Net Artist Asks What's Real in Online Images

Need a reason to stop ignoring art online? Try the HatePlow Tumblr, or Z_D_ as the page is titled, which collects the work of Portland artist Zack Dougherty, who does some interesting things with gifs — and reality. Gifs, those little animated images of pixelated dancing cats, have grown up and are becoming a format of choice for artists on the social web. And on Z_D_, gifs are scratching the boundaries of the uncanny valley between the real and the generated image.

All the the gifs below were published in the last few months and are shown in chronological order, though they are only a small selection of Dougherty’s output during that time. This string of works has gone from revealing the wire frame behind digital image generation, through an exploration of the aesthetics of various 3D computer modeling, animation, and rendering programs, and leaves us to sort out what was real and what was made in the computer.

c. Zack Dougherty

The first in this collection introduces the viewer to the concept of more polygons equaling more resolution. This is a factor of digital rendering most of us are at least peripherally aware of from watching any Pixar movie: as processing power improves, computers can put more math, and thus more polygons, into a 3D model. Here the face slowly resolves, adding polygons until we might be seeing a real face, scrubbing the playhead of resolution back and forth trying to find the exact edge of ‘realness,’ and testing the “uncanny valley.”

The uncanny valley is a concept in computer animation and robotics denoting the space between comfortably real people and the cartoonish parodies of humans made to seem charming (think WALL·E or C3P0). In between lies the similar, but not exact recreation of a person whose minute differences leave him/her feeling unsettling to human observers. But the uncanny valley doesn’t only apply to human likenesses, but also to the line between real and generated objects in the images we see online.

c. Zack Dougherty

Objects can be confusingly unreal as well. Here low resolution shape is mashed up with high resolution texture, leaving the middle face out of sync along the digtial-real sliding scale. The flickering statue in the background leaves behind a trace of the computer generated object, in what otherwise might have been a standard gallery documentation shot. But the images ask more questions than they answer. Are the heads sculpturally stylized to look digital? Is the room generated too?

c. Zack Dougherty

Is the digitally generated image, the white network of lines, made to resemble a real world photograph or is the entire image completely generated? Is what I’m looking at physical, an actual rock from actual Earth or entirely made by the computer?

c. Zack Dougherty

Dougherty’s next set of real objects are twisted, scaled and otherwise left with the markings of digital manipulation (above), then completely, recognizably digital objects start showing up in real places. A plastic texture covers the roman carved face and chess piece neck balanced on top of a too-perfect, shiny grey sphere, the painted lines of the parking lot reflected in its rocking surface.

c. Zack Dougherty

The work also hints at its own relationship to previous generations of visual art, even reanimating carved busts, from back when art was, and here comes that word again, more real, carved from chunks of rock dug out of the Earth, the height of advanced technology at the time.

c. Zack Dougherty

Or a swelling cairn stuck on a modern street. Is it the elastic pull of the of the rocks or that somehow still-in-existence pay phone that makes the image unsettling — real, but not quite?

c. Zack Dougherty

The answer to these mounting questions? The work argues that it doesn’t matter if what you are looking at is real or generated and asks you just to wait in the liminal space between things, with all its eerie quirks. Dougherty is then a conceptual realist, interested in what images look like being out of sync with what, or sometimes where, they are. This work is made for eyes that are accustomed to spotting photo manipulation in online images, for minds that see little difference between ‘real’ photographs and filtered Instagrams. It’s for all of us, online right now, reading this article, saturated with the aesthetics of digital life.

The expectation of digital manipulation on everything we see allows for a more plastic relationship to real things. Z_D_ is a great example, but net art itself is blurring the harsh seam between authentic and recreation. We accept work in museums or galleries as real, and likely scarce, and thus authentic. But that’s the thing about art online, there’s no scarcity, and without scarcity our ideas of original and forgery, real and generated no longer apply.