<nettime-ann> Simon Biggs featured by the Archive of Digital Art

Simon BIGGS featured by the ARCHIVE of DIGITAL ART

Simon Biggs’ artistic interest in electronic and digital media goes back to the 1970s. Since then, he has evolved into one of the leading artists of the field and works as scholar, writer and curator who explores a multitude of subjects within Digital Art such as digital poetics, interactive and performative environments and posthumanity. His art works have been exhibited all over the world (including Tate Modern, Centre George Pompidou, Walker Art Center, Akademie der Kuenste Berlin) and he has held keynotes at conferences worldwide (including ISEA 2015 and ICA 2008). He was principal investigator of the HERA-funded research project ELMCIP, which developed an open.access, contributory database for electronic literature. Publications include "Remediating the Social"(2012) and "Autopoeisis" (with James Leach, 2004).

His earliest works in the genre of Digital Graphics consisted of minimalistic real-time computer animations constructed algorithmically. Today, his research topics vary from augmented reality, performance environments to electronic writing and data analysis, where he focuses on the influence of digitisation on our bodily perception between artificial intelligence, phenomenology and semiotics. His works give insights into the production and reception of meaning within a socio-technical system. The manifold expressions of his art vary from digitally mediated performance installations to computer programmes. "The Great Wall of China" (1996) is a real-time interactive language machine, which was shown in a website, a CD-ROM and an interactive installation. Through object-oriented and behavioural programming techniques and based on a basic grammar system, text emerges from the formation of the language itself as something simultaneously written and read. In "Dark Matter" (2016), multi participants interact with textual fragments and become inferred from the physical and cultural information around it to question the meaning of a "collective unconscious" within individual knowledge and identity.

Sean CUBITT: Unlike the familiar human-computer interface, Biggs opens up the body to the experience of the digital: moves the corporeal from the stasis of cinema (and the railway carriage) to the movement of architecture, ghosting in the secular the Gothic’s divine architecture of light, but preserving the escape from destiny so long fought for and so weakly held.

Wolf LIESER: As one of the first artists ever, Simon Biggs has not only made his net art works available online, but pioneered in publishing a CD-ROM with interactive software art in 2000, which sold out immediately.

Find out more about Simon BIGGS from his early works to new installations, or search for related topics and art on the keyword index: www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/biggs.html

ADA keywords: Artificial intelligence, Algorithm, Digital Graphics, Installation, Representation of Knowledge, Literature, Performativity.
www.digitalartarchive.at

The ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA), the first web 2.0 based online archive in the humanities, expands its scope of documentation by including scholars to the database.
ARTISTS and SCHOLARS are invited to become members of the online community and set up their ADA profile!
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.

COLLABORATIVE ARCHIVING OF DIGITAL ART
The large assortment of information on Jeffrey SHAW and hundreds of other leading artists and their artworks were carried out by the artists themselves in assistance with members of the ADA community. The new ADA web tool allows members to archive artist statements, works descriptions, literature, information on exhibitions, high resolution images, blueprints, videos etc. Artists and scholars are invited to contribute actively to the archive and to work collaboratively on the documentation and analysis of digital art.

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
Janina HOTH (Editor, Community Admin)
Wendy COONES, Ann-Christin RENN, Viola RÜHSE, Devon SCHILLER (Editorial Team)

digitalart.editor@donau-uni.ac.at