PARADOXICAL RETURN TO PAINTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
(From sociological art to bar codes – a lonesome manifesto, 1999)
When technoscience becomes more and more subdued to computing, when communications grow electronic, when education, psychoanalysis and
religion reach us on-line, we may state that a new cosmogony is born, that of the digital age. The revolution of the numeric technologies radically changes our image of the world.The most fascinating challenge for today's artists lies in exploring the rhythms and accidents of computer binary language, the four letter language (a, t, g, c) of DNA, the identification of bar codes and the control of the consumerist society, the variation and drama of financial world diagrams and cyberspace numeric networks, since these languages invaded the entire kaleidoscope of our human activities like an irrepressible flow.As to show these new mental and aesthetic structures, we have to:- Reaffirm that progress is meaningless in the field of art,- Underline that the emergence of new media does not mean the end of existing previous media, but rather esthetize them and compel them to more exaltation and expressivity,- Remember that not only the digital world, but also nature, war, city, and living beings are multisensoriel or multimedia, and were best captured by painters, able to seize them, understand and show them according to their fundamental structures and figures, with still, iconic images.- We therefore feel the need to paint the cyberworld, alike other artists painted God, the ocean, crowds, heroes, movements, rhythms and energy, or the geometrical structures of the old world.- We bathe with passion in this dissolving flow of pixels and sounds. But to evocate the new algorithmic world, we have to resist to it, take distance and freeze the image for condensation.- We have to deny this too real postulate of McLuhan stating that the medium is the message.- We have to deny celebrating communication for its sake.- On the contrary, we have to search for a fixed rock and escape immersion, taking an esthetical and critical breath from the position of another media. It is not possible to paint nature with itself. Fishes don't see the water they swallow or humans the air they breathe.- We need to practise again silence, immobility, solitude, meditation to escape and show the chaotic unrest and disturbance which carry us away.- We also should attempt to escape the fatal volatility of the numeric culture, which is loosing memory. Barely born, digital arts disappear. More powerful and sophisticated is the technology, faster it ages and more vulnerable it becomes. Where shall we run without memory?Facing the fascinating complexity of the numeric world, the paradoxical return to painting seems at least as important as the ingenious dance of the digital arts. May we love both? We work on a joyful, conceptual, iconic, distant and critical painting.
Hervé Fischer
