THESE days, we all live digital lives, from Facebook to eBay, music downloads to chip-and-pin, yet digital art has remained a fringe activity. While many artists use elements of technology as means to an end, the creation of art in digital media is s
till regarded with some suspicion.
The Alt-w fund was set up in 2000 by Scottish Screen and the Scottish Arts Council to support artists exploring digital and web-based practice. Eight years is a long time in technology and the remit is still evolving, but the current show at CCA includes a cross-section of the projects the fund has supported.
The first gallery features a different website each day on a big screen. On the day I visited it was the turn of Glasgow-based German artist Holger Mohaupt, with a series of films, each just a few seconds long, showing sections of street and passers-by. They feel like sketches, a collection of raw ideas that might one day be worked into a finished piece. This is one of the pitfalls with web-based art: a website can display so much work that a rigorous selection process becomes less important.
While Mandy McIntosh's prints about sunbed culture in Scotland and Japan use digital tools to create wall-based art, Beverley Hood has produced an eerie little film about a 19th-century psychiatric patient, which is transferred on to viewers' mobile phone via Bluetooth, the intimate setting making it a little more chilling.
Nicky Bird's Question for Seller is an album made from historic family photographs bought on eBay, and the responses from the sellers to Bird's questions about their origins. Some speak of distant relations, but the vast majority have acquired them at car boot sales or as part of eBay lots, and know as little about them as we do. It's an articulate comment on the way items as seemingly personal as photographs now circulate on a digital merry-go-round, one that continues as the album was itself sold on eBay.
When digital is employed in art, however, the key word is "interactive". There has been much art of this type, some of it seemingly more concerned with proving its technological sophistication than saying anything to the viewer. Blowup, by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley, which reveals fractured images on a screen responding to the viewer's movement seems to fall into this category. Nigel Johnson's A-Life, which uses games technology to explore ideas of artificial intelligence and DNA is supposedly interactive too, though it didn't interact with me.
On the other hand, Simon Richardson's Broken Glass Harp which attaches notes from an old music box to fragments of glass on a screen, is rather beautiful in its simplicity. Donna Leishman's Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, proves rather addictive, each click of the mouse revealing another set of cartoonish images, even if it's too fragmented to make much narrative sense.
When presented with all the possibilities of digital technology, it's odd what some people choose to do. Jaygo Bloom, with Ian Campbell and Paul Fernihough, has wired up a live feed from CCA to a flock of hens on a community farm. Fresh toast will be made every time an egg is laid. Egg-laying also triggers the picking of random lottery numbers, and pecking triggers the mix on the Cock Rock Disco of chicken-inspired songs.
Zöe Irvine's Magnetic Migration Music is anomalous here as it is not digital at all, but addresses an older, near-defunct technology. Irvine has collected discarded strands of tape from all over the world – Glasgow, Paris, Brazil, Montreal – and re-spooled them so we can listen to them in pick'n'mix fashion on handheld tape recorders. Snatches of music from religious chant to pop ballads speak of an era of recorded music that the iPod has all but left behind.
Projects like Irvine's turn the viewer into a browser of a vast array of unselected material, an experience which is multiplied at Stills Gallery, currently home to some 7,700 volumes of the library of American artist Martha Rosler. Viewers are invited to sit on the comfy chairs among the shelves and delve, or make photocopies.
What do we learn about someone from their book collection? It's a game we've all played. From her books, Rosler is clearly a serious, politically aware artist who is interested in social and women's issues, architecture, film theory. She subscribes to various journals, and doesn't read a lot of novels (apart from a few thrillers by Ian Rankin and John Le Carré). In fact, the books don't tell us much more about her than we already know from her work.
The experience of visiting the library is more about how you navigate your own unique path through the labyrinth of books. Despite the fact that I perhaps should have been reading Art in the Third Reich, or The Sociology of Housework, I couldn't resist Alien Influence on World Art Volume 1, and was totally absorbed by the Sears Roebuck catalogue from the 1930s, with its fox furs and panty girdles and promotions about the nutritional properties of cod liver oil. Perhaps the library has as much to tell us about ourselves.
&149 Alt-w until 13 September; Martha Rosler Library until 9 November
The full article contains 916 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
