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.

Artists have a sense of ownership to the work that they produce, often times rightfully so. They want to be able to create original work and not have it be stolen and claimed as someone else’s original work. They want to be able to make profits off of their work by touring it around the world, performing it, possibly selling their work to others to have it reproduced. All of types of artwork and media are copyrighted to protect those artists, from plays and musicals, to music both aural and written, dances, visual art, images, logos, poetry, books, and video games. The data lies in the works themselves; plays, books, and poetry in the words. Music in notation and audible sound. Images in colors, shape, texture. Dances, even, in notation, recorded performances, and the physical movement itself.

The controversies arise when the copyright is abused, and when the boundaries between what makes each individual piece of art different is blurred. In February 2019, a handful of theatres across the country were producing To Kill a Mockingbird, a stage play adapted by Christopher Sergel. At the same time in New York City on Broadway, a new adaption of the same book by Aaron Sorkin premiered, and the producer, Scott Rudin, shut down the productions of a different playwright. Rudin closed eight productions of Sergel’s To Kill a Mockingbird (including one in Salt Lake City at the Grand Theatre) because of a 1969 contact, even though a representative of Harper Lee’s (author of To Kill a Mockingbird) estate approved the shows to be produced in the first place.

When art is plainly plagiarized, as with Kelsea Ballerini’s CMA performance, that is a clear violation of someone’s artistic work and legacy. However, to create art, one is inspired by other art. Art builds on itself and is constantly changing; even the most famous artists drew from other pioneers. Michael Jackson’s dance style was influenced by Bob Fosse and Fred Astaire. Hollywood music producers ‘sample’ music. The music of the 80’s, the orchestra hit, was inspired by Stavinsky. Plays are adapted from books (Great Comet of 1812 from War and Peace, West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet) and other sources. Even William Shakespeare’s plays were slightly, if not completely inspired by other plays and stories. The connective tissue between different works in nearly endless. When iconic pieces of art are translated and redefined in a new context, that is merely part of the process of creating new art. The plays written by Sorkin and Sergel were completely two different pieces of work. They were adapted from the same source and have the same narrative spine and characters, but the dialogue isn’t the exact same for every scene, the structure isn’t the same, the subtext isn’t, and the theme isn’t. They aren’t the exact same pieces of work, otherwise that would be plagiarism. Rudin was unjustified in shutting down the eight production’s of Sergel’s play, and this instance only shows that inspiration and plagiarism (even adaptation) are vastly different.

Sources:

Alter, Alexandra and Paulson, Michael. “‘Mockingbird’ Play Publisher Demands $500,00 from Harper Lee Estate.” New York Times, 8 Mar. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/theater/mockingbird-broadway-harper-lee-dispute.html?fbclid=IwAR00ARJAuNjKCYpJ5FXtjB_nAJberafhq0S2qKKaBFcyEVdvf0Oaj0zXtFo.

Alter, Alexandra and Paulson, Michael. “Legal Threats from Broadway’s ‘Mockingbird’ Sinks Productions Around the Country.” New York Times, 28 Feb. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/theater/scott-rudin-mockingbird-broadway.html?module=inline.

Wingenroth, Lauren. “Can Music Artists Stop Stealing From Choreographers Already?” Dance Magazine, 19 Nov. 2018, https://www.dancemagazine.com/can-music-artists-stop-stealing-from-choreographers-already-2620680049.html.

“The Sound That Connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars.” Youtube, uploaded by Vox, 15 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A1Aj1_EF9Y.

Often times art is thought of as an entity separate from culture and society; it doesn’t hold the same importance as science, mathematics, or other things that govern how we function as a society. However, art has been a staple of the human experience since we dawned as a species: it served as as a method for discovering how our world works scientifically, and though subtle, impacts how we think of our own culture and how we function as a society today.

Art was a vehicle into understanding the world through science; the Renaissance was an intersection of science and art. Leonardo da Vinci, a commonly known polymath, through seeking to better understand how to paint humans realistically led to groundbreaking studies in anatomy and physiology, “His study of anatomy, originally pursued for his training as an artist, had grown by the 1490s as an independent area of research… By his own count Leonardo dissected 30 corpses in his lifetime.” Da Vinci’s research was an impactful precursor to scientific illustrations and modern biomechanics. Leonardo da Vinci’s experience with drawing anatomy is a small part of larger story, the Renaissance. The Renaissance defined the culture of that period of time, and transformed how society functioned through art, “Renaissance art did not limit itself to simply looking pretty, however. Behind it was an intellectual discipline: perspective was developed, light and shadow were studied, and the human anatomy was pored over – all in pursuit of a new realism and desire to capture the beauty of the world as it really was.” The Renaissance was “a coming together of art, science, and philosophy.” Art led to a bigger passion to understand the world through science, and it questioned how to capture the real world as we perceived it in art. To do that, artists were required to study light and it’s effect on objects, how light and perspective creates three dimensional objects and how to translate that to a two dimensional form, the proportion and musculature of the human body and how if it’s depicted incorrect, humans look strange. Art essentially changed how society (a structure that provides an organization for a group of people in a region) functioned, by shifting it from a world that understood and organized itself through religion, to one that understood and organized itself through science.

Culture “refers to the set of beliefs, practices, learned behavior and moral values that are passed on, from one generation to another… It is something that differentiates one society from the other.” Art, just as beliefs, learned behaviors, moral values are succinctly distinct from culture to culture; each culture defines what those individual values are and the importance in their own culture, and those same values are ever-changing as time passes. Art is directly tied to culture, and it preserves what it felt like to exist in a particular time. Think of American culture in the 80s: the AIDS crisis, President Reagan, the first space shuttle, the rise of computer technology. Those who lived in this period most likely had other things come to mind referring to the culture of the time as well: Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, music from Madonna, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, the 2nd and 3rd installment of the Star Wars trilogy, The Breakfast Club, etc. Art (and more accessible and diffused: entertainment/media) is synonymous with culture in a certain period of time, and it gives humans a common experience to rely on to recall what it was like to live during that period.

Art is necessary for more reasons that human expression. It isn’t something we can sever from our lives, it’s entwined with culture and society. It has a symbiotic relationship with culture and society: art gave a spark to the scientific revolution, and is a medium in which humans remember the past.

Works Cited:

Heydenreich, Ludwig. “Leornardo da Vinci – Italian Artist, Engineer, Scientist.” Encycopedia Britannica, 19 Feb. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci/Anatomical-studies-and-drawings

“The Renaissance – Why It Changed the World.” The Telegraph, 6 Oct. 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/london-culture/renaissance-changed-the-world/

S, Surbhi. “Difference Between Culture and Society.” Key Differences, 31 Mar. 2016, https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-culture-and-society.html

Many times the arts are overlooked in the educational system. Some school districts face financial budget cuts, threatening to erase arts education from the curriculum because they are deemed as having little relevance, value, or application in comparison to the academic subjects. Some argue even that they have little real-world applicational relevance at all. However, those who do study art know there’s just as much applicable value as science, math, computer science, engineering, physics, and anatomy. Though each art form doesn’t necessarily concern itself with the data that is tied to it, looking through an academic lens shows how much real-world application there is to art.

In school we learn that sound is caused by vibrations in the air, and that same idea can also be applied to music. Music is entirely mathematics, boiled down to it’s scientific essence. In Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the first three notes consist of a D Major triad (meaning the chord consists of the root: A, a major third: F#, and a major fifth: D). “But these aren’t just arbitrary magic numbers. Rather, they represent the mathematical relationship between the pitch frequencies of different notes which form a geometric series.” Really what this means is that all music is a function of math and every single note can be graphed as a sine wave: the note A equals 440 Hz, F# equals 370 Hz, D equals 294 Hz. The relationship between a collection of notes (or chord) can be graphed to visually depict the consonance and dissonance. Every song, every note, every time someone hums a melody, the humming of your bathroom air vent, the chirping of birds, is the quantified presence of mathematics in the world, and those who don’t see the value of music don’t even realize it.

Dance is one of the more abstract art forms. However, even dance can also be reduced to physics and anatomy. Dance really is combinations of momentum, torque, friction, and an understanding of the center of gravity (especially in regards to turns). This video, posted by Ted-Ed, breaks down dance through the lens of physics incredibly well, “The fouetté is governed by angular momentum, which is equal to the dancer’s angular velocity times her rotational inertia. And except what’s lost to friction, that angular momentum has to stay constant while the dancer is on pointe. That’s called conservation of angular momentum. Now, rotational inertia can be thought of as a body’s resistance to rotational motion. It increases when more mass is distributed further from the axis of rotation, and decreases when the mass is distributed closer to the axis of rotation.” This equation can be summarized as L = Iω. Dance is a series of embodied physics, from the simple act of walking, to the complexity of turns, and jumps.

Another academic application of dance is anatomy. Understanding anatomy is crucial to a dancer’s career: anatomical familiarity prevents injury, can increase flexibility with stretching, and sustain the strength and longevity of the muscles and body. An excerpt from an article written for the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science shows just how vital anatomical knowledge is, “The psoas is one of the longest and most powerful muscles in the body, and it is ‘the only muscle that attaches to the spine, pelvis and femur’… Clearly a powerful source of energy of that sort, located right in the center of the body and attached to three anatomical unites that are most crucial to dance movement – the lower spine, pelvis, and hip joint – has to be respected.” This is only a small example of what anatomical insight provides, and dance requires far more to be an accomplished dancer. Knowing which muscles in your legs are used for your inner and outer rotation, how the hip flexors, hamstrings, and calves correlate to achieving your splits, or a deeper lunge, or a more extended battement is all rooted in anatomy.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a more objective application of art happens to be technical theatre design. Scenic design is fundamentally based in mathematics and engineering. The theatre’s measurements are taken and reduced to a model size, the set is designed in proportion to the model and then enlarged to fit the size of real theatre in proportion to the model, all while needing to be functional, safe, and what the designer and director aesthetically agreed on. Mimi Lien, Tony Award winner for Best Scenic Design in a Musical for Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 describes the relationship between what people consider ‘real-world skills,’ and her art, “People often ask me, ‘How did you find your way to doing set design from architecture?’ And I always think it’s a funny question because to me the tasks that I’m doing are exactly the same: building models and drafting. However, it’s almost like set design and architecture [are] the flip sides of the same coin, but with set design it’s a completely ephemeral thing.” Lighting design works with computers and light technology, using computer science to manipulate and shape light to create an effect onstage. It requires a knowledge of circuiting, calibration with the computer system and the lights, even how light reacts with fabric for costumes, and other layers of light.

The arts are just as, if not more applicable in the real world as any other subject. They have as much math and science applied as architecture, physical therapy, physics, engineering, etc. I would even argue that the arts are far more attainable to students in grade school than studying each STEM subject individually; students can learn how they apply to the real world more than just theoretical story problems, or labeling diagrams of the body, or physics abstracted in variables and numbers. The chasm between arts and STEM subjects isn’t as wide as we imagine and perceive them to be. They are integrally tied to one another, and are equally valuable.

Works Cited:

Schmitt, Jacob. “Working to keep the Arts in Public Schools.” Education Funding Partners, 17 July 2017. http://www.edufundingpartners.com/2017/07/17/working-keep-arts-public-schools/.

“Music and math: The genius of Beethoven – Natlya St. Clair” Youtube, uploaded by Ted-Ed, 9 September 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAxT0mRGuoY.

“The physics of the ‘hardest move’ in ballet – Arleen Sugano.” Youtube, uploaded by Ted-Ed, 22 March 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5VgOdgptRg.

“Functional Anatomy in Dance Training: An Efficient Warm Up Emphasizing the Role of the Psoas.” International Association for Dance Medicine & Science, 2011. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.iadms.org/resource/resmgr/Public/Bull_3-2_pp13-17_Solomon.pdf. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Chow, Andrew. “2017 Tony Award Winners.” The New York Times, 11 June 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/theater/tony-winners-list.html.

“Working in the Theatre: Scenic Design.” Youtube, uploaded by American Theatre Wing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXYX5YXjYaA.

“Working in the Theatre: Lighting Design.” Youtube, uploaded by American Theatre Wing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqMYsjHU5rU.

There’s an ethical question posed when artificial intelligence is programmed to create art. Yes, they do have the ability. Yes, various experiments have been conducted on audiences asking whether they can distinguish AI generated art from human generated art, usually through a form of the Turing test, and the consensus being that it’s hard to determine. Yes, (though subjective) people find that AI generated art is just as relevant, important, or aesthetically pleasing as art created by humans. But the question that arises is that is it possible for artificial intelligence to replace all humans in developing every form of art?

AI can be programmed to create paintings based off of images of art throughout multiple centuries, and can even develop music when fed information about famous composers. The team that designed Aiva, an AI classical composer, described how they taught the algorithm to compose music, “We have taught a deep neural network to understand the art of music composition by reading through a large database of classical partitions written by the most famous composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc). Aiva is capable of capturing concepts of music theory just by doing this acquisition of existing musical works.” AI has been proved to be able to create aesthetic products from analyzing and identifying patterns from preexisting material, however, there are things that AI might be isolated from that have a huge influence on humans. Ahmed Elgammel, director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University, has been experimenting with CAN, another AI visual art creator. Elgammel even says about his own experiments that art boiled down to its essence, creation, is achievable by AI and perhaps even in some cases the product can be better than human creation. However, he describes variables that do not influence AI the same way it impacts humans, “But if you define art more broadly as an attempt to say something about the wider world, to express one’s own sensibilities and anxieties and feelings, then AI art must fall short, because no machine mind can have that urge — and perhaps never will.” Humans simply have a will to create art that AI does not.

Another area where AI falls short is the ability to create in space. Artificial intelligence has the ability to create music, paintings, poetry, and even choreography, however these merely exist in time, only in the digital world, not in the physical. Art is more than the ability to create and develop a product based off patterns and variations of those patterns; humans have more than the ability to create and develop a product, they also have the ability to perform their own works. While some art forms don’t necessarily need a body to be created, the act of performance in the physical world needs a body. AI generated choreography has been achieved, and it uses footage of movement to recognize patterns to create movement in a virtual simulation. However the AI will never be able to perform the work the same way a human would be able to. Unless our technology advances enough to give AI a body that has the exact same motor functions and capabilities as humans, AI will never reach the wholistic realization of an artist.

Artificial intelligence lacks the mind-body connection that humans have, and their ability to use their sensorimotor engagements to absorb new information from engaging with the world. When computer scientists feed information to AI, such as famous paintings, composers and their music, words from books, movies, articles, and poems, the AI are using preexisting material to create a product. This is a singular variable in the human experience of art making. The presence of the mind and it’s complexities (consciousness, the ability to make decisions, the ability to have intersubjective realities or to imagine, etc.), are biologically and physiologically tied to our bodies. Mark Johnson, a philosopher and professor at the University of Oregon, confirms this theory, “What we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ are not two things, but rather aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of this embodied activity. Chief among those dimensions are qualities, images, patterns of sensorimotor processes, and emotions.” AI being given the ability to create, just as the human mind, doesn’t also give it the ability to have consciousness, make decisions, and have imagination, which are variables tied to the human mind in the act of creating art.

While there are some things that AI generated art can achieve, an aesthetic product for example, there are some things that it also fails to achieve: an urge to create art stemming from emotional afflictions in an imperfect world, influences from sensorimotor engagements developed from a body that interacts with the world, capability to perform in some art forms. AI can create an aesthetically pleasing product, but it can’t create art. At least, not in the sense that humans make art. We can program AI to create an aesthetically pleasing product in various forms, but human art is born out of an imperfect world, one where humans are emotionally and even mentally affected by it, and are urged to use art to define it through various lenses, make commentary on the world, and connect others through a shared experience. Unless AI can be given the same capabilities that humans have, such as having a fully functional body with sensory devices, and a mind that experiences consciousness, imagination, emotions, without being programmed to create, there will never be an AI that can replace humans in developing art.

Works Cited:

Kaleagasi, Bartu. “A New AI Can Write Music as Well as a Human Composer.” Futurism, 9 Mar. 2017, https://futurism.com/a-new-ai-can-write-music-as-well-as-a-human-composer.

“Is Artificial Intelligence Set to Become Art’s Next Medium?” Christie’s, 12 Dec. 2018, https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx.

Robitzski, Dan. “Artificial Intelligence Writes Bad Poems Just Like An Angsty Teen.” Futurism, 26 Apr. 2018, https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-bad-poems.

Stahl, Jennifer. “Is AI Choreography the Next Big Thing?” Dance Magazine, 11 Jan. 2019, https://www.dancemagazine.com/is-google-the-worlds-next-great-choreographer-2625652667.html?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3.

Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetic of Human Understanding. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2007.