Cultural Studies 3: Cultural Studies 3 Digital culture and life in the 21st Century Lecture 6 Art, Culture & Digital Technologies Liam Greenslade http://ncad.culturalstudies.googlepages.com http://ncadculturalstudies3.blogspot.com The Girl with a Pearl Earring Censored, Dan Proops 2005


The work of art in an age of digital (re-)production: The work of art in an age of digital (re-)production In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931 From Benjamin (1936)


Walter Benjamin 1892-1940: Walter Benjamin 1892-1940 The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. Permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.


Art & emancipation: Art & emancipation Benjamin’s vision of a ‘politicised aesthetic’ predicts a change in the ‘mode of participation’ in art The freeing of art from the idea of the ‘original’ and its ‘aura’ offers the opportunity for art to be controlled by the masses, to become a means of emancipation rather than social control Benjamin’s vision, though not realised in his life-time, nor even for most of the 20th Century nonetheless resonates with contemporary developments in digital culture


Marshall McCluhan (1911-1980): Marshall McCluhan (1911-1980) Effects of technology on cognition and social organisation: ‘The medium is the message’ Print culture affects perception by ‘visually homogenising’ experience and fostering the idea of the individual and the specialist ‘Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism.’ (The Gutenberg Galaxy 1962) The use of a communications medium has a greater impact than the content that the medium conveys. The message tends to distract us from the significance of the medium itself. When we use instantaneous electronic communications, e.g. speaking on the telephone or writing online, users become disembodied content.


The Global Village: The Global Village Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian Library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)


Origins of the ‘Digital Avant Garde’: Origins of the ‘Digital Avant Garde’ The origins of digital art and aesthetics may be found as far back as the 1920s The key artistic innovations of the 1920s were all made in relation to what was then new media in particular photography, film, radio and advertising The techniques introduced by the modernist avant-garde shaped mass visual culture for the rest of the 20th Century Later developments only push further what was already invented, intensifying particular techniques and mixing them together in new combinations.


Montage: Montage First exploited (if not invented) by Sergei Eisenstein a pioneer of Soviet cinema The ‘collision’ of cinematic images to manipulate emotion or create metaphors ‘Montage is conflict’ where new ideas emerge from the juxtaposition of images Millions stand behind me John Heartfield 1932


Dadaism & Montage: Dadaism & Montage Dadaists adapted the method and used it as a central feature of a radical aesthetic critical of both Capitalist society and the art world in general Hannah Hoch ‘Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry into the world of art.’ Dadaist montage anticipates contemporary cut & paste aesthetics in digital visual and musical forms ABCD Raoul Haussmann 1924


Post war digital culture: Post war digital culture Like the Dadaists, the post-war precursors of contemporary digital culture emerged from a world war and reflected the pre-occupations, both political and aesthetic, of their time Influenced by cybernetics, their early artistic works were less technological than conceptual, emphasising interconnectedness, the complexities of communication and the fragility of existence (Gere, 2002)


John Cage and digital culture: John Cage and digital culture American composer of the post-war period Early work used audio-montage with radios, record players, and tape Engaged with issues of interactivity, noise, information and communication Pioneer of multimedia events Significant influence on The Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk whose own work later influenced contemporary forms such as Techno 4’33” (1952) White Painting 3 Panel Robert Rauschenberg 1951


Fluxus & ‘mail art’: Fluxus & ‘mail art’ Throughout the 1950s radical art concerned with issues of communication and interactivity Fluxus emerged from Cage’s sessions at the New School for Social Research Used the postal system as a means of exchanging ideas and ultimately making art Members included Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins and Ray Johnson


Fluxus: Fluxus Fluxus was regarded in its day as little more than an association of art-pranksters However, its concentration on interactivity anticipates the changed relationship between art, artist, and society characteristic of the internet age Mail-art reflects a world in which remote, mediated communication amongst artist and audience becomes the norm rather than the exception Its importance for contemporary ‘net-art’ has recently been acknowledged


Nam June Paik 1932-2006: Nam June Paik 1932-2006 Korean artist member of Fluxus One of the first video/multimedia artists In 1959 Paik performed his composition Hommage a John Cage. Combing a pre-recorded collage of music and sounds with "on stage" sounds created by people, a live hen, a motorcycle, and various objects. Coined the term ‘Information Superhighway’ Pre Bell Man Nam June Paik Photography by F. Bucher {{cc-by-sa-2.0-de}}


Video Flag', synchronized video playback on 70 CRT monitors 1958-1969 Nam June Pak: Video Flag', synchronized video playback on 70 CRT monitors 1958-1969 Nam June Pak


Nam June Paik: The information superhighway (1974): Nam June Paik: The information superhighway (1974) Video-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television (for shopping, bibliographies, opinion polls, health care, bio-communication, data transfer from office to office) and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an «expanded-media» telephone system with thousands of novel uses, not only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself. This «mini- and midi-television» (to use Professor René Berger’s expression) will join ranks with many other forms of paperless information transfer, such as audio cassettes, telex, data pooling, continental satellites, micro-fiches, private microwaves and eventually, fiber optics on laser frequencies. All of them together will constitute a new kind of nuclear energy for information and the improvement of society. I would like to call it tentatively a «broadband communication network.»


Cybernetics and Art: Cybernetics and Art In Europe cybernetic theory began to exert an influence on artistic production Many works emphasised a concern for both behaviour, process and systems as well as interactivity and participation Roy Ascott highly influential in the use and development of cybernetics and information theory in the development of art work


Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968): Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968) Exhibits in the show were produced with a cybernetic device (computer) or were cybernetic devices in themselves which reacted to their environment, either human or machine, and in response produced either sound, light or movement. Part scientific demonstration/part art exhibition the show demonstrated both the ways in which contemporary art was responding to technological developments and the technologies emerging which could be used in making art Exhibits included text and graphic generating computers, kinetic sculptures and state-of-art software. Interactivity was a central feature of the show with users encouraged to generate their own artwork in collaboration with the technologies


Conceptual art & digital culture: Conceptual art & digital culture 1960s optimism for the role of cybernetics and computers in art was soon replaced by disillusionment regarding the politics and use of these technologies in Western society Simultaneously the development and availability of ‘artist-friendly’ technologies did not proceed as quickly as expected Artists began a ‘turn to language’ as a basis for practice and a means of exploring systems of power and domination


Conceptual art as critique: Conceptual art as critique Conceptual art sought to critique or disrupt the acceptance of technology implicit in Cybernetic art Parodies of technology and computer algorithms The Cybernetic Art Work that Nobody Broke (Harold Hurrell, 1969) Seek (1970) Cybernetic art other than video/multimedia became unfashionable amongst the avant garde until the end of the 20th Century Seek," Architecture Machine Group, 1969-70


The Avant Garde as software (Manovitch 2002): The Avant Garde as software (Manovitch 2002) The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, simulation. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using previously accumulated media in new ways. New media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material. (


Meta-media : Meta-media The computer's post-Internet identity as a distribution machine for older. Meta-media society has given up computation in favour of distribution. Meta-media society does not need even more ways to represent the world—it has enough trouble dealing with all the already accumulated representations. 3-D computer imaging imitates the look of classical cinema, complete with film grain Computer-based virtual spaces usually look like something which was already built in reality; Flash animations on the Web imitate old video graphics The Web itself combines the layouts of pre-computer print media with moving images which follow the already established conventions of film and television.


Meta-media society: Meta-media society With the accumulation of media records, along with the shift from a concern with the production of goods to the processing of data and information, it becomes more important to find effective and efficient ways to deal with already accumulated volumes of media than to record more or in new ways. The emphasis shifts to finding new ways to deal with the media records obtained by already existing media machines. This shift is paralleled by the new economic importance of data analysis over material production in the information society. In the new information society we no longer with the material reality directly but with its records. How this will impact upon art, culture and society has yet to be determined


Further Reading: Further Reading Benjamin W (1936) The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm Levinson, P. (1999). Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge. Manovich L (2002) The avant garde as software http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/manovich1002/manovich1002.html Palmer D (2006)Cut and paste: a history of photomontage http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davepalmer/cutandpaste/dada.html