Digitalis is Fourth Door Review’s new media section, which aims to look beyond the hype, and disentangle the differences between where technology is genuinely liberating and where it is only addictively and captivating. It’s Fourth Door’s view that such an approach relates, even if implicitly, to ecological and green issues. The contention is that the orthodox green world hasn’t really got to grips with the hydra-headed implications of the vast ongoing surge of technologisation, either in the range of opportunity in terms of what is possible, or in technologies apparent overall narrowing of the diversity of these futures. Fourth Door Review believes it can contribute to this multilog,, both ideas and practice work to influence the colour and character of technologisation, from the wheel-barrow to the web-blog. Alongside this, Digitalis’s individual approach to new media issues, encompasses design as an answer to environmental problems; the relation between virtuality and embodiedness; and integrating the spectrum of ‘green’ philosophies into the digital futures debate. Digitalis is interested in both the old and the new, and also, given the youthfulness of new media, in how technologies mature. In romantic terms the review might be seen as attempting to introduce Permaculturalists to the Organic Computer Art of William Latham, Resurgence readers to the cyber-philosopher, Pierre Levy, and vice versa, as well as points between and beyond.
In Fourth Door Review 8’s Digitalis, a variety of themes familiar to previous editions are expanded and extended, while new aspects of the relation between new media and the physical environment are introduced. The new media artist, Susan Collins talks with new media theorist Sean Cubitt about the relation of new media art and ecological thinking. Between 2004 and 2006 Collins used web-cam technology to record and transmit two locations, one in East Anglia, the other near Pitlochry, Scotland. The resulting Fenlandia/Glenlandia works arguably introduce the notion of pixel landscape art, while Cubitt and Collins develop the notion of grey ecologies in relation to new media.
Zurich based digital architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler have developed software for robots to design building facades. Working from the city’s technical University, ETH Zurich, the pair applied this façade technique to a winery, designed by leading Swiss architects Bearth & Deplazes. This digital materiality offers new ways to engineer craft as well as re-defining the parameters of skill, which Gramazio and Kohler explain and explore in the piece. We also showcase Koln photographer and video artist Egbert Mittelstadt has developed a unique video slicing technique, he calls Split-Scan photographer. The results make for beguiling visual material, which can be applied to nature video as much as any other subject. Finally theirwork’s Dom Williamson and Emmet Connelly discuss their Open Source mapping project entitled theirwork. Based in Cornwall this is a community project, which uses new media map-work used in new and dynamic ways.
FDR7’s Digitalis focus is rather different. We profile George Dyson, both an Aleutian island baidarka boat-builder and author Darwin Among the Machines, one of the definitive texts on silicon evolution. For these reasons Dyson is the subject of the in-depth lead Digitalis interview ranging across the connections between the mind of electrons, silicon and carbon symbiosis, computers in craft as well as his lifelong absorption in baidarka culture. Such crossovers between hi-tech and the handmade characterise issue 7, with further pieces on a CD Rom of the work of Irish Calligrapher, Denis Brown, and the application of CATIER modelling technology by Frank Gehry’s Dundee timberbuild Maggies Cancer care centre.
Dyson contributes his own essay in earlier FDR6, heading up Digitalis’s two-part intro, Machine Genes, on the evolution of machines. Dyson’s piece, What if Artificial Life Isn’t is complemented by Duncan Marshall’s article on why he believes the evolutionary development of radio is a highly successful example of machine life. Digitalis is completed by a look at Artstation, drawing out the links between their papercraft, cybernetics, and computer wizardry. Also in this issue, in the Middleground and Makeshift sections there are pieces on the Italian designer, Inci Mutlu’s Wattbug technology, a friendly mechanical bug which alerts you to how much energy your home is using, and Adam Nieman’s Scale Explorer project, which demonstrates in visually appealing forms the finite nature of some of worlds critical resources, including water and air. In Makeshift Chris Rose reports on a unique symposium between Maine’s world renowned Haystack mountain school of crafts and MIT’s electronic media hothouse, The MediaLab and Kaffe Matthews tells the story of creating a sonic chair, the movement of which creates differing sounds.
In FDR5 there's an in-depth interview with Pierre Levy, cyber-philosopher and author of Collective Intelligence and Becoming Remote by fellow digital denizen Paul Ryan; an overview of the remarkable OneTree Project by its conceptualiser, Natalie Jeremijenko, the cutting edge electronic biological instrument for sensing global warming through the genetic offspring of the biotech revolution; an interview with internet poet, John Cayley on the random generations of computers for creating a progammotology poetics; and the Oslo airport based Sound-Showers installations of Swedish new media artist, Anna Karin Rynander, on how her Sound-Showers and other installation experiments can tint and alter ones everyday, built travelling environment.
In FDR4, Digitalis is distributed throughout the review, in neighbouring sections. So the first Digitalis piece appears in Margins of Music and is an extended exploration of the Future Sound of London's ISDN concerts and its potential for ecologically sensitive remote performances. Two CD Rom’s are reviewed, the first illustrating the increasing significance of new media to the world of pottery, Representing Making by Katie Bunnell in Middleground; and the second reconsidering the CD version of the I-Ching, by Malcolm Learmonth; whether falling yarrow stalks are ever the same as virtually scattered yarrow stalks are thrown in the CD’s virtual space. Lastly DOC reports on the 1998 Consciousness Reframed conference in Caerleon, Wales, convened by Roy Ascott covering the interspace of art, new media and consciousness.
FDR 2/3 launched the Digitalis section. Its main feature is an in-depth interview with the leading British digital artist, William Latham, discussing organic form, virtual and embodied sculpting, and the green uses of his mutator programme. There's also two CD Rom reviews; the first on Re-Cycled Places, an educational CD Rom developed locally for the Wildlife Trust, Railway land in the Lewes, Sussex, considering the ongoing digitisation of education in the environmental context. And second, London media centre Artec’s CD Rom on the watershed change in photography entitled From Silver to Silicon.