Where digital culture meets art

By GLIBERT WONG Arts editor

In our household Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup, the Powerpuff Girls, rule. Their Japanese anime origins are obvious. But not so obvious is the impact that anime, the Internet and other digital technologies have had on art.

Cyber-Cultures - Sustained Release is an exhibition opens on March 6 at the new home of the Moving Image Centre, the Archill Gallery in Grey Lynn. It aims to show the diverse directions in which this emerging artform is headed.

The exhibition features two "capsules," Animation Playground and Posthuman Bodies. The first includes Digital String Games 111 by New Zealand artists Maureen Lander and John Fairclough. The second, which opens on April 3, plumbs more disturbing aspects of technology, with work from Stelarc, the performance artist who seems to want to be a cyborg.

"Definition is part of the process," agrees writer and independent curator Kathy Cleland, an expatriate New Zealander who put together this snapshot of the artform for the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in New South Wales.

"I'm not sure how the debate is forming in New Zealand, but in Australia experience shows that new media becomes old media quite fast. Where do you draw the line? Digital art used to be used. The current term is new media art.

"For me it is about using digital technologies for art. Whatever area we think of, photography, sculpture, performance, digital media is having an influence.

Cleland says art has "always adopted new technologies, with photography the most recent example.

"My question is how would traditional media deal with new technologies, like genetic engineering? What art form is best suited to grapple with those areas? People ask whether this is the death of painting or sculpture and I say, of course not. It just means more tools to play with."