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The experience of jurying is one of the most notable pleasures associated with my work as a curator and as someone who has been deeply involved with the field of photography - or can we now say imaging - for many years. It allows me the occasion to stand apart from daily routine and to come face-to-face with new imagery that attempts to stretch the imagination, surprise, challenge, or fascinate. It is an enriching experience because at one time, I can look at a multitude of visual expressions embracing ideas and approaches both personal and cultural. It is the pursuit of the unexpected, the images that linger in the mind long past first sight that stimulates the jurying experience. The invitation by ASCI to jury their 1999 competition in digital art was an opportunity I eagerly accepted. That it involved still images in transparencies, single digital files, and websites, some with movement, added to my enthusiasm as juror. My interest in digital technologies and their aesthetic uses stems, in part, from my curatorial work at George Eastman House where photography and motion pictures, and their accompanying technologies, form the core of the Museum's collections. Additionally, the Museum's use of digital technologies to provide access to collections and educational programs, and the immediate community's deep commitment to imaging in all its forms, has also informed my personal and professional desire to study and present current developments in the digital world, especially as an art form. With that said, does this mean that I - or you - must approach digital art with a special or new way of seeing that is wholly attune to this new media? The answer is no. Just as you and I cannot jettison experiences that inform who and what we are, so too digital art, like other forms of imaging that preceded it and accompany it today - important here are its sister arts of photography, printmaking, and film - resides in a reciprocal relationship with the past and present, its themes and concerns. Thus it is not media which stands apart, but within, extending the applications of modern imaging that prizes reproducibility, public access and dissemination, and popular and aesthetic presentations, to name but a few. Perhaps it can be simply said that digital art is just another way to get at a picture(s). But this is not to say it does not provide its share of challenges that are uniquely its own! The technologies that inform and enliven digital art often come at a price for both artist and viewer. The artist's intentionality is often obscured or obliterated if on the receiving end, the viewer does not have compatibility of equipment, etc. Digital art's dependency on rapidly evolving technologies - here today, gone tomorrow - is at once, a boon and a burden. But in the final analysis, after files have been downloaded, slides projected, and websites navigated, we as viewers contemplate image(s) and the stories they tell about ourselves, and about this particular moment in time and culture. From the submissions, I selected works in which subject, form, and presentation successfully united to create compelling content. A narrative impulse with a strong autobiographical emphasis appeared to course through many of my final selections. So too did a sense of utter playfulness in which artists seized upon digital imaging's ability to merge the real with the artificial, in an effort to construct new "realities" with new interpretive possibilities, into confounding and delightful visual spectacles. This ASCI competition provides an illuminating perspective from which to survey the depth and breath of current digital practice, and the possibilities it holds for the future of image-making. I would like to thank the staff of ASCI for extending the invitation to jury, and to all the artists who took part in the competition. -- Therese Mulligan
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Therese Mulligan is the Curator of Photography at George Eastman
House - She has organized numerous exhibitions, including accompanying publications, on 19th and 20th century photography, including Mexicanidad: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, The Mia Album: Julia Margaret Cameron and Her Circle, Telling Stories: The Narrative in Contemporary American Photography, and Digital Frontiers: Photography's Future at Nash Editions. Most recently, she completed editing a comprehensive guide to the photography collection at the Eastman House that will be published in the summer of 1999 in celebration of the Museum's 50th anniversary. Mulligan received her M.A. in art history from Michigan State University, and is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of photography at the University of New Mexico. |
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