Digital Discourse

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Digital Discourse

An exhibition that mega bites - Stanley Borg crosses the bridge over digital water with Vince Briffa, Digital Discourse curator

The digital world is a place of travel and transition, swept by the endless movement of people and objects in the form of virtual, anonymous transactions. And personal computers, our gates into the digital world, promise the exciting idea of travelling a distance, somewhere far from home, to a place with fairer weather and inspiring landscapes where we imagine that we will finally be happy.

"The specularisation of the world is, intrinsically, its own end" writes Marc Augé in his book ''Le Temps en Ruines''. This does not extend, however, to the digital world since the latter’s exploration is an endless discovery which, like space, is perpetually expanding. And given this seemingly autonomous distension, we, the primary explorers, risk to be overtaken by our own creation.

What bridges us to this virtual world is digital art, more specifically, installations which explore the notion that space and time are fodder for artistic consumption. “Digital expressions are at the very crossroads of art, science and technology,” says Vince Briffa, curator of Digital Discourse, as we walk around the exhibition which brings together nine artists from selected Commonwealth countries, including Malta. “And through their interactive nature,” he continues, “the installations establish a relationship with the viewer.”

The nine installations on show are not site-specific, in which case art is created, experienced and then dismantled, the actual process showing man bent on creation and destruction. Consequently, these digital installations are not infused with a finite quality. However, each installation focuses on the body and regards it as the unavoidable logos in the understanding of the world, and thus more than a passing nod is given to inevitable physical entropy.

In Universal Zoologies, Jon McCormack reiterates his interest in philosophical and cultural issues concerning Artificial Life and Nature and the practical simulation of natural forms and behaviours using the unnatural means of complex software. Universal Zoologies is a technological rendition of the natural and the viewer navigates in a digi-scape of shapes which develop in what appears to be a grand, cavernous, anonymous environment. In reality, this is your body and the world it inhabits.

Singapore’s Margaret Tan presents the whole body. In Virtual Bodies in Reality, Tan makes use of the Visible Human Project which was initiated by the National Library of Medicine in the US and which successfully converted two human bodies - that of a male convict sentenced to death and an anonymous woman - into data. The viewer can interact with these bodies by either harming or healing them with a click of the mouse. The viewer has the responsibility of choosing between two extreme actions on virtual bodies which were once alive.

Catherine Richards concentrates on the human heart, a symbolic seat of the emotions but also an electromagnetic field. The viewer sees the heart in the third person and participates in the installation by crossing that invisible ‘Do Not Touch’ barrier present in most exhibited art to lift the glass bell jar and excite the heart’s phosphorescent gases. This action plugs the viewer in, who then becomes part of the installation.

In Melita Couta's The Physical Impossibility of Running in the Mind of Someone Sleeping, which uncannily echoes Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the viewer’s participation and interruption of the artist’s quiet presence is foiled by sleep, an unheroic act which we nonetheless spend a third of our lives doing. Thus, neither the unconscious installation nor the conscious viewer is ever awakened to the other.

In giving latitude and longitude measures, Raqs Media Collective’s installation gathers information from city streets and places the viewer sometime, somewhere in Delhi. The viewer is not a tourist but a traveller in an Andreas Gursky photograph where the anonymous individual is but one among many. Public signs are provided as additional reference points, but the language of these is an ordering process that masks existence and transform a real place into a new Babel. Mark Mangion’s Monument Valley is also a voyage. The slow moving images of the red mesas and buttes surrounded by empty, sandy desert are like hallucinations provoked by the reality of a conversation taking place in the background and which increasingly turns insidious and menacing. Like an Andres Serrano photograph, the seemingly calm sand hides the threat of imminent danger.

South African Minette Vàri also takes a natural phenomenon, the Aurora Australis, for her installation which bears the same name. This is visually compared to lost moments of television and other signals which are normally edited out. The whole effect is a salad bowl rather than a melting pot; carefully chosen images which constitute an act that is never predictable and for that, extremely sensual. Daniel von Sturmer’s camera is more playful and able to manipulate the viewer’s perception. In his Screen Test - Sequences 2, 3 & 4, objects are no longer confined to their passive roles as everyday objects but acquire an independent existence and a meaning which is other than their apparent one. Thus, von Sturmer conjures up surprising visual conundrums of a twisting paperclip and a roll of paper which seemingly defies gravity. On the other hand, Chris Meigh-Andrews’ camera obeys natural laws since it is powered by the same laws. Meigh-Andrews fuses natural and technological and resurrects the branch of a dead tree by recording its previous existence using wind and solar-energy powered cameras.

Digital Discourse is a tight exhibition in which every work seems to be a consequence of the previous one. It also successfully pauses a medium which is continuously playing yet simultaneously gives it more space in which to expand.

Digital Discourse aims at stimulating in the spectator both the comprehension of the specificity and the awareness of the universality of experience. This exhibition should not be intended as a complete testimony but as a combination of interpretations of all those cultural, geographical, social and political realities which characterize the Commonwealth countries today.

Exhibition

  • 22nd November 2005 to 8th January 2006: Exhibition held at Spazju Kreattiv.

Exhibition Photos

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External Links

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