The Other Side of Digital Art

Author(s): Harry Rand

Source: Leonardo, Vol. 41, No. 5 (2008), pp. 543-547
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20206688
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 The Other Side of Digital Art

he excitement currently associated with digital art springs from two sources;
one is obvious, the other obscure. Hence, the derivation of some of the enthusiasm for this
new art is easily misconstrued. While its gee-whiz appeal takes a starring role in the fore
ground and is hard to miss, the other, somewhat intuitive, prompt to promote this art is
almost undiscerned because it is invisible, with neither patrons nor a product. Still, it's
not incumbent on fandom to understand the roots of its own zeal, and the ardor (often
expressed in these pages) is warranted if unexamined in some aspects.
Generally the implications of the boosters' thrilled support are unrecognized, because
digital art is considered either a completely novel break with the past's limitations or a useful
implement to extend already established forms. Clearly both statements are true but inad
equate. And if, in the rush to admire and exploit novelty, something important is lost, the
current situation is hardly unique. Both continuity and freshness characterize the best arts
of all ages (just as science advances by incorporating the newest findings into existing para
digms, so art advances by exploring nuance in extant forms or exploiting overlooked formal
resources?that is the very essence of "high art": cumulative memory). Facing this quiddity
should not make us morose, as nothing is thereby changed about current prospects. When
properly founded on reasonable and informed expectations, exhilaration about the newest
possibilities is entirely warranted.
Contemporary spectators should be neither passive nor indifferent about the era in which
we find ourselves. Either we root for our own epoch and grapple with the actualities we face
with the tools we are given or we savor a fantasy of some past moment of lost wisdom as some
people long for an equally intoxicating future perfection; to these intoxicating choices of
retrospective myth or prospective sci-fi, rationality arrives a dilatory messenger, with excuses
to buttress instinct. We each live in a moment we may loathe or love without recourse, and
part of the present are new devices with which to reconsider art as emotional expression
or as formal investigation. We definitely witness an innovation worth getting excited about:
the digital age. The art that current technology invites solicits new artistry, new expressions,
perhaps even new forms of art.
The fundamentally electronic nature of much new art is not surprising. Yet spectators unas
sociated with the arts continue to be surprised by art's currentness, its unbroken attention to
and participation in the intellectual advances usually associated with science and numeracy.
We should be neither dismayed nor dazzled. Every artistic age avails itself of the qualitatively
best and comparatively most advanced technology of its time, alongside the maintenance of
traditional arts that serve to recall a cherished past. Additionally, and more often than usu
ally assumed, artists are in the forefront of conceptualizing the assumptions of science and
conditions for deploying technology?along with the military. This innocuous observation,
for all its prosaic tameness, nevertheless attacks an everlasting shibboleth?the rallying cry of
the undead. The idea that there was or continues to be a gap between the best artistic expres
sion and the scientific has no demonstrable examples in history. The supposed opposition in
worldview and thinking is a piece of pop journalism foisted, endlessly it seems, on a public
willing to take up either side of the so-called divide to justify personal dispositions thereby
presumably confirmed. To the extent that it seems to open a new age as it reunites technol
ogy and art, the hubbub about digital art is justified. Yet any art is ultimately judged not by its
conceptual reach or theoretical potential but by what it achieves. Since we are in the dawn
of the age of electronic art, it hardly seems fair to berate the community for not having "yet"

?2008 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 5, pp. 543-547, 2008

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 Fig. 1. Before-and-after photos of the Bamiyan
Buddhas. (Left: UNESCO image, no copyright.
Right: ? Cable News Network.)

produced an electronic Shakespeare or Beethoven. On the other hand, breakthroughs in the

applications of technologies to the arts often yield their best results early, just as mathemati
cians, athletes, chess masters and physicists?and many others?peak in youth. The examples
are myriad. The tempered scale had barely been off the drawing board when Bach ... well,
you know what he did; oil paints were a novelty when Van Eyck worked his still-unsurpassed
miracles with them; to the most salutary effect, perspective was simultaneously explored by
Renaissance mathematicians and artists, etc. Often, art gets it right the first time. Great artists
get it right early in the game, spoiling the possibilities for those who come second. So, any
day now we should expect a towering oeuvre of electronic?more specifically, digital?art.
The novelty of digital art is upon us; now we await the quality. (Artistic quality has a second
ary and justifying role: Questions about photography's artistic validity vanished when the first
great photographer appeared. Art validates technology as something more than a toy for
dilettantes. For any new medium, such as film, or?long before that?oil painting, artistic
genius vindicates the evolution of the material expression as manipulations of substance will
be otherwise discarded for want of a master. Quality does not just demonstrate the potential
of an art, but exonerates it from charges of mere potchkerai, useless messing around or rankest
craft.) Which brings me to the second point.
By "digital art" we are not customarily talking about the digits, fingers, or even the numbers
that came to stand for counting with fingers. (Digital art does not refer to finger puppets
or making recognizable shadows with our hands. I suppose for specialists in sleight-of-hand,
digital art means something else.) Generally the term refers to an art that is computer depen
dent and derives from digital computation's binary basis. Everything?colors, sounds, shapes,
motion?is reduced to computer-digestible form in one of binary code's two states. There are
two, and only two, signals a computer recognizes, and all digital art arises from the (still lim
ited) capacity of computers to recognize, read, store, process and display whatever combina
tion of these two signs are intended to indicate. Some happy day computers may cogitate with
more variables, but right now, generally, we are stuck with two. The twin signs arise from the
persistent nature of the machines themselves, or at least their ancestors, much as many fea
tures of our inherited tetrapodal design were bequeathed from animals that lived hundreds
of millions of generations past. Once a design is established, it is hard to discard and stub
bornly reappears in each new model.
Deriving from the mechanics of early computers (but far antedating computing machines),
the useful "-" and "0" or 1/0 of binary code expresses the bivalent condition of a switch

544 Endnote

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 (which accurately reflects the operating conditions of a non-analogue electric machine).
Electric current is distributed in one of two directions down a choice of pathways by each
transaction so that the -/0 corresponds to a switch's condition as being in either the "on"
or "off position, corresponding to "yes" or "no." With these simple -/0 directions, which
can also be stated as yes/no instructions, anything can be represented.
Indeed, the limitations on this system of representation are not quantitative, as?with
enough ciphers?anything can be expressed with the simplest natural language, consisting
of a single word, "No." With it, however laboriously, the entire world can be described. This
sort of redirection is used in animal training when natural human languages cannot avail.
With coaching and the discipline imposed by negation, virtually any behavior can be obtained
(which is also the theory of torture). No?meaning, I am not yet satisfied with the answer?
is a powerful response and implicit inquisition. Using "No," any situation can be altered to
create one congruent with desire [1]. Thus, slowly and with much repetition, using only the
word No, the entire world can be described.
An entire world can be conjured and a new one imagined using only this single term of
negation, which nullification has its equivalent in art. The 1/0 binary also expresses the differ
ence between something and nothing. While it is not a fraction, the convenient orthography
of 1/0 is a powerfully compressed image of much of what humans think about the world. The
graphic form and concept of zero derives from a sign for the goddess Kali, the self-devour
ing, and is used as such to indicate a negative-accent in Indian classical music, a stress without
parallel in occidental art music; the ultimate derivation of this reference is to Shiva, the great
destroyer. But there cannot be destruction without something, and the number one repre
sents presence and creation, the work of Brahma, the creator. It would be handy if 1/0 was
a fraction with 1 in the numerator and 0 in the denominator, because the slash between them
would then be no mere convention of separating the two ciphers but would have its own
identity, as the sustainer Vishnu; accordingly this "fraction," actually the representation of
binary relations, would present a complete world in all its tides of origination, universal activ
ity, and subsidence and destruction. One-over-zero, after all, equals unity. The tripartite idea
of such a dynamic world expressed as singularity is not so very far from God-the-Father as the
primordial creator; the Son as Lord-of-History (presiding over humanity's fate); and the Holy
Ghost as the beckoning future, the engine of change drawing the present forward. When
expressed in the prose of yes/no (or the mechanical switching of on/off), some of this fun
damental psychology gets lost, but since machines are expressions of human intelligence, it is
hardly surprising that they are directed by rules springing from the architecture of the human
mind?with its fundamental symmetry of bilateral yes/no.
"No" can serve the purposes, both traditional and formal, of all language, to describe con
ditions of, and contrary to, fact: the real and the foreseeable. Therefore, and perhaps oddly
when we think about it, this negative side of the -/0 or yes/no representation is quite potent.
Also, because it is often overlooked, the negative half of the fundamental digital phrase -/0
or yes/no is probably a more formidable tool than the entirety, since the cumbersome binary
expression of complex situations is not of any greater magnitude of onerousness than sim
ply "No," repeated as often as necessary [2], and nobody claims that art, binary or analogue,
can more than hint at an entire world. By an entire world I mean the utmost complexity of
nuance without necessarily invoking the utmost complexity of expression: Elegance in art or
science occurs when the least suggests the most.
If the planes of a Mondrian painting?ablative and intimating that they merely sample
greater fields, as do Barnett Newmans?suggest a grandeur, the entirety at which the shapes
gesture lies outside the canvas. That is one sort of elegance by which a world is implied.
Romantic music's resplendence, however luxuriantly floppy, does not extend beyond the
length of a Mahler symphony or a Strauss opera. That world too is replete within the sym
phony, although some still wish its drama guided existential decisions (these same folks
undoubtedly read novels to find out how to live). Except suggestively, the world of a poem
remains a sonic object (usually captured on the page) that no more expands beyond its own
borders than a chair takes up or displaces more volume than it occupies, notwithstanding that
the word "suggestively" is a mighty diminutive that scarcely acknowledges the power of some

Endnote

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 poems to move us, morally as well as emotionally. Yet no metaphor is needed to recognize the
digital power of-/0 or yes/no. Bluntly put, "No" can create a world replete and art cannot.
Art is suggestive of an infinitely extensive world, but "No" reifies its reference. This binary dis
tinction, however airy-fairy it sounds, has real-world consequences. Few things are as brutal a
wake-up call as the repudiation of a "No," but such negation only begins to hint at the poten
tial of that side of the binary code.
The refutation or vandalizing of art, partaking as it does in the fundamentally digital basis
of negation, can create a world. The desecrator can say more than the artist. After all, art's
violator is offered the whole of art history to erase, images from which to choose selected
points that will remain to constellate the permissible, while the artist faces the unknown with
the weight of tradition on his/her shoulders. When the 8th-century iconoclasts obliterated
any images they could get their fervent hands on, they were saying "not this," and thereby
endorsing something else. Instead of the images of portrayal that represented a "not this"
repugnant to iconoclasts, these destroyers of images were instructing observers (like pigeons
being trained to do some task) to work toward a "this"?whatever that was. The iconoclasts
expressed themselves with the binary -/0 or yes/no system to gesture toward a world they
wanted to bring into existence. Such disapproval of art to create another world was not a
unique expression exclusive to only one moment and a single purpose. The defacing of art
has a long and ignoble heritage dating from ancient Egypt's execration of unfashionable pha
raons (and even earlier); it still continues in an unacknowledged twin: a mirrored history of
art expressed in the digital "No."
When Rome was sacked (variously by Vandals, Goths, etc.), the visible world of Rome, to
our eyes an exquisitely finished and handsome material culture, was being replaced by a vio
lently communicated "not this," signaling a counter-weighted social and political substitution.
That replacement, by means of the destruction of material beauty, not only expressed rage
but an antagonism that preferred other tribal values. Those values included the morality of
freedom from serfdom, emancipation from falling victim to Rome's theatrical blood-letting
displays of the imperial cult's might, the imposition of a state religion, however welcoming
and syncretic?and those "barbarian" morals are perhaps as dear to us as the structure of
Roman law; those values were not expressed in emulation of the former conqueror or in
synthesis, but in negation, in the flip-side of the -/0 (or on/off or yes/no) binary divide.
In our own times we have witnessed a similar expression. (Some will recall various Dada
erasures. Initially Duchamp's act was small potatoes as art, but perhaps a necessary dem
onstration. When, however, the same act took refuge in Camp's ironic self-reference,
when Rauschenberg's vandalism of a De Kooning was supposed to elevate the status of the
destroyed art?like the "bond" between the sportsman-hunter and his prey in the crosshairs?
the failure was obvious in the unnecessary repetition. Done once, erasing art was an experi
ment; repeated, it was stupid.) The Taliban of Afghanistan also made digital art. When they
blew up the great rock-cut Bamiyan Buddhas, they were stating a clear preference. In before
and-after photos of those exploded cliff faces (Fig. 1), we see the clearest evidence of a yes/
before situation and the later condition consequent to their preferential judgment, a no/
after. Side by side, these images must clearly be called digital (art) and bivalent. There is no
third condition within a spectrum of possibilities. There is no spectrum, only yes and no, digi
tal. Those images are also a shameful display that should have rallied an indignant world to
definitive action, but that is another matter. (Those "before" and "after" photos are digital art,
monstrous as a snuff film or Nazis' documents of world-negation.) The important point is the
inherent dematerialization that corresponds to, but is not intrinsic to, what most people think
they mean by digital art.
A work of art is both a physical thing and a fact (representing a set of conditions); it is both
a material entity and the symbolic embodiment of a host of inferences and implications. Once
it is violated by an act of vandalism, the balance shifts toward the factual and away from the
physical. When an object has been wholly obliterated and becomes illegible in its original
context, all that remains is the desecrator's statement, a negative assertion, undoubtedly, but
a statement that shifts the equilibrium, so that the symbolic and factual now predominate
over the material [3], Political assassination operates the same way: "Not this."

546 Endnote

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 The point is that digital art's most astonishing expressions are not the same as computer
(assisted) art, which, so far, has been a pretty traditional extension of visual or musical media,
etc. The truly radical digital art aims to create a world, a what-if condition contrary to current
actuality, a necessity that urgently moved artists of every age. When asked why he painted,
Barnett Newman (echoing Disraeli on writing novels) replied, "To have something to look at."
By which he meant, to bring into being something that corresponds to what he, the artist, had
in mind and which was not currently available (otherwise why bother). So-called digital artists
should ask and answer the same question. The glib use of "digital art" to mean incremental
experiments using computers in place of brushes, pencil or musical instruments hardly begins
to initiate the sounds of a promising but distantly heard overture. If there is great (compa
rable to Velazquez, Van Eyck, Shakespeare, Sappho, Bash?... you get the point) digital art
coming toward us, so far it is over the horizon and out of sight despite the brave efforts of
those laboring for it. To date we have not even been presented a foretaste of a really new
world of neural stimulation and an art of such grandeur as may rightly take its place beside
history's great achievements. I await that day. We all anticipate it. And only the artists, perhaps
yet unborn, can, with courage and flair, bring it into existence.
Harry Rand
Leonardo Honorary Editor
E-mail: <randh@si.edu>

For their support, thanks to the Smithsonian Institution 's Division of Politics ?f Reform and to the University of Westminster, London.

Notes
1. There is a management joke that goes as follows: A boss calls his subordinates into his office and asks everyone to bring him a rock.
The staff scatters, and after a while each employee returns with a rock. The boss points: "Not that one, not that one, not that one_"

2. Yes, you are correct, this expression owes much to Georg Kantor.

3. Those who thought I might be referring to Wittgenstein in earlier statements ("The refutation or vandalizing of art... can create a
world," or "By an entire world I mean the utmost complexity of nuance ...") were mistaken, while in the present case, the distinction
between facts and conditions is intended to recall the opening gun of the Tractatus.

Endnote 547

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