:04.2005 Interview to LIA LIA
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For the last ten years, Austrian-born artist Lia has been a touchstone of the New Media international scene. From Graphic Design to Net Art to Visuals Creation in real time, her name – solo or on projects in which she has taken part – represents one of the most solid careers on the digital scene. Lia has presented her work at our festival on a number of occasions, and is now prepared to bring to Sónar 2005 a selection of the best in contemporary Abstract Art.

We would like to begin the interview with a preliminar question, who is lia and what does she do?

Well, who i am is not so easy to answer (not even to myself)...   ;) i'm working with computers since 1995.
I do work in many different fields in the digital section like visual design, web art, video, installations and real-time visual performances. besides that i sometimes do workshops as a guest lecturer at different institutions.


Let’s talk about your first steps as dextro.org

dextro.org is only done by dextro himself.
the project that dextro and me started together was turux.org
on turux we simply showed experiments we were doing with the macromedia director software. back then i started to teach myself lingo and on the way turux was more or less "happening" as an output of this.


How it was Vienna’ scene at that moment?

About the viennese scene: once a friend of mine told me that for a raisin it might be hard to figure out about the cake it is stuck in... ;) for me it was a very good time, because many people around me were busy with similar things i was interested in, so there was a lot of exchange, sharing and inspiration...


How did you start out and what your motivations were then?

I was just obsessed with working on the computer and spent an awful lot of time in front of it to learn as much as possible by myself. other occupations always became boring after a while and with the computer i figured out that it won't get boring that soon, because there is permanent development happening.
When i started i had the advantage (at least i think it was an advantage for me) that the applications were not that big yet. in case of macromedia director the programming language lingo was still very limited to an understandable amount of things to learn and it almost didn't sound like a programming language to me, rather like a very delicate poetry form in english ;).
And i was lucky that i had about half a year before i got my first job, so i was free to play around with whatever i liked to without thinking about the wishes or the needs of a possible client. that made the whole area much more interesting to me than it would have been when being forced to do boring jobs immediately.

What does code mean to you? Is it just a tool for what you do or is it something more ?

I think that code is just the language for the computer (or a programme) to tell what it should do and what it should show and in general i guess that the better you can "pronounce" things in that language the better it will be understood and the closer the results will be what you intended to do - as with any other language...
As in the beginning i had no idea about programming i was just trying out what would happen, if i change small parts of code, like for instance a plus and a minus sign, or a sinus with a cosinus and sometimes i liked the results and continued working from there... so there was a lot of experimentation until i really understood what i was doing ;)


What is the relationship between the code and your production?

In most of my work code is essential for the output because the result could not really be reached without. it could of course be done in another programme with another language, but not really without programming.
I think there is a special beauty contained in mathematics, which simply can not be faked by just producing the output directly without coding.


Recently, you and Miguel Carvalhais curated digital art selection for a exhibition titled as "Abstraction Now" and a part of it will be exhibite in Sonar2005. Do you feel part of a tradition of abstraction in art ?

Most of the work i'm doing is abstract, so my personal tradition can be seen as abstract, but i think there is more to the tradition of abstraction than only digital works...

How do you think has abstraction changed with the use of the computer?

I don't think the definition of abstraction itself has changed, but the look of it ;)
With computers it is possible to generate abstract works and multiple new tools are there to produce pieces which would not have been possible before. for sure there is a certain style which can only be achieved with the use of the computer.

We would like to talk with you about the fact of working in real time with visuals. For example, you performed in SonarNight in 2004. How that experience was?

Actually after that performance in the club i decided to continue doing club-visuals because that was REALLY a lot of fun! i got help from sebastian meissner, who was manipulating the second machine we had and i was astonished by the fact how someone else was doing something completely different with my tools. and the music was really inspiring there!

What is the different between to perform in big scenes like that and smaller clubs?

I just appreciate it a lot if the projections are really taken seriously.
when i do visuals not in a club to the sound of DJs, but for a performance of musicians, then the set of the visuals is a different one. then i really need to know the music very well before programming the appropriate set for it.

And what do you think that audiovisuals lives and vjing is giving to the visual art tradition in a global sense?
for me personally visuals and music are enhancing/improving each other.

With the use of the computer it becomes more and more easy to develop life visuals, as there are more and more programmes dedicated to that. so the fact that more people are doing live visuals will probably develop a broader range of different styles...

What is the situation of new media now and what do you think about the nearly future? In your opinion, where is digital art going to?

From time to time there are popping up a different words which are describing afterwards what was already happening: like from "interactiv" to "generativ" or from "VJing" to "visuals" to "live cinema".
it's funny enough the the term "new" media still exists for something which is already relatively old. ;)
i see the development in digital art in most cases strongly connected with the development of software and hardware which is permanently offering new possibilities to artists.



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