The new format of the Holland festival puts the spectator first. Plenty of visible events, free performances and being in the middle of the city. It's director Ruth McKenzie's trademark. It is therefore not surprising that she does not shy away from the digital universe. After all, what better way to share than digital art?
But what exactly is digital art? McKenzie had three directors/artists at the table of digital artworks on show during the Holland Festival. And she had invited Joris Weijdom of the HKU to provide a framework in a short lecture. Weijdom's tight half-hour was actually not enough to make sense of 20 years of digital art. Of necessity, he raced through all the developments, with one of his main conclusions being that digital art started 20 years ago with virtual reality and some kind of idea that the human body was no longer needed.
Now, however, performativity and the body are all the way back in digital art and, as a result, the new technical tools lend themselves a lot better to theatre makers. For example, dancers can have their movements tracked by a computer programme and use it to manipulate their projected scenery: the light follows the dancer, or the ground appears to move under the dancer.
Interestingly, he portrayed Stelarc's Ping Body as a kind of primal form of media art. The Australian digital pioneer connected his body to the internet and placed electrodes on his muscles. Internet-controlled algorithms activated the electrodes, allowing the public to control his body via the internet. Note: this was 1996. DDS and xs4all had only existed for 2 years and Mark Zuckerberg was just entering high school. Since then, so much more is technically possible, but does that make digital art more exciting?
The table guests came from art practice. Michel van der Aa I here already discussed. His interactive song cycle Book of Sand was created for the Holland Festival and is a state-of-the-art work of art. Linking 3 layers of image and sound with which the audience can mix it themselves is at the limit of how much computing power is now available. And as beautiful as it is, as an audience you have limited interaction with the work.
Keiichiro Shibuya's Japanese opera The End is of a completely different order. Smooth electronic music and a virtual character. The non-existent Hatsune Miku in a vocaloid opera, a piece of music based on software from a Japanese company. The audience watches holograms and projections. It can't get any slicker, content can.
And then there is Annie Dorsen's algorithm-based work: Yesterday, Tomorrow which had its world premiere on 4 June. An evolutionary biology-based algorithm slowly and without a preconceived itinerary changes The Beatles' song Yesterday into Tomorrow from the musical Annie. The singers do not know in advance what they will sing, but are presented with the sheet music live. It is the most abstract work of the three.
Each of them are works that explore boundaries and could not have been made in an analogue setting. Yet the feeling creeps up on me that Stelarc was a lot more radical with his algorithms some 20 years ago. It was his extreme physical presence that made his work so confrontational. The presence of 'real people' in the works of Van der Aa and Dorsen also made their work a lot more interesting than Keiichiro Shibuya's.
It is hard to predict where digital art will move. I think Joris Weijdom is right when he says physicality is back. But maybe his clip of Ping Body also just makes me nostalgic for the weird, exciting early days.
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