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Excerpts from: Pleasure on the machine on screen aesthetics and digital art The full text is available in Swedish at CRAC in Context. |
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Björn Fritz, born 1966, is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the Department of Art History and Musicology, at Lund University in Sweden. http://wwwarthist.lu.se/fritz/ He analyzes areas such as digital/computer-based art, graphic form and design, as well as queer theory applied to various types of images. At present he is writing a thesis on Screen Aesthetics. |
| Screen aesthetics is a technique that examines the way computers interact with us on a visual level, the true appearance of their interface, and how this relates to known ideas on the functioning of visual practitioners. The screen is the interface separating us from the mythical machine, the machine that we cannot see or comprehend other than through the signs it leaves on the screen itself. Aesthetics is the science of beauty our practices for structuring and understanding our experiences on a more general level. |
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..."The only area where I see anything today resembling a reasonable exploration of the potential of the machine as a medium of pleasure and experience is computer-based art. Much of what may be referred to as computer art is very poor, but occasionally a project and a group of people appear with a serious approach to the machine and its potential, and with the ability to extend its horizons of exploration. Some of the most interesting experiments I have seen recently can be found in different methods of reorganizing the web and our interaction with it. One approach is the creation of alternative browsers/browser simulators. I/O/Dıs Web Stalker, for example, (http://bak.spc.org/iod/) is a browser that stresses the structure extending between different documents and highlights this, but only reluctantly permits the viewer access to the contents of the document; it introduces an aspect of the web that is just as prevalent as any other, but which for various reasons is considered to be less essential. In so doing, it presents one of the original intentions of the web. It is the user who decides how things should be viewed, and the sender who sends information (though with todayıs Internet Explorer and Netscape, this is not the case: there, graphic design has completely taken the upper hand). I/O/D represents the artist as software producer in many ways, focusing our gaze on what the modeling of different programs actually does with our impression of the machine, and the web. A similar project can be found at http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/, where we have access to a browser simulator that destroys documents. This also radically reorganizes our experience of the web, and for optimal appreciation should be viewed together with The Digital Landfill (http://www.potatoland.org/landfill/) which is a waste heap for used digital material, a kind of garbage dump on the net. Both of these potatoland projects take functions from the physical environment related to destruction and disposal, and implement them on the computer network, where they are not found (and may be assumed to lack functions). When any of these three projects, is shown to an experienced (or skilled) computer user, the reaction is almost always "why do you need those?" The computer environment has created its own definition of function an extremely narrow definition with room for just certain types of production, but nothing else. The experience lies outside of this definition. Pleasure is excluded from this functionally-defined environment; even computer games, where at least to some extent the usefulness of creating experiences has been understood, suffer from this need to create functions and objectives."... ..."I/O/D, Potatoland.org, and jodi.org all consider and treat machine-based art as a process whose models are to be found in performance art and the happening. The experience or if we prefer, the work of art occurs in the machine-user process, and the artist has carried out an aura-creating act of design; and it was this act that I sought out in connection with my more general arguments regarding the design of digital objects. This is a good approach if the machine is to become a pleasurable place. If we are to achieve reasonable digital working environments and reasonable digital entertainment, then it is time to begin to investigate the digital environment. There is little that would give me greater pleasure as an art expert than to note that various groups of active artists are succeeding in pushing back the boundaries of the digital environment by exploring, questioning paradigms, and creating digital objets d'art. This is just the beginning." Translation by Susan Larsson |