“Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.” N.J.PAIK

Those words might be a little disturbing, but not since the advent of the camera has something come along that changes the possiblilities of the very fabric of art making on such a grand scale as digital art. Digital art has been likened to a revolution that greatly expands the artist’s tools from the traditional raw materials like paint, ink and brush into a progressive realm of electronic technologies.

A Million Lines, an exhibition by Mark Wilson at Centre d’Art Citadine on view until Wednesday the 31 st of January is a perfect example of digital art. “Instead of doing one line, you can do 10,000”, is what Mark, a pioneer in digital art, comments about his work. This artist, who trained as a painter at Yale School of Art, always had a tendency towards geometric imagery and became quickly interested in computers. He soon realised that there was no software available to do what he wanted to do. He then got into software programming for art and started to write his own programs in the 1980’s. He kept on going and since then his works have been widely exhibited all over the US and in Europe, including especially influential exhibitions on computer art like Computers and Art at the IBM Gallery in New York, Artware at the Hannover Cebit, Nokia Gallerie Atelier E in Zurich and the 7 SIGGRAPH art shows.

For him, most artist make art that is based on other art, and it all started with Kandinsky . Giving the example of Jackson Pollock, he also says that art is finally a mechanical process like a procedure, and that digital art is just a procedural technique to create images.

In this exhibition, where it seems that visual art and maths share the same vocabulary, all the prints are a combination of basic geometrical shapes and arrangements of truly a million lines varying in width, length, colours, curvatures and directions. A couple look like 3D cylinders, but most of them form patterns of squares with hundreds of different other shapes inside, with various bright colors, all combined in non-objective abstract compositions.

As Mark Wilson says: “What’s important is what you see, not how you got there….just the beauty.” Yet, going through all those 18 digital pictures of completely abstract work, 4 printed on canvas and the rest on paper, you may find yourself reflecting about art, its meaning and its future. Can we speak about evolvement in art? Is art evolving with technology? Is art evolving with consciousness? Auroville being a progressive place interested in a new way of seeking and viewing the world, the important question could be:

What is truly evolving here?
Chana Corinne for AVArtservice

A MILLION LINES
Exhibition by Mark Wilson
Centre d’Art at Citadines
On view until 31st of January, 4:30 to 6:00 pm