Welcome to Digital Visions, a juried virtual on-line exhibition coordinated by emerging artists and curators at the University of British Columbia.

The essays on this site combine to form an information resource about digital artworks and on-line projects selected from many different social and cultural contexts, from Latin America to Europe. The authors were challenged to create new theses and critical vocabularies to represent these new works.

Technology users can communicate on the net through chat lines, websites, blogs or other related e-media spheres (cell phones, text messages) and participate in information dissemination. Computers not only serve as a communications channel but also as transaction and distribution channels. Digitized materials can be interactive or constructed from different components of data residing in time. The computer can deliver multimedia content. It can carry not only text and graphics but also audio, video content and 3-D visualization.

Digital media’s ability to re-author, order or change lifestyle choices are shaking up the world and our understanding of physical geography. The ability to work in digitized media will also have a major impact on social interaction as more and more people access increasing volumes of instant information and different software tools that enable them to be a sound editing engineer or a digital photographer or a composer.

With these considerations in mind, the exhibition’s artists and authors began to question the constructs of computer culture and the "des frags" or small snippets of computer culture captured from which may of the artists reviewed use as source materials to explore, appropriate and re-contextualize back on-line.

Concepts of construction, networks and the placement of the user or viewing art public were considered in relation to these net art and digital pieces by each author. Where artists challenged traditional notions of time and space, the writers reflected on these arenas as new platforms where emergent vocabularies, ideologies, and social structures hybridize and where the potential of avant-garde expression might reside.

Viewers' judgments of the enclosed selection of artwork curated from Latin America to Europe will largely depend on their understanding of the concepts of computer culture and their subsequent interactions in relation to computer technology’s developments. Viewers who lack such contexts may find themselves alienated from the exhibition's artworks. This dilemma may be unavoidable, as the exhibition's artists are introducing new concepts and technical variables, and in this way, paralleling the reception of a historical avant-garde whose innovative concepts were misunderstood in their originating context and time, yet through cultural dissemination and temporal distance were later fully understood and appreciated by audiences. The vanguard is, after all, about the creation of innovative and inventive artworks whose subjects, mediums, techniques and styles are in tension with their current context. Avant-gardes push the known boundaries of socially acceptable art through their development and articulation of new cultural and political values. This exhibition is consequently sited at the point where boundaries between the avant-garde and new electronic social landscapes are simultaneously questioned and realized.

Against this backdrop, the computer movement continues to grow, allowing a free flow of information and resources to those who are on-line. To assert presence means to assert identity in the electronic social landscape (ESC); this involves the participation, ownership and ability of persons to navigate and to efficiently use computer technology to conduct tasks, express ideas or search for new content or territories via digitized media platforms. The creation of artworks that reflect on computer use, intent, and rationale are inevitably comments on the viewer’s e-lifestyle and relationship to the supporting machinery. The ability for future artists, writers and others in the creative realm -- whether commercial, scientific, or artistic -- requires access to previous information and a comprehension of what others have built. With this in mind, please explore the Digital Visions website.

Sylvia G Borda, MFA
Digital Visions, Committee Chair
digitalvisions@ontherundesign.com