Physical
adjective
relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete.
"pleasant physical environments"
Digital
adjective
(of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage or magnetic polarization.
relating to, using, or storing data or information in the form of digital signals.
"digital TV"
involving or relating to the use of computer technology.
"the digital revolution"
This week I want to explore this bridge between the physical and the digital. Whether you’re engaging with digital art through social media, physical galleries, or through the blockchain, you can’t live in the 21st century without having been exposed to it. What I think a lot of folks are not aware of, is that a lot of the art we observe on the web is, in fact, digital art. What I’m fascinated with, are the niche corners of art where we can challenge our understanding of digitized art.
Not all digitized representations of art qualify; a photo of a Monet painting covered in mashed potatoes is not digital art. It is merely a photo of a Monet painting covered in mashed potatoes. It is presented to you in a digital format, via a digital process and interface, but what you are looking at is a picture of the art. Sure, one can argue that the photo itself can be art, but that is a different topic altogether. In this article, we are focused on bringing physical art into a digital state.
WTF is Digital Art?
So what the hell makes an art a digital art? At what point does something you create physically begin to qualify as being digital, let alone art? I personally believe it begins with software and hardware. So let’s get into the digital a little first.
Software digitizes the physical.
I will argue that any and all art that has been passed through, manipulated or modified by, or simply been created with software is technically digital art. I will even emphasize that digital photography is digital art, especially if you modified values in Lightroom, Photoshop, or any other image manipulation tools. Unless you’re shooting in film, you are capturing a moment in time with a digital tool. Your cell phone camera, DSLR, or whatever device you’re using to capture a RAW/JPG/Whatever file, is using software to not only control a program that adjusts the mechanical values of the device, but also processes and writes the data coming in as soon as it passes through the lens(es) and bounces off that mirror (or not if you’re shooting mirrorless).
But I digress. We can get into cameras some other time. In the meantime, for really high quality work from a contemporary photographer that works with film, go check out @the_film_god. This is some of the purest, and most well put together body of photography work I have seen in this age defined by digitalisms.
We have become accustomed with different types of digital art in the last few years across “traditional social media.” Beeple brought absurd 3D art outside of the movie industry to the public eye in a way that was purely organic at first. He rendered offensive videos purely in 3D of hilary tits being milked by mickey mouse bots driven by fascistic trump droids while rotting biden zombies fucked north korean dick tanks. You can quote me on that. I’m not even linking his account, it’s so fucking ridiculous.
Over in relatively toxic Crypto/NFT Twitter, we have reached a period where we are starting to use terms interchangeably to define NFTs, Digital Collectibles, Digital Art, Crypto Art, etc. What we’re missing the point on is that digital art is art regardless of what format it is sold in. This brings me to the world of generative art - it has been around for fucking ever, but it’s truly with the popularization of NFTs that it has gotten more visibility. Ironically, before NFTs, it was unheard of that one could buy generative art. It was just a cool thing you watched looping on Instagram after it was done destroying the framerate and resolution the artist worked hard to preserve.
Generative Art
Generative art is an extremely vague term that encompasses a lot of different styles of art. Most PFP projects with code-driven randomization of layers, anything on fx(hash), and even code based image mapping scripts all generate visual output that falls in this category. Here’s a piece by Düzen, a Turkish musician and visual artist, that combines his digital work with his music, that falls under a very niche category in and of itself. Please view the entire video loop for the full audio-visual effect! This is one of my favorite pieces I’ve collected from him.
Here’s one I created somewhat recently. It’s called “Tension,” and it’s pretty involved. I suspended @BenHorrible, took the photo, passed it through a custom p5.js script I wrote, picked out a number of finalized frame outputs that I liked from it (about 12 out of 100), cleaned them up and prepped them in Photoshop for their final destination in After Effects.
The final piece is a combination of physical art (suspension), digital photography (snapped, Photoshopped), generative art (p5.js), and digital video editing (After Effects). Talk about an intersection of mediums. Be sure to check the final piece out on Makersplace to get the full, high resolution effect of this looping video. I am constantly awed at the variety of tools I have at my disposal to capture, and create moods with. To be able to convey concepts across realms like this is a privilege.
I also feed my photography into scripts I’ve been working on this past year, written in pure JavaScript. This, I consider to be generative art more than anything else. The exercise is also fascinating to me because I have very little control over how the script maps pixels to HSL values, and creates seamless GIF loops. Sometimes I layer color overlays on top of the GIFs, like I did for this collection I trickled out through October:
Pre-Blockchain Digital Art
And then there are types of digital art that I do not think folks who engage with NFTs give much thought to. Back in the old days, thousands of years before NFTs entered my life (specifically 2018 AD), I created a video game for one of my annual events with my brainchild production: The Skin Project. This was no ordinary console or keyboard based video game. The only way you could play it was with your heartbeat. Following is a brief overview of the technical aspects, and final output.
Tethered Hearts
Tethered Hearts is a game that is played with the human heart. For the live event, three bodies were suspended around a center console, with their biorhythms feeding a digital video game. I will explain the creation of the physical aspects of the installation in a future article, but suffice to say that all elements were hand-fabricated, and there was a lot of steel, rope, fabric, and electronics intertwined to created the environment.
Game Dev
The game was developed with nllpntr in Löve; a Lua based 2D game development engine. A multiplayer game, it runs on a LAN, over 4 Raspberry Pi boards – 1 client per player, and 1 running the game server. The visual output consists of a geometric representation of each player, in the form of a triangle color-matched to each player individually. The 3 triangles rotate in the center representing the BPM of each player, and some biometric data is also provided in text format as well. The only way to win the game, is if all three players can match their BPMs for short periods of time. In other words, the game can only be won if the hearts involved are synchronized for short periods of time.
Game hardware
While the RPIs house the game software, a number of external inputs and outputs are involved. Heartbeats are collected by way of heart rate monitors running through Arduino Nanos, including the 4th point where a guest to the installation can introduce their heartbeat into the game. While the game has a geometric video game as the main output at the center console, it was also projected to a floor-to-ceiling wall on the main event floor outside of the main installation, during the live event. Moreover, each player also had a 5″ screen affixed in their line of sight. In addition to the video output, each player had a physical LED system around them that pulses their BPM. A track of LEDs leading to the center console on the floor feeds their BPMs visually into the center console. Even without watching one of the screens, a visitor can watch a player’s heartbeat as represented by light pulses traveling across LEDs.
In addition to this visual reference, the players also had micro vibration motors pulsing the other players’ heartbeats physically into their bodies through the hooks they were suspended from, during live runs. This created a tactile connection between the players, like a vibrating video game controller, except felt directly in the body. Incidentally, this is the most problematic aspect I dread having to streamline, when we eventually revisit this game in the future. There were so many technical complexities that crept up and kicked our proverbial asses with this physical aspect of the game.
Theory
The working theory for this abstract game is that the players can match up their heartbeats for periods of time (which constitutes a “win”). By way of visual, and tactile sensations, the mind may be able to match up biorhythms of the body to external frequencies, in addition to the possibility that we are able to do this without these exterior inputs. Indeed, some of the players closed their eyes for periods of time, and checked out for a bit, as is the way with a solid body suspension experience.
In many ways, the final output of this insane thing I created is ultimately digital art to me. We are not just manipulating and modifying the visual output of a physical input, we are also generating live data output that is reflective of real time human experiences. Many artists like Itzel Yard or Refik Anadol have elegantly and impactfully explored the potentials of using aggregated data, but very few are focused on live feeds from human experience and biorhythms, let alone elevated states of being such as those afforded by the act of body suspension.
Crossing the Bridge
I understand that we are a society obsessed with escapism, and that the pandemic has accelerated our full-on comfort with being behind screens all the time, but we cannot entirely disconnect from our physicality. There are so many unexplored spaces between our biology and the technologies we casually interface with - true wetware & body hacking is still a generation or two away. Digital art provides uniquely creative avenues by which to present concepts, moods, and even educational experiences that would otherwise be very difficult with traditional visual arts. On the way to full integration with the digital, we are a generation of explorers in uncharted territories.
I do not think digital art will ever fully replace physical mediums. I think that even AI art will penultimately contribute to an amplified appreciation for physical creations and sensory experiences. After all, without the corporeal experience of being human, how can you feed an idea into a machine to receive a visual result? We are the spark.
Is this the continuation of Duchamp's ready mades? Or moreover is it something like the natural extension of our minds? (https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/). Clearly the division of art into digital/physical is just a fleeting moment in the transpiring of our (f)art journeys. Was not photography seen as not as real as painting was during the dawn of that technology? And what happened? It gave rise to abstract art when the duty of documenting reality wan no longer constrained to someone with a brush and pigments. I wonder what will happen with AI generated images as it frees the burden of illustration from a single source.
Also I made some brain farts of my own (I made a substack)... come smell!
orb >>>>