Joanna Geldard 20-10-2011
Books
– Digital Currents Art in the age of mechanical reproduction
- Walter Benjamin John Walker
- Art in the age of mass media Simulacra and simulations
Summary –
- Technological conditions can affect collective consciousness
- Technology trigger important changes in cultural development
- Walter Benjamin’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.
Task - Get image from sketchbook
Reproducing and copying work becomes a work in own right or merely a copy of the original
The relationship between art design and media born from this scenario
Between who is copying who, who is reproducing who
The introduction of artists who deliberately use reproduction for their own work
Machine Age - Modernism
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
Didn’t need to think about what was the original and what was the copy before technology. Understanding of the original, e.g. movies that have been remade – never the same Maholy
(American, born Hungary, 1895–1946) Gelatin silver print
Moholy-Nagy played a key role at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau as a painter, graphic artist, teacher, and impassioned advocate of avant-garde photography. He made this image without a camera by placing his hand, a paintbrush, and other objects on a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light.
Benjamin and two Parallels Freud and Marx
- Photography had overturned the judgment seat of art – a fact which the discourse of modernism found hard to repress (Lovejoy Pg36)
- Freud instinctual subconscious side of human behaviour
- marxist economic though gave new political models of thinking over new criteria for value of the work of art.
- Brings about the understanding that technology changes the value of a piece of art – original is worth more, but what if the copy was made my a celebrity
Once art and design enter modes of production and consumerism the value of it can be disorientated or changed.
Kineticism
"Etienne-Jules Marey. French photographer. His photographic research was primarily a tool for his work on human and animal movement. A doctor and physiologist, Marey invented, in 1888, a method of producing a series of successive images of a moving body on the same negative in order to be able to study its exact position in space at determined moments, which he called ‘chronophotographie’. He took out numerous patents and made many inventions in the field of photography, all of them concerned with his interest in capturing instants of movement. In 1882 he invented the electric photographic gun using 35 mm film, the film itself being 20 m long; this photographic gun was capable of producing 12 images per second on a turning plate, at 1/720 of a second. He began to use transparent film rather than sensitized paper in 1890 and patented a camera using roll film, working also on a film projector in 1893. He also did research into stereoscopic images. Marey’s chronophotographic studies of moving subjects were made against a black background for added precision and clarity. These studies cover human locomotion—walking, running and jumping (e.g. Successive Phases of Movement of a Running Man, 1882; see Berger and Levrault, cat. no. 95); the movement of animals—dogs, horses, cats, lizards, etc.; and the flight of birds—pelicans, herons, ducks etc. He also photographed the trajectories of objects—stones, sticks and balls—as well as liquid movement and the functioning of the heart. He had exhibitions in Paris in 1889, 1892 and 1894, and in Florence in 1887." - Quote from Lecture
- Photography moves production into image. Increacingly transform it
- Photography provides the dematerialisation of art and design
Richard Hamilton Dada, collage and montage (1922) images or objects are ordered and coded and styled according to conventions which develop out of the practice of each medium with it s tools and processes Pg $ Lovejoy many different contexts change meaning. Dada and surrealist movements and the dematerilaization of art
- The beginning of development of art and design coming together
- How you replicate it, how you style it all changes because of new medias
- Increasing levels of deign within art being introduced
Karl Marx & Technology
- Associated with the the term technological determinism. How technological determines economical production factors and affects social conditions.
- The relationship of technological enterprise to other aspects of human activity
Dialetical Issues
Technology drives history
Technology and the division of labour Materialist view 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. They must sell their labour power. The worker is cut off from his productive power as result of mechanical reproduction. Competition replaces cooperation. Alienated form other human beings. Alienated from distinctive creativity and community we share. - These are the pains of our alienation
There is a distinction between the labourer and the worker and the people that are selling
Electronic Age - Post Modernism
Many electronic works were still made with the modern aesthetic
Emergence of information and conceptual based works
The computer a natural metaphor
A spirit of openness to industrial techniques - Moves away from current aesthetic
Collaborations between art and science
Boundaries are broken because of the introduction of the computer, allows it to shift into other forms of media
Dziga Vertov Performance Group
In 1991 Rosenberg founded the Dziga Vertov Performance group in order to develop new works that combine dance, performance and media with such elements as text projections, all filtered through Rosenberg’s masterful use of the camera. Dziga Vertov was an early Soviet filmmaker who believed in the primacy of the camera or "Kino Eye," relying on it to make sense of the myriad images that otherwise bombard our senses. Like Vertov, Rosenberg possesses an ability to distill essential movements and gestures, creating montage works that resonate with our emotions. A case in point would be Rosenberg’s "Falling / Falling" a 1998 video installation. This work depicts a nude woman, falling deeper and deeper into a body of water. She moves in response to the currents that surround her and carry her downward while her mouth tries to form words but is silenced by the aqueous void. Her hair suffers a sea change, floating about her like the silken pennant billowing in the wind. Partially inspired by the passing of the artist’s father, the piece addresses the theme of death. This is embodied both in the person of a drowning woman and the personification of death which is traditionally feminine. At the same time this image is both sensual and erotic, as this beautiful, graceful woman moves through the water, exploring the notion of the death of reason and analogies between death and sexuality. - Quote from Lecture
Laurie Anderson 1976 Viophonograph - >>>>> Research and make notes <<<<<
Flying "True materialism is what you learn in the material world, not what you earn." - LINK
Consumerism in the real world and its relationship with image
Simulation and Simulacrum -
It is the reflection of a profound reality
It masks and denatures a profound reality
It masks the absence of a profound reality - it can become reality in its own right
It has no relation to any reality whatsover; it is its own pure simulacrum
- Jean Baudrillard (1981)
- The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. It is not parady, nor duplication, nor imitation it is a substitution of the signs of the real for the real
He used technologies as critique on their actual effect on society
- Paik loved to employ up-and -coming technologies as a method of critiquing their actual effect on society. He was the first artist to use a Sony Portapak and to utilize visual electronics in addition to already established acoustic technologies.
John Walker and art and mass media; Art in the age of mass media (2001)
Art uses mass media (1990 – 2000)
Art in advertisements
The artist as media celebrity
Digital Media
Margret Lovejoy - Digital Currents
Digital potential leads to multimedia productions.
Technological reduction of all images so they are addressed by the computer
New contexts
The Human race Machine
Nancy Burson; Nancy Burson is best known for her pioneering work in morphing technology, which age enhances the human face. Her Human Race Machine, which allows people to view themselves as a different race, is used worldwide as a diversity tool that provides students with the profound visual experience of being another race. She was responsible for the creation of computer morphing technology, FBI collaboration etc....
The lines between the creative subjects are blurred, think about how digital media and technology has affected this...
