The senses in technology

To many artists and art educators, an important missing aspect in the involvement of any kind of technology in art is the missing sensory experience. We can’t touch our art here, we can’t smell the tools, we can’t hear the noises, and we can’t taste the paint. We can see, but our sight is flat; the texture here is an illusion. How do I respond to this? We can sense differently like someone who is deaf speaks differently or a blind person reads a book differently. It is not lesser; it is different. Where there is something missing there is also something more.

TOUCH

We can’t touch the art, we can’t feel it.

When are we ever allowed to touch art? The artist, of course, touches a painting or a sculpture when it is made, but as a viewer we can only see it. However, we may touch a picture on our screens. Here, when we touch things our brains act as our sense of touch (inevitably, that is what a feeling is). We can hover with a mouse and learn what something is. We click on something and read or travel somewhere else. Touch is understanding.

SIGHT

The experience of seeing artwork projected or on the screen just isn't the same

You can use a projector to show images so that is a lesser alternative to the “real thing” or you can us the projector as an alternate real way of seeing art. It is the same since your eye sees the image through the light going to the eye and the brain understands it as an image. It is not the painting itself; it is a reproduction through ones and zeros transmitted through light.

In technology culture

It is a way of doing

It is a place to be

It is a way of seeing

It is a state of being

Progress in investigation

I have discovered several readings that will be informing my investigation for the duration of this study. One such reading is a collection of articles from the proceedings at the Conferences of Conciousness Reframed: Art and Cconciousness in the post-biological era. Which deals with the conciousness of mind within the arts, within technology. The post-biological era (obviously, not some sort of rise of our robot masters) is the idea that our culture places importance on technology. If art creates culture, then art in technology will create a new culture conciousness. Conciousness Reframed calls for a radical reconstruction of art education that will bring a link between natural and artificial systems of conciousness; a link between our own biologically based culture and the new, post-biological technology culture.

Roy Ascott, a member of this conference, wrote an article called Arts education @ the edge of the net: The future will be moist! that seems to articulate what I am trying to say here, althought at the expense of using adjectives that evoke an unpleasant tactile experience. Ascott talks about Moist Media as a new way of thinking, a link between the real world and the cyber world. He believes that integrating computer art and computer technology in general will construct our future. The integration of this technology will change our attitudes and our fears of losing ourselves in the “the machine”. “Twenty-first century arts will increasingly be seen as a form of world building, of mind construction, of self-creation, whether through digital programming, genetic coding, interactive performance, imaging, sound work, simulation, or hypermediated construction in general.” (Ascott, 2001, p 10) In "moist media" we create ourselves, we are constantly rewriting ourselves in the universe. Some say that art is culture, it creates culture. In technology culture this can be taken quite literally. The people making web pages, who are grandmothers, students, web designers, create the cyber world; they are the artists, the engineers, the citizens. Here there is no distinction between "good art" and "bad art", it just is. The art is the infrastructure and the people simultaniously, it's as if you are yourself and your house and your neighborhood all at once.

Ascott lists the changes that will happen (or are happening) when we shift from the "postmodern world" to the "post-biological" world:

Cultural Shift

from                   to

Content              Context
Object               Process
Perspective          Immersion
Figure/ground        Pattern
Paranoia             Telenoia
Aesthetics           Technoetics
Nature               Artificial life
Certainty            Contingency
Resolution           Emergency
Reception            Negotiation
Representation       Construction
Hermeneutics         Heuristic
Tunnel vision        Bird's eye view
Observed reality     Constructed reality
Autonomous brain     Distributed mind
Behavior of forms    Forms of behavior
Immaterialism        Re-materialization
Perception           Cyberception

Some of these items may seem frightening, an illustration of what is wrong with this sort of shift, such as "nature to artifical life" or "autonomous brain to distributed mind". But we must consider the ways that this is not wrong to us, as people discovering a culture that was always there, but hidden, emerging suddenly in full form.