Digital Creativity

When I did my MA in Creative Technology, I had to struggle with much of what passed as 'digital art', and the assumption that I should adopt its aesthetic parameters. The latter was not an integral part of the MA but a questionable ethos. In the world of Creative Technology, interaction rules because it makes full use of the sophisticated possibilities of, for example, Macromedia Director. You can understand that. However is the ensuing work a pleasurable experience, or interesting beyond the fact that it has an underlying structural logic like a video game: carefully arranged, with rigorous code. At our end of year exhibition (which I never wanted to do), I could barely look at some of the work of my fellow students. Not because I didn't like the people, but because I found their work visually repellent. An unpleasant painting is one thing; an in-your-face large scale projection is something else. You have some perceptual control over the former but far less with the latter, because it imposes itself on your senses.

In some respects, I think that MA damaged my feeling for creative process. That's because all creativity was - had to be - channelled into technological form. Clearly, creativity is far bigger, more fluid and less constrained than the fashions and parameters of ‘digital art’. Therefore, confining yourself only to technological or digital expression is not advisable. I resisted the implicit assumptions of the course because I intuited that it was neither healthy nor inspiring. Thus, some of my work had a narrative basis more akin to old media rather than new media, and I researched the photographic aesthetic as a significant mid-way development between earlier attitudes toward art like representational painting, and contemporary digital work. Photography was a revolutionary aesthetic which liberated people from craft based skill; suddenly you could capture powerful images with spontaneous ease, so what was the point in learning how to paint and draw? The prediction ‘painting is now dead’ was actually unfounded. Painting and photography are two different aesthetics, which are complementary rather than opposed. Multimedia and digital technology has a similar status: it is relatively easy to produce static, moving or interactive imagery, with or without sound, stand-alone or live, streaming or interactive, over the Internet. It doesn’t compete with painting; it’s different.

I am interested in photography because there’s an extensive discourse surrounding the photographic aesthetic which is more sophisticated, developed and contextualised than the prevailing digital rhetoric. ‘Techno-culture’ is a fashion, a set of attitudes, assumptions and ideals which are isolated from wider cultural theory. The criteria derive from the tools: the cognitive process of software application and underlying code. That is, programming has become the aesthetic. Which raises the question which comes first: the creativity or the technology? The balance between the two varies considerably according to whose work you are considering and what their background is. Digital work can derive from a ‘technological level’ or from a deeper and more elusive strata that is not and cannot be confined to the computer. Creativity precedes technology – in fact the technology itself derives from creative scientific advance – but sometimes, digital work does not tap into this. It plays with Macromedia Flash, Director, whatever, adopting technological form as its aesthetic rationale. Ultimately, electric fluctuation, hidden binary logic and, more obviously, the VDU or a projection.

Admittedly, the digital realm is extraordinarily flexible. As an art form, manipulating zeros and ones incorporates all prior expression - drawing, photography, music, cinema - and adds its own uniquely panoramic viewpoint. A few years ago, David Bowie became very interested in the Internet and when interviewed in Internet Magazine he said “it takes everything we’ve done before and improves on it”. In other words, it’s an artistic progression and a significant cultural development. I agree – and the same thing applies to digital work in a wider sense. The infinite fluidity of binary code breaks down aesthetic boundaries, and does away with the need for craft based skill. Manipulating software is far more conceptual than wielding a paintbrush, and by working at that level you have considerably more power, control and thus – potentially at least – creative possibility. You can therefore argue that digital art has a new cognitive or philosophical stature, very different from prior aesthetic forms. You can for example concern yourself not with the interaction of form (art gallery), but the form of interaction (multiple possibilities).

However, the inescapable fact is that you are operating in a flickering world of transitory pixels and decentralised meaning. There is no map – this is exciting, but can also be enervating and ultimately disillusioning. You switch off your computer and the rest of your life is still there with its various physical and social experiences. Despite what some theorists say the digital realm – networked or otherwise – does not replace or supersede ‘real life’. It can legitimately enhance it but as with creativity, ‘life’ precedes and is bigger than whatever you construct with a computer – symbolic, spatial, interactive or otherwise.