8 Computer Art and the Art World
Ernest Edmonds
“If you have to plug it in, it isn’t art.”
When the artistic director of Biennale of Sydney 2008, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, spoke at a public meeting that year, she said, “If you have to plug it in it isn’t art.”1 So to some people, Dan Flavin’s work using fluorescent light tubes, let alone computer-based art, is not art at all. It was strange that this view was expressed in Sydney because, in fact, Australia has been one of the leading countries to recognize computer-based art as legitimate.
While the major public galleries in Australia may have been no more receptive to art that has to be plugged in than public galleries in any other country, the main funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts, has a progressive history. I spoke with Andrew Donovan, director of Emerging and Experimental Arts at the Australia Council, who explained the development of the council’s interest:
We’re fortunate at the Australia Council in that we do have, and we have had, sections devoted to supporting these new and emergent practices. … The Australia Council probably first started responding to computer-based art in the 1980s, and they formed the Art and Technology Committee, which I think was formed in the late eighties, and in fact the Australian Network for Art and Technology grew out of that committee.
The Art and Technology Committee then merged into the Hybrid Arts Committee. … So the Hybrid Arts Committee kind of was born and was formed in the early nineties. … Keating released the Creative Nation arts policy of 1994, … [and] the New Media Arts Board, which was formed in 1998 … ran the course of its life until 2004, so that’s six years, which probably wasn’t very long, but there was also a view forming in the council around about 2004 that electronic art and media art practice was becoming so ubiquitous across the art forms that it wasn’t felt that it was necessary to have a separate board. … Then the Inter Arts Office was formed.
And now in 2013, the Inter Arts Office has sort of merged into the emerging experimental arts section, and I think that will give us a lot more freedom to respond to media art practice that is really pushing the boundaries and is really challenging our understanding of what art can be. Importantly, the experimental art section will have the same status as those other art forms and will have the same voice at the various policy tables.
We only have to consider social media to see that the general public, particularly young people, are very comfortable indeed with the computer-based media that artists have been working with for fifty years or more. In 2013 Sydney held its annual Vivid Festival,2 where interactive experience, interactive art, was shown along all the central harbor shoreline in a significantly bigger program than had been presented before. It was a sensation. The transport authorities were caught out by the crowds. People could not board full ferries, overflowed the streets, and created an atmosphere that rivaled New Year’s Eve, which is quite an occasion in Sydney. Computer-based interactive art was interesting to the public, without any question. As Andrew said,
There is an enormous appetite among the general populace to have arts experiences that are … outside of the conventional spaces for art. … We all understand that the work presented through Vivid could be far more interesting … but understandably, they’re very much focused on building audiences and getting their numbers up so they can go back to government and say, yes, we’re a success.
It so happened that the Nineteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art was held in Sydney at the same time as Vivid and the chairman of the Australia Council opened one of its exhibitions. Andrew reported the chairman’s very positive statements about the new art forms, as exemplified by Vivid: “The comments the chairman made last night … very much [indicate] that the conventional art form practices need to make way for the new practices as well.”
Andrew says, about the next stages,
It was a really interesting discussion at the National Experimental Art Forum about whether the approach of the experimental arts area should be to create solely experimental arts focus events and organizations or whether you try and infiltrate the mainstream. [In the context of the mainstream, there] is probably the need for us to fund some curatorial fellowships within some of these institutions … to help them understand this practice and understand what they need to do.
Internationally, perhaps the best place to look in terms of the established view of art is the Venice Biennale. I was able to talk with Francesca Franco, who has made an extensive study of computer-based arts as they have appeared at the Biennale. She explained,
The first time that proper computer art was exhibited at the Venice Biennale was in 1970. And there was a big experimental show … that included computer artworks by Frieda Martin, CTG, Herbert Franke but also optical art from the sixties. … So that was a section of computer art … [that] was probably one reaction from the Venice Biennale Institution to the student protests of 1968. So the Venice Biennale as a conservative institution until then wanted to show an openness to a younger audience. So they decided to find a new approach to art and curation … and it also changed in terms of its structure, its internal structure. So from 1970, for instance, there were no categories involved in the prizes. Again, this can be seen as a result of the 1968 protests.
Even so, computer-based art had not become integrated into the Biennale and could not be said to have achieved acceptance. In fact, Francesca says, “I talk about anomaly” when speaking of that period.
[However,] after that, from 1986 really, … computer art and technology started to be accepted. … The whole Biennale theme was art and science in 1986 … that’s when Roy Ascott curated and exhibited works like Planetary Network and other big projects that tipped the whole area. … That is when, probably, computer art became accepted and shown more as a standard feature at the Biennale. … And that’s also thanks to curatorial projects everywhere at that time, including the Patric Prince show in Dallas and the SIGGRAPH Art exhibition in 1986.3 That was a way to historicize computer art. So that made it kind of safe for a conservative institution like the Venice Biennale.
Despite the relatively early interest in computer-based art in this key forum, we might still judge that interest to be somewhat peripheral to the core issue of the medium: software and computation. As Francesca said,
From the nineties [onwards] the Biennale became addicted to video art. So they started showing a lot of video art, and [making] award[s for] video art. … So that was a preference. And you can still see that trend now. There was also a “virus project” in 2001 that was awarded.4 That would be probably one of the few software art projects that I know. And that was in 2001, the 0101.org project. … It was basically a virus exhibited at the Biennale as an artwork. And it was sold in CDs at [AU]$1,500, together with T-shirts and gadgets. I forgot which pavilion that is. I think it is the Slovenian pavilion. So it didn’t look very much like a forwarding boundaries project—I mean, with that commercial aspect.
So far, it seems that computer-based art is still not normal in the core of the Venice Biennale. Francesca continued,
I know already that there will be [in] 2014 a project involved with software art. But I know already that is outside the official areas. So that will be in a small gallery near the Museum of Modern Art. … It happens that there are external curators … they call it a collateral event.
A few well-established institutions have fully embraced computer-based art, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is a notable example. I talked there with Douglas Dodds, senior curator of the Word and Image Department, and Melanie Lenz, Patric Prince Curator of Digital Art.
Doug said,
[I] started when the V&A’s library merged with the Prints and Drawings Department, and at that point I transferred from the library. … What became apparent to me was that we hadn’t really been documenting the history of this new medium as much as perhaps we could have done. … I realized that we didn’t have very much that was computer generated. … We had a very small number of prints that had been acquired in the late 1960s in conjunction with Cybernetic Serendipity show. … There was very interesting internal debate, for example, about the acquisition of some of those early works and who would take responsibility for them within the museum; where they fitted in the museum collection. … There were a couple of Manfred Mohrs, I think, already in the collection quite early on, collected sometime in the midseventies. But they were the only things that really would count.
A very important step was when Doug managed to acquire the Patric Prince collection and, subsequently, the archives of the UK Computer Arts Society:
The first one was the artworks, which were actually given to us via an organization called the American Friends of the V&A [and] then ultimately became our property. But in parallel with that, [Patric Prince] also gave her entire archive, her library and her ephemera and all the rest of her material to the museum directly. … Pretty much in parallel with that, we were also negotiating the transfer of the archives of the Computer Arts Society to the V&A. … George Mallen and colleagues at Systems Simulation had held on to it, stored it in their offices for many years, realizing the significance of it, and without them it wouldn’t have survived.
These collections form the basis of what would become a significant part of the V&A’s work with computer-based art and design. One might have thought that a national art gallery would have taken this on, but, Doug argued,
We were probably a natural home for it in the sense that, if you look at the history of computer art and its reception by curators and by art historians, it had a very bad reputation; it had a very bad press. Many of those people were very reluctant to be seen anywhere near it. For us, that whole debate about Is it art? didn’t matter so much as it would matter in a different institutional context. … We’re interested in the design world. We’re interested in graphics. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s computer graphics or whether it’s art—it’s still of interest to us. So that debate doesn’t particularly apply. … The Word and Image Department of V&A covers exactly that range of material anyway.
So the very fact that computer-based art did not have to be labeled as art within the V&A was a significant advantage. Just as the Venice Biennale still keeps computer-based art largely at arm’s length, so the British art establishment has left it to the V&A, our primary museum of art and design, rather than just art, to lead the way. Tate Modern is the obvious location in London to see the most modern art. Interestingly, at the time of this writing, its prominently displayed and well-promoted Timeline, made by Sara Fanelli, does not mention computer-based art at all. It has “Video and Film” listed and even “Düsseldorf School Photography” but nothing that covers all that the computer has brought to modern art. Slightly off center, the more trendy Tanks at Tate Modern shows performance and film, and so on, and computers certainly can find their way in there even if, normally, they do not appear in the main galleries.5 “Modern” as the Tate might be, perhaps the processes that underpin computer-based art are still difficult to grasp in the context of such an institution. As Melanie said about the V&A, however,
One of the things that informs the collection is this interest in process, and I think that is the crossover, because we’re interested in the finished product but also the methodology. … If you just look back to the relationship between the history of the museum being the first place to collect photography, fine arts, etc., it’s not such a massive step to understand that we would collect other new forms.
Collecting computer-based art, then, is bound to introduce new issues, just as photography did. As Doug explained,
[It] is a new process, it’s a new medium. … It took us a while to raise our hands and say “Oh, by the way, we’re also collecting the software that these things relate to.” … The process, then, I think is particularly interesting, because if you’re interested in process, then you’ve got to take an interest in software for a certain class of art.
Software has a number of issues relating to it that would have been new to a museum. For example, it requires either particular hardware or a particular operating system to run. The hardware and the operating systems evolve and even change quite radically over time. So using, or running, the software can become very difficult. The survival of software-based art is, therefore, a potential problem. Doug points out that such issues are hardly new, however:
For instance, consider David Em’s artwork. … We realized that our print of it was a different color to his print of it, and our print was produced using a different photographic technology, and the color wasn’t so stable on it. At the time it was thought to be the best available process, but it obviously wasn’t. So thirty years later, looking back at it, you realize that, actually, even the photographic print hasn’t survived as well as we thought that it would at the time. So it’s not just an issue with digital media.
With digital media, the museum sometimes just buys computer code:
Casey Reas is an example of that. When we acquired a work of his, we made sure that we got the artist to state what the requirements would be for it. In that sense he was an example of an artist who was very helpful, because he said, of the hardware, it doesn’t matter—the work is in the software. The particular hardware used is expendable and can be replaced by equivalent units, so long as you try and maintain the aesthetic values of the original. So if the monitor that it’s on dies, it doesn’t matter. In fact, he didn’t even supply the monitor—it’s our monitor. … We had one classic example of that actually quite early on. Quite soon after we acquired the Casey Reas, we had a request come in to borrow it for an exhibition in the US. And of course, because it’s just the code—the object really is just a code—there’s a representation of it, which is this box, but the object is just a code. In fact, we never actually sent them the code because of course the artist retained his own copy of it. So he supplied it to them. But because we’re the only location for that particular version of that work, it was effectively a V&A object. So the label said that it was shown “Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum London,” but we never physically had provide anything physical, just the code.
Melanie added that the standard documentation procedures, as used for objects, worked perfectly well even for the very abstract software held by the museum: “So the code will be given a museum number, and it’ll be documented in the same way as any other object would. So when … the Casey Reas was lent, it was lent in the same way, even if it wasn’t physically taken.”
The example of the V&A shows that public institutions can, and in some cases do, embrace computer-based art. In the commercial art world, however, it is even harder. Robert Devcic runs GV Art London and, at the time of the conversation, its associated gallery. GV Art is a hub for collaborations between artists and scientists for exhibitions and discussions. His concerns are broader than computing and art, but that broader view has many of the same properties. Robert’s intentions are clear:
For me, if there isn’t some sort of meaningful dialogue between the art objects and the art and some kind of science, then I tend to lose interest pretty quickly. … I’m trying to develop how to engage the general public when they walk into the gallery, and I wonder, do I put wall labels up, and do I have to provide information? … Fifty-six percent of the people who buy our art happen to be scientists or work within the sciences, so that’s really unusual. … We do a lot of debates and exhibition-related events.
Sometimes it can be really rewarding.
I had a nine-year-old come into the current exhibition, and he spent a lot of time asking his father really good questions and me some good questions and responding really well, and that would have made the whole show worth it.
The work of GV Art has not been easy.
When we first started I had people in the art world … saying “Well, what are you doing, polluting art and science?” … But in … the last eighteen months there’s been a huge rise in popularity in what we would loosely call science-inspired art. … There’s a lot of people doing it.
The gallery’s plans have to take something of a long-term view and, as Robert sees it, there is a need to rethink the way that the gallery system works.
I don’t do auction houses and all the rest of it, so what I’d like to eventually develop is kind of a new model for a contemporary art gallery. And I’m not quite sure what that model is, but it would combine the community in lots of ways that a conventional commercial gallery wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable in today. … So we’re very limited, and basically everything that we generate in sales goes back into the gallery.
As we have seen in several contexts, GV Art is finding it easier to make progress outside the center of the art scene. Robert says, “[Galleries] like the Tate don’t quite get it yet. … The Science Museum, they’ve recently started talking, using language like aesthetics, and that’s really cheered me up.”
But Robert finds there is much work to do; for example, he says,
grooming journalists not to feel intimidated by the fact that the art has some science in it, so getting them to be comfortable with it and getting to know it and then eventually—I mean there’s one writer who came to every show for two years and suddenly she did a fantastic piece in a major international publication, but it took her two years to feel confident enough to be able to do that. … And scientists equally might feel intimidated, because they’ve not talked about art and will not feel comfortable about art. … I think that there will come a time fairly soon where your traditional art collector won’t be kind of suspicious or wary, and they’ll be wanting to invest in emerging young art-and-science artists.
This role of working to change the climate and help develop new ways of engaging with art, embracing science and technology, seems to be a stronger feature of certain commercial galleries than of many of the public art institutions. Another, newer gallery in London that is also changing the climate is Carroll/Fletcher, where I spoke with cofounder Steve Fletcher (now Director of The Artists’ Development Agency, London). He was quite clear about the particular role that a commercial gallery should take:
As a commercial gallery we are simply one element within the complex of institutions that are involved in art. So you might have a commercial gallery like us, a public space like the Tate or the Chisenhale Gallery, or an artist-run space. There’s room for all these different spaces that fulfill different roles. … It’s our job to sell the work.
The arts that use digital technologies are varied and need quite varied methods of presentation as well as financial models to support them. As Steve put it,
Some of it is supported by public sector funds or private sector patrons, because it’s a performance or it’s an installation that exists for a certain period in time. … The danger is when you try to force the wrong economic model onto a piece of work, because that undermines its integrity and the integrity of the artist.
So it is important to understand that the commercial art world does not represent everything that is important, and perhaps, this is particularly the case for the moment in relation to the computer-based arts. Steve again: “There is really fabulous work being done in areas that are currently sitting outside the mainstream commercial world, and there is an opportunity for us, as a new gallery, to develop an identity based on the support of certain sorts of work that we believe in.”
This opportunity is not easy to take and must be given time, however, as Steve explained:
We started off and said it was going to take three to five years to understand whether it was going to be a success. That wasn’t three to five years necessarily to make it a success; it was three to five years to understand whether you could make it a success. You have to think ten to fifteen years is the ultimate payoff period … but then if you look at the museum departments, when they were set up they would have painting and sculpture and photography. … Now, obviously, over the last five to ten years that’s begun to change, where you have performance departments.
From a gallery point of view, whether it is commercial or public, the design of the space is quite significant in relation to the computer-based arts. Mostly we do have to plug things in and often connect one box to another with wires. There are aesthetic, safety, and security issues that are somewhat different from a gallery that shows only paintings. Carroll/Fletcher was fortunate, as Steve said, “to be able to design the space,” constructing it with appropriate false walls and cable ducts, and so on, making the display of computer-based works possible in an elegant, as well as a safe, way. Steve went on to explain how it was also possible to think quite hard about facilitating an appropriate viewer experience through exhibition design:
We spent a lot of time thinking about it in terms of the way it was laid out such that the works themselves, in the individual spaces, can be seen to best effect. … Exhibition making is very important, and we see any exhibition as a journey. And therefore when thinking about the space in terms of the different rooms and how you journey round the rooms … some sort of metanarrative emerges.
Beyond the exhibition, as before, Steve is largely concerned with developing interest or, perhaps one might say, developing the market:
It’s about developing relationships … public or private sector collector or as a curator. … Then we have to develop a track record that shows that we’re going to be around for a while. [But there are] multiple types of collector. … It’s not just about owning a work; it’s about being part of something. … Not because they’re going to get an object but because they’re going to get an experience, they’re going to get some prestige, some enjoyment.
In terms of the behavior of collectors, Steve made a clear distinction between those looking for investment and those in what he termed the luxury goods sector:
I think people are worried about stock markets, they’re worried about property. It seems to us that the blue chip sector, … the market for Picasso or for Gainsborough or today Bacon and Freud, for example, is different. That sector’s buoyant. … It’s a good place to put money. … The luxury goods sector of the market, the area that we’re interested in and talking about, doesn’t fall into that category. … It’s not a store of value. … We’re not in a bubble type thing where you can think “Well, this is the next hot thing.” … In our sector they like to collect things. … They can actually put together an important collection for a relatively small amount of money. … I talked to some serious, important collectors of video art who have built up over the last fifteen to twenty years fantastic collections. But they’ve never spent more than, let’s say, $10,000 or $15,000 on a work. … They’re not necessarily massively wealthy, able to collect Bacon.
The individual and unique nature of an artwork is not always a major concern, as Steve explained:
A painter is perfectly capable of turning out multiple copies of the same painting, but they choose not to. … Look, for example, at Munch’s work and the number of Screams that are out there. … Producing an object isn’t the only thing that people will invest in. … People collect cigarette cards and video art, for example. … When you’re buying some cigarette cards you probably want to put them in the original album, etc. Now, you can get the original album out and look at them, but they’re not something that you put on a wall. I think if you think about the whole notion of collecting, it has many facets.
A serious issue in relation to computer-based art is maintenance and the lifespan of any particular work. On this subject, Steve said,
The issues of preservation have been there for a long time. You just have to look at the light conditions one needs to keep watercolors in, or the necessity of cleaning oils, etc.. Look at what’s happening with film collections. … My colleague Jonathan owns a work by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer called Pulse Room, which uses incandescent light bulbs. … That technology is declared to be obsolete, so what do you do? That is a lot more challenging. … Energy-saving light bulbs don’t quite hack it.
More specifically, he said,
an artist’s concept can have a certain manifestation—for example, in the underlying source code—… that drives the artwork, and then there’s the … manifestation of it—what it looks like. I think you need to preserve each element, the concept and the manifestation. … I quite like the idea of it being a testimony to a dead civilization. … Some artists that we work with … when you buy one of their works, it comes in a beautifully produced box, and in the boxes you’ll get a flash drive with the work on [it]; you might also get a Betamax copy, a Blu-ray disc, or a DVD. Often you’ll get … one that’s watermarked. You get these different manifestations … with something that’s as lasting as you could possibly get, so that while these formats may go out of use, hopefully this thing, … the flash drive with the source code on, remains. I took an early work on consignment … and I went to the collector to pick it up, and I get literally a plastic bag with a bunch of things in it.
There’s only so long that Thompson and Craighead, for example, can tie themselves in for sourcing a new one for you. “For X period of time, every six months” or “every three months”—whatever it may be—“we will check that those cameras are working, and if they’re not working, we’ll contract to find another one.” … But you can then do the film version. … It’s almost easiest with software and generative work, because there’s an algorithm, there’s a code, etc., which underpins it. Manfred’s work is really interesting in this respect. For Manfred, what matters is the output. He doesn’t need to preserve the source code for any of his drawings, paintings, or sculptures, because you’ve got it. Then if you look at his time-based work, that’s obviously slightly different, but there’s a core that is the same.
Fundamental to Steve Fletcher’s position in any case is that the commercial gallery is only part of the picture: “I think that, to my mind, … what you’re doing as a commercial gallery—it’s working with the artist, not just to sell the work.”
A slightly different perspective is that of Keith Watson, who coordinates London’s Kinetica Art Fair and works as curator at Canary Wharf’s Level 39, an art display in a high-tech business environment. Although his main concern is showing work in various contexts, he does sell. As he puts it, he sells into the “normal art market, but it’s not necessarily to people who are looking at collecting it. They’re buying it because they like it. They don’t really distinguish digital arts and painting or photography in any way.”
So this confirms Steve Fletcher’s points from another perspective. The Kinetica Art Fair, in particular, is, Keith said,
a great bed for discussion and networking and everyone meeting each other. People who take part in the show are just blown away with the amount of contacts they get with the public and with each other. … They wouldn’t have known each other before the fair but have gone on to do other projects together, which is just fantastic, which is one of the best things to come out of it. … However, even though Kinetica Art Fair is encompassing in terms of the profile of people that we attract, and we fit all the bills for funding, they still don’t get it. It’s quite amazing how the official bodies just bluntly refuse to fund such a popular thing.
This is another example of computer-based art not being fully accepted in the traditional art world. Level 39 is rather different, however, as Keith explained.
I’ve been there five years, and I haven’t really had the opportunities to show much of the digital side of my practice. But in the last six months I have been able to, and it’s really opened their eyes to what is possible. … I am showing work to people that don’t really have much interest in art. … They’re general public; they may like something if they see it. If they don’t, they’re not really bothered. … They’re not buying things to collect or anything like that. … They’re very excited by what they see, and they’re really open to new ideas and new work. … They are much more used to working on computers all the time; they have their mobile devices, they’re playing with their Connects or Wiis at home or whatever, and they see things on TV as well. … I think people subconsciously are seeing … TV or they’re watching big blockbuster movies, and they’re seeing all these interactive things going on, and that is actually informing them in terms of what they might like. When they’re seeing art that has that kind of discipline, they’re much more receptive to it.
Keith’s remarks suggest that there is much less of a problem with the general public in relation to computer-based art than there is with the art world.
I talked with Wolf Lieser, who worked with Keith in a London gallery for a while but went on to set up DAM Gallery, a successful, or sustainable, digital arts gallery in Berlin. He runs various associated activities and has also reached out to other German cities. He is one of the most important international dealers in computer-based art. Wolf is more optimistic than some. He said,
Recently interest has really grown and people have started to understand, now, that this is really something new in the art world. … It’s so exciting and why I think that is the future in art for sure. … I would say [that] in the last two or three years there’s much more interest coming back from institutions, from collectors, and so on, who are suddenly realizing there could be something going on, which they hadn’t really put enough attention on before.
Starting out, however, presented many problems. Wolf looked at art galleries that had succeeded in other areas. For example,
Leo Castelli’s … was a very good example for me. … I visited his gallery beginning of the nineties. … What really made him so influential … was being a good businessman as well as being convinced about this new kind of pop art, which was not that big when he started to take it over. He was convinced and loved it and stood behind it and supported it for a long time and basically built it up.
You have to persist and communicate it long enough to impinge. It takes a while; at the beginning people just don’t take you serious. And the museums or curators, they just don’t talk to you. When you survive, let’s say, five, six, seven years, then they start thinking about it because they think, well, they know you don’t have the big money behind you so there must be some foundation.
In terms of what Wolf sells today, he said,
More than 50 percent of all my sales in the gallery is software art. … I’m selling a file. I’m selling just a digital file, a digital process, which they receive on a stick or whoever, what kind of art ware. But these collectors or these institutions already accept the idea of owning a software piece and that’s it.
The issue of multiple copies, editions, of digital artworks is also interesting. Like Steve Fletcher, Wolf also deals in editions, but he is less convinced about the significance of them today:
Some … are selling them as single pieces like Casey Reas does. Others are selling them as an edition. … Conceptually I think the idea of an edition is old-fashioned. It doesn’t apply to this field anymore. … It makes no sense to produce twenty pieces, which are exactly the same. It’s not logical from the whole concept of programming art. … Casey doesn’t do it. Casey only sells his piece once, and sometimes when he sees there is some interest, then he has two or three variations.
In fact, the whole nature of the art object is shifting.
It is a very strange idea to get a file which could be deleted by pressing the wrong button … owning it as an artwork. … So I’m trying to draw the attention away from this idea of this materialistic aspect. And of course I’m not alone. … If you analyze the market in new tendencies, it’s already obvious that this aspect is going to influence the art in the twenty-first century in a drastic way. So this is very easy to see, … from a purely financial point of view, you should buy it. … Ten years ago, it would have been a big risk.
Wolf sees the big institutions as making moves in the direction of accepting computer-based art.
Pompidou [Centre], for example, has created a new position about two years ago. And the curator … approached me and he visited me in the gallery in Berlin. … That was only very recently. They have bought from Vera Molna, but she actually produces paintings as well. So they had bought some plotted drawings because these were the background drawings, and later on they realized they are probably going to be much more valuable in the end than the paintings.
If the collections6 hadn’t been donated to the V&A, maybe the V&A would still not bother much about digital art. But luckily enough they were, and Douglas Dodds7 could put more attention on digital art and expand it, and it is really growing.
I just prepared an exhibition in Taiwan, in one of the three biggest museums in Asia. … They have one department, which is called Digi Art, and they do only digital media.
Naturally, the big public institutions are particularly concerned about the long-term maintenance of the works in their collections. Wolf said, “They have to think about what’s going to happen in twenty, thirty, fifty years. So they have to have different kind of restorers, people who are familiar with programming, being able to handle these kind of pieces and preserve them for the next generations.”
In terms of the DAM Gallery, Wolf said, “As long as the artist agrees with it, we upgrade the software to newer contexts or platforms as long as they are alive. That is normally free. … They know that they will not run into problems in a short amount of time.”
We see from these many different points of view that computer-based art is still not fully part of the standard art scene. But is that such a surprise? Radical innovation normally takes quite a while to embed itself into its proper social context. It is not as if such art is just a new style or a variation on an accepted form. Computer-based art, and software art in particular, is radically different from what preceded it, even though we can trace its origins to art practice that was current before the invention of the computer. Wolf Leiser said his vision of the future is that “it will be great.”
I’m totally sure that digital technology will be the most influential medium. When you look at the twentieth century we had photography, which totally changed our aesthetics in painting as well as in other media. … But the digital medium has already done that. People don’t even recognize it … [but] the good times have just started to happen for this medium and for people working in that field. And, as I said, the institutions are starting to buy it. … Of course, there can always be bigger shows, always other things. There’s still a lot of expansion possible, but I think that will be exciting times for all these people who have survived it that long.
Interviewed
- Robert Devcic, GV Art London
- Douglas Dodds and Melanie Lenz, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
- Andrew Donovan, Australia Council, Sydney
- Steve Fletcher, The Artists’ Development Agency, London
- Francesca Franco, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
- Wolf Leiser, DAM Gallery, Berlin
- Keith Watson, Kinetica Art Fair and Level 39 at Canary Wharf, London
The chapter was also informed by a discussion with Deborah Turnbull of New Media Curation, Sydney.
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This chapter is based on a set of interviews with curators, dealers, and administrators working with computer-based art. Much of the chapter consists of direct quotes from these interviewees, whose names and titles are listed at the end of the chapter.
1. Reported by Deborah Turnbull, who attended “The Art of the Curator: Times, Spaces, Biennales,” Goethe-Institut Australien, Sydney, Australia, May 2, 2008.
2. “Vivid Sydney 2013 Lights up Harbour City with Biggest Program Yet,” Vivid Festival media release, March 21, 2013, accessed July 31, 2018, https://
3. “Patric Prince is an American art historian and collector of Computer Art, who followed and documented its rise from the earliest days. She was responsible for organising some of the key computer art exhibitions, including the SIGGRAPH retrospective in 1986, as well as lecturing and writing on the subject extensively.” “The V&A’s Computer Art Collections,” Victoria and Albert Museum, accessed July 7, 2018, http://
4. Artists Eva and Franco Mattes exhibited a computer virus as an artwork. For a description, see “Eva and Franco Mattes,” Biennale.py, accessed August 10, 2014, http://
5. In 1983, when we had just the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain), a major exhibition of Harold Cohen’s computer-generated work was indeed mounted, but that seems to have been another anomaly, as Francesca put it in relation to Venice.
6. Wolf is referring to the Computer Arts Society archive and the Patric Prince collection.
7. This is the V&A’s Douglas Dodds interviewed here.