Nouveaux médias : mythes et expérimentations dans les arts
Interviews on a New Spatial Paradigm in the Digital Age
Zoe Stillpass
Media theorist Lev Manovich has written, “The computer era introduces a different paradigm. This paradigm is concerned not with time but with space.”1 Indeed, departing from prior emphases on medium specificity and flatness, artists and theorists have developed novel approaches to thinking about space in visual imagery. Through the remediation of established media, software offers artists previously unthought-of ways to configure space. These spatial reconfigurations correspond to a recent reconsideration of the relationship between the human and technology. While the digital regime provides new democratic means of producing and distributing artworks, concomitantly, it establishes forms of control administered through a global network and through the free flow of international capital. Whether for good or for bad, the digital has proliferated and permeated all of social space, leaving us in a situation where there appears to be no inside or outside.2 In the following series of interviews, I asked several artists about the role of digitalization in spatially composing an image. All of the interviewees are preeminent American contemporary artists who have shown extensively around the world. While these are not the only innovators who are transforming visual representation, I chose these particular artists for several reasons. First, although they have all received international recognition in the contemporary art world, they are lesser known by European art historians and academics. Secondly, they each work in different media and employ disparate techniques. Finally, they each approach spatial composition and the digital from their own unique angle.
MARK BARROW AND SARAH PARKE
Husband-and-wife team Mark Barrow (b. 1982) and Sarah Parke (b.1981) live and work in New York City. Barrow received his MFA from Yale University. Barrow and Parke each received a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Their work has recently been exhibited at JDJ | The Ice House, Garrison, NY; La Capella Cavassa, Saluzzo, Italy; the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; White Columns, New York; Le 109, Nice; ZERO..., Milan; Galerie Almine Rech, Paris and Brussels; Elizabeth Dee, New York; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; and the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
The loom is considered a precursor to the computer, and your work has explored the relationship between weaving, visual systems, and the digital. The digital, which literally means the digits of the hand, can imply touch while also describing incorporeal information. In your work, you play on this dichotomy between the tactility of weaving and the opticality of painting. Could you explain some ways that you've used digital tools and referenced computing in your work? How has the digital influenced your spatial compositions?
MB: It's interesting to think of the digital in relation to its literal meaning. We start most of our compositions by drawing them with our fingers on an iPad or phone. We use a fairly rudimentary app that translates our fingers’ movements into bulbous lines, like finger painting as a child or writing your name in the sand. For us, there is a direct correlation between this digital act and the first cave paintings. Those first paintings were everything – abstraction, representation, innovation, giving an idea a form. In a way, all art thereafter has been an attempt to recreate those first moments. A finger on an iPad is a recent iteration that circles back to the original act in a lovely way. After all those tens of thousands of years and technological advancements, we’re still just drawing with our fingers.
SP: Yes, we then translate our computer-drawn composition from pixels-on-screen to paint-on-fabric. The bulbous lines become containers that hold different information. We often trace the threads of the fabric with paint using a small brush the size of one weaving pick (a single weft thread). A pick goes either over or under the warp threads. This binary predates the computer. We further play with this idea by also painting the weaving draft (a pixelated notation of the picks) and painting the tie-up (a numerical notation of which threads are raised to create the fabric). The latter looks like the binary digital code of zeros and ones.
You have used synaesthesia as a metaphor for your work. Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which an individual conflates multiple sensory experiences from the same stimulus. For example, a synesthete can perceive numbers as colors or vision as touch.9 With the digital, similar to synesthesia, every medium can be transformed into another. Could you discuss this relationship and your interest in synaesthesia?
MB: We can only understand concepts through other concepts. Art allows us to see something in a new way, to see a concept through a new concept. That is what makes art interesting. Synaesthesia or the digital seem like apt metaphors or even tools to help facilitate this mode of working.
You have stated that your work reduces materials to their “most basic forms until everything becomes interchangeable.”10 Reductionism was central to modernist abstraction as well as to the dominant scientific paradigm of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it seems to me that your work is as much about complexity as it is about reductionism, and an interest in complex systems is central to networked society and contemporary science.11 Today, scientists use computers to visualize the emergence of complex forms that are impossible to observe in physical space. In the same vein, you have likened your practice to scientists’ quest to understand the world beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and have stated that “things in the field of physics like commingled particles, non-locality, and inflationary theory may point to new understandings of space.”12 Could you elaborate on the link between your work, complexity, and alternative scientific models of space in the digital age?
MB: This question brings us back to the idea that people can only understand concepts through other concepts, a conceit advanced by the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.13 They write about subjectivity and its relationship to phenomenological physical experience. They argue that our subjectivity binds us, and the details of our corporeal existence limit our concepts. For example, the fact that our eyes and feet face the same direction, and we are biologically disposed to a front/back orientation determines our conception of space and time (moving forward, passing, standing still). Sometimes in art, it feels like everything has been done before. How can anyone make anything new or interesting? But when we read about contemporary science and see that, despite our corporeal limitations, scientists are still coming up with new (even radical) ways to view the world, it is really inspiring.
SP: Maybe other artists don’t have to do this in their practices, but we need to reduce things to understand them, and we must do this first in order to make anything more complex. We learned this in our undergraduate education, which was modeled on the Bauhaus and required a “foundation year” (learning the basics of drawing, two-dimensional design, and three-dimensional design) before moving on to a field of study. We have spent years making work based on the idea that a weaving pick = a pixel = a brushstroke. It feels like only recently, we have developed a language that we can use to make more complex compositions.
Your work Origin (2019) (fig. 2) has a floral pattern based on an Islamic tile design. In your recent exhibition Future Homemakers of America,14 you presented this work beneath a window with an aperiodic tile motif. As the press release states, “Taken together, one can draw a link between their underlying geometries, suggesting infinite expansion and a sense of spirituality.” Your continuously looping animation of an exploding star also seems to concern infinity and the digital. This statement brings to mind Laura U. Marks’s book Enfoldment and Infinity, which situates the origins of digital culture, particularly the algorithm, in ancient Islamic art. Tracing the connections between Islamic aesthetics and new media art, she describes an algorithmic aesthetic experience where the image functions as an interface to information and information is an interface to infinity. Could you expound on this relationship between infinity, information, and image?
MB: I don’t think the digital embodies any new concept, but because it accelerates everything and pervades our culture, it foregrounds already-existing concepts, structures, and ideas that were perhaps not as prevalent before, at least not in wider, popular culture. The argument that digital culture has its origins in ancient Islamic art is similar to the idea that the computer has its origins in the loom.
SP: We haven’t read Laura U. Marks’s book, so we probably shouldn't speak to her algorithmic aesthetic experience. But we are really interested in patterns, both as decorative motifs and as images, that through repetition do not necessarily represent what they depict but rather become interchangeable pieces of information. As you mentioned before, our work has always sought to reduce forms to their most basic components. The way we work with images is no different. If everything is interchangeable, you can better make connections across seemingly disparate concepts.