Mark Davies, Hiram To, Edite Videns, John Waller, Pat Hoffie, Adam Wolter, Malcolm Enright
Seven Brisbane artists, each using new technologies, shared the exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery which was, misleadingly, called Instant Imaging. For although at the heart of each work there lay an instantaneous creative event, the generation of a digitised image, the completed works were just as carefully considered and laboriously crafted as anything on gallery walls today.
Indeed, part of the debate within the photocopy and computer art circle is concerned with how to create enduring works from processes designed for ephemeral mass culture. Computer artists, for example, often see their completed work as the final flickering image on the VDU. This brings them into conflict with gallery management who are often uncomfortable without a physical object to hang or install. Thus the unhappy compromise of this exhibition was the displaying of computer imagery as laminated prints. The results were disappointing. Despite ever-improving copying technology, the precise colours and electronic luminosity of the computer 'original' was lost. And it was made worse by the low resolution graphics of the personal computers used. The rigid alignment of pixels, gave the final images the stolid look of coarse tapestry or designer knitwear.
Adam Wolter's untitled series of prints suffered from these problems and yet, in a sense, was an answer to them. He explored the expansive field of digitised squares to rearrange, enlarge, and revalue them. The dappled image of a bespectacled man in one print was recodified into a multicoloured gridwork of pixel-lines, revealing, and reveling in, the computer elements which constitute the representation without losing representation itself.
Edite Videns' Latvian background was explored in her series of computer-generated prints in which family snapshots and postcard pictures of Riga had