|
|
Dear readers,
Welcome to Dichtung-Digital
2/2003
This issue is the first
issue co-produced and co-published with other
online-journals. It is also the first issue devoted to a
specific group of artists, entitling it Paris Connection.
Finally, this issue is the first issue entirely made
possible by sponsorship: dd 2/2003 is virtually owned by ZKM
(Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany) which now and
for the future provides all articles of this issue free to
the net community.
Paris Connection considers
the work of six fascinating French artists working with
Macromedia Director. Some of these pieces are quite popular
such as Nicolas Clauss' ballets, whose digital dancers and
cello music can be choreographed by the user or Jean-Luc
Lamarque's Pianographique, an interactive visual music
instrument that one plays with the keyboard. Other, lesser
known pieces are equally or even more interesting for their
conceptual depth such as Antoine Schmitt's digital
creatures, Nicolas Clauss' moving still life Mechanical
Brushes, "a provisory goodbye to painting", or
Frédéric Durieu's Puppettool where the user
can morph animals into grotesque bodies. Or take
Servovalve's audio-visual minimalism and Jean-Jacques
Birgé's fascinating sound design for many of the
pieces of Durieu, Clauss, and Schmitt.
Paris Connection introduces
these six artists from Paris. It also discusses some
examples of their work in detail and within a broader
perspective, which takes other representatives of digital
art into account as well as theoretical discussions on
cyberculture and its predecessors in art history. The
unifying element of these pieces may be that all are
programmed with Director and that their authors all live in
Paris as the title suggests. Another connection may be their
specific approach to digital art: the combination of
sophisticated programming, design and meaning. These pieces
are of great audio-visual pleasure and still propose deeply
philosophical questions about art, media, and life. It is a
combination one often looks for in vain with respect to
digital literature. Why this was to be expected, how digital
art can be read, and, finally, to what extent the pure
technical effect can be seen as the updated version of the
"pure visual" the formal aesthetic tried to archive a
century ago, will be discussed in the introductions,
interviews, reviews and theoretical contributions in this
issue.
Roberto
Simanowski
Berlin, April 19,
2003
dichtung-digital
|
|