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LuYang NetiNeti, named after the Sanskrit expression meaning ‘neither this, nor that’, is Yang’s first solo UK exhibition, featuring immersive digital installations, an interactive gaming arcade, and a screening room of the artist’s greatest hits from across the last decade. “Many of my works are about the body, spirituality, and perspectives on the world,” they say. This includes “DOKU Binary God”, a brand new work commissioned for the exhibition, where heaven and hell engage in an epic dance showdown atop a yin yang symbol. Featuring a thrashing metal soundtrack, the two avatars – modelled on Doku, the artist’s 3D-scanned digital replica, or “reincarnation” – move in sync, eventually summoning a third hybrid character: the binary god.

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Lu Yang’s digital reincarnations explore the ghost in the machine

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Lu Yang’s digital reincarnations explore the ghost in the machine

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Experiencing Lu Yang’s sprawling virtual worlds is a pure dopamine rush. The Shanghai-based artist constructs techno-psychedelic realms that explore the human body through the lens of Buddhist iconography, videogames and sci-fi, where fantastical avatars embark on mind-bending odysseys across multiple dimensions, and neon deities compete in Dance Dance Revolution-style battles in the afterlife. Often set to pulsating, arcade-style soundtracks, Yang uses digital technology to extend their soul beyond its corporal form and into various avatars modelled on Doku, the artist’s 3D-scanned digital replica, or “reincarnation”.

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The revolution was multicasted, brought international attention to the

Mobile locative media are not only a technological format but also a concept and

theme that have been increasingly explored by artists. Electronic networks in general and mobile devices in particular have brought about formal redefinitions of what we understand as ‘public space’; more specifically, they have opened up new sites for artistic intervention, broadening our concept of so-called ‘public art’ – a term that has traditionally been used for art displayed in public spaces outside of a designated art context or for public performative events, from graffiti to site-specific interventions by art movements such as Fluxus or the Situationist International. New media art in the public space of networks – be it net art or art involving mobile devices or so-called public interactives, participatory public interfaces – can be understood as a new form of public art. Compared to more traditional forms of public art practice, these artworks can be both trans-local (connecting people across geographical locations) and site-specific, enhancing or augmenting physical space with information that can be deposited and/or retrieved. Mobile locative media have found a broad spectrum of use in artistic practice that ranges from the enhancement of urban spaces or landscapes with information, and the creation of participatory platforms of production, to critical engagement with the cultural impact of mobile technologies, and enhancement of the public’s agency.

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Redefining public space: Locative media and public interactives

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Redefining public space: Locative media and public interactives

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In the twenty-first century, wireless networks and the increasing use of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets have blurred the boundary between the non-local (or non-site-specific) and the locative (or site-specific). Locative media use a location in public space as a ‘canvas’ for implementing an art project and have become one of the most active and fast-growing areas in new media art. Smart phones and tablet computers have become new platforms for cultural production, providing an interface through which users can participate in networked public projects, as well as the formation of ad hoc communities. In his 2002 book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold described the self-structuring social organizations supported by wireless digital technologies. This potential manifested itself in the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ from 2011 onwards, in which mobile media and social media platforms were used as tools for organizing events and reporting.

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Digital imaging: photography and print

Digital imaging as it manifests itself in photography and print is a vast field, including works that have been created or manipulated digitally but then printed in the traditional way, as well as images that have been created without the use of digital technology but then printed using digital processes. In this section, these different techniques will be considered, with a special focus on the changes they have brought about in our understanding and reading of the visual image.

Early experiments with digital image creation and output, such as the works of American artist Charles Csuri, exhibit some of the essential characteristics of the computer medium, such as forms driven by mathematical functions and their repetition and reiteration. Csuri’s SineScape (1967) [14] consisted of a digitized line drawing of a landscape that was then modified by a wave function in a procedure repeated
about a dozen times. The original landscape thereby underwent a process of abstraction that made it appear as a notation of its own characteristics.

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The use of digital technologies in almost every arena of daily life has vastly increased during the past two decades, leading to speculations that all forms of artistic media will eventually be absorbed into the digital medium, either through digitization or through the use of computers in a specific aspect of processing or production. It is certainly true that more and more artists working in different forms of media – from painting, drawing, and sculpture to photography and video – are making use of digital technologies as a tool of creation for aspects of their art. In some cases, their work displays distinctive characteristics of the digital medium and reflects on its language and aesthetics. In other cases, the use of the technology is so subtle that it is hard to determine whether the art has been created by means of digital or analogue processes. A work suggesting that it has been created through digital manipulation may have been created entirely by means of traditional techniques, while one appearing to be entirely handmade may have undergone digital processing. In both cases, however, these two kinds of work owe as much to the histories of photography, sculpture, painting, and video as to the use of digital technologies.
While not every work that makes use of digital technologies also reflects on those technologies’ aesthetics and makes a statement about them, there are certain basic characteristics exhibited by the digital medium. One of the most basic of them is that this medium allows for multiple kinds of manipulation and a seamless combination of art forms, which can lead to a blurring of the distinctions between different media. Photography, film, and video have always entailed manipulation – for example, of time and place through montage – but in digital media, the potential for manipulation is always heightened to such a degree that the reality of ‘what is’ at any given point is constantly open to question. Recontextualization through appropriation or collaging, as well as the relationship between copy and original, are also prominent features of the digital medium. While appropriation and collaging, techniques originating with the Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists at the beginning of the twentieth century, have a long history in art, the digital medium has multiplied their possibilities and taken them to new levels. Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ discussed the impact of reproduction brought about by the then ‘new’ media of photography and film. For Benjamin, the presence of an artwork in time and space, ‘its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’, constituted the authenticity, authority, and ‘aura’ of the art object, all of which seemed to be jeopardized by the possibilities of mechanical reproduction and the creation of identical copies. The work of art in the age of digital reproduction, however, takes instant copying, without degradation of quality from the original, for granted. The digital platform also increases the accessibility of visual materials: images can be easily digitized through scanning and are readily available for copying or dissemination on the Internet. Whether the concepts of authenticity, authority, and aura are destroyed through these forms of instant reproducibility is debatable, but they have certainly undergone profound changes.
In this chapter, the use of digital technologies as a tool for the creation of art objects and their aesthetic impact will be discussed through the use of a few key examples. Since these technologies are now commonly used in art, an inclusive survey would probably have to comprise thousands of artworks. The works presented here are merely a selection that illustrates specific aspects of digital imaging and the digital production of art.