Technology.Art.

Where is the line between art and entertainment? Between a masterpiece and a screensaver? A complex, algorithmic, evolutionary art and a fractal?

There has been a lot of interplay between technology and art, so as to move the relation from just using technology (for example, Photoshop-like software) to produce art, to the technology being an actual component of an art piece, to be the paint, as it were. Photography at its early days took a long time to be accepted widely as an art form, and this fact may seem strange to a lot of us at present. But how many of us would really appreciate the art that is now being made where the technology is like the paint on the canvas of the art? Also there are cultural, social and technological factors here if we look at the places where this art has flourished and are being nurtured.

Its still not so widespread and the critics and thinkers are now still struggling to give it a name. Digital Art? New Media Art? Software Art? Generative Art? There are many names, many variations. The medium's conspicuous role in the totality of an art piece is now the root of the need to term it with some indication of these new media that have come along. Maybe as the new media finds a common place in the world someday, they will blend into the general description of the word ‘art’.

Artists have produced art using technology as far back as 1960s. For example, Jean Tinguely is one sculptor who focused on making metallic, mechanical sculptures that could move, and one that was designed to destroy itself (Homage to New York, 1960). Robert Rauschenberg was another artist who filled an aluminum tank with mud and had an apparatus put in underneath it by which bubbles were made on the mud that was again synchronized with sounds being played on site (Mud Muse, 1971). And since the computer was being conceptualized, those who had imaginations and creativity that allowed so, it naturally started using computers and other emerging digital technologies in their artwork. Many of the art forms now take on the form of installations with sound, graphics, video, sensors or some combination thereof.


Techzine Wired's September issue did a feature of Steve Sacks who has opened up a gallery for this different art form in New York, named Bitform (http://www.bitforms.com), and is soon to open another in Korea. Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of New Media Arts at Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) has a book titled Digital Art that tries to explain, and document this phenomenon with the use of various examples (complete with illustrations) of the work done in this area all throughout. The book is well laden with these examples, illustrations, and descriptions and will challenge the newbie's imagination and raise questions or fascinate. Yearly events where one might see this kind of art on display are the ACM SIGGRAPH Futurama (USA), and the ARS Electronica (Austria).

There is one thing here that a lot of artists try to overcome from the traditional arts, that is its static nature. Art could be put on a wall or a pedestal, and the only interaction the viewer could engage in with the art was mental. Now with digital technology available, the artists can devise more interactive art. The user can now physically interact with the art, or participate with it to make it complete. For example, an installation was setup by Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw which gave a new view of New York city. There, a person would have to sit on a static bicycle and pedal to set in motion the images on a screen in front of the person. The pedaling and steering creates the sensation of moving through New York's cityscape, but with the buildings replaced by words that are characteristic to the city (Legible City, 1989).

There is also the generative and evolutionary software art that incorporate principles of evolution, artificial life and generally, algorithms to create art forms. Generative art has been defined as “any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set to motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a complete work of art.” by Philip Galanter, who is also working in this field.

Artists never want to confine art to its medium. From drawing pictures on walls of caves, to stone to paper, from using pencils, to paint to charcoal, to using bits of paper and other elements around us as in collage techniques, mixed media, the scope increases. And the internet now is no different. From doing artwork involving text, manipulating the art of narratives and creating collaboration between participants; to using what has to be offered by the multimedia support of the WWW, and the event based model of websites; artists have moved fairly well into this area. Especially the artists with intentions of activism found it a very good platform for their work, a platform where information could be distributed freely.

In the end, art has remained art, forever changing, forever in flux, presenting itself in new forms and testing the boundaries of thought. I much prefer leaving the determination of something as art to those who present it. Whatever name we give this new form of art, its still 'art', just in a new space, with new elements.

Suggested Reading/Browsing:
http://www.rhizome.org
http://www.pixelache.ac
http://www.whitney.org/artport/
http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/
http://www.f2fmedia.net/

References:

Digital Art (Paul, Christiane, 2003)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/sacks.html
http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/phase3/main_frame.html


Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZcSX4_b3Wo

About the Video: Presented at the ARS Electronica 2006, this chair breaks down, and then locates its broken limbs by using sensors and robotics to build itself up again. The performance by the chair fulfills the senses of the viewers as would a movie. This is a work of Artist Max Dean, along with a computer scientist Raffaello D'andrea and a mechanical engineer Matt Donavan.