Artists' working spaces, tools, and materials in the digital domain

To be a digital artists means to have a wide range of expertise and skills (an artist has to be engineer, programmer, graphic designer, and hardware constructor all at once, or has to have access to others who are skilled in those specialities.

Conception, production and technology are closely intertwined and independent. Existing technologies have to go in hand with new artistic concepts, while new technologies inspire and create new concepts.

Lehmann is interested in what this versatile practice of new media artists might look like. Throughout history, artists had displayed, advertise and explained their art-making skills in genres specifically created for this purpose. Author raises questions on how this kind of skill presentation works in the age of digital art, and if artists draw attention to the processes and procedures underlying their work at all.

The question about a contemporary iconography of the representation of artistic practice raises more general questions about the spatial, material and theoretical aspects of this practice: what kind of materials and tools are used to construct media art, and how do artists employ these tools and materials in their creative spaces? How are these creative spaces defined and located, and can they and the creative processes within be visualised?

Eventhough the author assumes the answer to be negative – “digital modes of production do not appear to favour the representation of the artist at work because the very process of making is rendered invisible by the medium itself.” She is testing her hypothesis in order to determine whether or not representation of practice is absent in the creation of digital art through four aspects described in the following four chapters.

1 The representation of artistic practice and creative spaces in the pre-digital era

In the pre-photographic era artistic practice represented artists working in their workshops and was displayed in its own media/genre. It was idealized, generic, staged, mysterious and therefore unobjective.

After 1900 photography and then film replace the painted depictions of the artist at work, and allthough it provided more information about art making it often kept the klishes of the actual moment of creation. Studio spaces and creative enviroments are still treated as relicts.

The author concludes that the representation of practice was – and still is – closely tied to the aura of materials and spaces.

2 The designation and location of creative spaces in the digital era

New media practice formed new creative spaces. These new spaces seem to changed the notion of the traditional working space by the partial absence of its materiality.

In this chapter the author is investigating the physical, metaphorical and theoretical appearances of these new digital spaces and their representation.

The creative space in the world of digital art practice is difficult to mark out. It is at the same time at the desk, in front of the computer, or rather at the intersection of the physical and the machine world, the human-computer interface.

Differentiation between space and place gives an approximate definition of a creative working space of the digital artists. Spaces are part of the material out of which places can be built. Dealing with physical structure, topology, orientation and connectedness, spaces offer opportunities and constraints. Places, on the other hand, reflect cultural and social understandings. (Harrison and Dourish)

It seems that the creative virtual and physical space/place representation avoids to be defined even more than it evades verbal description, maybe because there is no fixed space left to depict anymore.

3 The visibility of digital tools and materials

While the creative space seems to defy representation, the tools and materials of the new media artist (in or at the computer) don’t have that ability. Tools also oscillate between a physical and virtual presence. The physical beeing the keyboard, mouse, pen, or the hand itsef when it comes to touch screens. These tangible devices are translating movement into digital action on the screen, where the tool is represented by an icon reffering to a familiar device of non-digital origin.

Allthough they have only the virtual component, digital materials oscillate between two shapes. On the surface, they resemble artistic material of the physical domain, but beneath that there is a whole new level of software- the code.

One could expect that the digital tools will be used in representations to evoke the magical aura of artistic creation, but digital tools and materials have not shed the iconic or symbolic bond with their precursors. Instead of that, the current development of design software is getting even closer to a perfect imitation of the materiality and tangibility of traditional artistic tools.

This poses the question of weather this kind of software development is restraining the development of tools and materials of an essentially digital nature, without precursors in the non-digital domain.

Digital tools and materials haven’t (so far) represented the artistic practice in the digital domain.

4 The visibility of digital tools and materials

In the field of computer graphics and computer animation, processes of production are almost excessively represented. Here, ‘showing making’ has even been defined as a separate genre, the making-of.

In film, this new genre is a way to appeal to the fascination and apprehension by showing how these images artificially created photo - and hyper - realistc images were generated.

The making-of of computer-animated scenes is much more static, as it is showing animators or technicians sitting in front of their workplace - computers, displaying skilful manipulation of tools and digital materials while the images they create come into being on a screen.

Allthough they promise to reveal the actual making of illusion, they don’t show the actual proccess due to the pleasure of watching. This insight causes the viewer to admire the appreciates the knowledge and the effort of the maker.

Hidden practice

The process of artistic practice seems to be a hard thing to present due to the variety of factors: the metaphor of the laboratory for the artist’s workspace; the difficulties in describing and visualising the procedures of data programming; the hybridisation of creative space; and the multiplicity of artistic practice within this space.

The author summarises the problematic of presenting creative and working proccesses in the new media with 2 possible conclusions: “Either the representation of artists at work has become obsolete in new media art practice and the mystification of artistic creation has finally been discarded, or the representation of practice has become just as hybridised as the space in which it takes place.”