Art and Technology
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Since the turn of the century artists have incorporated machine imagery into their art. But, whether they were frightened by the threat of a dehumanized, mechanized society or pleased by the hard lines of factories and machine-made objects, they only borrowed their images and their style for use in traditional art media. In the 1960s, however, artists began to expand the boundaries of their media with the incorporation of machines and technological processes into their art. From radio broadcasts and videotape to functioning mechanical objects and digital computer imagery, the last three decades have seen the increasing use of various technologies to make art. Instead of visual or thematic inspiration for painters or sculptors technology today is used as a part of art, in the service of art, and as forms of art. But these are arts in their infancy and for every new use of technology in art a new set of questions--practical, theoretical, or aesthetic--rises around it. A review of some of the types of technology-based art, with examples of work by some prominent artists, establishes the range of difficulties that still attend the introduction of technology into art. At the most basic level, of course, technological competence in some areas had long been taken for granted. Cindy Sherman's 1981 series of photographs, Metro Pictures, displayed the artist's understanding "that the success of a technological art, after the stage of conception, is a technical affair: realiz
. . .
ers confusing, ambiguous messages, the piece also assumed the oracle's function of predicting the future of technology in art.
Around the same time Paik first introduced the video camera into art with his Family of Robot (1964) and other works. Paik's reputation grew steadily over the next few decades as his vibrant video installations, with their "playfulness, humanism, inventiveness and positive attitude toward technological change" became popular museum events (Green 17). But Paik's pioneering attitude raises another important question about technology in art. His work was originally "the embodiment of a utopian moment in the 1960s when a generation of new artists and curators believed that technology could help change society" in positive ways (Green 17). Critics of his work have found, however, that, rather than providing a critique of the dangers of corporation-based technological domination of the world, Paik's works have served this unarticulated corporate ideology. As Martha Rosler notes, Paik's supposed attacks on corporations' dominance have instead served to legitimize their economic imperative by uniting "the two ends of the American cultural spectrum by symbolically incorporating the consciousness industry [co
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Approximate Word count = 2406
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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