Kerry Andrews' work focuses on a multidimensional aspect of digital media, particularly the area of the static image, text and music/sound. He is interested in the way we often translate ideas across mediums in our everyday lives and how this area of translation is an important place of our awareness/consciousness. In this respect he has set out to define some answers to the question: 'how might an image look when created on a computer?'

Various key aspects of the computer define the background to his work:

1. The understanding that the computer has two interrelated areas or superstructures:
   • Computational aspect (binary code, basic computer language, algorithms, processing capabilities) [discernable and predictable patterns of mathematics]
   • Organisational aspect (interface, programmes, networks, content)
2. Inherent qualities of the computer as a creative tool (some of the main qualities):
   • Manipulability (transformability, outputs, supports and grounds)
   • Interdisciplinary nature (exporting files, manipulation using the same or similar methods)
   • Computer organization via layers of languages
   • Narrative (temporalities of processes, outputs)
   • Collaboration
3. History
   • Information Technology (manipulation and classification of data. See Turing and the Universal Machine - the Making of the Modern computer by Jon Agar for insights into the bureaucratic beginnings of IT)
   • Universal machine (meta machine)

• There are also some more personal areas of interest and their relationship to the computer medium that inform the work:
  • Relationship to the human
  • Translation between image and sound/music
  • Detail of image and multiple meaning
  • Voice - particular characteristics or expression

The computer has offered artists a new territory to discover and define for the past 50 years and its possibilities have constantly transformed throughout that time. The level of participation in the pure technology and the newest programmes of the IT medium will differ with each artist, and from time to time or even from piece to piece in their career, so the works vary in their use of IT.

Andrews is interested in the language that IT has come from and how it transforms that and what it offers. It poses questions: How does the computer reflect our 'languages' and us? How does it affect the way we think or act? One of the basic questions has been: how might a still image look when created on a computer? This may sound simple but has deeper ramifications to image making than first appears.

These works of art deal with complexity, and although they are made as transparent and readable as possible there is a level of density or opaqueness that reflects the difficulty of 'language'. This density often comes from a simultaneous exploration of several lines of thought, and the idea that thinking and being are essentially nonlinear.

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