Creativity Bytes: A Brief Guide To App Art

Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: App art.

So, what is app art?
It’s the use of mobile applications, used by mobile devices, to create art, often experimental or abstract in nature. Quite different from, say, MoMA’s iPhone application, which allows you to virtually surf part of their extensive collection—that’s for art patrons, not art makers. There are various forms and techniques these apps can take: audio, visual, and audiovisual—sketching, generative, synthesized, glitched, collages—using gesture strokes on touchscreen technology to create unique works.

Where did it come from?
The experimental ways in which app art is created aren’t new, but the means by which it is distributed and engaged with are. Artists have long sought to be able make mass-distributed computer art programs, but the technology wasn’t yet up to the task. With the advent of 3G capable mobile devices that use touchscreen and tilt sensors and the introduction of mobile applications, it is now possible to dust off these screen-based art tools and unleash them onto the public. Allowing for the artist to collaborate on a mass scale while also getting their work seen, and getting paid for it. Even allowing for feedback, development, and improvements.

This week you’re really digging…
Pioneering tech-artist and illustrator Joshua Davis’ JD Reflect app, which combines random vector images with kaleidoscopic colours and a Japanese Hokusai-style aesthetic. You’re also looking forward to the release of master and commander of interactive abstract art, Camille Utterback’s first (of hopefully many) iPhone app. Based on her previous work, like her celebrated installation Untitled 5, it promises to be a stunning interactive experience.

Nano talk
Media artist Scott Snibbe is Charlie big cheese when it comes to art apps with three apps and over 400,000 downloads. While art apps do not account for a large percentage of downloads, more and more interactive artists are seeing it as a way to connect en masse with their audience, bringing out modified versions of their work to be explored and absorbed. The art app is a place of collisions where fine art meets commercialism, global meets the personal, disposable meets collectible.

Describe yourself as…
Duchamp with an iPad.

Keywords
Gesture, touch, app, coding, mobile, screen, abstract, interactive.

Difficulty level
Body language.

Age range
Until the day you die.

Tagline
Utility be damned.

To recap:
It is early in the evolution of the art app, but the industry will grow as more artists seek to take advantage of the mobile medium. One day soon there will be an “Art” category in the iTunes App Store and we’ll download experimental digital art like we download film, music, and books.

In two weeks: Glitch art.