Digital Life
Speaking at the 2009 Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities
A bit of exciting news! I’ll be presenting at the 2009 Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu on January 9th, 2009.
My paper is entitled: Painting in the Digital Age: When Pixel meets Paintbrush. Here’s the abstract I submitted:
This paper examines my paintings from the series “Digital Life”, comprised of computer screen imagery rendered in oil paint. The paintings form a link between traditional painting and the contemporary digital world and as such, connect the past with the present.
As an avid museum-goer, I am startled to see how little time viewers spend looking at paintings, but will spend countless hours staring at digital screens. My idea, in order to bridge this divide, has been to turn the screens into paintings: to inject the texture, brushwork and physical quality of oil paint into the virtual, technological realm.
The subject of these paintings is the UI (User Interface) design of computers, the icons and symbols that characterize the digital experience. This interface is familiar to millions of people, often as a mundane feature of their work-lives. By making paintings of them, I am memorializing an experience that millions have on a daily basis; in a sense finding art within everyday experience.
This paper examines these paintings within the context of both contemporary painting and the historical oil-painting tradition. Additionally, this work is influenced by innovations in the fields of computer science and graphic design, and these connections are highlighted and examined.
Finally, since digital images of these paintings are scattered all across the Internet, I examine the recursive nature of making paintings of computer screens and displaying them on the Web.
In an era when there is fierce competition for people’s attention, and digital screens are often examined far more closely than paintings, my work forms a bridge between the two, breathing new life into the dialogue.
CAPTCHA Paintings
Human Error (7″x6″)
CAPTCHA Painting 1 (7″x6″)
CAPTCHA Painting 2 (7″x6″)
I started this series after encountering CAPTCHAS on several major sites including Blogger, Yahoo and MSN. These codes are used to prove that the site’s users are human, and not a spam bot. The whole thing seems very “Blade Runner.” It was fun to take this computerized humanity test and paint them in oils, an all-too human process. To read more about CAPTCHAS visit the Wikipedia entry and to see a CAPTCHA in action, try entering a comment.
