1882-1885
Window Onto A Floating WorldIn the late nineteenth-century, French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1973) sought to revisit the way in which he translated the landscape he saw before him onto canvas. His innovations were instrumental in transforming modes of representation for subsequent artists. Unlike the Impressionists, Cezanne was less concerned with capturing “a moment” in nature and more interested in penetrating deep into the heart of it to give life to that which was enduring and constant. He wanted to explore and understand the essence of the things in nature he depicted; ‘their inherent and eternal form.’[1] It is in Cezanne’s numerous representations of Mont Sainte-Victoire that best illustrate his departure from the Impressionist school of thought towards Cubism. Photographic analysis taken at the vantage points from where Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire indicate these works show more perspectives of the mountain than is possible to be seen from any one point. In effect, these paintings show Cezanne’s period of interaction with the mountain over time as he moved around and absorbed its size and shape from different angles. Cezanne’s depictions of the landscape were thus a culmination of many perspectives synthesized into one image - the result of attempting to represent exhaustively on a flat surface all aspects of what he had seen in three-dimensions. In Alfred Gell’s opinion, Mont Sainte Victoire is revealed as documentation of a process, a movement of duration, rather than as simply a ‘thing’ in world.[2] After his study of Mont Sainte Victoire, Cezanne’s art became defined by a series of forms and colours, without any attention paid to depicting a linear perspective. Instead, recession was suggested by the overlapping of certain forms within the painting and Cezanne’s pre-Cubism came to influence the generation of collage and assemblage art practices.
The series of artworks chosen for Window Onto A Floating World parallel Cezanne’s departure from traditional structures of space and form in their individual examinations of landscapes and scenes from nature, in which the process of their coming-to-being is made apparent through their digital and online realisation. The artists selected all display an interest in adapting paper based art practices, namely painting and collage, into a computational medium for display and interaction online. These artists have all retained varying degrees of a hand-made, low-tech and painterly feel when translating their works into a digital format. Each artwork exhibited intersects in some way with Cezanne’s innovative fashioning of the landscape. Modern art is defined by a constant rejection of representational ideal (towards abstraction) and an ongoing investigation into seeking out what it is that defines art. These online landscapes continue on in that tradition, in the way in which they seek to investigate theories, styles and modes of representation in a digital environment.
Ezra Johnson’s three artworks’, Fall, Undercover and High And Low were created for a web-based project in April of 2008 at the DIA Art Foundation in New York. The series entitled Wrestling with the Blob Beast was comprised of sixteen animated screen-savers, each one available to be downloaded free of charge from the DIA site.
Undercover presents to the viewer a night scene comprised of a vast area of dark moonlit water, with a cityscape across the horizon underneath a purple black starry sky, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888). In fact, the way in which the paint strokes have retained their broad and gestural form in Johnson's works resemble Van Gogh’s painterly approach to depicting nature. Undercover incorporates a glistening and shimmering backdrop for the animation of a cardboard cut-out style tug-boat, which makes its way across the dark deep sea in the foreground repeatedly for as long as the animation is played. A sense of movement is created in the artwork through the animated manipulation of what resembles the interplay of glistening sections of painted collage on top of each other. However, as traditional collage is fixed, instead through the flash animation programme they are able to remain in constant rotation with each other, thus giving birth to movement indicated by mimicking the effect of the moon glistening against turbulent waters. The use of animation in Johnson’s works extends the shortcoming of traditional painting in its inability to adequately convey nature’s transitory atmospheric and weather effects. Cezanne limited himself to describing the inherent essence of nature’s forms, as opposed to exterior influences upon the forms for this very reason.
Johnson’s High and Low captures that which Cezanne saw was an impossibility in painting – the movement of transitory effects of light. The main feature of this intimate night-time cityscape comprised of a dark cardboard cut-out style building is the amazing display of light above in the night sky. Johnson’s virtual aurora borealis undulates an floats in a way one would expect to see such a display in reality. In this way, Johnson’s screensavers can be seen as indexes to the prototype of both the impressionist and post-impressionist landscape - this work could be viewed as an effort to bring the two movements together by attempting to reconcile their differences through digital means. The process that went into the production of Johnson’s art is evidenced through the way in which traditional painting and collage practices are changed and revolutionised by their new digital context.
Cezanne once said to his friend and painter, Emile Bernard that it is the process of reforming - which a painter carries out as a result of his own personal way of seeing things - that gives new interest to the depiction of nature. The nature of this process meant that the end result was always going to be something that no one had ever seen before, something other than reality.[3] The works of Qubo Gas (collective of French artists Jean-François Ablézot, Morgan Dimnet and Laura Henno) are dynamic digital animations comprised of abstracted elements influenced by forms found in nature, which come together to transform the landscape into an imaginary or a dream-like vision. Deleuze saw that the separation of art from the actual (“life as it is actualised”) caused it to have the power to open up the virtual.[4] The works by this French collective take everyday common art forms and practices and redescribe them to offer an alternative vision or sensation to everyday life and traditional representational art. These digital works do not rely on perceiving subject or representing the world as being constituted by systematic and structured hierarchies or laws to instead remind the viewer of the expressive potential inherent within all the elements of life. This is conveyed not only from within the life of the works themselves, but also through Qubo Gas’ belief in the expressive potential of digital technologies for the creation of art.
The work Escargot Couleurs is a music video for a song of the same name by Belgian computer-pop-rock band, Pet Scratch Land. Like Johnson’s screensavers, this work is comprised of painted, collage and graphic aspects resembling elements from nature and landscapes, but which are arranged in a much more disorderly fashion. The animation begins with the digital generation of simple amorphous shapes that over the course of the video are transformed and sometimes subsumed by more complex and dynamic elements, including “cut-out” photographs of trees. The work is constantly in movement with the individual forms bouncing frenetically off each other. There often is no central point of action. Instead the forms move in a chaotic and irregular fashion, producing an image similar to microorganisms or bacteria multiplying. Again, as with traditional collage, an overlapping of forms suggests an element of depth. In parts, the animation enables elements of the work to enlarge and reduce, giving the impression that they are coming towards or receding from the viewer. The virtual world that is opened up and explored before the viewer supports Pet Scratch Land’s soundtrack, which is in itself an avant-garde melange of unconventional and experimental computerised sound.
Animation, collage and sound are aspects explored in a more immersive manner in Watercouleur Park (2007). This work relies upon interaction with the viewer for is complete realisation. Simple and childlike drawings or ‘doodles’ of both generic representations of nature and specific objects, such as trees, flowers, clouds, and stars have been made in pencil, felt-tip and watercolour and subsequently cropped into individual pieces and then digitised and put into a database from which the programme runs. Each time the artwork is launched these ‘collage’ pieces are generated at random to create a new landscape. The resulting effect looks very much like a child’s hanging paper-mobile. Each individual collage piece retains its flat two-dimensional nature in the artwork, but the software programme on which it is running has been coded to allow the parts to suspend and not be fixed to any one point. The collage parts move as free agents floating around the screen and have the ability to overlap in the ‘space’ defined within the programme. Sometimes the collage pieces that are generated are transparent, which allows for the overlapped pieces behind to be seen and further creates the illusion of depth. This ‘space’ can be explored as the beholder is invited to rotate, modify and change the point of view of the layered collage pieces. The beholder, or activator, becomes linked to the life of the work, temporarily immersed in the artificial landscape through the window of their computer browser. Their manipulations are emphasised by the generation of specific noises, which further links the viewer to the evolution and realisation of the work in each manifestation.
Art Critic Benedict Ramade has likened Qubo Gas’ artworks to Japanese landscapes produced in the genre of “ukiyo-e” (produced between the seventeenth and twentieth-centuries), which translates in English as “pictures of the floating world”.[5] Similar to the works' of Cezanne, landscapes that were made in the genre of ‘ukiyo-e’ traditionally would have little special depth and variation for seasonal atmosphere (prior to the 1830’s), exemplified in works by renown artist of the Edo period, Katushika Hokusai (1760–1849). [6] Quo Gas’ Uki-Yo (2004) is a work that takes its name from the genre but conversely is formally quite distinct from landscapes made in the ukiyo-e tradition. The landscape-forms in this new media work are completely computer-processed; they are generated by an algorithm (based upon a Japanese Haiku) which dictates the works continuous evolution, reproduction and eventual destruction. Uki-Yo is the result of culmination of collage studies and computer based drawings, as evident from the multiple preliminary sketches of the work. The hand-made tradition of collage has in this work been transmuted into a completely digital form and given a new context, but still retains its two-dimensionality and strongly resembles its hand-made precedent. In an abstract manner this work seeks to convey within a single frame/window the lifecycle or process of nature – birth, life and death - in a way traditional landscape painting could not adequately achieve.
Window Onto A Floating World is an exhibition that celebrates artworks that re-visit in a digital medium paper based art traditions, focusing upon works that depict aspects of nature and landscape. In their own way, each work could be viewed in relation to Cezanne's refashioning of the landscape in the way they are dominantly characterised by the use of a series of colours and forms, which in a digital medium create floating vibrant worlds for our interaction through the window of our computer browser. The mixture of media and technologies in these works create a picture of the world that Cezanne saw as an impossible task for painting - the capturing of movement and momentary effects. The artists in this exhibition respond to this, each offering an alternative extension of that which Cezanne was so troubled yet inspired by - the changing world around us.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As my proposal includes a work that is not web-based (Uki-Yo, by Qubo Gas) when conceiving of this exhibition I decided that it would be best experienced in an actual space, as opposed to being strictly online. This would mean that I would need to borrow Uki-Yo from Qubo Gas in order to display it. However, seeing as the work is a computer programme, I could ask for the artists to lend me a digital copy that would be projected from the computer onto the wall. This would then indicate to the public the process of the generation of the digital work. The work would run perpetually for the duration of the show. In researching and writing this essay, the only reproduction I have seen of Escargot Couleurs is from YouTube. I would also ask to borrow a better quality version of this video clip. This too is not strictly an internet art work, but it was chosen, as was Uk-Yo as an contextual comparison as a work from Qubo Gas' oeuvre. As all of the works chosen display a mixture of media and show cross-over of formal and technical boundaries, I feel justified in making the decision to include these works.
Below is a diagram of how I would stage the other works in this exhibition. I would propose to have the works in a circular space. The computers (iMacs, 24-inch screens) in the middle would display the three screensaver works by Ezra Johnson. The viewers would be able to activate all three screensavers on each computer. I would want to maintain the part they play in the generation of the work, instead of simply displaying it without necessitating their interaction.
Watercouleur Park would also be projected onto the wall opposite the door, but only at the instigation of a visitor who would approach the computer with projector attached, and launch the work. To stop cross-over of the music from Escargot Couleurs, I would attach personal headphones to the computer playing Watercouleur, which would also make the experience more immersive for that participant.
1: Uki-Yo
2: Watercouleur Park
3: Escargot Couleurs
4, 5, 6: Fall, Undercover, High and Low
The series of artworks chosen for Window Onto A Floating World parallel Cezanne’s departure from traditional structures of space and form in their individual examinations of landscapes and scenes from nature, in which the process of their coming-to-being is made apparent through their digital and online realisation. The artists selected all display an interest in adapting paper based art practices, namely painting and collage, into a computational medium for display and interaction online. These artists have all retained varying degrees of a hand-made, low-tech and painterly feel when translating their works into a digital format. Each artwork exhibited intersects in some way with Cezanne’s innovative fashioning of the landscape. Modern art is defined by a constant rejection of representational ideal (towards abstraction) and an ongoing investigation into seeking out what it is that defines art. These online landscapes continue on in that tradition, in the way in which they seek to investigate theories, styles and modes of representation in a digital environment.
Ezra Johnson’s three artworks’, Fall, Undercover and High And Low were created for a web-based project in April of 2008 at the DIA Art Foundation in New York. The series entitled Wrestling with the Blob Beast was comprised of sixteen animated screen-savers, each one available to be downloaded free of charge from the DIA site.
Ezra Johnson, Fall 2008
Fall is a multi-media work that is composed of a hand-painted backdrop of large orange and brown autumnal trees against a bright blue sky. The trees have been painted from a low perspective giving the impression that the viewer of the work is looking up towards their towering tops in the sky. Johnson has digitised this painting and incorporated it into a flash animation programme where the still image is brought to life by a series of single leaves which appear to fall and float from the tops of the trees, starting small and increasing in size as they spiral down, as if towards to viewers face. The leaves are like elements of collage that have been given life through the animation software. No longer do collage elements have to be stuck and fixed onto the canvas - in this software they have been coded to float and give the impression of a three-dimensional space in which their action takes place. Collage is given new expressivity through its digitisation.
Fall is a multi-media work that is composed of a hand-painted backdrop of large orange and brown autumnal trees against a bright blue sky. The trees have been painted from a low perspective giving the impression that the viewer of the work is looking up towards their towering tops in the sky. Johnson has digitised this painting and incorporated it into a flash animation programme where the still image is brought to life by a series of single leaves which appear to fall and float from the tops of the trees, starting small and increasing in size as they spiral down, as if towards to viewers face. The leaves are like elements of collage that have been given life through the animation software. No longer do collage elements have to be stuck and fixed onto the canvas - in this software they have been coded to float and give the impression of a three-dimensional space in which their action takes place. Collage is given new expressivity through its digitisation.Ezra Johnson, Undercover 2008 & Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone 1888
Undercover presents to the viewer a night scene comprised of a vast area of dark moonlit water, with a cityscape across the horizon underneath a purple black starry sky, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888). In fact, the way in which the paint strokes have retained their broad and gestural form in Johnson's works resemble Van Gogh’s painterly approach to depicting nature. Undercover incorporates a glistening and shimmering backdrop for the animation of a cardboard cut-out style tug-boat, which makes its way across the dark deep sea in the foreground repeatedly for as long as the animation is played. A sense of movement is created in the artwork through the animated manipulation of what resembles the interplay of glistening sections of painted collage on top of each other. However, as traditional collage is fixed, instead through the flash animation programme they are able to remain in constant rotation with each other, thus giving birth to movement indicated by mimicking the effect of the moon glistening against turbulent waters. The use of animation in Johnson’s works extends the shortcoming of traditional painting in its inability to adequately convey nature’s transitory atmospheric and weather effects. Cezanne limited himself to describing the inherent essence of nature’s forms, as opposed to exterior influences upon the forms for this very reason. Ezra Johnson High and Low 2008
Johnson’s High and Low captures that which Cezanne saw was an impossibility in painting – the movement of transitory effects of light. The main feature of this intimate night-time cityscape comprised of a dark cardboard cut-out style building is the amazing display of light above in the night sky. Johnson’s virtual aurora borealis undulates an floats in a way one would expect to see such a display in reality. In this way, Johnson’s screensavers can be seen as indexes to the prototype of both the impressionist and post-impressionist landscape - this work could be viewed as an effort to bring the two movements together by attempting to reconcile their differences through digital means. The process that went into the production of Johnson’s art is evidenced through the way in which traditional painting and collage practices are changed and revolutionised by their new digital context.Cezanne once said to his friend and painter, Emile Bernard that it is the process of reforming - which a painter carries out as a result of his own personal way of seeing things - that gives new interest to the depiction of nature. The nature of this process meant that the end result was always going to be something that no one had ever seen before, something other than reality.[3] The works of Qubo Gas (collective of French artists Jean-François Ablézot, Morgan Dimnet and Laura Henno) are dynamic digital animations comprised of abstracted elements influenced by forms found in nature, which come together to transform the landscape into an imaginary or a dream-like vision. Deleuze saw that the separation of art from the actual (“life as it is actualised”) caused it to have the power to open up the virtual.[4] The works by this French collective take everyday common art forms and practices and redescribe them to offer an alternative vision or sensation to everyday life and traditional representational art. These digital works do not rely on perceiving subject or representing the world as being constituted by systematic and structured hierarchies or laws to instead remind the viewer of the expressive potential inherent within all the elements of life. This is conveyed not only from within the life of the works themselves, but also through Qubo Gas’ belief in the expressive potential of digital technologies for the creation of art.
The work Escargot Couleurs is a music video for a song of the same name by Belgian computer-pop-rock band, Pet Scratch Land. Like Johnson’s screensavers, this work is comprised of painted, collage and graphic aspects resembling elements from nature and landscapes, but which are arranged in a much more disorderly fashion. The animation begins with the digital generation of simple amorphous shapes that over the course of the video are transformed and sometimes subsumed by more complex and dynamic elements, including “cut-out” photographs of trees. The work is constantly in movement with the individual forms bouncing frenetically off each other. There often is no central point of action. Instead the forms move in a chaotic and irregular fashion, producing an image similar to microorganisms or bacteria multiplying. Again, as with traditional collage, an overlapping of forms suggests an element of depth. In parts, the animation enables elements of the work to enlarge and reduce, giving the impression that they are coming towards or receding from the viewer. The virtual world that is opened up and explored before the viewer supports Pet Scratch Land’s soundtrack, which is in itself an avant-garde melange of unconventional and experimental computerised sound.
Qubo Gas, Watercouleur Park 2007
Animation, collage and sound are aspects explored in a more immersive manner in Watercouleur Park (2007). This work relies upon interaction with the viewer for is complete realisation. Simple and childlike drawings or ‘doodles’ of both generic representations of nature and specific objects, such as trees, flowers, clouds, and stars have been made in pencil, felt-tip and watercolour and subsequently cropped into individual pieces and then digitised and put into a database from which the programme runs. Each time the artwork is launched these ‘collage’ pieces are generated at random to create a new landscape. The resulting effect looks very much like a child’s hanging paper-mobile. Each individual collage piece retains its flat two-dimensional nature in the artwork, but the software programme on which it is running has been coded to allow the parts to suspend and not be fixed to any one point. The collage parts move as free agents floating around the screen and have the ability to overlap in the ‘space’ defined within the programme. Sometimes the collage pieces that are generated are transparent, which allows for the overlapped pieces behind to be seen and further creates the illusion of depth. This ‘space’ can be explored as the beholder is invited to rotate, modify and change the point of view of the layered collage pieces. The beholder, or activator, becomes linked to the life of the work, temporarily immersed in the artificial landscape through the window of their computer browser. Their manipulations are emphasised by the generation of specific noises, which further links the viewer to the evolution and realisation of the work in each manifestation. Qubo Gas Uki-Yo 2004
Katushika Hokusai Dawn at Izawa in Kai Province 1831-1834
Art Critic Benedict Ramade has likened Qubo Gas’ artworks to Japanese landscapes produced in the genre of “ukiyo-e” (produced between the seventeenth and twentieth-centuries), which translates in English as “pictures of the floating world”.[5] Similar to the works' of Cezanne, landscapes that were made in the genre of ‘ukiyo-e’ traditionally would have little special depth and variation for seasonal atmosphere (prior to the 1830’s), exemplified in works by renown artist of the Edo period, Katushika Hokusai (1760–1849). [6] Quo Gas’ Uki-Yo (2004) is a work that takes its name from the genre but conversely is formally quite distinct from landscapes made in the ukiyo-e tradition. The landscape-forms in this new media work are completely computer-processed; they are generated by an algorithm (based upon a Japanese Haiku) which dictates the works continuous evolution, reproduction and eventual destruction. Uki-Yo is the result of culmination of collage studies and computer based drawings, as evident from the multiple preliminary sketches of the work. The hand-made tradition of collage has in this work been transmuted into a completely digital form and given a new context, but still retains its two-dimensionality and strongly resembles its hand-made precedent. In an abstract manner this work seeks to convey within a single frame/window the lifecycle or process of nature – birth, life and death - in a way traditional landscape painting could not adequately achieve.Window Onto A Floating World is an exhibition that celebrates artworks that re-visit in a digital medium paper based art traditions, focusing upon works that depict aspects of nature and landscape. In their own way, each work could be viewed in relation to Cezanne's refashioning of the landscape in the way they are dominantly characterised by the use of a series of colours and forms, which in a digital medium create floating vibrant worlds for our interaction through the window of our computer browser. The mixture of media and technologies in these works create a picture of the world that Cezanne saw as an impossible task for painting - the capturing of movement and momentary effects. The artists in this exhibition respond to this, each offering an alternative extension of that which Cezanne was so troubled yet inspired by - the changing world around us.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As my proposal includes a work that is not web-based (Uki-Yo, by Qubo Gas) when conceiving of this exhibition I decided that it would be best experienced in an actual space, as opposed to being strictly online. This would mean that I would need to borrow Uki-Yo from Qubo Gas in order to display it. However, seeing as the work is a computer programme, I could ask for the artists to lend me a digital copy that would be projected from the computer onto the wall. This would then indicate to the public the process of the generation of the digital work. The work would run perpetually for the duration of the show. In researching and writing this essay, the only reproduction I have seen of Escargot Couleurs is from YouTube. I would also ask to borrow a better quality version of this video clip. This too is not strictly an internet art work, but it was chosen, as was Uk-Yo as an contextual comparison as a work from Qubo Gas' oeuvre. As all of the works chosen display a mixture of media and show cross-over of formal and technical boundaries, I feel justified in making the decision to include these works.
Below is a diagram of how I would stage the other works in this exhibition. I would propose to have the works in a circular space. The computers (iMacs, 24-inch screens) in the middle would display the three screensaver works by Ezra Johnson. The viewers would be able to activate all three screensavers on each computer. I would want to maintain the part they play in the generation of the work, instead of simply displaying it without necessitating their interaction.
Watercouleur Park would also be projected onto the wall opposite the door, but only at the instigation of a visitor who would approach the computer with projector attached, and launch the work. To stop cross-over of the music from Escargot Couleurs, I would attach personal headphones to the computer playing Watercouleur, which would also make the experience more immersive for that participant.
1: Uki-Yo
2: Watercouleur Park
3: Escargot Couleurs
4, 5, 6: Fall, Undercover, High and Low
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References:
[1] Becks-Malorny, U. (2001) Paul Cezanne 1839 - 1906 Taschen Germany p. 46
[2] Gell, A. (1998) Art And Agency- An Anthropological Theory Claredon Press, Oxford p. 244
[3] Becks-Malorny, U. pp. 47 - 48
[4] Colebrook, C. (2006) Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed Continuum, London.
p. 99
[5] Ramande, B.(2007) Kakemono Tate Online (web article): [http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/entry15411.shtm]
[6] Smith, L.,V. Harris & T. Clark (1990) ‘The Art Of Ukiyo-e” in Japanese Art Masterpieces In The British Museum, London, British Museum Publications, p. 199
Bibliography:
- Becks-Malorny, Ulrike (2001) Paul Cezanne 1839 - 1906 Taschen, Germany
- Boundas, Constantin & Dorothea Olkowski (1994) Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy Routledge, New York
- Colebrook, Claire (2006) Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed Continuum, London
- Gell, Alfred (1998) Art And Agency- An Anthropological Theory Claredon Press, Oxford
- Ramande, Benedict (2007) Kakemono Tate Online (web article): [http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/entry15411.shtm ]
- Smith, Lawrence, Victor Harris & Timothy Clark (1990) ‘The Art Of Ukiyo-e” in Japanese Art Masterpieces In The British Museum, London, British Museum Publications.
- ‘Qubo Gas Presentation’ PDF – [Accessed online http://www.qubogas.com/]
- “DIA ANNOUNCES NEW WEB-BASED PROJECT BY ARTIST EZRA JOHNSON” http://www.diacenter.org/dia/press/johnson.html
- Uki-Yo’ http://www.galerieannebarrault.com/qubogas/qubogas_ukiENG.html
- Ezra Johnson screensavers: http://www.diaart.org/johnson/screensavers.html
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