Faster network speeds, accessible technology and wider acknowledgement have allowed electronic art to flourish not just in the nooks and crannies of the World Wide Web, but in our physical spaces too.
Laser lights, video, digital art and anything electronic are deeply rooted within what we term “electronic art”. Events such as last year’s Experimenta and the upcoming International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA 2013) indicate that these practices sit now within the spectrum of legitimate art forms, albeit on the fringe. As our technology develops and more artists take up the laser over the paintbrush, where will digital art head?
‘More and more artists – especially younger and emerging artists – are accessing these digital tools of the 21st century to create and explore new works and new paradigms and new realms of artistic practice,’ says Alessio Cavallaro, a leading curator and producer of electronic arts in Australia and Executive Creative Producer of the upcoming ISEA 2013.
‘It’s certainly very exciting to see the kinds of developments and to indeed marvel at the ingenuity and innovation that a lot of artists have been able to generate through their work with electronic media.’
But, as all good history teachers preach, to fully understand the future we must first examine the past. Electronic art isn’t a new medium and even though many still perceive it as ‘futuristic’ in the archaic ‘laser-beams-and-hover-boards’ sense of the word, it has been around for a while.
What we know as “electronic art” today has come to replace more specific terminologies, such as “media arts” and “interactive media art”, which were popular in the 90s and associated with CD ROMS and early internet use.
According to Professor Darren Tofts, author of Interzone: Media Arts in Australia, ‘This short-lived spike [the 90s] was a more public and spectacular expression of a more subterranean practice of electronic art, the history of which goes back as far as European modernism in the 1920s and 30s. Like video art, which also has a prehistory going back at least to the 1950s, electronic art was very much a minority culture, and largely a forgotten one.’
Perhaps this is why so many people associate electronic art with the digital realm even though it more often than not sits outside of it. While electronic artists have been slogging away for a number of decades, the presence of their work online was where this newest of art forms got its break. Electronic art cut its teeth in the decades preceding and emerged full force via desktop screens and handheld devices, with our screens playing the role of easels and galleries simultaneously.
But what of the future?
The symbiotic relationship between the art form and the technologies used to create it will no doubt be key to the future of electronic art. This isn’t a one way art form; artists give back by finding new uses and needs for technology, essentially operating as usability crash test dummies in the most creative sense of the word. This points to an optimistic future, because it allows them to shape the technology they create with and vice versa.
‘The creative interplay and interaction with technologies in turn affects how those technologies themselves will be further refined and developed in the future, so when you see it from that perspective it’s imagined that the future is limitless,’ says Cavallaro.
Mobile devices, virtual worlds, Google glasses – these are just what we know we are capable of. What we are really capable of is almost impossible to predict; these latest technological developments are merely stepping stones towards the unknown.
One thing we can’t see going anywhere is money, and art takes money to create. So, where does electronic art sit within the Australian contemporary art landscape and are there structures in place to protect it?
In 2004, the Australia Council controversially abolished its New Media Arts Board and some have felt this meant electronic artists were being abandoned. Yet, electronic art has held its own in the intervening years, becoming embedded in our visual art canon, no longer needing its own separate funding board to successfully exist.
The word digital is littered throughout government’s new Creative Australia policy but there is little to no mention in that document, that we can see, which explicitly details electronic or experimental art. Yet, embracing the digital future, as Creative Australia tries to do, inherently takes electronic art along for the ride – a much needed barnacle on the digital barge.
Artists’ minds are free to explore the possibilities. Chris Fulham, a digital artist who spoke with ArtsHub at Experimenta last year says, ‘I think eventually we’ll have mobile devices and that will be the main way we connect…. I think online space, and not internet specifically, moving image, photography through the internet, that’s where it’s all going. You’ll have art everywhere, and you’ll contribute too, you’ll go in with your device and you’ll basically be able to contribute.
‘Maybe ultimately there’ll just be spaces, you’ll navigate through spaces and that’s where the art happens. It’s distributed in a different way, maybe galleries become community spaces instead of that kind of white wall, quiet space.’
