Slashdot Mirror
Part One: Information Arts
The fusion of culture and technology into sophisticated art forms seems obvious when you think about it. But until now, few people have. Most of society is too busy clucking about how new technologies are stealing credit cards, transmitting smut and rotting young brains.
This fusion, Wilson says, is a signal that views of art and research are evolving, broadening, integrating. As he points out, the arts and the sciences are any culture's two greatest engines: "sources of creativity, places of aspiration, and markers of aggregate identity." Before the Renaissance, they were considered the same thing -- science was called natural philosophy.
In the l960s, philosopher C.P. Snow developed his "Two Cultures" theory -- Snow asserted that those in the humanities and arts and those in the sciences have developed sufficiently different languages and worldviews that they no longer understood one another. Wilson believes that art and science/technology are no longer segregated from one another, and that the Net, the Web and pioneering work by artists and scientists are re-connecting the two, creating a new sphere of culture he calls "Information Arts."
From programming to telecom design, Wilson has brought together the work great artists and thinkers in culture and technology and shown us how they are moving closer together, even in fields like bionics, parapsychology and bioelectricity. Coders are artists, not just scientists. So are Web designers and people who paint genetic portraits.The book takes this fusion and looks at its groundbreaking influence on life, thought, cultural theory and artistic activity.
"Leonardo da Vince is well-known was history's greatest integrator of art and science, " writes Wilson, but he was by no means unique in having interests that spanned art and science. Educated people of his time were expected to. But, says Wilson, by the 20th century, science and art had already become distinct and separate fields.
New inventions have stimulated artistic experimentation in fields such as photography, cinema, sound recording, electrical machines and lights -- think of Brian Wilson, Brian Eno, U2. Wilson writes about how Xerox's PARC initiated an artist-in-residence program called PAIR, an open-ended approach in which artists and scientists and researchers jointly defined a program on culture and/or technology, with the definition of the problem becoming part of the collaboration. The book chronicles scores of other experiments in business, Academe and science labs.
So who cares about the re-connection between culture and technology? Anyone interested in either, really. The most interesting and revolutionary parts of the Net and Web -- coding, gaming, role-playing -- have always drawn on artistic as well as technological sensibilities. And many of us have had the sense that we are witnessing a re-definition of what culture is. That's of equal appeal to people like me, drawn to the culture of technology but not the machinery, and technologists, who love technology but want it to embrace culture and artistry. In subsequent columns, we'll draw from the book to talk about the "information arts," and some of the amazing work occurring now at the intersection of culture and technology.
Next: Research agendas in biology and medicine, especially biology and genetic research.
This reminds me of the day in the 1980's when everyone thought they could fire their graphic artists and give standard employees graphic arts software. Result - lots of hideous graphics produced by non-artists with GA software.
I doubt Gaugain would have had any difficulty with Photoshop. Nor should any true artist today, whether or not he grew up with Photoshop, have any difficulty using any medium that he needs to get the job done.
sPh
Leonardo Da Vinci
Best Slashdot Co
Nothing illustrates the two cultures dichotomy in the US than two contrast between the neighbors Harvard and MIT in Cambridge MA. This week's Business Week has the new president of Harvard Larry Summers on the cover. Dr. Summers has been controversial about shaking up things at Harvard. Claims graduates are not getting enough exposure to scientific ideas. Ironically Dr. Summers, an economist, got his B.S. at MIT.
Art, technology and science have always gone hand in hand. Music and math - Pythagoras mixed music, math and astronomy. Bach mixed music and math.
Art and Anatomy - Rembrandt painted his "Anatomical Lecture" showing anatomical dissection. Artist Antonio Pollaiuolo performed dissections to learn more about the human form.
Photography is perhaps the best example of art and technology joining together.
I could probably come up with many more examples throughout all of history of when technology influenced art and vice versa but I think my point is made.
Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together.
Well, if by "centuries" you mean "two hundred years" then true, but before industrialisation all technology was basicaly art - without strict rules, management plans and so on. To make a precise clock in the 17th century you would need knowledge but also same sometimes not very well defined skills that today make a difference between a merely good programmer and a real hacker. The same you could say about a smith (especialy a weapon smith), an architect (nothing like a "civil engineer" then) and about many other then-high-tech professions.
And look at 17th and 18th century microscopes, telescopes, clocks and all other scientific instruments - everything had to be not only useful but pretty as well.
So, I think we simply return to good old times when there was still art and poetry in technology.
Raf
I'm sorry but that is pure techno-bullshit...
In fact, art has, by nature, nothing to deal with technology. The essence of art is just to be art, whereas technology is at the service of other aims, functionalities for instance, and some of these can - of course - be art.
From this point on, the involvement of technology as a new mean to produce art, is interresting, but, in my opinion, it already reaches its limits. For instance : Websites ! Technology allows to produce beautiful content, that can go further than the regular painting in ways of interaction, evolution, and so on. But, only looking in the enormous amount of not so interrrsting productions (i.e. crap) that can be found on the Net, gives an idea of the danger to confuse, or to merge, art and technology.
Contemporary art is the product of pure talent and hard work. Technology can be useful as a media to this production, but it is only at the service of art.
Therefore, I think that marketing so-called art and technology is pointless.
The only thing I am sure of, is that real creation is really hard to find nowadays, even more as means to produce and broadcasst anything are easy to use.
WebArt is not dead, but it risks to be lost in the chaos of the Web.
I don't think the point of the article is that code is art. Rather it is that technology enables art.
And that the net is somewhat-unique in that it is both an enabler and a medium. Granted many techs that enables art are themselves mediums (architecture and photography for example) but the net may be unique in having global reach
mgb
It's only since the industrial revolution that they have been considered separate. For example, Da Vinci was at once a master painter and a military engineer. There are countless similar examples of this in history if one cares to open one's eyes.
Modern specialization is what has lead to this rather arbitrary distiction between 'art' and 'science'.
Mr. Katz appears to have a problem with ridiculous generalizations. It is irritating.
As a graduate student in philosophy writing my dissertation on early 19th-century German attempts to intergrate their conception of science and technology with their conception of the rest of human life, I think about this stuff now and then.
Mainly I think about what a scam has been pulled off on the world by a strange confluence of events early in the 20th century, which led to the idea that science and technology had always been separate from the rest of society. This kind of thinking is easily traced to both left- and right-wing political movements which gained momentum in Europe and North America after World War One. That doesn't make it false, of course; it's false for other reasons. But its falsity hasn't prevented it from becoming bible truth to many.
But my real point is this: Slashdot reader responses to Katz are, mostly, encouraging in that they show that few on this board are fooled. Of course, most of you (or most who post) are still prone to a high level of inane scientism. And perhaps you reject the dichotomy between art and technology only to assimilate art to technology. But at least you're ahead of Katz.
There's nothing revolutionary about the melding of art and technology. It has always existed (and continues to exist in a field called 'architecture'. Architects have always had to wrestle with the same sorts of questions that now face and web designers, and the latter could learn a lot from the ideas generated by the former. American architect Louis Sullivan's famous dictum, "Form follows function" is applicable to web design as well. In both disciplines, the goal is to create something asthetically beautiful, technically sound, comfortable, and useful.
Regardless of pithy comments AC's have to offer, this is neither accurate nor new. "State of the Art" comes to mind. Is the cg in Tron not art? Laser light shows? The butt ugly architecture of the 70's? The beautiful Konsai(sp?) Airport? Modern graceful bridges?
Ever since man found fire, and began to share his knowledge, there has been a boundry between what is known and true, and what his intuition told him. To me, that is the domain of art. Where the knowledge can be described with paper and pencil and some formal model its technology. But when it leaves that domain, and you're counting on someone's skilled hand, be it behind a welding torch, or a keyboard, that is art.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.