Wonder Women :: Art & Technology

In 1988, the year I was born, Marc Canter was developing new kinds of software. Nicknamed "Father Multimedia," Canter worked on computer programs with a user-friendly notational system similar to a musical score. He saw the future as one in which the user could "compose" on the computer by bringing together text, art, video, music, sound clips, and animation into a single "composition." Canter is the founder of the software company Macromedia, which is still successful to this day.

In 1979, almost ten years before I was born, Michael Naimark released the Aspen Movie Map. This virtual map allowed users to navigate through Aspen, Colorado using a laserdisc. This map was one of the first instances in which a user could "travel" virtually. I see this technology used frequently today, but not in the context of art. One example is GoogleStreet, also known as Streetview, where users can navigate a map of a city and view photographs of what the street actually looks like in various places. Another example would be house tours on realty websites. In these "tours" potential buyers can "walk" through the rooms of the house -- all at their personal computer.

I see video games as one of the forefronts of art. Virtual environments pose a challenge for artists because unlike a 2-D artwork, the artist has to create a scene or an object that can be viewed and from an almost infinite number of angles. As computer technology becomes better and better, artists will be able to make computer and video games more realistic. In the future we probably won't see as many goal-oriented video games (games in which you have to say, kill a monster, or beat 100 levels), but instead more open-ended games like The Sims and Second Life that let users explore their personalities and socialize via virtual worlds. The artistic elements of the video game graphics will be an important part of the success of these games.

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In 1985, around the time my mother was gestating me, Scott Fisher was concerned with creating multi-sensory modes of interaction. He termed the world "telepresence" (seems not to have caught on in contemporary discourse concerning multimedia) which he described as "the projection of the self into a virtual world."
About a decade before Fisher was thinking about stimulating all senses during virtual experiences Myron Krueger was creating alternative modes of interacting with virtual worlds. Krueger, while not really appreciated by the art world, created art pieces and theories concerned with the idea that the response was the medium. I find it very interesting that a lot of Kruegers work took place at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Most of his pieces where concerned with the arts some even included interactive art drawing - however he was never embraced by the art community. It seems that his work was the "pandoras box" of many multimedia art projects today- and even of the past (Marcel Duchamp- A piece of art is not complete without the perception of the viewer)
I feel that multimedia practices will slowly become more in tune with natural processes. More and more we are finding that nature has provided designers and scientists with the most efficient solutions to problems. I feel that the future of technology (to broaden the scope of this prediction) will be taught to us by what nature we will have left!!

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In 1987, a year after I was born, George Landow was exploring new literary forms he called “intertextualities.” He wanted to use new media to dissolve the authority of the author, allowing readers to interact with texts in ways that were impossible before. He also wanted to get away from a linear/narrative text and instead focus on individual fragments of text. You can definitely see Landow’s influence on today’s hyperfiction and e-poetry, where texts tend to be more fragmented and are open to readers interacting with and navigating between fragments.

A decade earlier in 1976, Robert Wilson was creating “visual operas” such as “Einstein on the Beach.” Like Landow’s “intertextualities,” these operas worked against linear narrative structures. They were about music and visual effects for their own sake and didn’t “make sense” in a traditional way.

I think that technology encourages these non-linear and non-narrative art forms and will continue to do so a decade into the future. The idea of the reader/viewer’s increased interaction and authority in experiencing art I think will also influence art in the future. As art moves away from “traditional” media and into “new” media, I think it will continue to work against traditional structures and subjects as well.

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The artwork that “From Wagner the Virtual Reality” deems representative of 1986 is the “intertextualities” advocated by George Landow. The notion of hypertext came from the idea that computers could be tools for communicating with words and experimenting with interactive writing, More importantly, this kind of text was no longer words attached by the author in a specified order, but an artistic montage where the reader was bound only by his or her decision of what words to read first. This added a new dimension to the art of creative writing. It seems similar is some ways to the way poetry is written on page in a non-traditional, non-linear structure, yet the hypermedia allows for even more fluidity. Robert Wilson’s work from the previous decade also toyed with the notion of texts and other mediums that freed the spectators mind to wander freely through the sensory experience without being led down a preconceived path. In Wilson and Philip Glass’ operatic collaboration “Einstein on the Beach” the movement of the piece through time and space is completely non-linear, and it greatly impacted contemporary performing arts. We can see then that the transition to a greater use of computers might carry this concept of breaking the bounds of a strait line into the cyber world of hypermedia.
Computers, information technology, and the internet make the global community at large appear closer and closer to our daily lives. The art put forth using multimedia and the network of the internet is available all over the world. Once the multimedia art is online, it becomes a permanent, indestructible piece of work that may float in cyberspace for eternity. I imagine that a decade from now, artists will anticipate that wider and more diverse audiences will be viewing their work. Art will be greatly influences by how artists want their work to be seen and by whom. I believe that the tactics used in getting the multimedia art scene will be similar to tactics used by consumer marketing groups trying to find the most appealing image with which to catch the target audience. Spectators can be targeted in ways that were once impossible before computers and the internet were widely available. In an age where multimedia can easily be disseminated, artists will find new ways of reaching spectators that look for inspiration simply by clicking a mouse.

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The year I was born (1985), Scott Fisher's "Telepresence" is highlighted as symbolic of the times. His aim was to create/ enhance virtual realities, and his term telepresence meant "the projection of the self into a virtual world." Though virtual realities were already popping up, he added to his work headphones and microphones so that sounds could be both heard and created, as well as collaborating with another artist, Tom Zimmerman, to create the dataglove, which allowed people to "feel" and "grab" things in the virtual world. We hear about virtual worlds and realities today, though I myself have never experienced something like this in totality. I have had "virtual" experiences, such as art exhibits that incorporate the sense of smell, but nothing like the dataglove. This leads me to think that this concept of immersion (entering into an a simulation or suggestion of an alternate 3D world) will be elaborated on in the future, even though things like this may exist, they are clearly not well-distributed forms of art, and time may change that.

Roughly a decade before I was born in 1972, Alan Kay was working on developing the Graphic User Interface (GUI), which is considered one of the most crucial advancements in human and computer interaction because he assigned icons to how we use the computer (the folders and overlapping windows that we still use today). No doubt other icons could have been formed; last Tuesday we talked about the "desktop", as if the computer were a physical space. Perhaps this particular icon stuck because the original use for computers and the main function even today, is a workspace, as is a desktop.

As I wrote before, I think that a decade more of technology will show even more enhanced forms of immersion. We are already seeing elaborate and surprisingly accurate 3-dimensional worlds, such as on video games and animated movies. The next step is to combine Scott Fisher's ideas of incorporating all of the senses. And I am sure this is already happening, but as technology advances, virtual realities will be fine-tuned and become more and more "real". In a way, it's a little scary, but perhaps I am bit old-fashioned.

Posted by Kari Volkmann at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1987 when I was born, George Landow’s “Intertextualities” paved the way for the use of computer/viewer interaction in order to transform reading and writing into a unique individual experience. With hypertext, readers are able to read literary works that are ever changing before their eyes using both graphics and text phrases that allow the reader an endless range of possible interpretations. The meaning of what you see is entirely up to you and the route you take to using the hypertext is also entirely up to you. Grammatron is said to be the widely accessed hyperfiction work on the World Wide Web. Here is an example of a phrase that you would see from viewing it – “their computer-mediated environment announcing itself to the creative plureality of "being" that congregates before the Digital Altar.” This work reminded me of the action-novels I read in middle school where you could “pick your own journey” that would lead you to the end, but wouldn’t necessarily be the same as someone else’s experience. Similarly this concept is applied to hypertext art – allowing viewers to click on hypertext that leads them on a personalized path where they can expand on words that interest them. I agree with critics that have said this destroys the linearity of a work, but that is the point and it wasn't unintentional. Follow this link to view Grammatron: http://www.grammatron.com/index2.html

A decade and one year before in 1976, Robert Wilson created “Visual Theater.” Interestingly the reason he invented this new form of art was because he was “frustrated with the images in his head that were so much richer than anything he could get on canvas.” I think that a lot of artists probably feel this way when creating art. He worked with other famous people from artists to musicians to create a music theater experience integrating non-narrative drama, scenic beauty, music, sound, silence, and dance. Viewers were able to experience seemingly bizarre and out of place works such as Einstein on the Beach. I think it would have been exciting to go to a performance like this - something unusual and interpretive. I think more theatre performances have strayed in this direction since its initiation. Similarly to the hypertext fiction that was created 10 years later, this also made use of nonlinearity, so I was somewhat surprised to see this trend expanded over the years to incorporate new technology (computers) but still remained.

A decade from now in 2018, I imagine there still will be a trend of this non-linear perspective. Artists today seem to want to allow as much creative room for the viewer to participate in the meaning and presentation of the art as the artist himself. I would not be surprised if viewers were able to contribute to the artwork and leave a lasting impression on it in some way – more of a community collaborative artwork. The expansion of virtual reality will eventually become more accessible to the public and I imagine that participants will be able to create their own stories through this form of interaction that no other person will ever be able to experience in the same way. Maybe people will see artworks through virtual technology and be able to change it in any way they want while viewing it, but once they are done, it will be a completely blank canvas for the next person who interacts with it.

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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.

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Browse this Timeline and the related concepts.

Which art work is represented as symbolic of the art created in the year that you were born?

What was happening one decade earlier?

What do you imagine may influence art work created one decade from now?

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