MEDIA DIGITAL ART AND CULTURE IN FLANDERS BELGIUM - BAM

T R A N S P I C T I O N
Another example. Gorik Lindemans (1956) emerged as a painter, a graphic artist
and a video artist. He is known for his photo and slide installations which were
often inspired by books. Around the turn of the century he bid the art world
farewell with an exhibition and a book: a catalogue of realized and unrealized
projects which needed to be executed by his audience. The book as a medium,
a manual which includes the audience in the work and encourages it to take
over the artist’s role.
Only in 2005 Lindemans starts painting again. Very soon he invents the
transpiction technique, analogous with transpiction in music. Via a dozen of
steps in Photoshop a pixel image is created, a homage to the use of colour and
the feel for composition characterizing the bird paintings of the French painter J.
Eudes. But what is it that defines Gorik Lindemans as a media artist? Is it his use
of computer? Not really, given the basic way in which he is using it. Is it because
he is working in different art disciplines? Actually it is not that either, given the
fact that he has always been doing that. Instead, we have to conclude that it has
rather to do with a way of looking adapted to the digital era. This becomes clear
when considering his use of pictures in his drawings of houses and gardens.
Not analogue pictures as he used to create before quitting his artistic practice,
but digital ones: images characterized by their unstudied frame, made without
a viewfinder, as an écriture automatique, with positions a photographer then
or a painter now, would never take. It are exactly these snapshots, which are
characteristic to digital photography, that are embedding Lindemans’ paintings
in the media of today.
I N ?
Media art does not merely make use of a certain technology. It is not about
the media’s technology but about the environment that is created. Media art
uses media environment as a starting point. AMVK’s images of women, Nick
Ervinck’s video games, Gorik Lindemans’ digital photography: media art is
immersive art, art that departs from an environment and claims its place in that
environment.
O N Y O U R C O M P U T E R
It could be called interaction, the manner in which the remote control gives
access to the television set (or television, a remote itself, gives access to the
world); the camera to the video image; the mouse to the computer. However,
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