Painterly new work by Camille Utterback
Posted by Mark at January 30, 2005 06:02 PM
Camille showed this recent artwork "Untitled 5" during the Upgrade event in January. What's immediately impressive about this work is the painterly quality it generates. It breaks from the technological look that dominates so much digital artwork. She talked about how much more visual the process is for making this kind of piece, how she takes screenshots along the way to record ideas as she's developing the algorithms. She likened the process to sketching, with the screenshots working as a visual record and also as reference notes.
Art on the web has been dominated by conceptual art for years. The low resolution and variable nature of the web and of software/digital art in general has made the message the medium: net art is "read" more than seen. The experience of the work is tied to the conceptual manipulation of the work: what actions can the viewer take and what are the results. The concept can propagate in text and by word of mouth, much faster than the artwork itself, which means also that, like fast food, the concept can be rapidly consumed and leave the consumer hungry for the next. Ideas transmit quickly, are consumed quickly and grow old quickly. Since the idea travels in our heads and conversations, there's not much need to return to the art.
As multi-media computers propagate into the mainstream, graphics cards drop in cost and bandwidth increases, hi-resolution artwork returns and with it the possibility of work that has a conceptual underpinning, uses interaction and is also richly visual.
In Camille's Untitled 5, the interaction of many people over time generates a beautiful design that is the result of many motions in the space, and many people moving. It is not just a conceptual recording or interpreting of motion; the work responds to overlapping motion with a subtle and surprising vocabulary of shapes and colors, enticing the viewer to explore the possibilities of the artwork. There is poetry to this idea that is fittingly expressed in the abstract-expressionist and calligraphic qualities that the work generates. The viewer becomes an agent in an ongoing creative process.
The visual can't be adequately described in words. It must be seen. This return to the senses takes digital art to the next level of aesthetic potential.
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Found inAugust 24, 2005 09:20 AM