by Cinque Hicks

Tradition Projects Itself

The digital art of Peter Leighton is an art of contradictions. Dotting the red brick walls of The Hideout at Seventh and Congress, his PhotoShop manipulated photographs and collages, conveying a timeless spirituality, speak to serious issues about the past and present while simultaneously laughing at how much one can visually fabricate with computer technology these days.

Leighton's small, mysterious pictures look like Polaroid emulsion transfer photographs: rough, unpolished. You might be tempted to say that they are all about keeping it real, except that Leighton is more interested in keeping it surreal. In "Home for the Holidays," a man sits cross-legged on a simple chair in a dingy room contemplating the bright red star on top of a Christmas tree. The scene would just be a slice-of-life documentary if the man's head weren't the head of Christ, with crown of thorns radiant with divinity and eyes turned up in the agony of an implied, but unseen crucifixion. What's more, this head obviously is borrowed, collage style, from some other source: a Baroque painting that has been cut and pasted into a modern day realism with the seamlessness that only PhotoShop can bring off.

All of his pictures are jarring juxtapositions of borrowed imagery from different times and different cultures, fused into unified compositions. Some lie well within the bounds of traditional realism, but most fly way out on the fringes of surrealism. Geisha Contemplates Her Past, for example, drops a pristine, traditional, Japanese style female figure into a stormy, technological backdrop that is both vague and terrifying. The unifying factor in his pictures is his process: Leighton achieves his special effects not through the traditional methods of staging, props and costumes, nor through darkroom manipulations, but through the digital technology that is the hallmark of today's black magic.

Peter Leighton is one of many Austin artists taking part in a worldwide artistic experiment loosely called "digital art." Its forms are as numerous as those who practice it; its definitions are nearly impossible to contain. While Leighton exploits the traditional mode of static art hung gallery-style in a well-lighted area, other digital artists use dark spaces for projecting moving imagery in their galleries of choice. And still others explore the possibilities of videotape or the infinite space of the Internet.

Take, for example, moboid, also known as Heather Kelley, whose digital creation "Grip" debuted recently at the Austin Museum of Digital Art. "Grip" represents the implosion of video game conventions into themselves. This abstract installation, projected on a screen high above onlookers, has all the quick movement of a video game. You recognize game-like forms and geometric structures, but nevertheless, there is no apparent game narrative. It elides the shoot-em-up ethos and dumps the win/lose paradigm in favor of pure vision and still somehow looks like a video game. It is abstract art that owes as much to Kandinsky as it does to Space Invaders.

Meanwhile, "An Exquisite Corpse," conceived by Heather McCabe and Phineas X. Jones, goes even further to explore the possibilities of digital art by using the Web as both its medium and gallery. Paying proper respects to the surrealists of the 1920s, the "An Exquisite Corpse" project is an art game played on the Web by multiple players all over the world. One "artist" (an artist can be anyone who signs up) creates a digital image and emails a 15-pixel high strip from the bottom of the image to the next player. That player uses the strip as a starting point to build a new image without knowing what the player before has built and then sends a strip on to the next player. It goes on like this through four or five artists until an image emerges that is entirely unique yet belongs to no single artist.

"An Exquisite Corpse" illustrates one of the most fertile possibilities of digital art: the possibility of moving beyond the metaphor of canvas and brush. As an art piece, it simply doesn't use the Web as a means of display; rather, it actually depends on the Web as part of its creative process. The Web and email are as much a part of the art as are the bits of imagery that make it into the final pictures.

In fact, a lot of digital art is designed so that the spectator can participate in the actual creation of the work. The line between the artist and the spectator is blurred. An example of this type of interactive art is Andy Deck's "Glyphiti." Like a massive digital wall in some global public rest room, the site invites its visitors to draw little pictures (or big ones if you have the patience) using black and white pixels via an intuitive interface. Every visitor's drawings, presumably from around the world, turn up on the same digital graffiti wall, which changes, albeit slowly, over time. The result is a chaotic kaleidoscope of ideas, high and low, sublime and ridiculous: bits of bumper sticker philosophy, delicately drawn portraits, scribbles and declarations of love. Oh, and of course, there is an ample supply of crudely drawn male genitalia.

Why That's Art

The Dadaists understood the power in ridiculous things. Andy Deck brings us a digital Dadaism in which anyone can participate. This is another reason why digital art, or in this case, 'Net art in particular, is so full of possibilities. From Leighton to "An Exquisite Corpse," digital art is almost always a collaborative art form. It almost always depends on the efforts of more than one person and sometimes on the efforts of an undefined and unlimited number of people. And the collaborations are often with complete strangers, defying the constraints of physical space by using email, the Internet and off-the-shelf software.

What's more, when you log onto Glyphiti, it is as though you've tapped into some larger global subconscious. Freed from the artist's personal hang-ups, "Glyphiti" is a direct window into a kind of ongoing social conversation happening everywhere at once.

And this is perhaps where the real expressive potential of digital art lies. Think hip-hop. Digital art, like hip-hop, has a way of scanning the cultural landscape and plucking out bits and pieces-a bit of input here, a random image from the continuum of technology there-to weave a higher vision. It's the exact opposite of what many of us were fed in art classes: that the artist must be a lone wolf, burrowing ever further into the caverns of our own psyches. Digital art maps a territory that is social rather than personal, external rather than internal. For the digital artist, artistry is as much about what other people bring to the table as it is about the vision of the artist him or herself.

It's not a utopian vision, however, and as politics go, digital art is still finding its voice. Relying on collaboration as much as it does, it's easy to think of these forms of digital art as truly democratic, open to all. At last, a non-elitist art form! But in fact, the oft-cited "digital divide," very much a part of the "real world" is not surprisingly reflected in the digital art world as well. In Austin, as elsewhere, digital art is still largely a world of boys and their toys and, more specifically, of white boys and their rather expensive toys. Any claim of social relevance has to take that fact into account. How does an art form look so global yet still exist mainly in a technocratic ivory tower? How does it seem so social yet remain so isolated?

If digital art really shares something with hip-hop, then it follows that there must be a vast reservoir of untapped potential in this art form. Digital art is still awaiting its own "Fuck the Police," that single statement that so seamlessly marries artistic technique with political fury that it becomes impossible to ignore. In the right hands, a social commentary that devastating still seems possible.