Relevant books:
Digital currents by Margot Lovejoy
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (essay)
Art and the Age of Mass Media by John Walker
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
Summary of the lecture:
- Overview of the criticial and practical implications of technology upon art and its emergence within design.
- Evaluating what the implications of technology are on our design areas
- Technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness
- Technology trigger important changes in cultural development
- Walter Benhamin's essay 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' (1936) significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change. Balances between past and future in the emergence of technology. Critics are still writing about this essay due to its implications on how we work today.
All of these asses how technology is an instrument for change.
Task
Draw a doodle.. faithfully copy this.. and again.. and again.
This is my outstanding work of art:
This is my outstanding work of art:
Anything that is copied, reproduced or replicated is not in essence, the same as the original. It can either be a work in its own right or merely an image representation of the original. Benjamin's discussion is cruciial to understanding how art, design and media (early technology advancements aswell as new), is born from this scenario.
There are some artists and designers who purposely use the idea of replication and copy and some artists who critically comment on this in society.
Machine age / Modernism
The conversation between the two is all part of one period
Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction:
- The age of technology and art
- Parallel and specific to new developments; a duality expressing the zeitgeist
- Dialectical due to the copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original
- The aura and uniqueness of art
He claimed technology is parallel and specific to new developments.
Reproduction of the copy and the role of the original - Because of technology and the emergence of photography there is now such a thing as the original. We did not need to think about was the original and the copy before technology - it is only because of technology that we need to consider the uniqueness of the copy and its 'aura'.
When encountering the original work, there is an aura that is distinct.
An analogy of this would be a film sequels where people believe they are 'not as good as the original'
Photography
Photography is at the beginning of the technological relationship between art and design.
It is not just your own perception and what you see with your eye, it can used to create multiple viewing points and interpretations.
John Berger's writing is in direct relation to the thoughts and critique of Walter Benjamin
Dziga Vertov - Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
The camera eye has a variable gaze and Benjamin claims a new consciousness is a result. It represents an idealism of faith and progress through technological process.
Paul Valeria
'We must expect great innovations to transform the entire techniques of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing..." (rest on moodle)
Series of photogram
Merely a sheet of photographic paper with objects on top and exposed to light (early experiments with photography and technology).
Benjamin and two Parallels
Freud and Marz
Freud explores
Marx's thought explores economic that gave new political models of thinking over the work value of a work of art. He brings an understanding that technology changes the value of a work of art.
Marx
In reference to the doodles: Is the original worth more than the copy? What if a celebrity created the copy? The value can be distorted and changed. While the original may be valued, the copy, in consumerism and reproduction, adds value and consumed as valuable.
When distorted by mass media and celebrity culture, the value is again up for interpretation.
Marx foresaw this debate. Mass production and labour would lead to a bigger consumption of art and design.
Modernism likes to remain formal, composed whereas post-modernism destabilises these conventions and puts them into a new context.
Freud
While Marx pursues the effect of art and design on society and the nature of art, Freud explores the materialism of technology in terms of how it can express our deepest subconscious.. this resulted in the movement of Dada etc.
Kineticism
The idea of capturing movement.
Photographer (Marey Etienne-Jules) in 1888, he produced a series of kinetic photographs exploring the movement of the human body.
- Development of chrono-photography.
- His development of photography was vast.
- Space, time and place in a technological age.
- These are the start of exploring how we portray movement in time.
This begins the de materialisation of art and design primarily because when you look at the recorded image, it starts to move away from form and object and moves into the realm of mere image. Once you move into just image, you can replicate it, reproduce it and transform it with the emergence of technology.
Dematerialization of art
Richard Hamilton (1922)
"Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?'
Experiments with the Dada movement
- Photomontage
- Clearly using technology to create image
What we see - images and objects are ordered, coded and styled. This is the beginning of art and design merging together. These separately lie within either art or design or both.
Design is seen increasingly within art from this period.
Karl Marx and technology
Marx is associated with the term 'technological determinsm'. How technological determines economical production factors and affects social conditions. He examines closely the relationship of technological enterprise to other aspects of human activity.
He sees it as a role and tool for progress but also, a tool for alienation.
Dialectical issues
- Technology drives history
- Technology and the division of labour - Original & copy. The original is produced by one person with their own mode of production.
- Materialist view of history of history
- Technology and capitalism and production
- Social alienation of people form aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism
Workers do not own their means of making work. (Look at Marx and alienation in more depth)
Cartoon (on presentation) explores link between capitalism, competition, selling of products and also the issue of power in the consumption of objects. There is a distinction between the labourer, the worker and the people who are selling.
Electronic age / Postmodernism
Post modern / Post machine
- Many electronic works were still made with the modern aesthetic
- Emergence of information and conceptual based works - how data is collected and documented
- The computer a natural metaphor
- A spirit of openness to industrial techniques - moves away from a modernist aesthetic. We replace, move on and develop. We consume technology and in turn, develop new techniques - this is a shift from modernism. Everything becomes image and illusion-based.
- Collaborations between art and science
This collaboration breaks boundaries as a result of technology. The computer and technology allows you to shift one idea across to another context or media.
'Falling / Falling' by Douglas Rosenberg (1998)
- Multimedia, video installation (itself becomes an object)
- Dance, performance and media with text projection
- Different artistic forms merge and form new works
Publicly cremated 13 years worth of art (look up)
'I will not make any more boring art'
Simulation and Simulacrum
A simulated image (or a copy) of an experience, a replication of something. It is simulated and not meant to be real. However, simulacrum explains the simulation also becomes real - a huge effect on art and design. It becomes and object and a form in its own right. It plays with what is 'real' and what is an 'illusion'.
Jean Baudrillard (1981)
- It is the reflection of a profound reality
- It masks and denatures (distorts) a profound reality
- It masts the absence of a profound reality (it can become reality in its own right)
- It has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum
What is virtual and what is not, what is seen as real and what is not.
Benjamin talks about society an illusion. Baudrillard extends this to simulacrum and the reality and illusion of art and design.
We take word and mouth as factual as we view the spoken word as reality and truth.
Nam June Paik
He used technologies as a critique on their actual affect on society
- Cello out of televisions
- Bhudda watching TV just chilling
Plays with the idea of what is real and what isn't.
'Art in the age of mass media' by John Walker (2001)
We take word and mouth as factual as we view the spoken word as reality and truth.
Nam June Paik
He used technologies as a critique on their actual affect on society
- Cello out of televisions
- Bhudda watching TV just chilling
Plays with the idea of what is real and what isn't.
'Art in the age of mass media' by John Walker (2001)
- Art uses mass media (1990 - 2000)
- Art in advertisements
- The artist as media celebrity - Andy Warhol - Art has become design
At what point does art become design and vice versa?
Digital age
'Digital Currents' by Margot Lovejoy
- Digital potential leads to multimedia productions
- Technological reduction of all images so they are addressed by the computer
- New contexts created as a result
Jenny Holzer
- Digital projections as installations and illusions of images
- She transforms surfaces and buildings as images alone
- Experiments with Simulacrum
- Visually extends space beyond its immediate space
'Blue Tilt' (2004)
'Baltic Centre' (2000)
Staircase (1998)
Fran Gillette
- Real and fantastical imagery
- Patterns can be created as a result of this
Nancy Bersom - The Human Race Machine
- Morphing technology (originally used in the FBI)
- Examines characteristics in the human face
Multimedia work
- Interactivity
- Performance
- Transdisciplinary approaches
- Time, space and motion explored in art and as art
- Collaborations between different technologies and artforms
- Computer as a tool for integrating media
Hyperreal; reality by proxy
- These images are not all real
- Part animation, part real people
- How we project and play with what is real
Conclusion
- Art comments on the ideology of everyday life
- Art can be expressive of the progressive
- Technological tools can blur the line between production of fine art works and commercial and design production - they are no longer distinct
