Digital Arts

From the Latin digitus (finger) and the English digit (number, from the habit of counting on fingers), the term digital became popular in the 1980s to [Page 304]qualify new electronic technologies. As a form of new media, digital arts refers to artworks that use digital technology as a significant part of the creative process. It embraces an impressive variety of media and practices and uses diverse electronic devices and software, including video, photography, music, sound, light, graphics, comics, animation, video games, the Internet, interactive art, multimedia platforms, and more.

According to art historians, it is difficult to determine exactly when the digital arts emerged, but it is typically seen to date back to the 1950s. The development of technology has greatly influenced digital art practices. Key developments include the invention of the computer in the 1950s; the portable digital videotape recorder in the 1970s; the portable computer, graphic tablet, and digital video camera in the 1980s; the Internet, graphics, and video software in the 1990s; video channels like YouTube and Vimeo, smart devices, and applications in 2000s; and motion devices like the Leap Motion Controller and Microsoft Kinect in the 2010s, to name only a few.

The Deaf digital arts address a series of topics and include different artistic trends. One of the most important is Deaf View/Image Art (De’VIA), which focuses on the Deaf experience through the visual arts, featuring deafhood, oppression, audism, pride, and the experiences and struggles of Deaf people and Deaf communities as its main themes. Patricia Durr, a professor interested in Deaf cultural studies, has remarked that Deaf art could be categorized as a form of disenfranchised and affirmative art that aims to tackle history, culture, and collective experiences from the political perspective of effecting social change. Although only a few of the people who signed the De’VIA Manifesto in 1989 were doing digital art at the time, much contemporary digital artwork is inspired by this trend, including work by Arnaud Balard, who founded the Surdism movement—a Deaf innovative arts movement. Interested in focusing on the linguistic-cultural belonging to signed language rather than on Deaf experience, in 2014, 12 Deaf artists came together in a Canadian forum on the deconstruction of art practices and created a manifesto entitled Phonocentrism deconstruction. In the thought lineage of Jacques Derrida and using many kinds of text and media, they aim to deconstruct logo-phonocentrism in literature and art.

Deaf experience and sign language are at the heart of the Deaf arts. However, many forms of traditional art, such as painting, photography, etching, and sculpture, are not able to fully express movement, a major component of sign language. Digital arts offer a means to fully embrace the three-dimensionality of sign languages. Indeed, video does not have the same utility and potential for hearing and Deaf people; for the latter, it constitutes a way to access music, poetry, storytelling, performance, and literature in their original sign language.

Digital art reflects a diversity of aesthetic research interests and opens many creative possibilities for Deaf artists. Jolanta Lapiak, for example, considers photography and video not from the perspective of the production of images but rather as a digital surface to capture traces of sign language. Adopting a different approach, Sj Rideaf, Bradley Gantt, and Jason Nesmith have used clever handshapes and performances in their video work. Subtitles are also another space of innovation; some artists, such as Sean Forbes, Judy Lieff, and Deaffinity, integrate them dynamically into movies or music. Different from hearing music performed in sign language, Pamela Witcher creates her own body music to which melody is added. For her part, Christine Sun Kim reclaims sound as her property—not that of only hearing people—by rendering visual and motion sound dimensions in her artwork. Braam Jordaan, Rebecca Freund, Melissa Malzkuhn, and Paul Ososki are among the artists who explore different styles of animation and American Sign Language (ASL) storytelling through diverse techniques and digital technologies. Applications for smart devices, such as VL2, a Science of Learning Center, allow for increasing interactivity through applications featuring stories in ASL richly illustrated by the works of visual artists. Some artists also explore lightwriting, such as Klein Jürgen, Diete Fricke, and Ángel Málaga. In [Page 305]the field of graphics and photography, Ava Cardinalli, Vanessa Vaughan, Denny Guinn, Hokin Zerga, and Yiqiao Wang provide a few of the many examples of the diversity of gazes in the Deaf digital arts.

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