Title:
Visual Digitality: Towards Another Understanding
Abstract:
Given the assumption that the way an image is put
together affects how we see it, this paper will seek to
explore how art, image, photography and painting can be
talked about since the advent of digital painting,
especially in Asia. Faced with a composited image file
that is located somewhere between the histories of
painting and of photography, we need therefore to ask
what exactly is the digital image. How do we as viewers
from the age of film and photography come to the age of
digital visuality, which is intrinsic to the vision of
an Asian renaissance? The present trove of digital
lexicon has gifted us with new metaphors to imagine
this visuality: layering, channel operations,
re-sizing, alpha channels and masking, etc. At the same
time, we are, as mass-media consumers, seduced by the
familiarity of its surface declaration and the seamless
integration of disparate elements. Using examples of
digital artwork from artists such as Jason Wee, Miao
Xiaochun, Issei Yoshida, we ask if the logic and
politics of representation has changed from the days of
the disjunctive modernist avant-garde collage. Can we
locate the impact of digitality in Asia through a
newfound intractability of the digital image, which is
situated within a necessary excavation of the
profundity of its construction processes?
Presented at conference:
Re:Live
Dec 2009
PDF of conference paper. Right click, 'save as' etc
Re:Live (7Mb)