A story written by: Benjamin Bailey http://www.pixelart.org.uk/ What lies between the artists of this contemporary age and those who grasp at more traditional forms of representation? When challanged by the thought of a naked canvas and a box of paints I, an artist who has been brought up in spheres both physical and cybernetic, am reminded of the story of a painter in the late 1960s who, enjoying a relative level of success, embarks on a new project. His idea is simple and effective: there is to be, sat literally in the centre of the canvas, a young woman on a park bench in the middle of a grassy field on a bleak autumnul day, her world glistening damp. After taking a couple of preliminary photographs he begins, completely un-aware of what he is letting himself in for. The weeks pass, but quickly turn to months: a true realist sticking to his vision now finds himself slipping into an infinity of hours, mixing countless tones and hues in the marking of blade after blade after blade of grass. The artist finished the work which became lost amongst the collection of many and the Artist never really went back to the canvas again... The Artist in the story is my father and it was he who brought my childhood growth into the digital world. That painstaking endevor which he once followed speaks to me of all which once went into the generation of a piece of art, that kind of gothic mastery: the hours in which the Artist remains enslaved in the perfection of his execution.. In the case of the greats such work would often be carried out by labourers [as is true in all construction]. A famous critic once said to his friend and comrad, that paint should look like paint: we can leave everything else to look like its self. By that virtue, after the work man had been set free, painting could no longer be reinvented. As such, in a day when a landscape can be captured in such emotif and inspirational detail by a simple click of a the button on a camera which, for its user, captures natures majesty in proportions so gigantic that the contemplation of which would surely render a team of rennaisance painters naxious: the landscape painting also ceases to be neccessary. Such work could only stand to an obelisk to our mastery over the past. The pains of the artist have truely been mastered by technology, affording the Artist a freedom which perhaps stands as the main seperation between Designer and Artist. And so the process of Artistic creation has become an action, restricted to the location of the Artist. A process free'd from all but a sheer phisicality in the location of a subjects creation and the actions of its creator. Works which once found their integrity in the mastery of formation, those which once were found as avant-garde, have been rendered as artefact; resigned to history books and the inferi of museum by that freedom afforded by advancement in art theory such as that of the abstract expressionists and the revolutions in technology which have brought advanced image capturing devices like the digital camera. Art found itself in a position where it was being forced to claim some other form of verification: the object must serve a purpose as it was no longer capable of simply being an achievement of mankind; it must denote its nature as a form of distraction as imperativve, or accept its condition as a form of communication. As it has turned out, Art was simply on the dawn of a new horizon and was about to awake in a new period of enlightenment, une nouvelle renaissance: for as technology continued to advance, so did its capacity to provide new creations both entertaining and charming to the public. The engineer became someone who could surpass the stigma born of the nature of their creations; such drab technological iterations, and also of the place of their labour. Now they provide entertainment full of life which can be altered and stylized by designers [who themselves were once known as artists] to appeal to the masses. Such appropriations also became true within the artworld, and as these new languages with which engineers and programmers once had struggled, were also taimed then the artists themselves could move into new conquered areas. Consider the pointless machines created in the wake of Cubism and Dada. Artist's vain stabs at a feeling or notion that some artistery might lay in the nature of machine. Now artists can engage in the creation of complex systems of user interaction or guidence: plays and ongoing exploration within new spaces afforded by sociaty's mastering of technology. A text on how colour might be transformed into a literal language for instant communication* or a poem found in the echo reverbaration between the robotic voices of two machines, each attemting to mimmic the other and failing; it is the failure in their replication of the voice produced by the other, one which they can not properly destinguish where a new space is found^... A space which became the poetry of some "other". It is true that all art endevors to brind something from a space. Amidst a new age in technological advancement: in the twilight of the new media age the Artist finds himself wandering new spaces within which he may work. The descovary of this space makes the work possible therefor Art practice now finds its foundation not based in the technical mastery of physical space, but in some liberated phase beyond the technical. Past a stage lost in the mass production of spaces from which one might produce stylized images with the same freedom as the abstract expressionist of the 1950s. Or from which such commersial attempts to utilize the contemporary systems which have mastered the laborious intracacies of creation, systems from which those others have brought us concept after concept of image to line the walls of art shops with cost effective reiterations of the Warhol dynasty. Such reflections lend them self to the extremity which lends its self to distraction or further still, to the demand for some adornmentation for space. But Art has wondered beyond, amongst internal spaces, just as it once was within the mind only now the Artist wonders a place which can physically form new realities beyond the capacity of the external world: within the cybernetic construction. Art from the digital finds its integrity in the knowledge that some new space will occur. Like the findings of some empirical traveller - an Artist who ventures on. That the new boundaries themselves: those constructed by the Artist's journey to the new avant-garde; at some stage become capable of being Art. A nature of doing one thing leaving nothing else to be done. A search for a base image, an essance of some place in which the image is created, an internal landscape or a depiction of an "object" in its purest form. Much as photographs: they are not altered, improved or stylized, but simply grasped. Sculputed, paused or cut from a streme of fabric. The result of the exploration of Digitals internal place. Within a methon of creative communication or within the boundaries of a cyber space formed through a randomized generation within the endless possibilities of a combination of variables whose gradiation in stoppages is as smooth as the refraction of light. * - ideas on air ^ - neural