PATRICK LICHTY: ON DIGITAL MINIMALISM

Patrick Lichty: My parents bought me a personal computer when they were first available in the United States in 1978. I was on the internet as early as 1983 and became involved in digital art in the mid-1980s in online communities like CompuServe, where I made animated GIFs. However, back in the 1970s, I made images with code referring to science fiction movies, like TRON. My obsession with computers led my parents to believe I should be an engineer, but what was important was that I was drawing on the screen, and this is something my parents didn't grasp the importance of.

The idea of history in digital art is a strange thing; for most, the late 1990s is ancient, but I think it's important to know that I got started in the 70s as a teenager, then have been interested in how culture and technology shape one another, and to this day, I weave together ideas that were being worked with as far back as the 1970s, or even the dawn of the 19th century, if you count working in Jacquard (I currently do AI-based Jacquard weavings as well). My attention to art history spans much of my work, even the idea of low resolution and film grain in PIXEL GRAIN.

I have been intensely interested in art, culture, and technology for three decades and have sought to explore the possibilities in new genres whenever possible.

PL: My earliest work was naive, consisting of fan/science fiction and derivative art, but there was neon art that gained some recognition. However, due to health concerns associated with that medium, I transitioned to working with traditional and digital media. One of my first projects was a body of 24 watercolors created by reading nothing but Kandinsky's CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART and POINT AND LINE TO PLANE as a basis of inspiration.

The paintings had my sensibilities but looked like I had taken a class with Kandinsky. Although I was working with traditional and digital techniques, I worked to translate my traditional skills to technology, using programs like PC Paintbrush, Fractal Design Painter, and CorelDRAW and finding ways to try to output my work. I found Rick De Coyte and his Silicon Gallery in Philadelphia, and ironically, I found him again in Dubai in 2018.

PL: By the mid-1990s, I started making images I didn't find embarrassing or overly derivative, which were early memes for theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Also, by that time, I knew people in the cyberpunk community, like the publishers of FringeWare Review, Mondo 2000, and Bruce Sterling.

Close to that time, I also began making rock videos with my collaborator Jon Epstein based on visual sociology and media culture. They were for our band/media group, Haymarket Riot, and the videos were the Machine and Web series, which are still online. They are pastiches of video and 3D animations I did that were a distant relative of the media group, Emergency Broadcast Network. They were also a culture hack, as Epstein and I inserted these into 37 graduate sociology programs as media texts. This culture hacking led to my work as part of RTMark and The Yes Men.

In the mid-90s, I got on the Thingist and Rhizome lists, where I became an adjunct member of the New York digital art community, although I lived in North Canton, Ohio. I was lucky that there were some other great artists like Gregory Little (who had taught Liz Phair, Cory Arcangel, and members of Paper Rad at Oberlin College). He is a graduate of the Yale Art Program and taught digital art at a regional branch of Kent State University. Another great friend and colleague was a local Beatnik digital artist with a great studio named Jerry Domokur, who died about 15 years ago. They gave me local inspiration.

Internationally, through mailing lists like Rhizome, Thingist, Spectre, and more, I met the net.art community, including longtime colleagues like Joseph Delappe, Christiane Paul, UBERMORGEN Vuc Cosic, Lev Manovich, the McCoys, and more. If I became internationally known, this is probably the period when it happened.

An odd incident is that I was in Minneapolis from 1994 to 1998, where I fell in love with plotter drawing after making friends with Roman Verostko, although I would not make much machine drawing until 2003.

PL: In Verostko's studio, he showed me how he made marks with his algorithms. These days, I am much more knowledgeable about how he generates his shapes, but what impressed me was that he was taking plotter pens and making custom ones with casein inks and even mounting a large Chinese brush to plot single curves. And these were often on fine papers I had not imagined suitable for digital creation. I wanted to be his student, but this could have been more practical. I would return to the idea of robotic painting about a decade later.

Also, during 1994 to 2008, when I lived intermittently in Minneapolis, there was another artist, Bruce Shapiro, a doctor who had become disillusioned with the imprecision and greed of the medical profession to take up robotic metal sculpture. He had his own XY tables with plasma torches and grinders, and I made a piece called FALLEN MAN. He would develop this love of motion control to start Sisyphus Industries, where he creates meditative sand tables.

Returning to machine drawing, I needed more space and resources to have plotters. Still, in the early 2000s, I began experimenting with small autonomous robots until I found ones to program and have them react to the environment. I had ones that could carry Sumi-e brushes and would wander around a large piece of paper until it encountered a large piece of wood, a trash bin, or anything else I placed in the space, where it would change direction. This repetitive motion would create beautiful abstract patterns. I would experiment with these through the 2000s, most notably with the ROBOTS AND IMAGE MACHINES exhibition at Kent State University in 1999 and ZEN FOR BOT at Barristers' Gallery in New Orleans in 2006–7.

It was in the 2010s that I would work with plotters. My beginning to work with plotters would lead to solo shows in 2013–15 in New Orleans and New York: RISE OF THE MACHINES (New Orleans) and SENSIBLE CONCEPTS (New York). After that, I moved to the United Arab Emirates, with commissions for the Ministry of Education, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, and the SIKKA Art Festival.

Another interesting point is that I was involved with activism and performance art. I was one of the original RTMark/The Yes Men and was part of events with Guillermo Gomez Pena and the Critical Art Ensemble. My performance background would lead me to a longtime friendship with FLUXUS artist Larry Miller, leading to Al Hansen's daughter and NoWave artist/factory denizen Bibbe Hansen becoming part of my Second Life performance art group, Second Front.

There are other notable artists and festivals I've collaborated with, but that takes us up to the mid-2000s and the beginning of the post-internet era.

PL: I think there are three definitions. The best and most general definition is someone consistently recognized for their cultural contributions. Second, the SIGGRAPH conference (a global symposium on computer imaging) has a Pioneers program, which is very prestigious and by nomination only, and that is why we use this term in digital art. Last, some people self-define for promotion, which is fair.

PL: Being connected to some deep wells of computer art history, the term has some specific issues. First, calling oneself a "pioneer" is like saying you are "first" at anything. Someone once told me that to denote a first also presupposes a last, which can be a trap for oneself. However, in the history of art and technology, there are many cases in which "firsts" are spurious. Therefore, calling oneself a pioneer is more of a position where one is either given or claims primacy, which I'd like others to judge.

But in the end, if I am someone who helped build digital art for what, three decades now, that's probably realistic.

PL: I first started this as a lecture on digital art history, and that didn't serve the point I was trying to make. I began with a passion for art, tied to my writing and activism. So, in any of my art, it is a response to an event, a desire to converse about critical issues, explore new techniques, or delve into art history or media culture, all with a dash of irony.

This approach has different meanings over time; in the beginning, I focused more on sociology and art history, then tactical media and critical art, then performance, as in my Second Life performance group, Second Front, and now mixing AI with ancient digital techniques, like Jacquard weaving.

PL: The main changes are the professionalization of the genre, its integration into art academia and the contemporary art world, and its requisite effects. There is still a great bifurcation between the festival world and the gallery/museum world, and the circulation of capital mainly defines this.

PL: I am also a curator, with about 15 shows to my credit and essays in books by Christiane Paul, Janet Marstine, and Ho King Kay. Part of this comes from the fact that, thirty years ago, the cultural landscape for digital media essentially did not exist in the contemporary world. By making, curating, and writing, one opens up conversational spaces in which others in the space become familiar with your ideas.

Consider the books, ART AND THEORY. These volumes are primarily filled with texts by artists. Tzara wrote, and Kandinsky wrote. O'Keefe wrote. But I have a wide range and sometimes write about performance studies or sociology. I may diverge from my peers in my broad range of studies.

Curating serves many functions; it allows the curator to create a discursive space to highlight trends, engage critical issues, or allow artists to place themselves in the middle of a point cloud of others or to lift colleagues. It gives the practitioner a space for discussion. I particularly enjoy Robert Filiou's Gallery in a Hat and Hans Ulrich Obrist's early apartment project, especially using the refrigerator. It allows one to create spaces for what they want others to see and for work that they are interested in.

Being involved in all areas of cultural production is expansive and generous; it isn't so inwardly focused. While it is about one's understanding, it is also about mapping the terrain and clearing space for others. I also greatly respect curators building diverse spaces, and I find my spaces much less necessary in the West; therefore, I focus on media artists outside the West and the Global North these days.

PL: Much of this comes from methods based on Visual Sociology and the art of Marcel Duchamp. I observe culture and explore current technology, social justice, society, and art conversations. As a critical artist, a question arises about some aspect of art, myself, or the world I want to explore. I love to explore technologies that feel interesting in terms of their gestural or formal qualities. A third aspect is a consideration of contemporary media art and how it relates to art history. Mixed in with this is frequently a slightly contrarian aesthetic.

For example, with PIXEL GRAIN, coming from a project called 8 Bits or Less, I had this little Casio WQV-1 wrist watch camera. I began thinking of a panoptic society in which surveillance and sous-veillance (grass-roots observation.) I also think of a quote by Paul Virilio: "There are eyes everywhere/There is no blind spot left." Before Androids and iPhones, I wondered what it meant to have eyes all over us, always watching. Also, what image would I get from my wrist instead of a more formal phone or conventional camera? Having the camera mounted on my wrist gave me a different perspective.

Additionally, the fact that the images were generated by the phone (120 x 120 pixels, 16 shades of gray, and highly compressed) meant that the images were crude. The formal nature of these images made me think about the desire for high resolution in digital images, and I wanted to resist this, as the pictures had a charm. Also, the compression had a formal quality that reminded me of film grain and was something I didn't want to correct.

And lastly, and I am recently more comfortable with this, is my lifelong battle with severe eye issues like cataracts, retinitis pigmentosa, and glaucoma. These have affected my vision throughout my life, and using the wristcam also reflected on this existential state.

This process is all a diagram of how I approach such a question. I either find an aspect of culture or technology that raises questions; this can come from the overall situation or the effects of technology. I then, as Duchamp said, let the medium follow the idea.

PL: The secrecy was not as covert as you might think; I did not announce it. That was secret for situations like going through LaGuardia security a month after 9/11 or shooting my dentist working on my teeth.

The wristwatch cameras (the Casio WQV-1, 3, and the color WQV-10) reminded me of the little spy cameras I could get as a kid from the novelty company, Johnson Smith, that captured those little moments. It also felt a little rebellious to take photos wherever I wanted at the time, but my intentions were much more innocent than I'd imagined someone would be today—this was the dawn of these devices. Perhaps it was simply wondering what the world would look like from my wrist, much like Stelarc placing a third ear on his arm.

PL: This is a crucial point; in 2001, this was much less common. These devices were much less universal than in the 2020s. Considering that 2000 was a critical moment for techno culture, digital art, and so on, going around with a wristwatch camera relatively soon after that was a form of creating an artist's existential photo journal of the time. I wanted to record life from that perspective and note the surreal quality of that vantage point.

PL: From 2000 to 2004, I lived in Louisiana, mainly in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I had family in South Central Texas at the time, and as a contemporary artist, you go to New York whenever you can. These places are where I took the bulk of these photographs.

The photographs I took during that time with my wristwatch camera are almost a documentary of my life as they are artistic. It is a self-documentary of this weird journey called life. We have to live in the moment and pay attention to our surroundings. These destinations were where I happened to be at the time. I respected that I was there and taking the time to notice the exciting and strange things around me.

One example is the oil wells decorated with quarterbacks and butterflies in Luling, Texas. That was unlike anything I’ve ever seen and captured the idea that while I may not have an unusual part of me, I find unusual things fascinating.

I love the look and shape of dominoes, if that’s an odd thing to say. When you put them together, they create a beauty and tension that is truly captivating, with geometric shapes that repeat, curve, and form interesting designs.

Lastly, there are the photographs of cats. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m in love with cats, almost to the point of obsession sometimes. Loving animals is one of those supremely human things that ground us when everything seems to be going haywire. Cats are these beautiful little beings who share the ride.

PL: I knew a lot of Fluxus artists, the art group that Yoko Ono was part of. They taught me that life and art are the same and that everything is a process. I learned that the moment is a work of art. Looking at that with intention is bringing out the beauty in the moment, the strangeness, or the impact.

Instead of being tightly intentional about framing specific images, I would take pictures documenting where I was at the moment. The Brooklyn Bridge images, for example, were taken while I was on the subway, probably on my way to the airport. I found the structures of the bridge incredibly impressive. I wanted to photograph them to show others the amazing things I discovered. Twenty-five years later, I still feel the same way.

I was exploring what it means to consider documenting art as a part of life rather than approaching it as a formal photographer who intentionally frames a shot.

One aspect of living in the digital age is that we often become so obsessed with our destination that we forget to appreciate the journey itself. As I get older, every moment becomes more precious, and when I travel, I make a conscious effort to pay attention to my surroundings. It's truly magical when you think about it. No matter how beautiful or strange a place may be, I have the privilege of standing, sitting, or walking there—and I respect that.

PL: I went to NYC in October of 2001 to witness Ground Zero. A friend had a studio on the 42nd floor, a few blocks away. We had lunch, and then I went to the window, and my stomach sank. I was looking down into this massive hole with some pilings sticking up. This hole used to be the World Trade Center. Seeing it on TV is one thing, but looking into the hole changes your life.

My friend Michael Richards, who was a sculptor with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and was in residence there, died in the event. That made seeing that hole even harder.

I wandered the streets, trying to capture the feeling of the place. It was striking to see ribbons and memorials everywhere. There were wooden walls around the site, like any typical New York construction site. While memorials and pictures were on the walls and around the sides, people were just moving around as needed. For me, this didn’t mean that people stopped caring; it just meant that this was not the end of the world. I think that was a very hopeful moment.

In my memories, I also spent a couple of times sitting in Trinity Chapel near Ground Zero. There was a heavy feeling in the air, a mix of grief and loss from what had happened, but there was also a sense that this was a place for healing.

PL: I had been exploring my life through the lens of my wrist for some time when I decided to formalize these observations into a cohesive format. The images worked wonderfully as low-resolution prints and photomosaics (though the photomosaics were never shown).

Concurrently, I began experimenting with the images as photographs, shooting a series 1.5 seconds apart, which became video clips. These were compiled into 8 BITS OR LESS, the video counterpart to PIXEL GRAIN. Since 8 BITS OR LESS served as the umbrella term, this series of photographs could also be titled 8 BITS OR LESS: PIXEL GRAIN.

Additionally, 8 BITS OR LESS expressed an Arte Povera Digital Minimalism approach to digital photography, as I did not have the resources to afford something like a digital Hasselblad. It explored my fascination with low fidelity in a digital street punk style.

PL: The experience I remember most vividly was at SIGGRAPH, the international computer art conference that typically attracts about 6,000 attendees each year. The conceptual project took many forms, all representing my exploration of low-res aesthetics. There were images—both single and collaged (like the rectangular one-meter-wide collages at SIGGRAPH)—as well as videos for festivals and a live performance, which I believe only occurred twice.

The print versions were showcased at SIGGRAPH, and another set of 49 prints (30 cm each) was featured in a show at Diverse Works called THOUGHT CRIMES. The videos were presented at SIGGRAPH and ISEA 2002 in Nagoya, among other venues.

When I displayed the videos at festivals, they were shown in theaters at full cinematic size. My favorite moments were when the pixels appeared about one foot tall. The Canal Street Projection Project in 2003 was exceptional as well; video art was projected across Canal Street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras onto the buildings on the opposite side. These were large xenon industrial projectors, so the impact was significant. It was incredible to see my cats 40 feet tall on the architecture across the street. Imagine Milo the cat at 40 feet tall on the side of an office building.

PL: In a paper I wrote during my master's studies called CAUGHT IN THE GRID, which is all about pixel aesthetics, pixels became a choice around 2000, when the resolution was commonly available to the point where one did not have to accept pixelation. I echoed this in another essay called WHY DIGITAL MINIMALISM, a precursor to Glitch, where low resolution, limited palettes, and the like serve as formal constraints to digital formalism. In the latter days, I respect what Rosa Menkman has done with compression aesthetics, where she studied the pixelation of digital image formats. Jon Cates did this with Dirty New Media by taking digital images down to purely black and white, which is notoriously hard to control.

Although that work predates these essays by a few years, they are the root of these ideas, as I would even reproduce even more scaled-down versions of these photos in ceramic tile. I didn't accept what the camera gave me as such; I chose to use what it gave me as raw material.

PL: Digital Minimalism responded to the endless move towards technology, as in higher resolution, faster animation frame rates, more giant machines, and so on.

Two ideas fed this: one was an idea to do more with less, like Arte Povera or Punk. The other was a position to regard a deep formalism of the digital down to pixel aesthetics or to create minimal platforms like small chip or microprocessor-driven artworks. In some ways, it reflects my argument that higher-tech digital art, which is more about realism and direct representation of the subject it discusses, decreases the imagination. This area of my work suggests that it is more interesting to leave these gaps or not have that extra resolution in the work.

PL: Probably, or maybe it went beyond what I had been working for in my advocacy of digital art and new media. In the 90s, I aimed to help create spaces where the contemporary art world would hear technological artists and not have them relegated to computer graphics festivals.

That began with the 2000 Whitney Biennial, then with the rise of objective post-internet art in the mid-2000s. NFTs furthered this by creating provenance for digital media in and of itself, which is essential for the high-art ecosystem.

NFTs helped digital art develop in ways I see as logical in the collector/gallery/museum ecosystem.

What comes next?

Perhaps next-generation forms of blockchain migration and conservation.