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The Stone Age of the Digital Arts

Article in Leonardo · October 2002

DOI: 10.1162/002409402320774286

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 The Stone Age of the
Digital Arts
R OGER F. M ALINA

hen Tim Binkley of the School of Visual Arts engineering, and design–and beyond this, whether we could re-

W (SVA) contacted Leonardo with the idea of collabo-

rating on the Digital Salon, we quickly accepted the
proposal. This issue celebrates the many years of collaboration
imagine the internal structures and processes, the very metaphors
of how computers are designed, made, and used. Some of these
are burning issues in computer science and engineering: there is
between SVA and Leonardo, a collaboration that has brought a an increasing interest in the personalization of computers to adapt
new generation of digital artists to the attention of the interna- them to individual use and preference. The computer is now a
tional Leonardo audience. When Leonardo first started publishing mass market device whose future use and evolution depends in
the work of pioneering computer artists in the late 1960s [1] it large part on social acceptance and cultural desires.
was far from obvious that computer art would become the power- The computer is still a very primitive device, and its cultural
ful means for contemporary expression that it has become today. appropriation has barely begun. At an early ISEA conference,
Most new technologies do not prove to be suitable for art-making. William Buxton, then of Xerox PARC, made an impassioned plea
The change in the situation has been dramatic, seen from the for re-imagining what computers could be. He compared the use
point of view of the Leonardo editorial office. Our first book relat- of a computer keyboard as a human-machine interface with the
ed to the use of computers in art–Visual Art, Mathematics and musician’s use of a trombone or trumpet. A trumpet player uses
Computers [2], published in 1979–found a small but receptive eyes, ears, breath, saliva, body movement, and touch to such an
audience. At that time, few art schools had programs that extent that the trumpet truly becomes a seamless extension of the
addressed the use of computers in art-making and only such artist’s will. A jazz ensemble achieves a level of interactive creation
visionary centers as Gyorgy Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual that remains unmatched by any computer-mediated system. Even
Studies at MIT provided environments where artists could access today’s handheld devices are still foreign objects to the body and
the latest tools and devices. Our latest book to address the use of mind of the user. A number of experimental computer-machine
computers in art-making is Lev Manovich’s The Language of New interfaces and immersive environments–many developed by
Media [3]; it has now appeared in paperback and is reaching a artists–now exist, but none are in large-scale production, nor do
large international audience. All major universities now have or they achieve the jazz ensemble’s seamless integration of human
are starting to have new programs in art and technology, or art and tool in group work. The computer has not yet entered the
and new media. There are schools dedicated to the new art forms, biological age.
such as the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. SVA The artists at the Dagstuhl workshop included pioneers in
in New York now has one of the leading programs in the field. computer art such as Frieder Nake and Ernest Edmonds, but also
In July 2002, Leonardo co-organized a workshop at the Schloss artists from the more recent generation of practitioners such as
Dagstuhl Center in Germany on the topic of Aesthetic Comput- Jane Prophet, Christa Sommerer, and Jon McCormack. The early
ing [4]. The workshop was led by a computer scientist, Paul Fish- computer artists were either scientists or engineers interested in
wick [5], and brought together artists, engineers, designers, and creating artworks, or artists working in close collaboration with
computer scientists. There was a new urgency. The discussion did engineers who translated the artists’ ideas into concrete form. Today
not address how one could produce computer output that was
Roger F. Malina, Executive Editor, Leonardo, 425 Market Street,
considered to be of artistic or aesthetic interest. Instead, the heart
2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.
of the debate was whether we could bring new ideas from art
E-mail: leo@mitpress.mit.edu.
theory and contemporary art practice into computer science,

© 2002 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 463–465, 2002 463
there are artists sufficiently well versed in Kunst und Medientechnologie), Ars Elec- design materials with properties that are
contemporary computer science and tronica, Banff Centre for the Arts, and totally foreign to natural systems. Astro-
engineering that they can carry out their ICC (NTT’s InterCommunication Cen- nauts experience in zero gravity behaviors
own technical work or, as artists, lead ter, Tokyo). The time may be ripe for new that are totally new to human sensory and
multidisciplinary teams both to create art- forms of hybrid institutions that take locomotive experience. And, of course,
works of artistic interest and even to devel- advantage of the distributed strategies computer scientists and engineers have
op innovative engineering and computer- enabled by the Web. provided a globally linked Internet system
science solutions or inventions. We again Ironically, the very name “Digital Salon” that allows such rapid feedback and diffu-
find ourselves in one of those special times has become an anachronism. The rapid sion of human interaction that we are
in cultural history when artists, scientists, mutation of terminology indicates that the entering a space of unknown social phe-
and engineers–because of their use of the heart of the matter has not yet been identi- nomena and behaviors. The human cogni-
same tool (in this case the computer)–can fied. The early practitioners of machine tive system did not develop with these new
share experiences and vocabularies, views art, algorithmic art, electronic art, com- extensions of the human nervous system in
of what problems might be interesting to puter art, digital art, Web art, and new place, nor while interacting with these
solve and of which solutions would be media art [7] have shared few things environments and phenomena. So how do
considered exciting. Inevitably, shared except the use of the computer itself; their we develop our intuition about worlds and
epistemologies, aesthetics, and ethical sys- goals and practices differ widely, and they phenomena that are physically impossible
tems will emerge from this process. The do not share a common aesthetic. In addi- for our human senses to experience direct-
conditions are right for the emergence of tion, many of the artists in new media also ly? How do we build systems of values and
New Leonardos. make use of many other technologies that systems of meanings, of ethics and aesthet-
Many of the New Leonardos will not are not computer-based and are only inci- ics in this new epistemological landscape?
be individuals, but rather teams of several dentally digital. Steve Wilson, in his Ken Goldberg, in his Leonardo book The
or many individuals working together. Leonardo book Information Arts [8] has Robot in the Garden [9], elaborates upon
The Internet as a working environment documented the growing array of areas in these issues in his exploration of “telepiste-
facilitates many forms of cooperative, col- science and technology where artists are mology”; the crucial question is no longer
lective, and collaborative work. The prob- now occupying aesthetic territory. These the location of the “ghost in the machine,”
lems being tackled often require range through all the physical, chemical, but whether humans as primitive robots in
interdisciplinary teams that bring together cognitive, and biological sciences and this new foreign landscape can find a new ori-
disparate expertise from disciplines as include the whole array of nano- to macro- entation and vision for the human condition.
diverse, for instance, as the cognitive sci- technologies. If the computer-based arts This new intuition can be built and
ences, nanotechnologies, biological sci- are still in their infancy, these other art cultural appropriation can occur if we cre-
ences, and cultural theory. Already, the forms are still at the point of conception. ate situations in which contemporary sci-
open-source approaches can point to suc- And yet this work is not peripheral to the ence and technology can be incorporated
cesses in marshalling the creativity of large development of the science and technology into artistic exploration (and vice versa),
teams of geographically dispersed individ- of the future, but is at the heart of the cul- while recognizing the very different disci-
uals on common projects. The institutional tural imagination that creates the very plines of the arts, the sciences, and engi-
frameworks that foster such interdisciplinary desires motivating children to become neering. The creative process may be
work, and that often need to bridge the tomorrow’s scientists and engineers. Not similar, but methodologies, goals, success
non-profit/for-profit societal systems, are only does the interaction between artists, criteria, and institutional contexts are very
still in their infancy. A few pioneering pro- scientists, and engineers create the context different, and no doubt many areas of art,
grams, such as Roy Ascott’s CAiiA-STAR, for improved science and engineering, but science, and technology interaction will
are exploring this education and research different forms of science and engineering will prove to be culturally sterile. The steam
territory. Unfortunately early programs emerge from this period of cross-fertilization. engine, railroad, and telephone may have
such as Xerox PARC's Artist-in-Residence Scientists and engineers now work in transformed the social landscape, but no
program [6] and Interval Research Corpo- realms that are almost totally outside of significant new art forms have emerged
ration are no longer in existence. Leonardo direct human experience. Astronomers out of these particular technologies. Tech-
has recently launched a study under the work with forms of energy, such as gravity nologies of the moving image and cinema
leadership of Michael Naimark, with sup- waves and neutrinos, that are not directly led to the media society we now enjoy, but
port from the Rockefeller Foundation, to accessible to the human nervous system. there is no way of knowing ahead of time
learn lessons from the last 40 years of insti- Physicists and biologists work on such whether the new biologies and genetic
tutional experiments, ranging from the small scales that quantum effects and engineering will lead to crucial art forms of
early E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and group phenomena emerge that are the future until artists get inside them and
Technology) program to today’s leading unknown on the scale that humans can make stories, tinker with the systems, and
institutions, such as ZKM (Zentrum für experience directly. Chemists can now re-engineer their context.

464 Roger Malina, The Stone Age of the Digital Arts

 We are in the Stone Age of the digital
arts, and it is likely that the future of the
digital arts will have little to do with the
digital and everything to do with the aes-
thetic and ethics that emerge from the new
situation, just as the Renaissance was not
about the technology of perspective but
more about the new vision that emerged of
the place of humans in nature and the
future of human society. The New Leonar-
dos face a task as daunting as the tasks
confronting Leonardo da Vinci and his
peers; we can only hope that this special
period of interaction between artists, scien-
tists, and engineers will change our vision
of the world and our place in it as pro-
foundly as the Renaissance did. The artists
of the Digital Salon are among those laying
the groundwork for this cultural transforma-
tion.

REFERENCES
1. Computer art was a subject of discussion from the
earliest issues of Leonardo. See, for instance, Roy
Ascott, “The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and
Purpose,” Leonardo 1, No. 2, 105-112 (1968);
Richard I. Land, “Computer Art: Color Stereo Dis-
plays,” Leonardo 2, No. 4, 335-344 (1969); Robert
Mallary, “Notes on Jack Burnham's Concepts of a
Software Exhibition,” Leonardo 3, No. 2, 189-190
(1970).

2. Frank Malina, editor, Visual Art, Mathematics and

Computers: Selections from the Journal Leonardo
(Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon Press, 1979).

3. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

4. See the seminar description at <http://

www.dagstuhl.de/02291/>.

5. Paul A. Fishwick, "Aesthetic Programming: Craft-

ing Personalized Software," Leonardo 35, No. 4,
383-390 (2002).

6. Craig Harris, editor, Art and Innovation: The

Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

7. See, for example, the New Media Dictionary pro-

ject, <http://www.comm.uqam.ca/GRAM/Accueil.html>
(in French).

8. Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of

Art, Science, and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002).

9. Ken Goldberg, editor, The Robot in the Garden:

Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the
Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

Roger Malina is an astronomer, editor,

and father.

Roger Malina, The Stone Age of the Digital Arts 465

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