography, the Design Museum in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, the Institute of Contemporary Art London and Boston, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Centre Pompidou.

“I know myself that artworks that only spread doom and gloom make an emotional impact, but leave the viewers depressed rather than energized. With all my artworks, i try to give the visitors a bit of delight to encourage them to engage with the artwork, which creates an emotional moment when they realize the underlying darkness.”

Tamiko Thiel in article by Allison Meier | Hyperallergic

“The more we are physically involved with a process, the stronger it becomes embedded in our memories. The physical engagement that ar requires is not a bug, but a feature.”

Since 2018 the artist has been collaborating on many projects including Unexpected Growth, a commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art and Evolution of Fish. Installation views also include images from Digital Art Space Munich and Die Neue Sammlung / Pinakothek der Moderne Munich.

Eva Papamargariti’s practice focuses on time-based media (video, gif animations), printed material and installations that explore the relationship between digital space and (im)material reality. She is interested in the creation of 2D and 3D-rendered spaces, forms, and geometries that provoke narrations on the verge of digital and physical.