Digital Dimensions

AS part of its on-going forts to bring artists and digital technology together, Arthouse has brought together a number of artists…

AS part of its on-going forts to bring artists and digital technology together, Arthouse has brought together a number of artists, most reasonably well known, to take a dip in the digital pool.

The work resulting from this technological skinny-dipping has now been brought together in a show which does little to indicate that any of the artists have become particularly excited by the new possibilities

Perhaps the problem here is that the significance of digital technology is only very distantly related to the workings of graphics and video manipulation programmes.

The seismic disturbances in contemporary culture produced by new technology are centred on a change from analogue to digital methods of producing art, by shifts in the communication and consumption of those images. Oddly, however, most of the artists here are bogged down in the formal possibilities of digital artmaking.

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Alice Maher watches over the entrance to the building with a work shown in the video wall. A range of objects appears in the palm of a pair of hands. The objects slowly meld - or "morph", as it might have said on the pull-down menu - from one to the next, from nipples, to what look like the punctures of stigmata, to a crystal orb and eventually the head of the baby.

David Godbold too uses a morphine effect to hop between an image of Christ and that of Sam Spade, confusing their identities and in the process dispersing the iconic power of both figures.

Dorothy Cross's tight, small, monitor piece places a black and white moving image of a boat on the surface of a tea cup in a moment of surprisingly comfortable East meets West cohabitation.

Claire Langan has treated one of her sets of images seen at the Gallery of Photography, but does not seem to have achieved much beyond a softening of their formerly impressive saturated blues.

Michael Wilson has gone for a brittle enigma in his manipulated images of a vibrator, stretching the image on a wall-mounted photograph and fixing it over a patchwork quilt cover. Michael Boran's slick photoworks, particularly one featuring a gunman wearing a People in Need telethon T- shirt, are engaging images, but hardly constitute exciting use of the technology.