Specifications and products

The artists were asked to submit four pieces each. Each piece had to conform to certain specifications which imposed strong limits on what would and would not be possible. Some constraints were technological: the works were to be produced digitally, and submitted electronically. Some were formal: each had to fit the limits of an A4 sheet. All forced the artists down certain paths and blocked off others. Like all good patrons of the arts, we demanded a say in the content of the works: they were all to refer to the theme of limit.

Jennie Savage’s mouse sketches simultaneously expose and exploit the limitations of that particular artistic medium. When it comes to sketching, as anyone who has tried it will aver, a mouse is a most unsuitable tool. But it is not for all its awkwardness charmless, and it brings some of its own appropriately skittish character into the work. Its skittishness is real; a formula called ‘mouse acceleration’ translates mouse movements into pointer movements in a non-linear way. For a Mac user’s ordinary pointing and dragging, mouse acceleration is an unnoticed convenience; for the artist it is an intervention by the machine. The deliberately limited resolution of the images is a similar intervention. High resolution, for computer artists, is an essential part of Truth. But in these pictures the low resolution, with its hints at the pixellation which is the ultimate reality of digital graphic art, seems not to obscure but reveal an underlying truth about the world of the animals. Each picture meanwhile suggests a story which lies beyond the confines of its frame: the swan is either going somewhere or has come from somewhere; that badger clearly has a secret; the little duck has a plan. The neatly-bordered images point outside themselves.

Richard Powell’s dice nicely subvert the tired old jokes about the computer novice who tries to photocopy a floppy disk or paints the screen with typewriter correction fluid. Having the computer print something out is the accepted way of getting it from screen to paper. Tracing it from the screen is not. A printer would have reproduced the screen images faster, more accurately and less painfully, but this apparent act of wilful self-denial is also a demand not to be left out of the process. The dice themselves are each reduced to a single outline containing a number of small ovals. Other edges have been eliminated, leaving only ambiguous perspectival clues. To see the dice as dice, we recreate their missing bounds and edges in our minds.

Ian Llewelyn has discovered a new possibility in the effects of JPEG compression, something which one would normally seek to minimise. The JPEG algorithms were developed to store as much detail as possible in limited file sizes by progressively determining which data can be discarded by comparing areas of adjacent colour. As the compression is turned up, the process throws away more and more detail. At the tiny file sizes of his photographs the compression becomes part of image, with strange painterly distortions in blocks and stripes. Digital photography still aspires to, and is still measured by, the aesthetic values and achievements of film. These pictures represent digital photography as a medium in its own right, by recognising that it has its own particular limits and bounds.