Abstract
This essay discusses the use of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) as a site of creative practice. By creatively repositioning the GUI as a work of art it is possible to challenge our understanding and expectations of the conventional computer interface wherein the icons and navigational architecture of the GUI no longer function as a technological tool. These artistic recontextualizations are often used to question our engagement with technology and to highlight the pivotal place that the domestic computer has taken in our everyday social, cultural and (increasingly), creative domains. Through these works the media specificity of the screen-based GUI can broken by dramatic changes in scale, form and configuration. This can be seen through the work of new media artists who have re-imagined the GUI in a number of creative forms both, within the digital, as image, animation, net and interactive art, and in the analogue, as print, painting, sculpture, installation and performative event. Furthermore as a creative work, the GUI can also be utilized as a visual way-finder to explore the relationship between the dynamic potentials of the digital and the concretized qualities of the material artifact.
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Notes
- 1.
Bolter and Grusin discuss the idea of the transference of image from one media to another and the associated cultural and semantic implications associated with this activity [1]. They argue that the remediated experience (throughout media both old and new) is made up of the contradictory duality of immediacy and hypermediacy. The concept of immediacy refers to the notion of a ‘live point of view’, present in digital media. Immediacy suggests a transparent experience where the nature of the delivery medium disappears and the content / experience becomes the main focus. Conversely, the idea of hypermediacy implies that this primary experience is always intrinsically linked to the nuances of the delivery medium, from the texture of paint on canvas, to split-screen television news interviews and the screen architecture of web browser navigation devices. Hypermediacy suggests that the affect of the media is always present in the content delivery.
- 2.
Conceptual art represented a dematerialization of the art object and a questioning of art’s medium specificity. Moreover, it was interested in the redefining of the spaces in which we might encounter art. Tony Godfrey defines the works, concepts and actions of Conceptual art into four main categories. Firstly: readymades, wherein the artist recontextualizes existing material to comment on meaning or significance, (as exemplified through the work of Duchamp), secondly; interventions, the placing of an element in a different or unexpected context, thirdly; documentation, of social, cultural, or scientific phenomena or systems, and fourthly; words and the use of the written texts or trysts as artistic commentary, information, instruction or criticism [4].
- 3.
For further information on artistic references to the GUI see the following texts: From Digital Interface To Material Artifact, Proceedings of ISEA 2008 The 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Pages: 202–203, Year of Publication: 2008, ISBN: 978-981-08-0768-9 A Brief History of the Graphical User Interface in Contemporary Art Practice, 1994–2004, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information, Pages: 931–936, Year of Publication: 2005, ISBN ∼ ISSN:1550-6037, 0-7695-2397-8
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Gwilt, I. (2009). Graphical User Interface in Art. In: Furht, B. (eds) Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89024-1_28
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