Beyond Traditional Media

This is one section of an article about technology in the visual arts at the University of Washington. Click here for the complete article.

All of these technology-savvy faculty agree that teaching both traditional and new methods is the best approach. Then there’s Shawn Brixey. “Traditional” is not even in Brixey’s vocabulary.

Brixey is associate director of the UW’s new Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (see box, page 10) and associate professor of art. His work has strong visual elements but cannot be comfortably pegged as “visual art.” In fact, categorizing his work as a specific arts genre would be futile.

“I am committed to the exploration and development of new and experimental art forms,” Brixey explains. “My art work attempts to soulfully address the impact of advanced technology on artistic expression and the creative landscape it is dramatically altering.”

Shawn Brixey (left) and crew put final touches on his telerobot, "chimera obscura," for the exhibition, "Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics." Photo by Shawn Brixey.

Brixey’s fascination with experimental media emerged early. While he was in college, he became disenchanted with trying to represent what was in his head through drawings or sculptures. “I wanted to create emulations—the exact thing that was in my head, not a representation of it,” he recalls. “I realized that traditional arts approaches and media would limit me from exploring this. I felt that if I could understand physics, chemistry, neuroanatomy, and cosmology, I could build a strategy for achieving this radical form of art emulation.”

That realization led Brixey to M.I.T. As one of a handful of artists invited there to make experimental art, he became comfortable working with scientists and began creating works that combine the physical sciences with the creative arts.

An example of this approach is “Alchymeia,” a work done for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Brixey was invited to create a piece commenting on the spirit of the Olympics. “I think they thought I would do ice carvings,” Brixey laughs. Instead he transferred hormones from Olympic athletes into constantly changing ice crystal—or snowflake—for-mations that actually contain a tiny piece of the athlete. “To do this, I had to do science no one had ever done before,” says Brixey.

“Eon,” a new work for which Brixey received a Rockefeller Fellowship, incorporates the phenomenon of sonolumi-nescence, a process by which sound in water can be converted directly into light. Visitors to the project—in person or through the Internet—can send short, poetic emails that are then converted into text-encoded ultrasound. The ultrasound modulates a small vessel of ultrapure
water, creating a miniature star-like sonoluminescent light source. Visitors wearing specially designed headphones can “listen” to the light source—and to their own text or the voices of the net-based visitors, which are emitted from the light.

Sound complicated? It is. Brixey’s complex projects require him to gain mastery of physics concepts and then translate them in entirely new ways. Each project takes about five years to complete, including developing ideas, devising a process, and securing funding.

But even for Brixey, technology is a means, not an end in itself. “Technology serves a very particular purpose—it is a lens for observing the culture and for creating work that is on the extreme boundary of arts knowledge,” says Brixey. “For me, art is a process of inquiry. However we execute an artwork is central, but it ’s still really all about the conceptual framing of it. It’s about the idea.”

Related Article : Defying Categorization: DXARTS

[Autumn 2003 - Table of Contents]