How hard could this be? Over several weeks in 2017 I spent pockets of time assembling photos that reflected my artistic vision for a juried exhibition. With over 20 years of photographs in my archive, I needed to explore what, if anything, connects my photos beyond composition, theme, time or person. What vocabulary could I use to describe my work uniformly? An hour before the submission deadline I realized I was at a total loss of how to summarize my artistic vision in words.

So…I took more photos. A lot more photos. And more importantly I traveled with an artistic partner. We stumbled into exhibits and museums everywhere we went: California, Massachusetts, Brooklyn, and Paris. Along our journey I chose to visit, consciously or unconsciously, works that just spoke to me for some reason or another.

I also took good notes. Patterns started to emerge of what I will call a new Digitalism. “New” mostly because this has nothing to do with the German electronic music duo of the same name. I started to create a taxonomy of the qualities I observed both in my own work, and in the art I enjoyed.

Digitization is the conversion (or sampling) of natural waves into digits for use by computers, and is visually represented by a step curve. In contrast, analog is the recording of natural waves in complete form, and is visually represented by a sine curve. The former looks like a staircase and the latter resembles a much friendlier wave you might want to surf.

Digitalism is a range of visual emphasis from an analog (or natural) to a digital (sampled) recording of our world. And within this spectrum there are five different streams or elements present in Digitalist work: Code, Pixel, Viz, Multiple and Analog.

Code shares an inside-out view of digital art. It celebrates the craft of coding by including actual syntactical elements (snippets of of code) or by emphasizing iteration. Examples of the latter range from the kinetic arts of Arthur Ganson, to “Mine the Scrap” Certain Measures (Tobias Nolte et Andrew Witt), 2016 or “Life and Death of an Algorithm” Troika, 2017.

Pixel reduces the world to an assembly of blocks, using forms from ’80s style video games or Legos as the primary medium of expression for example. The work of Nathan Sawaya is a wonderfully literal example of Lego, and “The Big Wave” by Jean-Michel Othoniel freezes the impossible in a towering collection of bricks. “Glitch art,” such as Ultraconcentrated by Casey Reas, reduces digital images (and TV signals) to a smear of pixels bearing little resemblance to the original. The work of James Turrell is the most minimalist form of Pixel, shaping light into a singular experiential form such as Afrum I.

Viz is the intersection of data science and art, and shorthand for the visualization of data. The purpose of Viz is to enlighten by balancing quantitative and qualitative information and the use of volumes and/or variety of data is what separates Viz from other streams of Digitalism. Bar charts, line charts and scatter-plots are Pixel without data.

Multiple has evolved from a style attributed to Victor Victori “highlighting the many behind the one, unfolding all possible dimensions of a being in one all-inclusive piece of work.”  In Digitalism, Multiple includes objects and abstraction without an underlying data set (or algorithm) and in this way bears resemblance to Cubism. The lack of an underlying data set is what separates Multiple from Viz.

Analog remains true to original, natural form while employing digital tools or enhancements. In portraiture, the Selfie is a simple example. The image is captured digitally and typically any changes are intended to enhance the original subject. Filtered images are another example, such as the saturated landscapes that decorate our Windows (or Mac) Desktops. Abstract images are Analog when their visual ingredients remain largely recognizable.

Armed with this taxonomy, I looked back over the photography I had assembled for the exhibition and for the projects on my personal site. Am I a Digitalist? Professionally, I occupy the world of Viz and delight in creating new ways of exploring data in Tableau. And my art draws heavily from the Multiple stream, especially in my exploration of industrial themes. But a large part of my work echos a desire to return to a more analog world, grounded in tangible things, beautiful in its simplicity.