DAC Online Exhibition 2011: Analogue is the New Digital

• Andrea Zapp -
  • Manchester Metropolitan University

• Jacquelyn Ford Morie -
  • Blue Sky Studios

Curated by Andrea Zapp and Co-ordinated by Jacquelyn Ford Morie

ANALOGUE IS THE NEW DIGITAL is a new online exhibition project, based on an open Artists’ Call and facilitated through the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community Network. Analogue is the New Digital debates information space as an essential artistic one by leading it back to its origins, to visual arts and the corporeal; ironic at times, and as a symbolic manifesto, proving how inseparably intertwined these areas and our identity within have become at this time in which conceptual experiments, narrative histories and digital-analogue languages constantly overlap…

…In a second conclusion, data and physical body have merged into one entity and the virtual space has become the other place of collective and personal existence and memory. The aim of this exhibit is to look at our relationship with the digital world as a now subordinated, everyday, and popular culture. In the era of ‘post’ – be it postmodern or even post human – the theme opens up a ‘post-digital’ discourse by mixing the realities and inverting a methodological process whilst harking back to earlier stages in art in general, in visual technology and digital development.

This online showcase of related art works then researches in a wider context today’s socio-cultural language of hybridity, juxtaposition and artistic metamorphosis. It exposes artists that form part of the digital network whilst working across different mediums and equally employing ‘traditional’ as well as virtual means; ranging from ‘analogue’ painting, photography, collage and sculpture to its ‘digital’ adaption to achieve new and different results and designs. It documents inspirational, experimental, ironic, decorative, analytical, imaginative, and physical artworks and artefacts that reflect or interact with the invisible sub-structure of data that permeates our world.

Here are some of the initial questions that the Open Call was referring to:

Analogue representation of the digital and vice versa:

Rebuilding/reflecting the digital with analogue means
Physical replicas of digital spaces and narratives
Digital construction as analogue output as inverted process
Physicality of code and networks
Materialisation of data
Re-cycle – melt/shred/rebuild
Transitions/Media-Decay
Flow and Transit
The digital captured in low-tech aesthetics and craft-based traditions
Abstract concepts of technological space
The tactile digital

Analogue is the New Digital interprets these parameters by showing very varied artistic models of research and artwork that explore this debate. Artists of all age groups and from various practical backgrounds in Digital Art and Design are illuminating very distinct approaches in their work as well as evolutionary, time based processes of discovery. The projects further have to be looked at as a reciprocal process, in which analogue means may influence practice to reshape the digital on the one hand – while on the other a digital process of manufacturing and creating has become purely physical, sculptural, and materialised in a more direct sense.

To enhance these diversities, a physical-spatial design has been chosen for this website, based on a fictitious architectural exhibition space that allows to group the works accordingly, mark out installation or wall based artefacts, form small clusters of content and establish and play with a narrative that simulates a virtual walk.

The artists present their works and reflections via text and imagery sharing their explorations, knowledge, and research. In another step, the show opens up a further discourse in the community of Digital Arts by linking it to Visual, Applied or Conceptual Art and Design and related techniques.

Still, it was difficult to make a decision from a very interdisciplinary array of entries, and the artists chosen here often act as a representative for more experiments in the given field. To acknowledge this we have put down a link on the entry page that allows viewers to browse the Siggraph community network for the additional contributions that could not be featured here this time but are part of the discussion.

As a curator, I would very much like to thank all the contributors for making this a very special and intriguing venture with their works and research! Also I would like to thank Jacki Morie from the Siggraph Digital Arts Community for co-ordinating this project, and Andrea Pazos, fellow researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University, for designing the website

As a next step, we will be publishing selected works in a book and catalogue with related essays, due later in 2011, which will be distributed via the ACM SIGGRAPH DAC.

Andrea Zapp, Curator. Manchester/online, July 2011.

Andrea Zapp is a member of the DAC network, international Media Artist and Curator and currently a Senior Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, Faculty of Art & Design, UK. Andrea’s own work traverses this domain, such as her “Networked Installation Stages” – Mixed Reality installations that reference real, virtual and online space, using surveillance techniques. More of her work and publications can be found at. www.andreazapp.com