Many areas of our lives are heavily influenced by technology. It impacts how doctors look at a patient’s body, how people avoid traffic in the city, how we spend our down time at home, how we communicate with friends and family across long distances, etc. Technology itself is already prevalent in art forms already, however, art has begun to embrace technology to change the process and structure of itself.
New art forms are dawning out of technology. Technology has started to become deconstructed and thought of less as just a utility, and more as something that can be aesthetically beautiful, abstracted and thought of philosophically, and turned into something for pleasure and admiration. Alison Craighead of the artistic partnership, Thomson & Craighead, discussed technology as an art, “We were thinking, ‘Well, if data is our material, can we draw with it?” Jon Thomson added, “Decorative Newsfeeds is an automatic drawing. So it’s a kind of endless animation that uses syndicated news headlines the RSS feeds, and then takes a news feeds at random and displays it on screen according to a set of rules.” Nowadays, we often see film, animation, technology as sculptures and light paintings and mural, among many other things in the most famous museums such as the MoMA, Guggenheim, LACMA, and more. Technology is at the forefront of artistic creation, and artists must learn to embrace it and experiment with it to develop new forms of art.
Not only can technology in itself be an art form, it can also transform the way others are structured and experienced. Andrew Winghart, an emerging choreographer, directs and choreographers dance for the camera. Whereas stage/concert dance is open perspective, film dance has the opportunity to be forced perspective; it also provides the opportunity to explore and perform in spaces that can’t be replicated for the stage (the top of a skyscraper, a large warehouse, a canyon, etc.) This is very similar to the relationship between theatre and film/television. Dance for the camera takes the same concepts that film and television benefit from as opposed to stage performances, even considering the disadvantages of filmed dance. Film dance opens windows for entirely different structures of dance, and even to develop a new process of creating movement. Suddenly with cutscenes, movement no longer has to be linear and transitional. The movement can be edited, distorted, have images, words and sounds added to it. Winghart’s choreography in A Thousand Faces has the capability of seeing dance from a birds-eye-view, and even intense close-ups, something not easily available for the stage. Technology makes new structures of art possible, and I don’t believe it has been realized fully in every other art form. Not yet, at least.
The future of art will embrace technology. It will explore it’s advantages and disadvantages. It will become more than just the embellishments to a piece, it will become it’s own form of art entirely. Artists of all kinds: dancers, singers, painters, sculptors, directors, choreographers, cinematographers, musicians, costumers, poets, and more, will add their own ideas, their personal arts concepts and techniques to develop new art forms. Ones that will push their own art forms and create interesting subcategories, or even create ones we’ve never thought of before. The possibilities are endless once artists consider technology as new medium for creation.
Sources:
“Decorative Newsfeeds by Craighead & Thomson (2012).” Youtube, uploaded by Alicia Burr, 14 December 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2DFM3JPihA.
“What is Digital Art?” Youtube, uploaded by British Council Arts, 17 February 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RWop0Gln24.
Winghart, Andrew. “A Thousand Faces.” Youtube, 28 August 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE4ThOoCo4U.
Data/Society/Decision-making Spring 2019 