ART AND TECHNOLOGY may seem the unlikeliest of partners, but throughout history technology has provided artists with new tools for expression. From Leonardo da Vinci’s camera obscura (an optical device used as a drawing aid) in the fifteenth century to the emergence of Internet art, technological advances have always played a pivotal role in shaping art and our understanding of it. However, over the past fifty years it is fair to say that we have become more aware of the close ties between art and technology.
Artists had been experimenting with moving images since the early days of photography, but only with the introduction of video were many artists able to adopt it as a medium. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists began making tapes, as video cameras became less expensive and more portable. Tape stock could be recorded over and played back instantly. This new freedom allowed much more scope for experimentation and spontaneity, and no longer required artists to plan out the end product scene by scene.
Video also proved the perfect medium for documenting performance art and the experimental practices that were emerging at the same time → see S. Artists were able to re-purpose a tool that stood for objectivity, accuracy, information and mass-communication, to investigate concepts of surveillance, and the boundary between public and private. Moreover, here was a medium that had a running time and required viewers to watch it and lend it their attention in a different manner from a traditional art object. In this way, video art completely changed the exhibition experience. The new medium burst open a Pandora’s box of questions: what happens to the concept of artistic authenticity and originality when artworks are digitally manipulated? How should this art be shown and stored → see T? Is this even art → see E?
Alongside experiments with video, a whole realm of new possibilities were quickly incorporated into art as other technologies and materials were developed. Soon artists were using technology as sculptural material (see Nam June Paik’s television sets or Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent lighting tubes), and writing algorithms and coding to generate a new digital aesthetic (see Manfred Mohr’s randomized drawings made with one of the first computer plotters or JODI’s online drawings in HTML code in the early days of the Internet). More recently, a generation of artists has begun working with 3D printing, social media and computer gaming. To encompass this broad spectrum of work, which would not have been technically possible fifty or sixty years ago, the phrase ‘new media art’ has evolved as a catch-all term. This is ironic, given much of this media is not all that new and artists have always adopted the newest tools and materials available to them. Indeed, the term is problematic precisely because it can stand for everything and therefore nothing; its ever-expanding scope speaks to our difficulty in keeping pace with technology.
Throughout history technology has provided artists with new tools for expression.
Such developments have also transformed how we view and interact with contemporary art today. The digital age has fundamentally changed the ways in which art is created, circulated, marketed and supported, reflecting the world’s transition into an ever more connected society → see Y. Nowadays, images and texts on art can be accessed in a matter of clicks from the comfort of your own home, while artists are able to crowdsource money for their projects and sell works directly to the public online without the need for a gallerist.
In an era when technology has radically shifted our relationships to people, time and geography, art that is truly contemporary must reflect these changes. In fact, can there be a more compelling way for art to reflect our complex times than by embracing and understanding the media of our age?
THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB in 1989 heralded a new era of online communities that could exist outside of race and gender. Very quickly, this new ‘cyberspace’ became fertile ground for a wide variety of early ‘net art’. Online, artists could create art that did not rely on the art market and gallery circuit, reaching audiences in their homes and offices with work that could be both produced and viewed on the Internet.
In the Web’s earliest days, artists from across the world came together as online communities to exchange ideas and artworks virtually through web hosting and web art curating. With the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, many artists started to respond to the corporatization of the Internet. For example, etoy. CORPORATION (online since 1994), an online firm that describes itself as a ‘corporate sculpture’, is best known for a large-scale digital ‘hijack’, which involved infiltrating several major global search engines and replacing the top search terms with keywords including ‘censorship’, ‘bondage’ and ‘porsche’. In this way, these artists sought to show that what most Internet users perceive as the natural structuring of content online was actually developed for and controlled by corporate interest → see R.
More recently, the access to an incredible wealth of user-generated information, first through blogging and then social media platforms, has given rise to a new form of artistic skill based on the ability to interpret, filter, select and curate existing content. At the same time, many artists are drawing attention to the physical structures that support the Internet, which is so often portrayed as a mythical ‘cloud’. Evan Roth’s Web-based series of Internet Landscapes traces the landing points of Internet submarine fibre-optic cables, showing the Internet to be a sprawling infrastructure of wires and servers that spans the globe. With so many new challenges and possibilities opening up, artists have only just begun to explore the manifold ways in which the Internet is reconfiguring our times → see Y.