Technology for Art’s Sake
While covering a supercomputing conference in San Jose, California, I stumbled upon an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art that I found infinitely more interesting than supercomputers. Sure enough, two stories came of it that began to change the course of my career, though I’ve never revisited the subjects again. I’m grateful to the editorial staff at IEEE Spectrum for humoring me in my discovery; it certainly wasn’t what they bargained for!
You call this art?
In art, as in engineering, the past 30 years have seen tremendous diversification. These pages are inadequate to list all the technology that art has adopted–in part because art is difficult to define. Despite the lack of hard and fast rules, certain requirements guided the choice of the nine examples presented here from the many fine works at the “Alternating Currents” exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art, in California. Though not always obvious from the photographs, each work meets the following criteria when confronted by the viewer in person.
- The art had to be visual or have a visual component. It could give off auditory and other sensory stimuli, but sight had to be the primary means of communicating with the viewer.
- The art had to do something–move, talk, explode–just as long as it was something more than a static representation. Since technology is often evoked to produce physical or virtual motion, most of the items portrayed here are kinetic. Although many works that fall under the banner of Art & Technology do so because they comment on technology as a subject, works that use technology as a medium looked more likely to interest IEEE Spectrum readers.
- The art had to communicate. In the age of electronics, communication often means audio or video, but even in silent or static works, a message should be conveyed, be it obvious, covert, reportorial, revelatory, or fanatical. Regardless of the meaning, the image should stimulate thought and stir debate.
- One person’s trash is another person’s treasure–not a small issue! Having said art is hard to define, if not indefinable, right at this moment we are attempting to define it, categorize it, and judge it. Does art need to be beautiful? If it displeases or disturbs me, do I still have to regard it as art? These complicated issues bring to light the most important and self-evident statement that can be made about art: art is subjective.
In the following pages are works in many styles that will elicit an infinity of opinions from viewers. Yet they do have two things in common: they have been dubbed “art” by experts in that field, and they use technology as a medium, and quite often, as a message.
Spectrum is indebted to Beth Venn and Cathy Kimball, co-curators of “Alternating Currents,” for the interpretive captions. Unless otherwise indicated, each photograph shows an item from the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dimensions are in inches; height precedes width precedes depth. Photographs appear here through the generosity of the artists and through special arrangement with the owner of each work.
Art’s Sake
As with other areas of society, fine art was not immune from the sweeping technological advances that began in the early 1960s. The avant-garde artists of the ’60s counter-culture, in direct collaboration with engineers, welcomed the introduction of emerging technologies and employed them in ways that changed how art is created, defined, and appreciated [see "The engineer as catalyst,"]. In the decades since, this merger of art and engineering has blossomed into what museum curators and art historians now like to term the Art & Technology Movement.
Technology itself has had a multi-faceted effect on the world of art. These days, art may approach technology as a subject, an artistic medium, a message, or any combination of the three. As a subject, technology’s effect on society is well documented by today’s artists. Sometimes, oil paints or bronze or other traditional materials are harnessed to the portrayal of the positive or negative effects of technology, while at other times, artists employ technology as an attention-grabber, to comment on itself.
As a medium, technology may be considered an extension of, say, watercolors or clay. Today’s artists use motors, transmitters, and computers both behind the scenes and in the finished work. Technology has also transcended the bounds of the visual by incorporating sound, light, and motion. The moving shapes draw the viewers of a work deeper within its toils, even as the technological addition exacts from them a wholly new way of experiencing art.
In most works of art, subject and medium together affect the response to a painting, statue, or what have you, but the outcome is not always predetermined. The message put forth from a work, as interpreted by a viewer, is highly individual.
In fact, no interpretation of a work of art is ever universally accepted, and none will be proposed here. Rather, this report sketches in a perspective from which readers may draw their own conclusions. The objective is to provoke thought and retrospection, not to take sides on what is or is not “art.” But it seems fitting, as the turn of century, indeed the millennium, approaches, to step back and form our own opinions on what art is saying about this Age of Technology.
Pixels at an exhibition
Assembling an interpretive report of the Art & Technology Movement would have been a monumental task, in light of the relative youth of these works and the myriad opinions on what constitutes a successful work of art. The movement is 30 years old and shows no sign of ending. Happily, the selection of works for inclusion in this article was aided by two leading U.S. art museums, which mounted a major exhibition on the theme in October 1997.
“Alternating Currents: American Art in the Age of Technology” is a joint effort of California’s San Jose Museum of Art and New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The show, which runs in San Jose through mid-October 1998, features over 60 works representative of the Art & Technology movement from 1959 to the present. In this cross-section of late 20th century technological art, each work is poised to become a mine of fascination for art historians of the next millennium.
Most of the items were selected from the Permanent Collection at the Whitney Museum, long a promoter of Art & Technology. And while traditional art forms such as painting or bronze sculpture are of course still practiced, the arrival of new technologies has lured even these contemporary artists beyond the purely visual to incorporate other sensory stimuli in some of their works.
At first, the sheer variety of the exhibits on display in San Jose is overwhelming–a veritable onslaught of light, video, sound, size, and movement lays siege to one’s senses. The gamut runs from traditional pencil sketches to huge inflatable ice bags [Figure 1]. So what threads are common to the exhibition as a whole?
The primary component is, of course, technology, according to Cathy Kimball, associate curator at the San Jose Museum of Art, although not solely in its use as a creative device. “The works are not all tech-based,” she told IEEE Spectrum. “Many of the more traditional works were included since they speak to the paradox of technology in our lives, how everything has simultaneously become simpler yet more complex.” For some artists, it seems, the best way to comment on the effects of technology is to revert to the simplest and most traditional of artistic media.
Variations on a theme
The curators grouped the works by gallery, with a view to suggesting how technology has meshed with works of visual art, and what the results may say about the effects of technology on society.
One gallery, entitled Challenging Perceptions, houses items that tend to illustrate the artists’ shift from traditional materials to experimentation with “the powerful visual imagery of both complex technological devices, and explorations of light and space,” to quote Beth Venn, associate curator at the Whitney Museum. They illustrate the possibilities of electric light and kinetic sculpture, introducing a radical change from the art of prior centuries. This sharp contrast in style, fueled in part by the technological magic used to create these works, defy the viewer to answer the question, “Is real, real?”
Consider Robert Irwin’s No Title. Here, artificial light is deployed to obliterate the physical boundaries of the work, asking the viewer to determine where the wall ends and the art begins [Figure 2]. Engineer Harold Edgerton [see "An EE for all seasons," Trudy E. Bell, Spectrum, September 1989, pp. 52-57] manipulates the stroboscope to help him photograph what the human eye cannot capture [Figure 3]. The peculiar beauty of a bullet racing through an apple flowers from his inventive merger of light and motion with photography, and though the event is too fast for the human eye to see, the photograph proves how it all happened.
Or does it? Photography, once considered so honest that it could serve documentary purposes, can now be digitally altered without betraying the fact and has therefore lost a degree of trustworthiness. Some of the San Jose exhibits accordingly demonstrate the early capabilities of digitally enhanced photography. The axiom, “The camera doesn’t lie” may no longer be true. With the aid of a computer, the camera may lie just as seamlessly as it tells the truth, further blurring the line between illusion and reality.
Another gallery, Message & Narrative, examines how technology can transform the very nature of looking at a piece of art, in particular its contribution to the viewer’s interpretation of a work’s meaning. In this gallery, artist Jenny Holzer uses a light-emitting-diode sign to directly communicate alternating messages that in another age might have been a series of static, woodblock prints [Figure 4]. Pepón Osorio and Nam June Paik combine found objects with video and audio to erect virtual monuments to deceased acquaintances [Figure 5 and Figure 6]. In their thought-provoking works, Tony Oursler and Alan Rath use technology as tool, interpreter, and messenger [Figure 7 and Figure 8].
“It is important to recognize that not all art that concerns itself with issues of technology is necessarily ‘high-tech,’” the Whitney’s Venn said. Indeed, many of the exhibition’s works are drawn or painted, differing only stylistically from the portraits and landscapes of centuries past. The issues they expose can be foreboding or optimistic, offering as many types of opinion as there are types of artist. Despite all the technology displayed in the exhibit, however, the foremost byproduct of the Information Age–the computer–is all but absent.
Where’s the computer?
The art establishment by and large spurns the computer when it is used by artists to replicate traditional methods and materials. The feeling seems to be that artists who utilize computer software solely to produce and output a digital painting or other conventional work are neither battling the traditional mainstream nor advancing the field of visual art in any other way. For today’s artist, using the computer as a tool requires far less skill than mastering the techniques of oil painting or charcoal sketching, for example, since with the click of a mouse users can now automate what were once virtuoso artistic techniques.
Venn, for one, said that using the computer to generate images is not enough to elevate the work to a higher level in today’s art world. “The result has to be different from anything else to really make an impact, but all this technology will not eliminate the use of traditional materials and media,” she said. “Traditional media will continue to coexist with technological ones, much in the same way that radio managed to coexist with television. People have different tastes, so there’s lots of room.”
Art & Technology guru Billy Klüver is of the same opinion [again, see "The engineer as catalyst,"]. “Certainly you can consider works generated on a computer as ‘art,’ but it doesn’t interest me,” Klüver said. “Too many artists feel if they work on the computer, they don’t have to do anything dangerous. Art just can’t sit there. It has to do something.”
On the other hand, artist and educator Paul Brown theorized that computer technology will eventually spawn a revolutionary artistic medium, one in which the computer is not just a tool for the artist, but a medium for the art itself. Many young artists are working in new forms that again challenge the viewer’s understanding of what art can be. As with all avant-garde work, the viewer must re-examine their definition and appreciation for art.
“It will require a shift in the way art is perceived,” said Brown, a member of the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology, San Francisco and editor of Fine Art Forum. “It is slow in developing for a number of reasons, but if historical models–like the emergence of photography or motion pictures–are any indication, I would expect a new medium to emerge in the early years of the new millennium.”
Venn, Klüver, and Brown make the same excellent point. The use of a computer to produce static images, no matter how high-tech those images may look, turns it into simply another tool for the artist–a new-age electronic paintbox–and leaves the onlooker literally on the outside. The computer’s strength is its ability to interact directly with the viewer, seen or unseen, not unlike the early kinetic art of Klüver’s colleagues [see photos in "The engineer as catalyst,"]. When a viewer moves a mouse and so alters the artist’s image within a given set of parameters–or else triggers other sensations like touch, sound, and smell–the motion or event serves to involve that person or audience with the work.
Many works use a computer behind the scenes, as in the design of a mechanical work or in the software component of multimedia installations. In the finished piece, however, the computer may not be seen at all. While the computer may serve to display art or create art, its real potential emerges when used in both capacities, as evidenced by the only computer-interactive work in the San Jose exhibition.
In Joel Slayton’s To Not See a Thing [Figure 9], the viewer manipulates a transparent Plexiglas cube containing a motion sensor. The movement is displayed as a wire-frame drawing on a 15-inch color monitor, giving the viewer a visual representation of the cube’s movements. Meanwhile, the attached Sun workstation records all the coordinates transmitted by the moving box and will eventually compile them into one gigantic collaborative video file.
Interestingly, even though there are likely to be many thousands of user sessions, most visitors respond to the work in the same manner. First, they handle the box gently, watching the monitor to see how the wireframe cube reacts to their actions. Then, a little at a time, they handle it more roughly, starting slowly and building in speed and force. Some jump around with it, some dance with it. Eventually, they try to outdo it, moving it faster and more vigorously until the graphics cannot keep up.
This treatment of the art work suggests a parallel with society’s handling of technology. If the Plexiglas box is seen as a metaphor for new technology, then viewers handle it with the same actions as society does, in the same order–trepidation, familiarity, competition. Again, art has communicated. Only this time, it’s not just an artist’s suggestion of how society may respond to new technology. Like a good scientist, somewhere on the Sun workstation’s hard disk, there exists the evidence and data to prove his theory.