Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy: Ex­panded Cre­ativ­ity and Vi­sion

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging

• Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy: Ex­panded Cre­ativ­ity and Vi­sion

• Murat Germen

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging

  Pho­tog­ra­phy is one of the cre­ative fields in which tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances in­flu­ence artis­tic ex­pres­sion the most. The ease of ma­nip­u­la­tion brought by soft­ware and extra fea­tures avail­able in cam­eras made artists (using pho­tog­ra­phy as an ar­tic­u­la­tion tool) re­con­sider their vi­sions, themes, nar­ra­tion, syn­tax and ways of shar­ing their art­work. Shar­ing sites like Flickr, which ex­pe­dite en­coun­ters of var­i­ous in­di­vid­u­als from dif­fer­ent cul­tures, help in chang­ing the per­cep­tion of the vital no­tion of time and en­able artists to get faster feed­back. Dig­i­tal tools allow pho­to­graph­i­cally based artists to think in a more dar­ing and free way. In ad­di­tion to the reg­u­lar mon­tage and col­lage meth­ods re­main­ing from the ana­log days, dig­i­tal imag­ing tech­niques allow artists to work with no­tions of aug­mented per­cep­tion, chronopho­tog­ra­phy, sub­real en­coun­ters, pic­to­ri­al­ism, palimpsest-like su­per­im­po­si­tion, in­ter­lac­ing, sim­pli­fi­ca­tion / min­i­miza­tion, cre­ation of new worlds, delu­sion, syn­thetic re­al­ism/ar­ti­fi­cial­ity, ap­pro­pri­a­tion.

  Just as pho­tog­ra­phy with its in­no­v­a­tive re­al­ism changed the na­ture of paint­ing, so dig­i­tal image cap­ture and com­pu­ta­tional cre­ative processes are chang­ing the re­la­tion­ships be­tween pre­vi­ous tra­di­tional art media and di­rectly in­flu­ence our frame­works for in­ter­pret­ing new media works. In my work, I begin by tak­ing dig­i­tal pho­tographs, ma­nip­u­late them on the com­puter, cre­ate tra­di­tional draw­ings based on these works, re-dig­i­tize the works, and then cre­ate geo­met­ric, com­pu­ta­tion­ally based com­po­si­tions that could never have been drawn by hand but re­tain the hand-drawn mark­ing of the orig­i­nal draw­ings. The works are often fur­ther de­vel­oped by adding a time-based el­e­ment to cre­ate com­pu­ta­tional video draw­ings. The final com­bi­na­tions of old and new media, rep­re­sen­ta­tional el­e­ments and math­e­mat­i­cally in­spired ab­strac­tion, and still and time-based ex­plo­rations take ad­van­tage of the new vi­sual re­la­tion­ships and ways of think­ing made pos­si­ble by the com­puter.

• [View Full Paper/Presentation]

Category:

• Panel