The New York Times, January 3, 1998, pp. B7, B9.
From Science to Art to Science to Cyber-Art
Signs of a Revolution in a Centuries-Old Symbiosis
By Paul Lewis
Throughout history, technological advances and artistic
innovation have gone hand in hand. Without the advent of
slow-drying oil paint in the 15th century Renaissance
painters would not have used such subtle coloring and
shadows. Without printing, professional novelists may not
have emerged. Without certain instruments, some musical
classics would not exist. Liszt, for example, could never
have composed the "Annees de Pelerinage" if the piano
hadn't replaced the harpsichord.
Now a school of contemporary artists is trying to create a
new electronic art form based on the latest information
technologies. Using digital imaging techniques and the
worldwide Internet, these artists work with computers to
mix cocktails of images, texts and sounds that are
stimulating to ear, eye and mind and are instantly
available through the Web to an audience of millions.
What many of these cyber-artists may not consider is that
their art is the unlikely offspring of the cold war. Most
of the technologies they use, like digital imaging md the
Internet itself, were originally developed for the military
and have only become readily available since the cold war's
demise as manufacturers seek new markets for them.
The growing popularity of cyber-art--which more than any
other art form, some would say, is dependent on
technology--is leading more art historians to appraise the
complex relationship between science and art. It is also
spurring an examination of the impact of these newly
developed art forms on artistic tradition and the audience.
In "Techniques of the Observer," a study of modern artistic
vision, Jonathan Crary of Columbia University argues that
the roots of the whole modernist movement--of which
cyber-art is merely the latest example--lie in the science
and technology of the early 19th century. "In this book I
have tried to give a sense of how radical was the
reconfiguration of vision by the 1840's," Professor Crary
writes. "If our problem is vision and modernity, we must
first examine earlier decades, not the modernist paintings
of the 1870's and 1880's."
He cites such developments as medical research into the eye
and the advent of entertaining devices like the
kaleidoscope, the magic lantern and the stereoscope, which
created what he calls "subjective vision" and encouraged
artists to see the world in new ways.
Painters like Turner were experimenting with light decades
before Monet and the other Impressionists did. In the
1850's, the critic John Ruskin defined a new kind of artist
when he urged painters to recover that "innocence of the
eye" that would allow them to see objects "as a blind man
would see them if suddenly gifted with sight."
The impact of present-day information technologies on the
art world is even more revolutionary, says Professor Crary.
He argues that "cyber-art" represents "a transformation in
the nature of visuality probably more profound than the
break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance
perspective." No longer is the artist an "observer" seeking
to depict an external reality from a fixed point in space.
Instead he is creating images that exist only in
electromagnetic form, have no fixed relationship to him in
space, yet can be seen simultaneously by the whole world.
History is filled with examples of new technology that
enabled new art forms to develop while vastly widening the
audience. Printing created the best seller -- first the
Bible, eventually the novel. Lithography, an inexpensive
printing process that also permitted wide distribution,
brought art out of palaces and galleries and into ordinary
homes.
In his book "Technological and Social Change in the Middle
Ages," the American scholar Lyn White draws a parallel to
cyber-art's cold war origins, showing how the introduction
of the stirrup into Europe during the eighth century and
the heavy iron plow in the tenth laid the foundations for
medieval art and civilization.
Mr. White uses indirect linkages and extremely complex
chains of events to draw a connection between the invention
and the art. By harnessing the power of a charging horse
behind a knight's lance, for example, the stirrup made
cavalry the most potent force on the battlefield. That in
turn encouraged the development of the feudal system, under
which the nobility provided the king with prized horsemen
in return for land.
The feudal world, with its aristocracy of landed warriors,
its castles, troubadours and wandering knights, in turn
developed a distinctive culture of its own based on the
ideals of chivalry and courtly love, which left their mark
on all the arts of the Middle Ages.
Similarly, by boosting farm output by more than 30 percent,
the introduction of the heavy plow and the three-field
rotational system created a food surplus in northern Europe
that allowed people to move to towns, where they could
specialize in arts and crafts.
But if science is often the leader, it is also led:
sometimes esthetic needs are the motor of technological
invention. French hydraulic engineers developed new
techniques to supply fountains at Versailles, not to bring
clean water to Paris. And today's oxygen blowtorch is the
direct descendant of the blowpipes used for centuries to
make glass ornaments.
In a 1970 essay on "Art, Technology and Science," Cyril
Stanley Smith of the Massachusetts Institute Technology
offered examples of new technologies that developed first
in what he termed "an esthetic environment."
He theorizes that the first use of metal, in the fourth
millennium B.C., was for decorative buttons. Bronze was
cast as church bells for centuries before it was used for
cannons. Medieval illuminators developed metallic powders
for the silver and gold inks they used.
Similarly, interest in chemistry and the properties of
natural substances was stimulated by the centuries of
searching by Europeans for the right mixture of minerals
and clays to make porcelain. The potters of Meissen in
Saxony finally discovered it in the 18th century, although
it had been known to the Chinese since the seventh.
Artists' dependence on modern technology has reached its
highest level yet, and not just in cyber-art. Without
formaldehyde, the British artist Damien Hirst could not
exhibit his sliced-up pigs and cows. An hour-long video of
bored policemen shuffling and scratching as they pose for
a photograph has just won the Turner Prize in Britain.
Art scholars argue that the new "global information
culture" has tremendous implications for artists and their
audiences. Barbara Stafford, an art historian at Chicago
University, says cyber-art will "change the structure of
the art world" by allowing "anyone to make art and show it
to the world."
"Artists will no longer need to exhibit at some tony
gallery to succeed," she added.
For Ronald Jones, director of the Digital Media Center at
Columbia University, the emergence of cyber-art shows that
"our culture is embracing information as a medium for the
artist to work with," with far-reaching implications.
Artists are becoming technicians again as they were in
Renaissance days, he said, because they must learn to write
software, and operate the more sophisticated computers.
They are rethinking relationships with audiences they never
see. And they are forced to reconsider the nature of
originality by working in a medium that permits infinite
reproduction and distortion of any image.
Still, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the
quality of the cyber-art produced so far. "I'm struck by
the similarity of the images," Ms. Stafford admits. "They
do not recognize the richness of our of artistic
tradition."
"It's art all right, but we have not yet seen a great
computer artist," is the view of Robert Storr, a curator of
painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan. So far, he said, "these artists still seem more
interested in the technology itself and not in what it
could express."
[Photo] Detail from "Mistaken Identities," a 1996 work on
CD-ROM by the artist Christine Tamblyn.
[End]
From Science to Art to Science to Cyber-Art
Signs of a Revolution in a Centuries-Old Symbiosis
By Paul Lewis
Throughout history, technological advances and artistic
innovation have gone hand in hand. Without the advent of
slow-drying oil paint in the 15th century Renaissance
painters would not have used such subtle coloring and
shadows. Without printing, professional novelists may not
have emerged. Without certain instruments, some musical
classics would not exist. Liszt, for example, could never
have composed the "Annees de Pelerinage" if the piano
hadn't replaced the harpsichord.
Now a school of contemporary artists is trying to create a
new electronic art form based on the latest information
technologies. Using digital imaging techniques and the
worldwide Internet, these artists work with computers to
mix cocktails of images, texts and sounds that are
stimulating to ear, eye and mind and are instantly
available through the Web to an audience of millions.
What many of these cyber-artists may not consider is that
their art is the unlikely offspring of the cold war. Most
of the technologies they use, like digital imaging md the
Internet itself, were originally developed for the military
and have only become readily available since the cold war's
demise as manufacturers seek new markets for them.
The growing popularity of cyber-art--which more than any
other art form, some would say, is dependent on
technology--is leading more art historians to appraise the
complex relationship between science and art. It is also
spurring an examination of the impact of these newly
developed art forms on artistic tradition and the audience.
In "Techniques of the Observer," a study of modern artistic
vision, Jonathan Crary of Columbia University argues that
the roots of the whole modernist movement--of which
cyber-art is merely the latest example--lie in the science
and technology of the early 19th century. "In this book I
have tried to give a sense of how radical was the
reconfiguration of vision by the 1840's," Professor Crary
writes. "If our problem is vision and modernity, we must
first examine earlier decades, not the modernist paintings
of the 1870's and 1880's."
He cites such developments as medical research into the eye
and the advent of entertaining devices like the
kaleidoscope, the magic lantern and the stereoscope, which
created what he calls "subjective vision" and encouraged
artists to see the world in new ways.
Painters like Turner were experimenting with light decades
before Monet and the other Impressionists did. In the
1850's, the critic John Ruskin defined a new kind of artist
when he urged painters to recover that "innocence of the
eye" that would allow them to see objects "as a blind man
would see them if suddenly gifted with sight."
The impact of present-day information technologies on the
art world is even more revolutionary, says Professor Crary.
He argues that "cyber-art" represents "a transformation in
the nature of visuality probably more profound than the
break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance
perspective." No longer is the artist an "observer" seeking
to depict an external reality from a fixed point in space.
Instead he is creating images that exist only in
electromagnetic form, have no fixed relationship to him in
space, yet can be seen simultaneously by the whole world.
History is filled with examples of new technology that
enabled new art forms to develop while vastly widening the
audience. Printing created the best seller -- first the
Bible, eventually the novel. Lithography, an inexpensive
printing process that also permitted wide distribution,
brought art out of palaces and galleries and into ordinary
homes.
In his book "Technological and Social Change in the Middle
Ages," the American scholar Lyn White draws a parallel to
cyber-art's cold war origins, showing how the introduction
of the stirrup into Europe during the eighth century and
the heavy iron plow in the tenth laid the foundations for
medieval art and civilization.
Mr. White uses indirect linkages and extremely complex
chains of events to draw a connection between the invention
and the art. By harnessing the power of a charging horse
behind a knight's lance, for example, the stirrup made
cavalry the most potent force on the battlefield. That in
turn encouraged the development of the feudal system, under
which the nobility provided the king with prized horsemen
in return for land.
The feudal world, with its aristocracy of landed warriors,
its castles, troubadours and wandering knights, in turn
developed a distinctive culture of its own based on the
ideals of chivalry and courtly love, which left their mark
on all the arts of the Middle Ages.
Similarly, by boosting farm output by more than 30 percent,
the introduction of the heavy plow and the three-field
rotational system created a food surplus in northern Europe
that allowed people to move to towns, where they could
specialize in arts and crafts.
But if science is often the leader, it is also led:
sometimes esthetic needs are the motor of technological
invention. French hydraulic engineers developed new
techniques to supply fountains at Versailles, not to bring
clean water to Paris. And today's oxygen blowtorch is the
direct descendant of the blowpipes used for centuries to
make glass ornaments.
In a 1970 essay on "Art, Technology and Science," Cyril
Stanley Smith of the Massachusetts Institute Technology
offered examples of new technologies that developed first
in what he termed "an esthetic environment."
He theorizes that the first use of metal, in the fourth
millennium B.C., was for decorative buttons. Bronze was
cast as church bells for centuries before it was used for
cannons. Medieval illuminators developed metallic powders
for the silver and gold inks they used.
Similarly, interest in chemistry and the properties of
natural substances was stimulated by the centuries of
searching by Europeans for the right mixture of minerals
and clays to make porcelain. The potters of Meissen in
Saxony finally discovered it in the 18th century, although
it had been known to the Chinese since the seventh.
Artists' dependence on modern technology has reached its
highest level yet, and not just in cyber-art. Without
formaldehyde, the British artist Damien Hirst could not
exhibit his sliced-up pigs and cows. An hour-long video of
bored policemen shuffling and scratching as they pose for
a photograph has just won the Turner Prize in Britain.
Art scholars argue that the new "global information
culture" has tremendous implications for artists and their
audiences. Barbara Stafford, an art historian at Chicago
University, says cyber-art will "change the structure of
the art world" by allowing "anyone to make art and show it
to the world."
"Artists will no longer need to exhibit at some tony
gallery to succeed," she added.
For Ronald Jones, director of the Digital Media Center at
Columbia University, the emergence of cyber-art shows that
"our culture is embracing information as a medium for the
artist to work with," with far-reaching implications.
Artists are becoming technicians again as they were in
Renaissance days, he said, because they must learn to write
software, and operate the more sophisticated computers.
They are rethinking relationships with audiences they never
see. And they are forced to reconsider the nature of
originality by working in a medium that permits infinite
reproduction and distortion of any image.
Still, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the
quality of the cyber-art produced so far. "I'm struck by
the similarity of the images," Ms. Stafford admits. "They
do not recognize the richness of our of artistic
tradition."
"It's art all right, but we have not yet seen a great
computer artist," is the view of Robert Storr, a curator of
painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan. So far, he said, "these artists still seem more
interested in the technology itself and not in what it
could express."
[Photo] Detail from "Mistaken Identities," a 1996 work on
CD-ROM by the artist Christine Tamblyn.
[End]