Technology and art (1999)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 10 September 2011
This paper was previously presented at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, USA in February 1999.
Art Papers magazine, while I was the editor, did an interview with a puppeteer who had taught puppetry for years, to people from school age to retirement age. He said that he first assigns the class to make a single puppet, from whatever material is at hand, and the results are widely diverse in what the puppets are made of and what they can do. But he said that when he has the class make a second puppet, whether the student is 14 or 84, the results are always the same: first the two puppets fight, and second, they have sex. Then they can go on to perform the eerie magic of puppets in a broader range of action. The fascination with technology today is, I think, related to the fascination that puppets have for us. A thing is acting like us. A puppet is a surrogate or a cyborg that can act out for us in a way we can’t do in our everyday lives— and their uncanny nature can permit us to see through their actions to the truth of our own.
And as with puppets, technology gave us first violence, from computer games to Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories, and then sex, from virtual sex to Web porn, to Laura Kikauka’s copulating robots or the Center for Metahuman Exploration’s "Paradise" project, which I’ll talk more about in a minute. What we can expect beyond violence and sex can be glimpsed across a broad range of what is called "new media": robots, video installation and projection, net.art, computer-aided design and production of both two-dimensional, virtual objects and environments and three-dimensional, tangible objects— and also a range of community-interaction projects that, although they may depend on non-technological means (including puppets in some cases), are often lumped in with new media and do often use technological means.
But is "new technology" really something new rather than just new packaging and marketing, as Randal Walser argues in an article, "Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse". [1] Packaging and marketing are at the very least a substantial part of technological advance, as anyone knows who has ever tried to throw away the MSN icon on their Windows desktop. The two larger arguments that Nancy Paterson is making are also interesting, especially in the light of the claims for a difference in embodiment as well as gender and race in a technological realm: "Whatever our class, race or gender, we all take our bodies with us as we approach the millennium."[2] Our interface with technology IS the body— virtual reality technology depends on the body, on the sense apparatus, stereo vision and hearing, and so forth— virtual reality only works by fooling the body, not eliminating it. And our interface with technology is imperfect. I recently got a notice from my bank that they are now offering an internet service: "Pay all your bills on-line, without ever leaving your desk. To sign up, drop by one of our branches to pick up an application."
Technology and art - Glenn Harper: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
References:
[1] Randal Walser. "Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse" in
Sandra K. Helsel and Judith Paris Roth (Ed.), Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice and Promise. (Westport, CT, USA: Meckler, 1991, p. 53). (This is a typical example of web "research"; I got the quote from Walser, by the way, not from the original text but from an article by new media artist Nancy Paterson in an online magazine named Massage, which republished it from the Canadian magazine Fuse.
[2] Massage, #2.
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