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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction: The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, Stella Brennan, Su Ballard
Introduction: The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, Stella Brennan, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
A sampler containing many voices and visions-histories, critiques and calls to arms- this book has developed out of a particular networked community. A network both evokes and elides. For as Danny Butt asks in his contribution to this book, "How do we think what is not connected?" Or, for that matter, how can we know what (or who)we do not know? Do we as editors have a responsibility to make definitions, despite our awareness that any definition is partisan? Have we not already done so? Can we describe what is digital, what it means to make art on, influenced by, …
Mutable Aesthetics: Emergence In Digital Installation, Su Ballard
Mutable Aesthetics: Emergence In Digital Installation, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
In order to make the claim that the aesthetic specificities of digital art practices are about more than their technologies, this paper contends that the micro- and macrocosmic realms of information theory are applicable and useful in the field of art history. In his introduction to The Digital Dialectic, Peter Lunenfeld presents the impact of the digital on representational media as the recasting of 'everything' as 'digital information.' Consequently, everything can be 'stored, accessed, and controlled by the same equipment' (Lunenfeld 2000, xvi). For Lunenfeld, the digital does not merely represent an aesthetic, or a process, but operates from 'similarity …
Swarm And Flicker - Exhibition Catalogue Essay, Su Ballard
Swarm And Flicker - Exhibition Catalogue Essay, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
Locusts have no need for network technologies. For a locust to connect iphones, facebook and twitter are irrelevant. A day can start off pretty normal but in overcrowded conditions suddenly something totally new can be imagined and a swarm can amass momentum. Scientists now think that it is the overproduction of serotonin that causes this transformation and inspires the locusts to become mutually attracted, to gather, breed and eat.
Antipodean Media Ecologies: Journeys To Nowhere And Back, Su Ballard
Antipodean Media Ecologies: Journeys To Nowhere And Back, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
In summer 2005 the Association of Freed Times (AFT) published an article in Artforum. "El Diaro del Fin del Mundo: A Journey That Wasn't" described environmental damage to the Antarctic ice shelf and the subsequent mutations occurring within the Antartic ecosystem. One of these mutants is rumoured to be a solitary albino penguin living on an uncharted island near Marguerite Bay. The article documents French artist Pierre Huyghe's journey to find the island and its mysterious inhabitatnt, and forms the first part of an event that culminated in a musical on the Wollman ice rink in New York's Central Park, …
Entropy And Digital Installation, Su Ballard
Entropy And Digital Installation, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
What would it mean if communication were exact? That, in spite of the real, material, spaces of message, channel, format, filters, modulations, mediation, and plain old error, it might be possible to exclude all noise and see through to some pure space of connection and transmission. Despite my curiosity, I suspect the result would be disappointingly dull, or simply redundant. The search for perfect communication is as pointless as trying to find an audio space not infected with electromagnetic waves, or a gallery space where only one work is apprehended at a time. Our communications spaces are always already determined …
Html Colour Codes, Su Ballard
Html Colour Codes, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
The HTML Color Codes exhibition features a selection of internet based artwork that address the topic of digital color. The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a "ready-made" color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed. The rationale for this question stems from theories of perception that argue that color is a not ready-made object found in a paint set or machine, but rather it is an experience that results from a complex process of …
Emergence: The Generation Of Material Spaces In Anthony Mccall's "Line Describing A Cone", Su Ballard
Emergence: The Generation Of Material Spaces In Anthony Mccall's "Line Describing A Cone", Su Ballard
Su Ballard
Anthony McCall's solid light film Line Describing a Cone (1973)is about the emergence of dimensionality in space. This paper uses Line Describing a Cone to discuss emergence as a material algorithmic process occurring across the media of informatic systems and installation art. Evolutionary models of emergence trace patterns, whether behavioural, spatial or genetic. Line Describing a Cone suggests the emergence of a new kind of mobilized viewer within gallery spaces who does not necessarily 'evolve' but who (through interruption and noise)becomes an interactive emergent part of the material processes of the work. Noise travels and generates the excess dimensionality within …
Cloudland: Digital Art From Aotearoa New Zealand, Su Ballard, Stella Brennan, Zita Joyce
Cloudland: Digital Art From Aotearoa New Zealand, Su Ballard, Stella Brennan, Zita Joyce
Su Ballard
The Maori name now used for New Zealand is Aotearoa, ‘Land of the Long White Cloud’, a description of the form of islands glimpsed from the ocean, their mountains obscured by the vapour gathering around their peaks. Cloudland draws on this duality of the solid and insubstantial to address the instability of place and its definitions, the permeability of boundaries and the connections between people and place.
Information, Noise And Et Al, Su Ballard
Information, Noise And Et Al, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
At their most simplistic, there are two means for shifting information around - analogue and digital. Analogue movement depends on analogy to perform computations; it is continuous and the relationships between numbers are keyed as a continuous ordinal set. The digital set is discrete; moving one finger at a time results in a one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless, analogue and digital are like the two companions in Serres' tale. Each suffers the relationship of noise to information as internal rupture and external interference. In their examination of historical constructions of information, Hobart and Schiffman locate the noise of the analogue within its …
Embedded Ecologies: Teaching Digital Theory In Art And Design, Su Ballard, C Mccaw
Embedded Ecologies: Teaching Digital Theory In Art And Design, Su Ballard, C Mccaw
Su Ballard
We are both researchers in a traditional sense and also design and art practitioners. We work in an environment where our students make things as well as study theory. Our hypotheses surround our experiences, both as academic 'makers' and through our observations in the classroom. Our position is, that if practice and theory are integrated and embedded within art and design educational experience, meaning is brought to theory and thoughtful positioning to practice. There is a wide range of literature on the theory/practice relationship within art school environments. We draw on this material but in many ways diverge from it …
It's A Small World After All: Susan Norrie's Enola, Su Ballard
It's A Small World After All: Susan Norrie's Enola, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
This essay explores the movements of cinema as it is refashioned within an art gallery space. In addition it charts a number of research ideas as they find themselves manifest alongside Australian artist Susan Norrie’s digital video installation ‘ENOLA’ (2004). The essay engages with a current argument in new media theory surrounding the influence and relevance of the cinematic apparatus for analysis of new media, and suggests that although both cinema and new media can be understood through shared aspects of movement, duration, and sound, to reference cinema directly in a digital gallery installation also introduces a number of problematic …
Susan Norrie - Exhibition Catalogue Essay: Taking Time, Su Ballard
Susan Norrie - Exhibition Catalogue Essay: Taking Time, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
In ENOLA this shifted perception is multiplied many times over. We see the camera as it sees, we see the visitors to the themepark looking at the world below them as they step carefully between its buildings, we watch the tour guides watching that scene, we see the spaces of the installation, we see the stools which stand mutely before the screen, we see ourselves amidst others watching the screen. At no point do any of these levels of vision refer back to reality, but instead keep us aware of the multiple and material structures of the architectures of the …
Flickering Affects, Su Ballard
Flickering Affects, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
All digital work is made and viewed in the glow of the flicker: the image moves, our eyes move, our body enters into some digital space. Whether or not a screen is present, the viewer of digital installation art is implicated within this flickering affect. This paper discusses three installation works by New Zealand artists informed by digital practice. I argue that an affective viewing experience can be examined through the semantics of the flicker.
Old Noise, New Sounds: Sonic Explorations In Gallery Spaces, Su Ballard
Old Noise, New Sounds: Sonic Explorations In Gallery Spaces, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
Leon Narbey's electronic sound and light installation Real Time opened . New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in February 1970. It was a noisy exhibition. Fluorescent and neon lights constructed flickering visual spaces, swathes of black polythene disguised all internal architecture, and recording microphones and movement triggers transferred sounds from one space to another. It was simultaneously disorientating and exhilarating. Real Time was a major installation in a minor location. Outside the centres of an already. peripheral country, Real Time raised the possibility of networked electronic installation transgressing the mainstreams of both "gallery art and media art." It did this by …
D>Art05 Distributed Art And Mobile Journeys, Su Ballard
D>Art05 Distributed Art And Mobile Journeys, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
There is time for the work to be examined, experimented with, and opened up to a visiting public. This kind of exhibition model has for a long time been problematic for works that do not exist within a defined 3D space, or a comfortably measured duration. D>Art05 and Mobile Journeys address the temporal and spatial restrictions of the exhibition model by making the work available for download both during and post-exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition could bring their mobiles and download any of the fourteen works in Mobile Journeys, in effect, mobilising the work.