From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics by Meredith Anne Hoy A dissertation ...

181 Pages·2010·0.95 MB·English

by  Meredith Hoy

UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/25f4v730
Author
Hoy, Meredith Anne
Publication Date
2010

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From Point to Pixel:
A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics
by
Meredith Anne Hoy

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Rhetoric
and the Designated Emphasis
in
Film Studies
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:
Professor Whitney Davis, co-chair
Professor Jeffrey Skoller, co-chair
Professor Warren Sack
Professor Abigail DeKosnik
Professor Kristen Whissel

Spring 2010
Copyright 2010 by
Hoy, Meredith

All rights reserved.
Abstract

From Point to Pixel:
A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

by

Meredith Anne Hoy

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Whitney Davis, Co-chair

Professor Jeffrey Skoller, Co-chair

When we say, in response to a still or moving picture, that it has a digital “look”
about it, what exactly do we mean? How can the slick, color-saturated photographs of
Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky signal digitality, while the flattened, pixelated landscapes
of video games such as Super Mario Brothers convey ostensibly the same characteristic
of “being digital,” but in a completely different manner? In my dissertation, From Point
to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, I argue for a definition of a "digital method"
that can be articulated without reference to the technicalities of contemporary hardware
and software. I allow, however, the possibility that this digital method can acquire new
characteristics when it is performed by computational technology. I therefore treat the
artworks covered in my dissertation as sensuous artifacts that are subject to change based
on the constraints and affordances of the tools used in their making. But insofar as it
describes a series of technological operations, the word digital often references the tool
used to make the art but does not help a viewer/user relate to the art as a sensorially
apprehensible artifact. Consequently, I gather together artworks that disclose visible
evidence of their digital construction in order to identify the perceptible characteristics of
digitally processed artifacts. I foreground not the hidden operations of computers—the
intricacies of binary code and programming languages—but rather the surface qualities of
digital graphics. While acknowledging that internal processes govern the aesthetic
properties of these surfaces, I investigate the extent to which it is possible to encounter
digitality at the level of the interface. Taking into account that the sensuous object will be
informed by an underlying conceptual and technological framework or genotype, I set out
to discover whether certain phenotypic aspects of digitality will be inherently accessible
at a phenomenological level.
Much of the best scholarship in media studies has offered cogent analyses of the
political, social, and economic formations that emerge alongside digital technologies.
These readings of “networked culture” focus on the systems of power/knowledge that
arise from the Web 2.0 and a globalized world economy. Although this research proves
invaluable to the understanding of a culture shaped by ubiquitous computing, a well-
developed methodology for interpreting the role of digital technology in art practice must

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also situate digital artifacts in a specifically art historical and theoretical context. When
do digital artifacts overcome their dubious status as mere demonstrations of technical
novelty, and become artworks worthy of serious consideration? What is the importance
of digital technology as an artistic medium, and how do affordances and constraints and
technical parameters of digital processing influence the sensible configurations of
computationally generated artifacts?
Despite its foundation in immaterial electronic pulses, digital technology produces
material effects on culture and communication. The assessment of digital images is often
based on their “reality quotient”—the degree to which they accurately reproduce the
optical and haptic conditions of external world. The fascination in digital cultural studies
with virtual reality, second life, and other such practices supports this view, and also
leans dangerously towards the notion that progress in art is achieved by producing ever
more sophisticated techniques for rendering illusions of spatial depth. This concentration
on the immersive capacities of digital graphics runs the risk of assuming a teleological
progression in art towards “accurate” spatialization and virtualization. But this is not a
tenable model for art historical investigation, given that the evaluation of art objects
based on culturally determined signifiers of naturalism is exclusionary of alternate visual
models and historical traditions. It is therefore imperative to consider depictions that
exhibit visible evidence of digital construction—digital aesthetic characteristics—
independently of the virtualizing capability of computational technology. My dissertation
examines a subset of digital image-making practices that suppress virtualization in order
to examine the structural principles undergirding digital graphics. In parsing these often
abstract, highly formalized pictorial strategies, I conclude that they convey a different
aesthetic and architectonic sensibility than analog depictions.
Over the course of five chapters, my argument moves between theoretical analysis
and case studies of artworks produced both with and without the aid of computers.
Chapter One outlines the theoretical models used to differentiate digital and analog
properties, and illustrates how and why art historical discourse has accorded value to
artworks based on analog principles, such as fineness of color, texture, and line. It argues
that discrete, particulate digital artifacts are constructed according to different principles
than analog artifacts, which are relatively smooth and continuous with no absolute
division between parts. My review of the formal characteristics of digital systems sets the
stage for my argument that an observable model of digital facture—a digital method—
preexists electronic, binary computers and that this digital process results in a digital
aesthetic. Understanding this aesthetic is useful for theorizing the genealogy of
contemporary computational graphics. Additionally, it provides for alternate theorizations
of artifacts that have not traditionally found a secure place in the artistic canon, and it
affords a new interpretive schema with which to examine artists and artworks whose
position in the art historical demands renegotiation. In my second chapter, I support the
claims of the preceding chapter by evaluating the extent to which the work of several
modernist painters, including Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, and Paul Klee, exhibits
constitutive features of a digital system. I use my findings to argue that understanding
these artists’ roles as experimenters with a digital method adds a new dimension to the
theoretical, aesthetic, and historical significance of their work.
The following two chapters provide comparisons between artists who apply a
digital method without electronic computation and artists whose digital aesthetic is

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computationally driven. Chapter 3 attempts to recuperate the value and relevance of Op-
Artist Victor Vasarely. Through an inspection of his writings and his algorithmic painting
practices, I trace Vasarely’s lifelong goal to develop a programmable visual language,
and demonstrate how, without ever touching a computer, he was attempting in his
practice to adopt a visual model of a digital system. In the second half of the chapter, I
introduce the example of Marius Watz’s computationally-generated homage to
Vasarely’s work in order to ascertain whether the use of a computer alters the visible
qualities of Vasarely’s plastic language. In Chapter 4, I examine Casey Reas’s fraught
and often contradictory response to the legacy of conceptual art in programming-based
practices. Through a comparison between Reas and Sol LeWitt, I maintain that Reas
occupies an oscillatory position with respect to the values traditionally attached to analog
aesthetics, such as immediacy and uniqueness/irreproducibility. By mobilizing
algorithmically encoded instructions to automate artistic production, Reas reinforces the
turn away from the cult of the artist achieved in conceptual art. But at the same time,
Reas’s fascination with handmadeness and organicism preserves a link to analog
aesthetic principles. Finally, my conclusion shifts away from direct comparison between
computationally and non-computationally digital art, and instead assays the discursive
resonances between Jason Salavon’s software-based computational “paintings” and the
increasingly widespread use of information visualization as primary mode of mapping the
vast amounts of data produced by the mechanisms of the “culture industry”.
The works under consideration in my dissertation cohere around questions and
problems related to painting. Part of the difficulty in defining “digital art” as a singular
medium or genre is that the range of artifacts potentially contained under the rubric of
digital art is massive and therefore resistant to canonization. A concentration on painting
initially allowed me to refine my analytic method. However, the broader rationale behind
this constraint grows out of the fact that the screen-based computational pictorialization
analogizes painting. I contend that painting, despite, or perhaps due to its status as a two-
dimensional mode of depiction, is deeply concerned with spatial and material
architectonics. Painting is invested not only in the problem of how to graphically render
volume and depth, but also the dynamic spatial relationship between bodies and concrete
objects. Similarly, digital rendering must cope with the question of how to present the
relationship between objects and spaces in two, three, or multiple dimensions. My goal is
to discover whether the technical parameters of computation affect the way pictures are
constructed, the kinds of subjects for which computers have the greatest representational
facility, and by extension, the way digital pictures—the graphical index of digital
technesis—will ultimately look.
Overall, my dissertation offers a methodology for speaking about and
contextualizing digital practices within the history of art and visual culture. While
programming literacy is important for many scholars, producers, and users of digital
hardware and software, if artifacts made using computational technology remain
inaccessible to all viewers except those with a background in programming or
engineering, we are faced with an art practice that is technically dexterous but
phenomenologically bankrupt. Unless the possibility of translation between two
languages is realized, a communicative gap will continue to yawn between art history and
“media studies,” which makes more urgent than ever the need to grant digital artifacts

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and processes the possibility of making a significant intervention into and contribution to
the artistic canon.

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Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: From Analog Pictures to Digital Notations
I. Discursive Horizon(s) of Digits, Digitality, and Digitization
II. Digital Analytics: Nelson Goodman’s Language of Notation
III. Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences
IV. Indeterminacy, Hybridity and Incompossibility
V. Functional Aesthetics: Measurement and Notation
VI. Digital Gestures
Chapter 2: Points, Divisions and Pixels: From Modern To Contemporary Digitality
I. Seurat and Klee: Modeling Digitality
a. Pointillism: Discerning the Digital
b. Paul Klee: Pictorial Notations
II. Digital Structure and Computer Art
a. Daniel Rozin: Wooden Mirror
b. Jim Campbell: Ambiguous Icons, Home Movies

Chapter 3: Vasarely, Watz, and The New Abstraction: From Op Art to Generative Art
I. Op Art, Computation and The Inhuman
II. From Grid to Matrix
III. Programming the Alphabet plastique
IV. The New Abstraction
V. ElectroPlastique: A Generative Appropriation of Op Art

Chapter 4: Spectral Analogies: From Wall Drawing to the Art of Programming
I. Reas, LeWitt, and the Legacy of Conceptual Art
II. Software Art: Computing Conceptual Critique
III. From Wall Drawings to Processes
a. The Open Work
b. Aesthetics of Multiplicity
IV. From Conceptual to Organic Systems
V. Processes as “Painting: Painting and Digital Media
Conclusion: Amalgamations: From Painting to Information Visualization
I. Beyond the Digital


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Introduction
The Digital: An Aesthetic Ontology

Picture a screen before you, roughly the size of a moviehouse projection. Then
picture this screen divided into a 4x8 grid of perfectly regular squares, each pulsing with
a pale monochromatic light. As you read the description of this work, you notice that it
claims to present an encrypted version of the final scenes of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. At this point, the installation begins to make
sense, perhaps as cinema redux, or cinema remixed. As you gaze at the pared-down
coloration of the grid structure before you, you may be reminded of the seriated
photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher or the houses on the Sunset Strip photographed
by Ed Ruscha. Perhaps you even think of the rich tones of Jeff Wall’s lightboxes. But, if
you continue to wait for something like cinema to reveal itself to you, you soon realize
that no image is about to shimmer into pictorial legibility. Instead, each square changes
color with infinitesimal slowness and clings resolutely to purified abstraction of light and
color; any pictorial content remains latent, hidden far below the human perceptual
threshold. This is Angela Bulloch’s Horizontal Technicolor (2002), not quite cinema, not
quite sculpture, not quite sound installation, but possibly intelligible as something else
altogether, as a playful union of high modernist abstraction and digital programming.
Bulloch, a London and Berlin-based sculptor, installation and sound artist who has been
counted among the Young British Artists, performs a “digital reduction” of selected
scenes from Kubrick’s and Antonioni’s films and displays the results in a grid of colored
“pixel boxes”. These large “pixels” abrogate the possibility of image-resolution and force
the viewer to reconsider the structural composition of the photographic pictorialization
that usually accompanies the cinematic experience. These pixel boxes appear as
luminous, individuated tiles, as screens that produce their own strange glow rather than as
image-machines that reflect the familiar world back to the viewer. Here, the picture never
supplants the technological apparatus, nor does it camouflage the grid of pixels, the very
structure that engenders digital graphics at a cellular level.
Bulloch’s work is best described as aesthetically digital; that is, it renders its
visual data as a formal array of discrete elements that correlate to a definite informatic
quantity. Because any kind of information, such as color, sound, words, or numbers, can
be processed digitally once it is converted into machine-computable numeric data, the
type of information conveyed may vary. But once the parameters of an element—its
behavior within an overall system—are defined, it must reliably produce the same output
with each iteration. Thus, if a pixel location is commanded to render a given numerical
value corresponding to a particular shade of blue, the color will be the same each time it
appears. Within a digital system, the range and complexity of the information that can be
conveyed—the resolution, for example, or fineness of discrimination between color
values—is dictated by systemic parameters. Binary systems process information through
a series of commands that turn a simple switch to an “on” or “off” position, but
increasing the number of possible switch positions dramatically increases the complexity
of the tasks the computer is able to carry out.
More often than not, however, users/viewers attribute digital characteristics to
digitally processed artifacts—video games, digital photographs, cinematic special
effects—not due to observable traces of digital processing on their surface (which are

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often registered instead as “glitches” in the system), but because their constitutive
digitality is deduced associatively. If an image appears on a computer screen or monitor,
I know, logically, that it is a digitally processed image. My awareness of technical
parameters of digital computers tells me that the image that appears on it must be
processed and rendered digitally, but I cannot necessarily discern evidence of digital
processing embedded in the picture’s formal configuration. When the computational
ability of computers-as-machines meets or exceeds the maximum fineness of resolution
registered by the human sensorium, this associative logic replaces direct observation in
the determination of digital ontology. But some digital artworks use the medium
reflexively, to consider how both objects and knowledge are reconfigured within a digital
epistemological framework. In this instance, the appearance of discrete units on the
image surface is not attributable to technological failure, insufficiency, primitivism, or to
a lack of technical dexterity on the part of the artist/programmer. An unfortunate
peripheral effect of the expectation that technological development leads inexorably to
seamless, transparent virtualization is the concomitant assumption that digital and analog
modalities will converge and ultimately become indiscernible.1 While this is certainly
true in many cases, what I want to guard against is the blanket supposition that digital
depiction always, or even in most cases tends toward immersive pictorial virtualization.
Rather, I postulate that artworks, like Bulloch’s, that emphatically and obsessively
explore the visible properties of digital discreteness are bound together in their profound
investment in and investigation of the effects of the information revolution on patterns of
seeing, thinking, and acting both individually and collectively. Bulloch formulates a
visual (graphical) proposition in which the “digital” becomes a sensed and experiential,
instead of a technological, category and identifies the perceptual properties of digitality
as a valid analytic problem within contemporary epistemology that necessitates both
perceptual and intellectual negotiation.
Horizontal Technicolor is a work of art made with a computer, but it is not simply
its computational ontology—the invisible processing of binary code taking place prior to
its graphical rendering—that lends it a digital aesthetic sensibility. In many examples of
computationally generated works, such as the digitally manipulated photographs by Jeff
Wall, their formal appearance is derived through the processing of binary digits but they
do not bear the stamp of digital processing on the pictorial surface. In other words, while
these depictions are technically digital, they adopt the look and feel of analog imaging;
instead of foregrounding the piecemeal, additive processing of individuated pixels or
even vector-based curves,2 these depictions are computationally derived but bear the
properties of analog pictures, such as continuity, density, repleteness, or what I will call
irreducibility, ambiguity, and indeterminacy.3 I will explain these terms in further detail

1 Transparency occurs when all signs of artifice and mediation “disappear” from a picture, leaving the
viewer instead with an impression of a naturalistic, three-dimensional illusionism or “virtualization.” For
more on transparency see Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design,
Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
2 In vector graphics, the “digital depiction” becomes, in theory, infinitely expandable and compressible,
because the appearance of a line is independent of the arrangement of pixels on a bitmap, instead derived
from equations that are transposable to a screen of any size and/or resolution.
3 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to A Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Co., 1976). See also Robert Pepperell, "Seeing Without Objects: Visual Indeterminacy and Art,"

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