Curator Statements:

Ms. Lambert's work was accepted into SIGRAPH August 14-16, 2008 at The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Two of her current work images are also accepted into the exhibition "Perfect with Pixel" at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery at Bowling Green State University, School of Art, Bowling Green, Ohio which focuses on works on paper that integrate traditional media (print, painting, drawing and photography) with the digital medium as an integral part of its creation. Following are the curator's statements:

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The pervasiveness not just of computers, but of digital media, is the defining factor of early 21st-century life. As with many other technological revolutions of the modern era, from the printing press to the camera, this one came up behind all but a few of us and bit us hard, and we’ve all been scrambling to keep pace since, with various degrees of success. This is no less true of artists than of the rest of us, but artists adapt differently – in some ways more readily, in some ways less – than the rest of us do. The main advantage artists have is the ability to approach the digital world as a new toolshed; and the main problem they can suffer is getting trapped in that toolshed, prisoners rather than masters of a technological paradigm. This has been apparent since the 1950s, when the first “digital art” was realized. Of course, back then the process was so laborious that an artist had to surrender to the tools, and the electronic mystique was likely to swallow the technique-obsessed creator. (This was less true of, say, musicians than of visual or verbal artists, but that’s another story.) With the advent of personal computers in the 1980s, and the rapid sophistication gained since by both digital machines and their operators, the genre of “digital art” has become less and less omphaloskeptic on the one hand, and less and less self-consciously art-historical on the other.

In judging this competition, we looked for work that, among other things, transcended as much as possible the self-reflexive fallacy that has weighed on digitally produced art for so long – but at the same time we looked for work that could only have been produced with digital means. Sometimes that simply meant images that seemed skillfully Photoshopped; other times that meant images that resulted from an intricate crossplay of algorithms manifesting the intersection of diverse concerns. We presumed technical virtuosity, we did not seek it; what we sought was distinctive vision brought to full expression through – and often because of – digital means.

Peter Frank
Senior Curator, Art critic
Riverside Art Museum, Angeleno Magazine and LA Weekly

A prime ideal of much modern art was for the art work to be "honest" about its material: much of the most radical painting of the modern period – Cubism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, for example – was hardly illusionistic, but unabashedly announced itself as paint applied to a surface. Digital art in the twenty-first century, however, is a shifty chameleon. Among the many works submitted for consideration by the jurors for this project were digitally-generated imagery that mimics painting of almost any style; paintings that were scanned as digital files sometimes manipulated, sometimes not, and subsequently printed by digital technology; abstract visual compositions systemically generated by musical notations, algorithms or other electronic programs; pictures punched up by elaborate special effects; straightforward "straight" photography that happens to have been recorded or printed by digital means; and bizarre surrealistic fantasies that could not be further from such photographic reportage. Through it all, our intent was not to privilege one strain of digital practice or another but, rather, to embrace the full spectrum – and the inherent conceptual contests and contradictions – that animate the practice and discourse of new media, making it so vital for so many artists working in the international art world today.

Digital technology was initially invented for computing and data storage; later it was developed for use in audio and video equipment; and after that was adapted to all manner of communication and imaging, from cell phones to body scans. But all such applications are rooted in the apprehension, storage, transmission, and display of information - that is, of facts, of data, of any useful worldly intelligence - in the form of binary code. At least until the artists got to it.

It is hardly surprising, given the roots of modern art in notions of a revolutionary avant-garde, that progressive artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries devoured new materials, new technologies, and new art forms with a prodigious and omnivorous appetite. Digital technologies are no exception, and whether artists today use digital tools to aid in generating traditional art forms (for example by making virtual sketches toward paintings or sculpture) or as the basis of experimental new art forms that are generated by and/or displayed via binary code, many artists around the world have indeed gone digital.

In selecting the works for DigitalArt.LA, no aesthetic parameters or requirements were set. Artists were free to submit work of any artistic persuasion - and they did, with copious entries that ranged from moving images to interactive installations to still images. Yet it seems that certain aesthetic predilections may have been at work. The works that asserted themselves most strongly tended to be those that integrally and overtly engage digital technology in the final form of the work. Thus, while some very compelling "straight" photography made with digital cameras and print methods is deservedly represented, the preponderance of works here tend to manipulate the factuality of the real world or to invent worlds that exist only in a realm of digital generation and display. The exhibition is characterized less by faithful reportage than by invention, transfiguration, and wonderment.

So while the "ancient" history of digital technology may have its DNA in strictly practical, informational tasking, the interests and imaginations of the artists who have appropriated those technologies in recent years have evolved them into agents of human psyche that, like much art throughout human history, has only a passing focus on things as they are and much more engagement with our dreams, our fears, our desires.

Howard N. Fox
Juror, DigitalArt.LA
Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

When people discuss the use of the digital technology in the realm of art, it is often dominated by the critique against the missing physical "mark" of the artist. There are some discussions also about the authorship of the artist, the lack of physicality and most importantly, the absence of the "aura" in the work. While there are some who argue that digital technology is detrimental to traditional art methods, others argue that it is another tool that not only offers many more options, but also has an aesthetic unique to itself. And then there are also some who believe that while the digital and traditional media have individual potentials, the combination of both media to create successful works of art is an obvious future.

Shauyra Kumar
Curator
Assistant Professor (2D - Digital)
School of Art
Bowing Green State University, Ohio