Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen

by Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, and Stefan Müller Arisona, Editors
Number 7 in the Communications in Computer and Information Science series
Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008
501 pp., illus. b/w. Trade, $119
ISBN: 10-3-540-79485-9; ISBN: 13-978-3-540-79485-1.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney

legart@ozemail.com.au

The volume collects papers from Digital Art Weeks in Zurich (July 2007) and Interactive Futures in Victoria, Canada (November 2007), two respected events with parallel objectives. In common with several other annual and biannual projects combining conference, exhibition, workshops, etc. (ISEA, DAC, C&C, SIGGRAPH, etc), they are devoted to bringing practitioners in varied disciplines together with the purpose of both widening and refining art and cultural practice. It is a welcome mark of recognition for transdisciplinary practitioners that the papers selected are receiving a wide distribution through Springer Verlag.

The meta-project of attacking interdisciplinary academia, within which elitist silos are maintained and between which occasional collaborative effort is pursued, proposes transdisciplinary practice as the means by which new knowledge is created through direct and shared research. Sharing is not confined to protagonists but importantly, to participants of and with the art experience.

The papers provide a snapshot of a state of play and are similar to the curated group exhibition, selected by the vision of the curator(s) and the quality of the work discovered or offered. Those selected and subjected to further peer review – there is no mention of rejection ratios for this project — are usefully organised into six sections: Philosophies of the Digital; Digital Literacies; Multimedia Composition and Performance; Interfaces and Expression; Digital Space — Design, Movement and Robotics; and Digital Performance in Urban Space.

Like most conference papers, these are working documents, intended for the specialist. The irregular formatting ‘as submitted’ even reinforces this — some authors use headings and sub-headings extensively, others discursive critical texts. The coming together of practitioners from differing research traditions is thereby immediately evident. There are even English spellings reflective of authors’ cultural backgrounds — praiseworthy, as the transcultural is a necessary part of the transdisciplinary. But do these differences encourage or evidence the crossing over of disciplinary traditions?

Surveys of extent and recent digital artefacts are common to both traditions — the literature search frames the otherwise hermetic objectives of new scientific research; and surveys of artefacts through critical analysis by the experienced observer and commentator creates linkages between individual works, and often the social and political contexts in which they are made or encountered. The task of re-presenting the findings of each approach to co-researchers, as well as readers of this volume, is nuanced by not only language but also by training. Working on the documents therefore requires patience to extract their value.

Remapping public, informational, and social space for instance using Rorschach as a key figure, while being an engaging paper was frustrated by the absence of direct reference to the illustrations used in the text. Amply illustrated, it is the ideas expressed rather than materialisation that remains with the reader. Another paper in the same section appears like a scenario on the page, suggesting that expressed knowledge was implicit and performed through manipulations of metaphor during a ‘staging’ of the paper. Similarly a following paper attempts theoretically, “to engage the imaginary possibilities offered by artistic technological use – “.

The volume amply demonstrates in ‘writing across media’ the eclectic mix of practices, including curation and critical writing, that the range of work being made reveals, as patterns of research activity, obsessions, positive and negative outcomes. The reader thereby becomes the active assessor rather than the consumer of others’ opinion, amplified through the methods we often unconsciously apply when seeking leads for instance, on the internet. Grappling with literacies and the ethnographic approach to understanding current modalities is countered by an inconclusive account of archiving strategies where it seems, the ‘new screen’, the waveform or the binary is an ephemeral given of impermanence.

By far the longest section of the book is devoted to multimedia composition and performance, giving access to the complexities of the expressive individual whose creativeness rarely follows logical development. It leads to assertions of the kind that are bound to irritate the rational researcher such as, “..the listener is able to discover..”, by what means and through which processes being left to the imagination of the reader, absent from the first hand experience. Such experience is able to be described, providing information capable of traction for the reader, beyond nuance and suggestion. In this some papers are successful and demonstrate reflective practice employing in-depth descriptions of physical and material fundamentals. This is a significant advance on earlier times and here provides deeper access to the work of, in particular, composers, performers and instrument-makers.

Is this the best form of making proceedings and working papers available in a paper-based format? Certainly historians and archivists of the present will welcome this hardback snapshot, so avoiding the vagaries of the unresolved problem of documenting digital artefacts whether textual or interactive. Hopefully it will communicate to researchers currently servicing industry and corporations that social transformation is a flux not often in the service of a paymaster.

For the active researcher at the present time, seeking a lead or a colleague, the online research databases of papers may remain the most direct means of narrowing the search. However, many will find from the well-documented references contained here, a greater number of productive leads than those gleaned from hours spent juggling keywords in search engines. For being able to consolidate researchers outcomes over the time scales necessary for feedback from audiences, and with the guidance of experienced and discerning editors, such convenient book-sized format volumes will become invaluable.