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From Pigments to Pixels: Programme

Introduction

In his discussion of art practice as research, Graeme Sullivan observes that the uncertain world of the digital age offers us new ways to communicate:

“Digital technology serves as a site for inquiry where information is clearly no longer a form within which knowledge is found, nor a unit of analysis that lends itself to neat manipulation or interpretation. Yet this uncertain realm of investigative opportunity is just the kind of place where artists, scientists, researchers, cultural theorists, and community activists are speaking to each other in a fresh language of images and ideas.”

(G. Sullivan, 2005, Art Practice as Research, California, Sage Publications Inc.)

For the visual arts research community, dominated as it is by the practice of art, much of the fresh language comes in the form of digital imagery, whilst many of the topics discussed relate in some way to digital imagery and, inevitably, the Internet: the key enabling mode of communication of this new language and the discussions it stimulates. However, as the Internet, in its basic form, is a technological domain, its development can often seem to be dominated by a technological agenda which does not necessarily meet the needs or expectations of the art research community. This is particularly true in the case of those who wish to explore, exploit or expound on such technologies through their practice, rather than via the apparently more tangible means of humanities or science methods.

What this tends to mean, is that much of the integration of visual art resources or methods (on or for the Internet) is through use of the word to describe the visual, and on the development of standards, techniques and technologies for manipulating text rather than images. Consequently, the distribution and accessing of visual information is a complex and often unsatisfactory activity – the fresh language that Sullivan promotes is perhaps not yet fully coherent. The core of the problem lies in the very nature of digital images: through their make up of simple pixels or point data, they tend to lack useful data for machines to interrogate or interact with, making art researchers’ interaction with them dependant on added textual information. This is particularly problematic for the practice-led researcher where the visual object is often the primary means of communication.

As ever greater numbers of images join the information superhighway, the visual arts research community’s reliance on electronic, rather than analogue, images will inevitably increase. This one day seminar will bring together experts, from a number of different disciplines, to discuss: methods currently used for enabling the distribution and accessing of digital images in cyberspace; and, the relevance, mismatch, and unfilled gaps of such methods, particularly in relation to practice-led visual arts research. At a recent AHRC Town Meeting on ‘Understanding and Mapping Practice-led Research’2, one big question that arose was: ‘What's in the methods toolbox?’ This seminar will contribute to the answering of that question.