Articulating - Digital Art
Posted by: Fats in: Fats, Vitamins & Minerals > Teyorya ba > Pagtatanghal“Diwà’t Kapookán” and “Articulating Spaces” are not literal translations but reflections of each other. “Diwà” suggests “substance contained”, “soul”, “vital principal” and “consciousness” whereas “articulation” entails “pagsasatinig”, “pagpapahayag”, thus, a “pagsasadiwà.”- in its verbal form. Together, “diwà” and “articulation” suggests an artistic process which goes beyond romantic “expression”, enlarging the creative universe, or the “sansinukob ng kalinangan at paglikha”, where sense and meaning (diwà’t kahulugán) flow into each other.
This creative universe is operationalized in the terms “Kapookán” and “Spaces.” These terms suggest the possibility of identifying precise vectors in space, of making connections, and imbuing them with meaningful structure. “Kapookán” pertains to the center of a place, enabling “space” to extend to “alangaang”, the stratospheric space, including pressure and tide. “Alangaang” links the movement of bodies in space with “laon” — or the passage of time — in a particular place. The terms “Kapookán” and “Spaces” articulate links between space and time in the Filipino universe, where time describes the organization and meaning of objects in space.
Within the context of the WebGSining/WebSGising digital art competitions, the term“digital” is appears to be interpreted as a simulation of other media. Digital animation, for instance, simulates the visual language of traditional cell animation, and the moving image in film and video. The dDigital still images also simulate many other visual forms: like photography, painting, collage, printmaking and even sculpture. Although this seems apparent, the dynamics of “Diwà’t Kapookán/Articulating Spaces” could define a universe where aesthetic structures based on digital media is made comprehensible apprehensible. Let us investigate three important vectors in this universe.
The first vector is that which is underlined by the socio-political, the place of image and technology in governance and social organization. The second vector is that which is underlined by the body or the medium, in particular the digital medium, as stimulus for intellectual and sensual dynamics. And the third vector is that which is underlined by language, in the conception of technology, or any means of artistic production, as a linguistic process.
In the socio-political dimension, people are organized and governed through representation; social figures and political leaders are purported to represent “the people.” Images in art are also often said to be representations of something, that is, they serve as symbols, expressions or designations of something. Within the domain of representation, both visual and the socio-political dimensions is are regulated by specific points of view especially intended to influence judgment. This is how where propaganda obtains its efficacy - from nationalistic posters representing unfounded cultural renewal to multimedia education driven by proprietary software claiming to represent ting the so-called cutting-edge in image industry.
However, in the creative universe, diversity and constraints are actually defined by structure and not representation. Representation is only an expression of one point within that structure. Structural thinking and analysis enables us to see the stratifications taking place, for example, in the seemingly altruistic integration of information and communications technology in our educational institutions’ arts curriculum, where the computer is often considered to be no more than a “paint brush.” The same dilemma is reflected in the computer sciences and management curriculum, where more and more young people are being educated through software-oriented courses rather than through more fluid courses that articulate the dynamics of rules which underlieing the interdependencies of software, hardware, cognition and perception.
The second vector of the creative universe is the body or the medium. In Philippine folk medicine, one of the techniques of diagnosis is palpitation or pulse taking. This means that the internal biological dimension consists of signals (flow of blood flows) that are that are also expressed externally represented (pulses), that the condition of major organs of the body are “expressed” through pulses on the radial artery at the wrist. In other words, the pulse is considered as the outer manifestation of the inner equilibrium of the body.
In the creative process, the artist engages in a technique congruent with pulse-taking. Here, the artist develops a very high sensitivity to his or her medium, listening carefully to the frequency, regularity and amplitude of its pulses, that is, to its inner structures. The beauty of the Filipino concept of body is that its diwà, essence, like the pulses, is indicative of meaningful structure. The sensorial aspects of this body, this medium, comprise two branches: one is motivated (”attribute”) and the other is spontaneous (”likás”). This defines the interdependence of attribute and essence, of mind and body - in digital media, of the meaning and form. This begs us to the explore the form of nature of digital media, as a machine-based form -with its own internal biological dimension.
The third vector in the creative universe conceives of technology as a linguistic process. If language is the medium by which concepts are internalized and externalized, then it must constitutes a very significant aspect of the creative process. This is embodied in “articulation.”
“Articulation” or “articulate” comes from Latin “articulatus” and “articulare” meaning “furnished with joints”, as in zoological terms, referring to invertebrates with segmented bodies, or in anatomical terms, the bone in the base of the lower jaw of most vertebrates except mammals). Articulation also means “to divide into joints or segments.”. In language or speech (mechanical, vocal or other), “articulate” is characterized by division into syllables and words, thus making it possible to distinguish articulate sounds from other sounds. In “articulation”, the elements of precision, of logic, rules and grammar is are crucial. These elements describe a structure upon which meaning is articulated, rather than being simply a representation through which meaning is conveyed. A way to explain the difference between articulation and representation is through the concept of “bilang” or “number”, “counting.”
In Tagalog, “bilang” translates to “isip” in Hiligaynon, Maranaw, Sibuhanon, and Samar-Leyte Bisayan. “Isip” means “thought”, “thinking” or “cognition.” “Isip” is also used in the word “isipáan” which means “counting sticks” or “palilyong pamilang.” So, there are two ways of looking at the concept “bilang.” One is to look at it in terms of articulation, that is, as a form of syllabary with its own logical grammar such that the arrangement or structure created by this grammar is based on its own internal logic (such as neighborhood relationships). Here, we may also describe “articulation” as an aesthetic equilibrium between káaluluwáa (knowledge), wikaà (language) and ginhawa (body). The other way to look at “bilang” is in terms of representation, that is, at the level of sentences and compound words (rather than syllables) such that “seven,” for instance, can represent “seven chickens in the market.”
In the first example, “bilang” is seen at a philosophical level, in terms of “bilang-isip”. As a grammar system, “bilang” preserves structure in a syntactical (spatio-temporal) sense and not merely in a representational sense. However, in the second example, “bilang” is seen in entirely pragmatic terms, as figures carrying only rules of presumed static meanings and not rules of connectivity. Interestingly, in “bilang-isip”, the mind-body problem of western philosophy is of no great circumstance, whereas in the representational sense of “bilang”, this problem is deeply inscribed. It is indeed amazing how “isip” or “thinking” came to be removed from “bilang” or “number”, for example, how supposedly democratic processes like national elections actually marginalize conceptual diversity. Even worse is the scientific use of statistics to hide diversity of internal structure in a wide range of cases.
So, how can artists define digital art in ways that form a more independent and self-supporting approach based more on uniqueness rather than on simulation of other media? How can articulation – the building of language and not merely the display of images – become possible in digital space? Let us look at some possibilities.
Fig. 1: Three screen-grabbed frames from “ArtQ2: Jellyfish Animation” by Josef Boydon. Software art written in C. 1999.
“ArtQ2″ by young programmer Josef Boydon is from a series called “Art Query” (”Would you call these programs of mine, art works?”) For Boydon, it was an exercise in creating animation within the constraints of a text mode screen. The initial problem was implementing “fakemode” in order to display virtual colors on a 256-color video mode. This resulted in “blinking”, a common problem in “virtual colors.” From this constraint, Boydon, who had already converted several stills images into text mode, surmised that “motion video might suffer less blinking since the images keep changing anyway.”
Fig. 2: Three screen-grabbed frames from “Quad” by Trevor Batten. Software art written in Java. 2004.
“Quad”, by pioneer British computer artist Trevor Batten, on the other hand, is a Java-based interpretation and implementation of an analogue machine called a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). Basically, a VCO produces a sine-wave which varies in frequency depending on the voltage level fed into it, while its amplitude (the difference between the peak and mean values of the oscillator) moves between constraints of +1 and -1. In “Quad”, the feedback dynamics of the VCO was used by Batten to depict the continuous construction of a number of shapes, including rectangles. A rectangle is defined by two points, each with an X and a Y coordinate. In “Quad”, these points are composed of “oscillators” each with its own minimum and maximum values.
Between Batten and Boydon is the programmer-artist tradition spanning nearly 50 years since the introduction of analogue and digital computers in the creation of aesthetic structures. It is a tradition marked by the artist’s intimation of his or her medium as a linguistic-perceptual system rather than on a purely visual and representational sense. However, this it is a tradition that is also present in the apparently visual arts of painting and sculpture; in fact, it is a tradition core to found in any creative process.
Fig. 3: “San Bonifacio” by Juan Arceo. Oil on Panel. 1830.
“San Bonifacio” by Juan Arceo depicts San Bonifacio is an oil on panel painting of the saint in a soldier’s uniform. Despite the striking realism of San Bonifacio, the figure’s background, particularly the arched doorway, is depicted as an “impossible object.” Here, the depiction demonstrates the apparent reversal of solid objects between binocular vision and seeing with one eye, in other words, the problem of projecting interpreting multiple-dimensions onto a 2-dimensional surface.
Fig. 4: “Church of Caysasay” by Pedro Salazar. Oil on linen. 1904.
In contrast, “Church of Caysasay” by Pedro Salazar presents us with over half a dozen realistic-looking arched doorways and windows painted from an impossible viewpoint. Topologically, all these depictions are true and self-consistent because they were all based on a visual grammar: the computation of structure invariants within the limits of insufficient information – the same constraints evident in “ArtQuery2” and “Quad.”
In the “sansinukob ng kalinangan at paglikha”creative universe – where sense and meaning (“diwà’t kahulugán”) flow into each other, where there is where the possibility of making connections and imbuing them with meaningful structure is created – the artist engages in dialogues with the medium – towards a more independent and self-supporting notion of digital art. Eventually, these dialogues are what enlarge our creative spaces – from the building of aesthetic structures to the birthing articulation of a truly free and independent Filipino people – dialogues that “Diwà’t Kapookán/Articulating Spaces” hopes to ignite and nurture.
