3 The Development of Pictorial Language in Live Visuals

In 1997, Image/ine, the first software for commercially available personal computers — in contrast to high-performance machines in professional video and television environments — appeared on the market, which enabled live sampling and the continuous processing of previously recorded image sequences in real time.^[3]

The means of composition at that time corresponded with the technological possibilities. Short, recorded image sequences were digitally manipulated and overlapped. The reuse and recombination of media elements (remixing) as an esthetic method was dominant in the 1990s. Because of the low processing power (compared to today), videos could only be processed in real time at a very low resolution (320 x 240 pixels). The enlargement on the actual projection surface resulted in highly pixelated images. This typical ‘pixel look’ of the time did not necessarily reflect the express desire of the artists; in actual fact, they were working and experimenting within the scope of the possibilities and limitations of the available software and hardware.

Soon after, the applications Nato.0+55+3d^[6]

The motto generate, don’t make collages (Jan Rohlf) aptly describes the moment at which the issue of pictorial language became wide open for debate again.^[8] In the design of a digital composition, the technology of computation also contained an element of chance: artists lay down certain rules, the computer performs these processes and supplies results within the predefined conditions, and the outcome is an infinite number of visual options. Although visual artists maintain control over the process and the process conditions, the chance factor also produces results that are scarcely predictable at the beginning of the process.^[9] The artists’ group Ubermorgen^[10] consciously incorporates an element of chance in its work The Sound of eBay (2008), in which sound and image are automatically generated by the same external data source, namely by eBay user data.