Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 09:29:38 -0500 From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com> Subject: War Sci to Sci-Art 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 list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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