Towards A Sculpture of the Digital Realm
(essay from the Norwegian Society of Sculptors' yearbook 1996)
Until quite recently it was possible to describe sculpture in terms of a body which occupies a given space. All of the other concerns of the sculptor - the specific qualities of particular materials, the languages of form and colour, the symbolic or the purely formal - could be read as sub-categories of this primary narrative: that a body exists in space. With Conceptual Art we enter a period in which the body begins to disappear, or seems to exist in absentia. The idea of the body remains, the space in which it may be assumed to exist remains, its potential for becoming remains, but its physical occupancy of space is replaced by a set of signs or by the mechanical documentation of an event that exists in the past. The persistence of the body is replaced by the persistence of the idea of the body. Beyond the reductive logic of late modernism, the hyper-aestheticism of minimalism, the apparent collapse of the object into its own signifier, installation art from the late seventies onward has further problematised the condition of sculpture by liquifying its traditional relation to space in order to establish a dynamic constituted as much in language as in physical form. The sculptural elements of installations are often provisional forms shaped from ephemeral materials and the meaning of the work can not be located in an isolated object, its formal or symbolic construction, its relation to space or its material qualities - though indeed all of these considerations will contribute to an understanding. The installation is a dynamic form, located in time as well as space: that is to say, constantly relocated, constantly under revision. It is qualified by an uncertainty that lies at the heart of twentieth century knowledge: the Uncertainty Principle of the pioneering quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg states that it is not possible to know both the precise location and the precise velocity of a body in motion. The American art theory group Critical Art Ensemble in their recent book The Electronic Disturbance (Autonomedia, 1995) state that uncertainty and confusion are to be taken as the most viable, perhaps the only useful terms with which to discuss contemporary art practise.
As the twentieth century closes and the information society becomes a reality the process of disappearance via technology accelerates. Paul Virilio has written much about the aesthetics of disappearance, and the question of appearance and disappearance or presence and absence becomes ever more vital for the artist. At earlier stages of western cultural history these apparently opposing qualities functioned in terms of a symbolic order: the presence of a sculptural body invoked that which was absent. According to Baudrillard's theory of simulation we have arrived at a stage whereby the sign (a simulated body) no longer refers to an absent other, but instead signifies merely the absence of any referent whatsoever. Absence not as the distance between the sign/object and something to which it refers, but absence as an emptiness. Absence also as a potential, a pregnancy. The architect Rem Koolhaas (S,M,L,XL, 1995) writes of absence in these terms .. the most beautiful of all is not to be present. Absence then as a virtuality, and the virtual as a concept that comes to reinscribe our relation to space and to the body.
What can sculpture be or look like or mean in a virtual world ? How does art negotiate its passage from the external physical world to this other space of information in perpetual circulation ? Historically speaking, the dematerialisation of the art object described by art historian Lucy Lippard in the seventies is a documented fact. It is also a fact that throughout this century artists have experimented with new technologies that could offer new aesthetic possibilities and create further opportunities for the extension of art practise beyond the constraints of existing institutional forms. The American Myron Krueger, considered one of the fathers of Virtual Reality, began to develop systems for creating digitally generated, interactive forms with no physical existence, in the late sixties. Video art from the early seventies onward moved steadily towards a condition of dis-incorporation and dynamic interactivity, leading toward works such as Gary Hill's famous installation Tall Ships which we can take as an (admittedly primitive) encounter between ourselves as physical bodies and the virtual bodies of the electronic image. Presence is replaced by tele-presence and this tele-presence both masks and illuminates absence. Like Alice before the looking glass we gaze into a parallel world, though here we are not yet able to step through the glass and enter. Immersive virtual reality makes us this promise, to be able to enter the world beyond the looking glass.
Technology constantly reshapes our world and our understanding of it. Bio technology and molecular engineering allow us to penetrate deeper into the structure of things, while computer visualisation shows us a picture of the sub-microscopic world in a state of constant evolution. Artificial intelligence and the emerging science of artificial life challenge some basic assumptions about our role as creative custodians of the planet we occupy. And if machines may one day create intelligent life (culture) then art made by machines is not just possible but almost inevitable. In the USA, Carl Sims, a computer artist and executive of Thinking Machines Corporation, uses genetic algorithms to create electronic forms which are in a constant state of dynamic evolution. In Britain, William Latham, a sculptor who has been artist in residence at IBM reserach laboratories since the mid eighties, makes objects in electronic space that conform to organic growth patterns and seem to "look like" objects that may exist in the physical world. But while these mutant forms may refer to the structures of organic matter, their behavious is something else entirely. Floating in their zero gravity electronic universe, these virtual objects evolve and transform continually, elaborating a language of three dimensional form that is constituted in time as well as in space.
At this point, the term three dimensional becomes inadequate, and those who work at the leading edge of research into computer-generated realities begin to speak of four (or more) dimensional structures and spaces. Take the work of Marcos Novak, for example, theoretical architect and director of The Reality Lab at the University of Texas, Austin. Novak creates computer generated worlds which he describes as Four Dimensional Liquid Architectures and he further describes his structures as inhabitable sculptures . Unlike the meta-organic forms of Sims and Latham, Novak continues to work out from a palpably geometric formal language, though the geometries he uses are warped spatially and temporally by their algorithmic manipulation in digital environments that offer a glimpse of a world beyond the looking glass. In Marcos Novak's virtual world, the sculptural body returns, attains a new sense of presence. The old discourse of body-in-space is reinscribed here as a fluid dynamic in which both body and space are in a state of constant modification over time. Form, scale, structure and the appearance (or simulation) of materiality are no longer absolute in terms of the discrete object, but become a set of evolving relations within what we could regard as a dynamic language of (meta) sculpture.
Is this, then, the future of sculpture ? Probably not, in the short or medium term. Rather, this other world of information structures offers the artist another alternative to choose from, another space in which to work and another set of tools to work with. Perhaps one day in the middle of the next century another edition of this book will describe the evolution of intelligent sculptures in the years between 2010 and 2030. Perhaps then the tools of the computer programmer will be as familiar to artists as hammers and furnaces are today. What is quite clear right now is that digital media are changing everything, sculpture included. It is quite appropriate therefore that this discussion should be raised within the context of an overview of the art of sculpture in 1996.
© Jeremy Welsh 1996. This text may be downloaded and printed for personal use, but may not be reproduced in any form without the author's written permission.