Art Practice in a Digital Culture

Citation

Note, M. (2011), "Art Practice in a Digital Culture", Online Information Review, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 161-162. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521111113641

In Art Practice in a Digital Culture, editors Hazel Gardiner, King's College London, and Charlie Gere, Lancaster University, explore how digital technologies are increasingly affecting arts and humanities scholarship. The book resulted from the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Information and Communications Technology (AHRC's ICT) Methods Network, a 2005‐2008 interdisciplinary partnership that provided a national forum to investigate the use of ICT for arts and humanities research.

The book examines how artists engaging with technology or collaborating with scientists and mathematicians have made advances in creative practice. In the introductory chapter Gere writes:

The idea of art as experiment or research must not be mistaken for some kind of “science envy”, in which artists crave some of the institutional respectability of science and its supposedly more secure claims to truth … The opposite is more true … Artists may be the true experimentalists in culture, rather than scientists, and art is the place where the very question of what exceeds the known can be properly asked. Interestingly, at the edges of what might still be recognized as science, in areas such as artificial life, what is produced resembles (new media) art as much as it resembles scientific research.

The case studies in the chapters that follow investigate how the artistic application of computing methods has led to scientific discovery.

In “Limited edition — unlimited image: can a science/art fusion move the boundaries of visual and audio interpretation?” printmaker Elaine Shemilt offers insights into the analysis of data by visually representing genomics. In “A conversation about models and prototypes” sociologist Nina Wakefield interviews artist Jane Prophet about her work with rapid prototyping technology, her engagement with “the technologies of simulation and virtuality” and how rapid prototyping is “connected to other forms of computer and digital culture [to] contextualize the work in terms of other perceptions of models and modelling”. Professors Paul Brown and Phil Husbands (Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics), in “Not intelligent by design”, write about Sussex University's DrawBots project, “an attempt to apply … computational methods to the problem of artistic autonomy” to produce a robot whose behaviour may be described as creative. In “Tools, methods, practice, process … and curation” Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art, University of Sunderland, investigates how changing methodological tools impact research with particular emphasis on curation.

Art Practice in a Digital Culture focuses on new developments, advanced methodologies and research processes, providing critical readings in the field of digital arts and humanities scholarship. Due to the complexity of ICT, the book is recommended for those already familiar with the topic. While the subjects vary, the interdisciplinary narratives demonstrate that digital technologies create powerful vehicles for knowledge acquisition of the arts and sciences.