[spectre] BILL SEAMAN: Featured on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA)

[Oliver Grau]

BILL SEAMAN: Featured on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA)
Transdisciplinary explorations of meaning production and the process of
creativity
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/features/featured-artists/featured-artist-bill-seaman.html



"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/database/artists/general/artist/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.
 
Bill Seamans impressive body of work is represented and archived
thoroughly, with images, video and details on technology and exhibitions
on his ADA artist profile:  
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/seaman.html

 
 
Quotes:
"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, to become a member now, to create a profile, upload
information on your works and exhibitions. We document, as you can see
here, interfaces and displays and other inventions, soft- and hardware
configurations, literature, keywords and high res visuals of all kinds
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, Erkki HUHTAMO, Gunalan
NADARAJAN, Martin ROTH, et. al.

ADA TEAM:
Oliver GRAU (Head and Scientific Conception)
Wendy COONES, Philipp HOFFMANN, Carla Milena ZAMORA CAMPOS , Rachel
MÜLLER, Renato ROCHA-SOUZA (Editorial Team)
digitalart.editor at donau-uni.ac.at