by Jodie Keeling

Digital Display: A Visit to AMODA

zero... one... It's Tuesday night, February 26th. The Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) is having its monthly showcase at Texture (505 Neches). The club is crowded. Xingu Hill, the featured musician for the hour, is on center stage. His instruments- a laptop, a keyboard, and a mixer, sparsely decorate the table before him. A minimal setup, maximum sound. His music delivers a mixture of deep, down tempo rhythms with expansive atmospheric soundscapes. It's danceable. Yet most everyone in the club is sitting, grooving in their chairs as a captive audience, listening and watching the screen just behind him.

Ben Hodges, a graduate student at the Americo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the visual artists featured for the night. His work is a blend of multiple media- still photography, Super 8, 16 mm, and digital video. He warns me that the particular technology he is using for tonight's projection is very outdated- two VCR's stacked upon each other. From the joystick of a mixing board he cuts between the two decks, phrasing images. He says he's interested in seeing the way people move through unfamiliar territory. A female figure makes her way across the screen in extreme slow motion. By digitally slowing the speed of her movement, her natural gait becomes a ballet of subtly punctuated, emotionally charged movements. We see in her walk, nuances of anticipation and hesitation about that which she is moving towards, emotions that likely would go unnoticed if it were projected in "real" time.

Over the course of the hour, Hodges demonstrates AMODA's inclusive approach to programming. There is room for most visual media at these monthly showcases- music, illustration, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and video. What then is digital art for AMODA? Digital art is defined on their website as any art whose final form is digital in nature. It is art that uses digital technology at some stage in its creation, and art that addresses and discusses digital technology. Any art that has been influenced in the slightest way by digital technology is digital art, a very broad encompassing definition.

This broad definition and the pervasiveness of digital technology in art and music, has some conjecturing about a faraway day when the brush will be rendered obsolete, celluloid film dead, and musical instruments a thing of the past. Much of the same attitude was spoke when photography came about in the late 19th century, so I've read. Photography was going to be the death of painting. For up until that time, painting was wedded to realism. Now, reality could be captured in a moment's flash, with unprecedented accuracy. But rather than killing painting, photography liberated the brush to move from reality into a hundred new directions spawning a creative renaissance.

Most of us are resistant to change to some degree. I know many of my friends who feel defensive of themselves as digital artists, and their tools as a legitimate artistic medium. I also find myself on each side of the coin, both questioning and defending them and their art. Lately, when I'm on the flip side, my friends remind me of how they are like Steiglitz and others who had to put up a considerable fight to defend the legitimacy of photography as a continuum of art. At the Armoury Show, he deliberately hung photos next to Georgia O'Keefe paintings to make the visual comparison between photography and painting as two equal but different forms of art. The truth is though the folks down at AMODA are already making their own strong case for themselves as digital artists and the computer as an expressive medium. Their assimilation of other formats combined with the capacity for creative digital manipulation serves them similarly to Steiglitz's bold comparisons...and the creative renaissance? Keep it happening.