New Media Art / Ji Sun Lee (Sun) 03/09/2005

Digital Technologies as a Medium

It is problematic to claim that all digital artworks can be neatly categorized according to different forms: most of the time, these works combine various elements and defy a purely formal classification. Nevertheless, it is important to be aware of the formal aspects upon which the art is based. Ultimately, every object is about its own materiality, which informs the ways in which it creates meaning. Among the forms that a digital artwork can take are installation; film, video, and animation; Internet art and software art; and virtual reality and musical environments.

(Christiane Paul, Digital Art, 2003)

In this book Digital Art, the trend of digital art has evolved through the growth of technology with time. According to this phenomenon, classifying kinds of new media art or distinguishing new media from typical art is very difficult because the art is extremely hybrid and includes diverse meanings to express various artistic emotions or philosophies. Moreover, digital art seems to emphasize the technology rather than artistic aesthetic.

In New York, many artists want to explore new technology, like traditional artist find new kinds of brushes and new textual canvases, and display an art piece which uses complex computer programming or various multimedia data formats. Many of the new media artists come from computer engineering backgrounds or related areas. If someone thinks about or makes something, it seems that everybody wants to attach the name of “Art”.

The social scientists observe people’s behavior using GPS technology and they convert their research work to kinds of new media artwork. Many students or people who program Java or C++ create new algorithms and generate new images or new interactive skills and they want them to be called artistic creation. The physical computing engineers develop various robots and new kinds of computing devices and they think they developed art pieces. In digital art, is the technology essential property in art? Should the digital artist be an engineer or technophile? What is more important: the new exploration of the technology or artistic philosophy?

New media art easily gets an effect from new technology development with time and technology trends. This kind of phenomenon makes people confused about defining or recognizing art. The audience wants to see more and more new technology shows rather than understanding the background or hidden meaning because they already used to experience new form of interaction. Finally, the artist also follows the trend of technology and adapts it a their work. This will be a vicious circle in new media art. “Digital technologies as a medium” are occupying the creation of the artist and distorting the true art.

In numerous examples of the new media art in Digital Art, what does the examples show us? In the future, will we have more variety of digital art pieces or experience more new ways of interacting with art? People and artists should control the media, and when they use the media, they have to have a certain reason to use it. That will be the true new media art.

As we may think

New Media Art / Ji Sun Lee (Sun) 02/21/2005

As we may think

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. … His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
Vannevar Bush “As we may think”

Vannerva Bush, who was the first scientist in computer science field and truly considered the potential of the computer, had found potential possiblities about “Life Caching” of the computer before the invention of the Eniac which was the first personal computer. In addition, he researched the fact that the human mind has moved from an association of the idea to other associations, and he designed the “Memex” based on the idea.

How information would be gathered, stored, and accessed in an increasingly information-saturated world
Vannevar Bush “As we may think”

The “Memex” is the memory extender and a new way for saving and sharing information and knowledge. The “Memex” is mimic version of the human mind or brain. Based on the association in the human brain, it constructs information through the each personal association and it forms a huge scale of encyclopedia including text, images, and sound. The “Memex” is the machine which makes it possible to extend human memory and association. In this article, he depicted this “Memex” using invented technologies at that time like photography or film and these technologies was described by the similar concept of the process in the human mind or brain.

He mentioned about the way of storing, creation or generation, and examination of the record. Moreover, recording of millions of books in library could be possible to reduce to the size of a desk using micro film. He predicted that people could see and use the micro film using a projector. This is a very similar concept to save records in the database these days.

The quantity of the records is getting bigger and bigger and so the retrieval of the record should be changed using sorting by numerical and alphabetical indexing. However, if the user wants to find the information, he or she has to know the indexing rule. Even if the user finds one piece of information, for searching other information, he or she should start again from the first.

However, the human mind doesn’t work that way. The human brain transmits thinking or memory of the human from the one item to the other associated item. This memory or information of each item is stretched like cobwebs in the brain. Although the machine could not copy the process of the human brain, the machine could apply the structure or the system which records a selection by association, and permanence and clarity of the record.

Vannerva Bush presented the basic concept of the personal computer and Hypertext. Afterward, this concept has an influence on the formation of the World Wide Web. Moreover, he showed the meaning and the vision; how people adapt the computer technology in daily life after World War 2. This was connected with Cybernetics later. Vannerva Bush was a profound thinker of the computer technology.

Nowadays, the Microsoft Research Center are studying the vision of the “Memex” through the project “My life bits”. In this project “My life bits”, the researchers are trying to store various kinds of information and knowledge using lots of devices. They recorded text, images, sound, and video data. Recently they are also recording television channels and telephone calls.

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
Mylifebits from http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

In the future, people will receive and use more information than nowadays. People will need the devices or technologies which alternate with their limited brain ability. Every moment and event will be saved in some place or machine, and people will learn how to recall specific data about that later. The scientist will try to invent a similar concept of the “Memex”, and finally new kinds of “Memex” will be developed for storing and recalling data. The new “Memex” would be more complex than the current computer and include more various formats of data. Ability to remember would not be important. On the other hand, the ability for finding accurate information and combining knowledge would be more popular than ever before.

The authority of art

New Media Art / Ji Sun Lee (Sun) 02/12/2005

The authority of art

Through my life in New York, I’m very confused about the definition of art. When I went to PS1 in Queens or the Whitney in Manhattan, most art works gave me a shock or horrible feeling rather than deep impression. In Korea, I thought the art should give humans a great impression and have beauty in the point of aesthetics. I know the traditional art, including the medieval painting and music, has a hierarchy which was determined by critics, and compels people to appreciate from the same view of the critics about the aesthetic. Then, contemporary artworks crush a set notion of traditional art’s definition and are eager to explore the pure beauty or the authority in art.

However, people couldn’t understand the value or philosophy of the contemporary art without any background information. They just enjoy seeing famous artworks in person. In the MOMA museum, the majority of art pieces have already showed on mass media such as art history books, posters, or television. The art pieces were reproduced by the media and recognized for political or cultural objects. Even if the reproduced artwork couldn’t include as much “aura” of the original piece, the art work causes almost the same meaning with text descriptions in terms of the purpose in art history.

The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible or perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original. … The reason is two fold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. … Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. … And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.
Water Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

The reproduction of art leads to cultural power in the world. Most Asians know and remember the name of western paintings or painters more than their country’s art. The meaning of the reproduction has become very important in Western painting, print, photography, and movies during the last three centuries from the Industrial Revolution to the present. On the other hand, reproduction of the art changed Asian culture and life by the name of civilization during the last century. In the 21st century, the copyright is a crucial issue in images, music and other cultural products. The reproduction tends to try to include their copyright or authority to prove the original.

However, through the digital media period, keeping a copyright is difficult or almost impossible because of property for saving data or information. The digital technologies are drawing the different political power map in the world. At the present, America and East Asia are in the center of the mainstream of the digital technology power. The mass produced artwork from these regions would occupy the mainstream of the art like western reproduction technology occupied Asian culture before.

Artist have always been among the first to reflect on the culture and technology of their time, and decades before the digital revolution had been officially proclaimed, they were experimenting with the digital medium. … digital technology has now reached such a stage of development that it offers entirely new possibilities for the creation and experience of art.
Christiane Paul “Digital Art”

The development of new possibilities for the creation and experience of art would require more and more difficult and high technology, and the artist would try to reflect the newest technology with their artwork. Having more knowledge about various technology or capital for owning technology would be new issues among the artists beyond their pure passion. Furthermore, the artists could control the technology like an engineer, and the artwork with more complex technology would need to various expert’s collaboration.

In this project the artist was considered a resource in an actual physical situation with a functional end. … Underlying this whole complex of values and practices there is the assumption of consistency and integrity of authorship. … “Our dilemma is whether the artists have created a work of fine art or a work of commercial art to which there are rights which must be guaranteed.”
Billy Kluver “EAT” from New Media Reader

This form of collaboration makes people determine the authority or ownership about the artwork. In fact, the authority of the art is important to the person who can have a right to the artwork and get benefits. On the other hand, the authority doesn’t matter to other spectators because spectators just want to enjoy art. The authority of the art is related to capitalism beyond the pure purpose of the art because the artists need to preserve a copyright to obtain wealth and fame. The endeavor of keeping an original art or reproduction with a copyright has the same goal about art. Even though they object that the art become commercial, the authority of the art makes people compeled to obey their art. When the artist becomes free from the authority and allows infinite reproduction, they will realize the pure passion of art.

New Media Art blog

This blog is for the class of New Media Art.