In an era when kitchen appliances connect to the Internet and cell phones have more memory than a 10-year-old PC, artists are engaging ever more creatively with computers.
In an era when even kitchen appliances connect to the Internet, and cell phones have more memory and data processing power than a 10-year-old PC, artists are engaging ever more creatively with computers — or maybe vice versa.
As with video art in the 1960s and early digital work in the ’80s and ’90s, technological progress is providing not only an array of new tools for artistic creation, but also new sources of reflection and new subjects for social commentary. Out of it is emerging a new aesthetic inspired by YouTube and Google.
A global movement is hacking, subverting and critiquing the hardware, software, content, visuals — even the philosophy of the wired world.
Take Beige. A four-member U.S. computer programming art collective, Beige has built a reputation in the past few years by breaking into the code of old Nintendo game cartridges, and transforming them into animation artworks. Hijacked from its original purpose the famous, now-retro game platform becomes an abstract space where fluorescent squares float and bounce to the rhythms of electronic music.
Since 2000, when it first elaborated its basic technique, the collective has shown more durability than some of the technology it uses. Members have shown at prestigious events and galleries, including the Whitney Biennial for contemporary art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Guggenheim, New York.
Among Beige’s innovations is the exploitation of programming faults that cause a lapse in data transfer, leaving a pixellated effect known as a “residue” on the screen; this fault is used, and intentionally replicated, in several works.
“This is known as ‘glitch art,”‘ said Paul Pieroni, co-curator of SEVENTEEN, a gallery in…