Response to Reading - Michelle Hurley
When I read about George Landow’s “Intertextualities” from 1987, I was actually very scared. I feel that my generation struggles with deep and serious reading because we lacked teaching in phonetics in basic understanding while rushing to teach six year olds how to draw conclusions and comparisons. Projects like Landow’s work to further break down pieces of writing, though to his credit he did so before the boom of quick blog entries, newsbyte media, fragmented talk news, etc. I just feel that breaking down writing into “textual units” takes away from the writing as a whole and does not well serve Landon’s ultimate purpose of creating an easier way to draw connections and comparisons between works; his talk of a “docuverse” is idealistic yet possible in theory, but in the real world would become chaos. But, since I was barely drooling when all of this was happening, who am I to judge?
About a decade before I was born, Michael Naimark was working on “surrogate travel” in 1979. It’s an interesting project that allows the viewer to travel to a place virtually, using panoramic film imagery that slowly turns and allows the viewer to see more of the place. Interestingly, I haven’t seen much of this technology emerge recently in regards to art, but I have seen elements of it in online panoramas so that you can see a room or apartment’s floor plan and on Google Earth so that you can see satellite images of a place. Through Google Earth I have seen the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and even my hometown from an aerial view. It’s cool to know that this amazing technology is based off of Naimark’s work in the ‘70’s.
I think that in the future art will follow technology’s footsteps: right now, technology is all about touch capabilities (touch screens, touch functions, touch phones, etc.). Imagine art that a viewer can touch and (to some extent) control. This would allow for greater dialogue between the artist and the viewer which could lead to greater understanding of the artist’s vision and inspiration. And what would it be like if a viewer could give greater feedback to an artist? Would it influence the artist’s future work? I don’t know. Perhaps even being able to see (whether by observation or recorded records) how someone interacted with their work could influence an artist, showcasing what parts of the work people were drawn to, which they lingered at, which they passed by, etc. I think increased feedback and dialogue through this kind of technology would greatly affect art on all levels.