Featured on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA): BILL SEAMAN – transdisciplinary explorations of meaning production and the process of creativity
"So instead of writing about meaning production, I empower the exploration of meta-meaning processes that arise via self-directed engagement." Bill Seaman, ADA Artist Interview, 2020 ADA features Bill Seaman – media artist, professor, researcher and philosopher bridging Neuroscience, Computer Science, the Arts and Humanities. He has been employing various digital media and other technological means since the 1980´s to explore language, meaning and knowledge production and the potentials of Computational Creativity. His artistic method is rooted in a transdisciplinary manner of cooperation with other artists, scientists, philosophers and designers, bringing about works that use the language of poetics and metaphor, but are always highly informed by scientific thought. Through building on a number of different perspectives and through their interactivity, the works of Bill Seaman also offer the viewer the possibility of a multi-perspective approach, the possibility to engage in a conversation with the artwork and take away different things each time they interact with the piece. https://www.digitalartarchive.at/features/featured-artists/featured-artist-bill-seaman.html Bill Seaman has exhibited his work in galleries, museums and festivals all around the world: at the Canadian National Gallery in Ottawa, Canada, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany and the 3rd Art and Science International Exhibition in Beijing, China, to name just a few. He has won a number of awards including two awards from Ars Electronica in Interactive Art, an Award in the Visual Arts from the Rockefeller Foundation and a Leonardo Award for Excellence, for “OULIPO | vs | Recombinant Poetics”. Currently he is working as a professor at the department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, where he also co-directs The Emergence Lab together with John Supko. Since 1979 Bill Seaman has been exploring image, sound and text relationships through various different media and technologies. From the start his works were characterized by collaborations with other artists and researchers and an interest in engaging the viewer into the artwork on a deeper level, by providing the possibility of active participation. Video as a poetic technological instrument became another medium central to Seamans early work. He explored the possibilities of distorting the material qualities of video, e.g. through editing, slow or stop motion techniques and also investigated the manipulation of language, by employing puns, word-plays and polyvalent language. These works focus on the relationships of image, sound and text and led Seaman to working in the field of "Recombinant Poetics", a term he coined in the 1990´s. “Recombinant Poetics” refers to non-hierarchical combinatory structures of text, video and sound elements being combined and re-combined by the viewers of the artwork themselves. Through his interactive involvement, the viewer becomes aware of the relations between the different media elements and his mind set and directly experiences how meaning arises and shifts as the various media elements are constantly recontextualised and act upon each other. Please find 31 artworks fully documented here: https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/seaman.html "Bill Seaman achieves a complex, reciprocal ordering of words and images which transforms the observer into a composer of new image/word/sound sequences, and carries the idea of an 'open work of art' to a fusion of poetry, music and video." Dieter Daniels, "Ars ex machina", in. artintact 1 “Bill Seaman explores the potential of extending our “ability to experience, generate, operate on, store, edit, and disseminate meaningful patterns of experience” through what he terms recombinant poetics.” Diane Gromala BECOME A MEMBER ON THE ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA) ARTISTS and SCHOLARS are invited to become members of the online community and set up their ADA profile! ADA recently received a 1.2 Million grant together with Art University Linz and Angewandte Vienna to develop ADA into a research and - most importantly - an international teaching tool for art schools and information resource for galleries and museums. Therefore we would like to **invite all artists and scholars, who fulfil the criteria - 5 exhibitions and/or articles - to become a member now**. Create your profile and upload information on your works and exhibitions. We try to document, interfaces and displays and other inventions, soft- and hardware configurations, literature, keywords and high res visuals to allow the next generation of artists to learn with the best information, to give scholars the research resource they need and museums, if they want to start a collection, the essential information. To ensure a high academic standard, five published articles and/or exhibitions are required to become members of the ADA community. Apply for an account here: www.digitalartarchive.at/support/account-request.html SHARE YOUR RESEARCH WITH PEERS AND THE COMMUNITY Community members can upload publications and PDFs, announce upcoming events, post comments, document exhibitions, conferences and other relevant news. ADA: THOUSANDS OF ARTWORKS Since its foundation in 1999, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (former Database of Virtual Art) has grown to be the most important online archive for digital art. In cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions it has been documenting the rapidly evolving world of digital art and its related fields for more than a decade and contains today a selection of thousands of artworks at the intersection of art, science and technology. ARTISTS and SCHOLARS are invited to join the community and set up their own archive pages. EXPANDED DOCUMENTATION FOR THE NEEDS OF DIGITAL ART Due to the processual, ephemeral, interactive, technology-based and fundamentally context-dependent character of digital art, it is at risk for becoming extinct without an adequate documentation. Therefore, the ADA is based on an expanded concept of documentation, which takes account of the specific conditions of digital art. ARTISTS represented, among many others: Rebecca ALLEN, Suzanne ANKER, Cory ARCANGEL, Roy ASCOTT, Louis BEC, Maurice BENAYOUN, Paolo CIRIO, Charlotte DAVIES, FLEISCHMANN & STRAUSS, Masaki FUJIHATA, Ken GOLDBERG, Agnes HEGEDÜS, Lynn HERSHMAN LEESON, Ryoji IKEDA, Eduardo KAC, Ken RINALDO, KNOWBOTIC RESEARCH, Lev MANOVICH, George LEGRADY, Golan LEVIN, Rafael LOZANO-HEMMER, Joseph NECHVATAL, Michael NAIMARK, David ROKEBY, Jeffrey SHAW, Julius v. BISMARCK, Paul SERMON, Karl SIMS, SOMMERER & MIGNONNEAU, STANZA, Nicole STENGER, THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD, Peter WEIBEL, et al. Advisory board: Christiane PAUL, Roy ASCOTT, Beryl GRAHAM, Erkki HUHTAMO, Gunalan NADARAJAN, Jorge LA FERLA. ADA TEAM: Oliver GRAU (Head and Scientific Conception) Philipp HOFFMANN, Wendy COONES, Rachel MÜLLER, Renato ROCHA-SOUZA (Editorial Team) digitalart.edi...@donau-uni.ac.at -- rohrpost - deutschsprachige Liste zur Kultur digitaler Medien und Netze Archiv: http://www.nettime.org/rohrpost http://post.in-mind.de/pipermail/rohrpost/ Ent/Subskribieren: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rohrpost/
