Spy cams or recording pen allowed us to realize the great transformations perpetrated by technology in the artistic fields.
The scientific and technical progress has transformed the humanitarian work through new technologies focused on the control of life and the increase of cognitive faculties.
In 1991, a movement founded by Max More, “The Extropians“, envisioned nothing less than to reverse the entropy of the universe and thus offer men the conditions for an unlimited improvement.
In the late 2000s, we learned of the creation of a Ray Kunzweil Institute of Singularity, funded by Google and NASA, whose project aims to prepare for the advent of a non-biological intelligence that will make humanity simply obsolete.
Art is not something independent in the world. He is often influenced not only by the artist himself but also by his time, historical events, philosophy, literature and other sciences. For example, painters like Rembrandt in The Anatomy Lesson (1632) incorporate new scientific discoveries into their works of art.
Technology is another development that has influenced art in many ways over the centuries. It is very difficult to find the first technologies that have influenced art since art is very general; there is art, music, literature, and others, but also because technology has sometimes indirectly influenced art.
Understanding Art
Art is the expression of our inner being, the one that lives in us. Beyond all the practical side of our intelligence what good is all this without notion of pleasure? What would we be without this culture of beauty and refinement? Art is the reflection of human expression. The cult of the image that reflects our thoughts and allows us to glimpse those of others.
Art and humans move side by side without anyone knowing which is the tool of the other. If we are ransacking our planet because of our overconsumption, we must also note that we have also covered it with millions of wonders ranging from the simple poem to oversized temples decorated with numerous sculptures and finely carved.
Our creativity is limitless, we perceive images and recreate new ones that when they materialize in the material offer new images to our fellow creatures who in turn will work their imagination.
We are born creators and some more than others will have the sensitivity and talent to transform beautiful into wonderful: it is the artists and their role in society is essential and their importance in our lives sometimes equal that of kings.
The musicians accompany us, the tales make us travel, the paintings sometimes amaze us, the writings teach us and distract us. Art in all its forms is what makes life wonderful because everything else is survival and meaningless.
Art and new technology
If the new technologies offer artists new creative horizons, they also bring their own difficulties, how to keep pace with the great societal changes brought about by these digital upheavals?
In his speech during the first morning, Eric Joris explained that we live in a “society fully mediatised”: technology is so much part of our daily lives that we no longer pay attention. But an artist, him, notices it. In an interview earlier this year with UK-based arts and technology organization
The Space, Hannah Nicklin, creator of plays and game designer, defines “digital culture” as “the way we live our humanity in the context of technology“. She goes on to explain that digital culture is “the speed at which information is spreading, and the way the commentary culture affects our public discourse … It’s the gradual disappearance of the interfaces between technology and human input, and the question is whether this should worry us. It is this growing feeling of living in a ‘global village’ and the problems that arise in wanting to integrate this reality into our minds.” Whether an artist is present on the internet or not, these questions will always underlie his works.
Artists are the geniuses of the imagination
Artists are often badly judged by their fathers who rarely understand them. Artists are staggered by definition and it is not uncommon for their behavior to provoke questions among their peers, but it is part of a whole.
The artist is not a mechanical being; he is the emblem of all that is the subtlety of the human spirit. All is not mathematical intelligence, there is always a small part of chance that is intuition and artists sometimes have the gift to identify better than others. Except for certain “elites” who often owe their glories to their relationships, being an artist is not a sinecure and never has been!
The vast majority of artists must learn humility and resourcefulness since despite the apparent universality of their work the “others” do not give them “practical” utilities, which is a regrettable mistake as I tried to explain yesterday in the article devoted to art itself. Artists are essential to the balance of the world; they are the ones who transform food into a kitchen, the building into a monument, the ceiling into a masterpiece. They are the ones who give value to things. They are the thickness and consistency of what we are alive for. Feel and imagine; making dream the universe.
Have techniques invented man?
Will we know one day if the “technoprophets”, as Dominique Lecourt called them, are illuminated or if they hold the performative power to make happen what they expect?
We must in any case temperate their lack of time if we do not hypertrophy their expectations.
Because, it must be emphasized, the idea that the techniques have the faculty to transform the man is far from being new. It is at the beginning of the paleo-anthropology and the explanation of the phenomenon of the hominisation.
The ideal of a new man
New technologies reinvent a man according to their format and their functional requirements. It is this world in the making that justifies the impression of a break in the process of co-evolution that described the construction regime of humanity.
The new man, proclaims, will be able to adapt to his machines, even if he becomes unrecognizable.
Changes in the technique
In what way do we perceive in the current power of technology the announcement of a break in the process by which man has precisely produced these techniques? In what way does the prospect of being reinvented by these techniques seem to us to modify what we have hitherto considered obvious?
The answer must lie in the uniqueness of the technology unfolding before our eyes. One can risk the thesis according to which the technique acquired characteristics which upset the anthropological constitution which it guaranteed.
The observer of his recent development meets these characteristics which serve as arguments for transhumanism as well as for critics of the modern world.
Photography
Photography has allowed artists to capture a specific moment in time and represent it in a realistic way. This is why realistic paintings, which were very fashionable before, have been replaced by photography.
Computer
The invention of the computer has greatly influenced our daily lives and art. The computer made it possible to transform the photographs into works that represent scenes that are not necessarily real but that give the illusion of reality. Many artists have also used programs on computers that use mathematical algorithms to generate a work of art. In reality, when programs are launched, the work is constantly in motion.
The music
Computers have also influenced the field of music.
They recorded sounds that can be replayed and layered to create new songs. The auto-tune software is also used by artists at the moment to correct notes that sound wrong. Many famous singers like Britney Spears and T-Pain use this software to transform their songs and their voice. Artists can also create songs from sounds that come only from the computer. For example, Dubstep is a kind of music that virtually mixes sounds from the computer.
The film/ The cinema
The field of cinema has also benefited greatly from computers and technology. The rapid advancement of technology is first of all an inspiration for many artists on their vision of the future. So there is an increase in science fiction movies produced. In addition, this technological advancement facilitates the creation of these sci-fi films while remaining a credible representation. For example, the movie “The Matrix” is science fiction and the advancement in cinematography and technology has allowed the creation of a film that remains credible.
Dance
One would think that technology does not have a great influence on the dance but in fact it is not the case. First, technology is integrated into dance choreographies. For example, on stage often stage lights are used to make artistic effects on the dance, technology is used to make the dance more “interesting”.
In the design
Technology has also influenced design because there is software that can represent models in virtual form.
The sculpture
The sculptors use software that allows to visualize on screen a representation of the idea that they have in mind. Moreover the very techniques that the artist uses to arrive at his work of art can incorporate technology or technical tools.
In addition, the technology itself can be incorporated into the sculpture. For example, a sculpture may consist of parts of technology such as computer parts. Technology has also influenced art with kinetic sculpture, that is, a sculpture in motion.
Digital, art is always ahead
“Artists using new technologies are an essential source for understanding how our world is confronting technology,” said Honor Harger. Take the example of the 3D printer, one of the most interesting current technologies, to build any object from its specifications. While 3D printing has the potential to change the way objects are made, artists’ illustration of this potential is not new.
In 2004, Eléonore Hellio and Joachim Montessuis had with MUSH (Multi-User Sensorial Hallucination, video) imagined a media art show using a device close to the Wiimote, before it existed. In 2009, Golan Levin published an article evoking several artistic installations as prologues to what has since become our daily digital life. The art is often ahead of the technical achievements … Unless it is the technological companies that end up integrating art into their tools, ironically Honor Harger.
Robots take over space
In 1956, the sculptor and visual artist Nicolas Schoffer anticipates the evolution of the artificial space by declaring: “From now on the role of the artist will no longer be to create a work but to create creation. “. Since then, through various artistic works, robots have gradually taken over our creative space.
Robots, new creators of the exhibited works
Robots are indeed a new working tool, as are brushes and paint tubes. They allow us to understand differently the term artificial. They add a new dimension. The artificial is both intermediate and finality of the work.
The emergence of the digital arts proves that art is constantly evolving. Imagine a robot reproducing an algorithm is no longer something foreign or the order of the imagination for us. It is thus understood that robots can reproduce an image.
Artists want to go even further by interacting with the robot, the work and its spectators. The public also becomes an actor and creator despite himself.
With Extra Natural, Miguel Chevalier concretizes this progress. The work is evolutionary throughout the exhibition. Plants grow in the Grand Palace thanks to an algorithm but also thanks to sensors. Visitors play a role in the creation of this garden. Presence sensors affect the flowers that evolve according to the passage of visitors.
The imitation of the painter and his emotions
In the same vein, the Japanese artists SoKanno and Yang02 bring their stone to the building. Already experienced in Japan, their robots have completely made a fresco station in Lyon, Paris, during the biennale Nemo.
Twenty robots simultaneously create an original work for each new exhibition in the world. Indeed, although they are conditioned by a starting algorithm, they are equipped with sensors that communicate them several data. Among them, the passage of travelers, the evolution of temperature and humidity in the station.
The artists have suspended these robots on rails that allow them to move horizontally, if they cross, they immediately change direction. Their work is therefore subject to the vagaries of passers-by but also to their interactions with each other. The work evolves according to the data collected thanks to the pens fixed on the robots. The result is abstract. For Japanese artists, this is to imitate the painter’s process in the realization of an abstract work in a changing environment. This same environment thus impacts his emotions and, consequently, his work.
How does science dialogue with art?
The arts and sciences have a long-standing relationship. The digital revolution, among others, accelerates cross-fertilization between the two domains. The places dedicated to this meeting are multiplying, suggesting a new cultural revival.
The one and the other contribute to widen the field of the knowledge, they participate of the same step of observation and exploration of new physical, immaterial or human territories.
The digital revolution is accelerating the cross-fertilization between the arts and sciences, the creative hybridizations of new values. New fields appear, such as “data design” (new graphic information science – Ed), “serious gaming”, tool using new technologies with the intention of getting a message in an attractive way – Editor’s note), biomimicry (process of innovation inspired by the living to take advantage of the solutions and inventions produced by nature – Ed) or empathic technologies.
Science participates with its rigorous and demonstrative approach, creation with its subjective and experiential approach.
This dialogue is not new, photography, for example, was born of the convergence of chemistry, optics, technology and the visual arts.
SPACE IN THREE DIMENSIONS: discovery and experimentation of the work in volume (modeling, assembly, construction, installation …); notions of closed form and open form, contour and limit, void and full, interior and exterior, envelope and structure, transition and transition; the interpenetrations between the space of the work and the space of the spectator.
THE CONCRETE REALITY OF A PRODUCTION OR WORK: the role of materiality in the sensible effects produced by a work; to experience the materiality of the work, to take advantage of it, to understand that in art the object and the image can also become material.
PHYSICAL QUALITY OF MATERIALS: their characteristics (porosity, roughness, liquidity, malleability …) on plastic practice in two dimensions (transparencies, thicknesses, homogeneous and heterogeneous mixtures, collages …) and in volume (stratifications, assemblies, stacks, weaves, nestings, additions of objects or fragments of objects …), on the invention of forms or techniques, on the production of meaning.
Digitization – from the coding of the known to the vertigo of the unknown
Digitization confronts us in fact with a relatively new situation: it offers us mountains of known facts, but it is the vertigo of the unknown that seizes us. Digitization makes available masses of knowledge from around the world – scientific, cultural, usage, even emotions, sensations.
It tends to roll back ignorance of what exists. But by contrast, it subjects us to the question of a world “still nonexistent”, emerging, future – not even imaginable, because the imagined is finally part of the known, a world still unimagined. And if the big challenge of today’s digital revolution was not so much the digitalisation of the known, but rather our ability to take advantage of digitalisation to master the unknown it creates itself?
Junaid Ali Qureshi is an ecommerce entrepreneur with a passion for emerging tech marketing and ecommerce development. Some of his current ventures include Progos Tech (an ecommerce development company) , Elabelz.com , Titan Tech and Smart Marketing .
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