Johannes Deutsch
It goes without saying that the significance and the assessment of the original has become, over the course of time, one of the plastic arts' own preconditions. The relation between new developments in art and new art forms on one hand and the original on the other has thus become a subject of discussion.
When a painter utilizes digital image-generating processes and goes about computer-aided artistic work, not only is he thus made aware that he has entered what Walter Benjamin referred to as the age of mechanical reproduction and of information technology beyond the realm of original techniques, he has also long since internalized the hymn to the simulacres of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard or Jean Baudrillard. Nowadays, it is probably not even his intention to create a one-of-a-kind original (independent of his striving to achieve a work of art that displays originality).
But as a result of the interconnection of the artistic process of producing a computer image with the technologies of the new media, new questions about the original emerge nevertheless.
In the early '90s, the relatively stable thermotransfer process was among the first artistically practicable computer printing processes. Issuing limited-edition computer prints was not really a question that suggested itself. Furthermore, the decision as to how many copies of such a "graphic reproduction" to print could in any case not be reached according to the criteria of a market position, and, in this case of a means of mass duplication, no consideration was even given to the idea of making the number of copies dependent upon the capacity of the printing technique as, for example, with an etching or a woodcut. The artistic criteria remained, and I observed that the thermotransfer process, which prints a coarse interpolating raster, yields a different result from print to print in the same batch, progressing from a saturated color to a light, transparent tone ultimately approaching white. With each individual print, the printer used a different number of dots for the same shading, and also positioned them differently each time. The thermotransfer print was obviously the result of an interpretation of the data material. From a normal viewing distance, the various segments of the image appeared identical in each print. In accordance with this observation, I printed out 200 specimens of a single image in one batch. It then turned out that making 200 prints using a data file that had been transferred only once to the printer, and, perhaps due to the printer warming up, caused the printed variants to slowly become coarser and coarser. Due to these technological preconditions, each of these prints became-contrary to expectations-an original, and the number of copies made of this "graphic reproduction" was extremely limited for artistic reasons since the variants of the delicate hues were most beautiful among the first three to ten prints.
Of course, a conceptual artistic question takes precedence over this phenomenon of printing technique: whether or not-and if so, to what extent-the computer image (which is also adapted for the purpose of making good print-outs) consummated on the monitor is the ("actual") original? Or are there several originals? I think there exists an original to original correspondence inherent in which is the specific process of origination of computer images and, in light of this as well as for the purpose of the integration of my artistic works that were created in other media and that take on meaning as works of art only then when they are considered in their overall context, I have come to speak of an original ensemble (of an original consisting of numerous parts and multiple strata working in concert).
Information technology also introduces a new creation of an original. This "data original," with its inherent problem of compatibility with systems undergoing continual development, stands in the way of fundamental considerations of the general availability of media art. Particularly in the case of works of media art in digital archives, however, the possibility of accessing such works everywhere in media domains and networks turns out to be advantageous or even necessary for the ongoing use of the actual original. To be sure, further development of information technology will solve the problem of compatibility of old and new data and systems. Nevertheless, in light of the emergence of the digital archive, research must immediately turn its undivided attention to the progressive aging of all data originals and the correspondingly increasing distance between them and systems currently in use!
Concepts are thus growing along with new forms of art and new technologies.
One of the essential changes vis-à-vis the production of graphic images as done in the past is the fact that computer images can be created from (raw) graphic material. In this context, concepts like original or fake become part of the strategy of creating new substantive concepts in the (computer) image. Often, the raw material was previously an original (e.g. an oil painting) and now appears in a computer image only as a fake of itself. From an aesthetic point of view, though, the effect and the originality of the computer image are based upon the suggestion of the multi-level medial spheres that are generated thereby. With the computer, the various different image components that originally did not blend together for material reasons-the make-up of their fabric or their texture-are able to be aesthetically amalgamated into a unified whole. In the computer image, a photograph of a piece of wood, a chunk of marble or an oil painting no longer poses the question of whether it is a fake, but rather, in this connection, raises the question of informational depth, which gives rise to the resonance and complexity of an image.
In this sense, I use the system of original and fake as a perceptual technique in order to bring together pictures seen and conceived in the computer image and, in doing so, I borrow and utilize the strategy of mental visualization-how people imagine in pictures. This nexus of the mental and the real perhaps compensates for the loss of the material in the computer image.
|