Interview with Patrick Goubet

When does a Digital Work become “Art”?

This is a timeless question. I would say that it’s a little like cinema. In the 1920’s and 1930’s it was not considered an art form; it only later went on to become the 7th art. Digital Art will be the same. Today, there are several kinds of digital images: there are fixed images and photos and all kinds of animated images... but the way I conceive digital art, it is a way of bringing permanent evolution to an image... giving life to an image in a timeless way... It’s a still life that becomes a living entity. What is very, very important in a digital work is that there is no beginning and no end. When you watch a video, there is always a moment when it gets to the end.You can’t run it as a loop at home because if youdo, after a few days you would go crazy because every time it reaches the end, you know it will start again and you know what will happen.

A digital artwork as I see it is a little bit like the waves on the sea or the clouds in the sky... It is something that evolves all the time. It can also be like the movement of a clock... each movement leads to the following one and there is neither a beginning nor an end. To this end, we have a project for a digital timepiece... with this, you buy a screen that you hang on the wall, and the time is made by a virtual machine that doesn’t just give the time... it makes, or produces time.

In other words, the time is no longer indicated, you have a digital concept which manufactures time. The possibilities are endless. It could be cartoon style ants that make the seconds with bricks; 60 bricks make a minute and a wall makes an hour and so on... It could be an organic form that evolves in such a way as to make time. You could imagine that if it stops, time stops.

What sparked your passion for digital images?

I have always been impassioned by images, whether they be cartoons, books or cinema, and what really was the turning point was the onset of plasma and LCD screens. When you put the Mona Lisa on a computer screen, it’s just another image. When you put the Mona Lisa on a plasma or large LCD screen on a wall, it is truly like a painting. Large flat screens have become “noble” enough for us to be able to display a real work of art. The digital works that ArtDisplay will be developing are dedicated to bringing artistic content to a flat screen.

Before, you could see Digital Artworks in museums or at shows, but you couldn’t own a Digital Artwork. ArtDisplay aims to take these works to the next step, wherein people can actually acquire digital works and call them their own.

How are ArtDisplay works spawned?

We are working with an animator and are centring our efforts on contemporary works. The first works we have produced are assemblages, where we have given life to an ensemble of digital sources.

Today we are at a stage where ArtDisplay will become a studio animating the works of many artists in such a way that even they may have never imagined until now. We will thus become editors for a number of artists. We do not have the pretention to think that we are reassessing the art world ourselves. What we want to do is to offer content for screens that does not exist today.