The global image. from consumer culture to the digital revolution
•
4 gostaram•815 visualizações
The Global Image: From Consumer Culture to the Digital Revolution is focused on the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history.
Recomendados
Recomendados
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Mais procurados
Mais procurados (19)
Semelhante a The global image. from consumer culture to the digital revolution
Semelhante a The global image. from consumer culture to the digital revolution (20)
Mais de DeborahJ
Mais de DeborahJ (20)
Último
Último (20)
The global image. from consumer culture to the digital revolution
- 1. The Global Image: From Consumer Culture to the Digital Revolution
- 2. Richard Prince. New Portraits (2014)
- 3. Digital Revolution Harold Cohen, an abstract painter who developed Aaron created in 1968), one of the first and eventually one of the most complex computer software programs for generating works of art.
- 4. Art and Technology View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826 or 1827, the earliest surviving camera photograph Martha Rosler Bringing Home the War: House Beautiful (1967-72)
- 6. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) Benjamin believed that mass reproduction contributed to human emancipation by promoting new modes of critical perception
- 7. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Mad Men (TV Series 2007-2015) Still from Rothko scene The loss of the aura • The aura is an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space • The originality of art comes from being in the presence of the artwork itself, not from viewing a mere replica.
- 8. The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction David Blandy Sea of Ice/ Wreck of Hope/Walk at Dusk (2014) A digital version of the artist, as though exited from an old computer game, walks through landscapes formed from adapting and combining paintings by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
- 10. The Global Village Nam June Paik. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) The Global Village describes the connecting influence that the huge growth in the media communication by electronic/digital means
- 11. The Medium is the Message Joseph Kosuth's 1965 One and Three Chairs, an arrangement of three versions of the same object, each signifying ‘chair’. (1965) The Medium is the Message is a deliberately paradoxical statement, traditionally, when we get a message we think that the message is what is important. McLuhan states that the form that we receive the message is as significant as the message itself.
- 12. Nam June Paik
- 13. Jean Baudrillard What is real is no longer our direct contact with the world but what we are given on the screen. TV is the world. TV is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into TV. The fiction is realised and the reality becomes fictitious.
- 14. Technological Determinism Technological determinism presumes that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values.
- 15. New Media & Net Art Still from Vuc Cosic’s ASCII History of Moving Images (Psycho) New Media is generally considered to be narrowly focused on the specific workings of new technologies. Net Artists often made works that existed exclusively online.
- 16. Post-Internet Art A sculptural work from Oliver Laric's Icon project, ongoing The Post-Internet generation frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world.
- 17. Amalia Ulman Excellences & Perfections consisted of a three-month- long performance on Instagram Contemporary artists both use new media in their artistic production and simultaneously tackle questions that arise with new technologies and a digital-driven world.
- 18. Claire Bishop “The digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, de-authored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.” Left: Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Roemer and Oysters (1642); right: Instagram post from inahalfshell #foodporn
- 19. Top: Attributed to Leonardo Alenza y Nieto, Maja Dormida (1867); bottom: Kim Kardashian post tagged “#TBT day dreaming,” from Instagram Left: Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman in an Inn (1623); right: Rihanna does New Year’s, via her Instagram Is the Medium the Message?
Notas do Editor
- This mornings lecture The Global Inage: From Consumer Culture to the Digital Revolution is focused on the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history.
- I will look at how we live in the complex age of the digital revolution and how the internet and digitalization have radically altered our everyday lives. We recognize that the digital revolution has transformed our work, recreation, culture and economy and changed the way we communicate with one another. And, inevitably, the digital revolution has also contributed to shifts in the artistic field. Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption. That said, we can also identify that the mainstream art world is predominantly populated by pre-Internet forms of media. In this lecture I consider the legacy of the Media Theorist Marshall McLuhan who wrote today’s seminar text The Medium is the Message, I’ll also introduce a number of other key theorists who elaborate on these ideas such as Art Historian and Critic Claire Bishop who criticizes contemporary art for what she considers to be its failure to respond to the all-pervasive digital revolution of the last twenty-five years. Bishop writes that although many artists use digital media that they are merely cashing in on the digital aesthetic and that they fail to address the issues of the emergent digital world in any kind of meaningful way. I’ll consider this position and offer some examples of contemporary artists who both use digital technologies in their artistic production and simultaneously tackle questions that arise with new technologies and a digital-driven world.
- When we talk about the Digital Revolution what we are referring to are the advancement of technology from analog electronic and mechanical devices in the 1980s to the digital technology available today. Technology has changed the way we shop with e-commerce solutions; the way we entertain with all type of content from everywhere in the world; the way we work with e-mail and skype; the way we relate with each other with new digital social networks; the way we learn with free and open solutions for everyone to learn from anyone; the way we travel, do banking, buy an endless list of products and services. In this image her you see: Harold Cohen, an abstract painter who developed Aaron created in 1968), one of the first and eventually one of the most complex computer software programs for generating works of art.
- Art and technology share a rich history, an example of the relationship between the two is the invention of photography at the beginning of the 19th century, which was a defining moment in the history of art that provided the impetus that pushed painting beyond figuration, and of course photography eventually became an art discipline in its own right.
- An essential reference in any attempt to analyse issues related to art and technology is Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
- In his influential essay Benjamin discusses the role technological reproduction plays in shaping aesthetic experience. It is a response to photography and film/cinema. Benjamin argued that the age of mechanical reproduction changed not only our aesthetic experience of art but also art’s political functions, its commodity value, and the social relations constructed around it. Written three years before World War II, Benjamin realized that if photography and film were appropriated for political goals, they could be used for manipulating the masses. However, he also believed that mass reproduction contributed to human emancipation by promoting new modes of critical perception. In his essay, he asks what happens to our experience of art, and to the artwork itself, when it becomes easy to reproduce it. He begins with the argument that works of art were always reproducible. Students or apprentices learn how to replicate the work of their teachers, master artists and crafters reproduce their work for others, and third parties copy works for monetary gain or fame. Nevertheless, the number of copies of a given work of art was always small and it was usually possible to determine the authenticity and uniqueness of an artwork. He argues that our experience of an artwork is closely tied to its physical positioning. In other words, there’s a difference between experiencing it in a gallery to experiencing it in a reproduction, in a photograph or film on a screen. He concluded that each reproduction altered the future experience of the original.
- Benjamin defines this missing quality as the loss of the aura through the mechanical reproduction of art. The aura for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been reproduced. According to Benjamin a painting has an aura while a photograph does not; the photograph is an image of an image while the painting remains completely original. The aura is an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space. The originality of art comes from being in the presence of the artwork itself, not from viewing a mere replica. It is connected to the idea of authenticity. A reproduced artwork is never fully present. Furthermore, if an image can be reproduced, wherein lies the art? Benjamin concludes that the loss of the aura isn’t a bad thing, he says that the aura stems from religious cults, where art is closely tied to communal ceremony and religious ritual. Benjamin though something good happened when the aura is banished. For instance, in cinema, his main example of the new media, supposedly enhances sense perception through techniques like for example slow-motion and close-ups. (Surrealism film). However, the aura of major artworks from history has not really disappeared. Despite the fact that you can view any major artwork on line, closer-up, in more detail than you could ever see in reality, people still make the pilgrimage to see the original.
- A lot has changed since Benjamin wrote his manifesto on the effects of mass production of art can now be viewed with the click of a mouse because the internet is saturated with images of art. This development does not mean, however, that original works of art have lost their authenticity just because they can be seen virtually anywhere in the world via the internet. The originality of art comes from being in the presence of the artwork itself, not from viewing a mere replica. On the other hand, what if the original were produced in the same way that the replica was produced, it follows then that a ‘copy’ of a digital image is exactly like the ‘original’. Digital reproduction brings several new elements to the process of diffusing art. Firstly, people can reproduce art much more quickly, secondly they can make many more copies, so the value of the art work cannot rely on an economic model of scarcity, the digital image gains its value from its accessibility, malleability, and information status. Because the relative freedoms of the Internet and the ease with which we can copy and distribute data raise significant problems for dealers who rely on authorship, authenticity and limited editions. And the third new element that digital reproduction brings is that it offers the use or viewer the capacity to manipulate the work of art and thus control the context of viewing. Software allows users to adjust the image size and the resolution, to focus in on minute details, to extract portions of an image, to combine one image with another, and to surround the image with a new textual or visual context. In other words, using digital technology artists are now able to introduce new forms of production, not reproduction.
- Like Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan argued that we should consider new media art forms, where Benjamin theorized about photography and film McLuhan undertook the cultural task of theorizing television and the computer. McLuhan also believed that new technologies promote democracy and enhance human perception and he advocated that artists were best placed to explore the possibilities of new media.
- Those of us in Western industrialized cultures live in a multimedia environment in which mechanical and electronic images, text, and sound are an almost constant presence, particularly in the mass media. The visual culture approach acknowledges this reality, of living in a world of cross-mediation, our experience of culturally meaningful visual content appears in multiple forms, and visual content and codes migrate from one form to another. Writing in the 1960s McLuhan used the phrase “global village” to describe the connecting influence that the huge growth in the media communication by electronic means. He used this phrase to highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet -- events in one part of the world could be experienced from other parts in real-time, which is what human experience was like when we lived in small villages. McLuhan was the first person to popularize the concept of a global village and to consider its social effects. His insights were revolutionary at the time, and have impacted on how we think about contemporary culture, globalization, media, technology, and communications.
- Marshall McLuhan’s publication The Medium is the Message (published in 1964) is the encapsulation of how technology impacted 1960s culture. It’s a deliberately paradoxical statement, traditionally, when we get a message we think that the message is what is important. For example, Joseph Kosuth's 1965 One and Three Chairs, an arrangement of three versions of the same object, each signifying “chair,” and language surrounding the piece to assert that nothing is being missed and the art is in the idea—Kosuth's “Art as Idea as Idea”. We get the idea of chair from each of the three media. However, Marshall McLuhan stated that "the medium is the message", which means that the form that we receive the message is as significant as the message itself. His point being that the qualities of a medium have as much effect as the information it transmits. McLuhan argues that throughout history what has been communicated has been less important than the particular medium through which people communicate. The technology that transfers the message changes us and changes society, the individual, the family, work, leisure and more.
- Commonly hailed as the father of video art, Nam June Paik asserted in 1965 that the television cathode-ray tube would someday replace the canvas. Known as one of the major proponents of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Paik's interest in the phenomenon of electronic communication led him to make predictions about how the technological changes were going to affect our daily lives. Forty years removed, we now understand the prescience of Paik's concepts of the "global village" and the "electronic super highway" were, which foreshadowed how technology would come to connect diverse cultures at high speeds in the pre-Internet age. McLuhan was interested in examining the way that technology penetrates our daily existence. His central argument – that the technologies we use to take in information, i.e., the media, become extensions of who we are and exert a powerful influence over us, he stated that “television has altered our world”.
- Jean Baudrillard The sociologist Baudrillard for example became famous in the 90s for making the claim that the Gulf War did not take place. Baudrillard claims that media practices have rearranged our senses of space and time. What is real is no longer our direct contact with the world but what we are given on the screen. TV is the world. TV is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into TV. The fiction is realised and the reality becomes fictitious.
- Baudrillard stated that we live in a world of images and simulations, he implied that many people fail to understand this concept, he said that we have now moved into an epoch where truth is entirely a product of consensual value. This is currently being played out in our ‘post-truth’ era where most information is apparently to be distrusted, as being more of a contribution to the manipulative image-making of those in power than to the advancement of knowledge. McLuhan's insight was that the qualities of communications media themselves are more important in shaping the social environment than any particular content. Conversely, we shouldn’t forget, the great communicators understand how to craft the form and style of their messages, irrespective of content, to the media by which they will be transmitted. Raymond Williams’ publication The Technology and the Society completely opposes McLuhan’s view that technology shapes society. McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message could be considered to adhere to the ideas of technological determinism. Technological determinism presumes that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values. This is aligned with McLuhan’s theory that media changes us whether we like it or not. According to Williams technology is not just something that happens to us, there is a reciprocal relationship between society and media. Williams agues this because it means that we have choice, and power, rather than being the victims of technological change or social forces.
- Since 1990s the new media have included video, computer, mobile devices, internet, software, code, computer games, streaming, GPS, sound production devices, robotics… New Media is generally considered to be narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than an exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. In other words, with New Media the Medium is the Message. Net Art was a movement that arose in 1994 and waned in the early 2000s. Post-Internet artists stand on the shoulders of Net art Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online.
- The post-Internet generation (many of whom have been plugged into the Web since they could walk) frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world. ‘Post-Internet Art’ is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog ‘Post Internet’ during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” (The Image Object Post-Internet Artie Vierkant. 2010) Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials. In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author. For objects after the Internet there can be no “original copy.” Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both its materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies. The second aspect of art after the Internet deals with not the nature of the art object but the nature of its reception and social presence. Fixed (which is to say, physical) media once imposed an economy to the image and object, a value driven by scarcity.
- Contemporary artists both use new media in their artistic production and simultaneously tackle questions that arise with new technologies and a digital-driven world. Over the past few years, even social media has become an important platform for works. Amalia Ulman’s now famous piece ‘Excellences & Perfections’ consisted of a three-month-long performance on Instagram. The performance had a narrative – it portrayed the everyday life of an archetypal social media ‘it-girl’, following a repetitive ‘selfie and fashion-posts’ regime. The work is a commentary on social media’s impact on visual culture: it has given individuals the power to carefully curate their lifestyle, often leading to the creation of consumerist fantasies that increase social pressure to look, eat and live a certain way. This not only demonstrates how technology has changed the material creation and the distribution of art, it also proves how it has become an important subject matter in itself.
- With today’s burgeoning potential for digital mass viewership, transmission becomes as important as creation. The art historian and critic Claire Bishop wrote in an article in Artforum that: “The digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, de-authored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.” Claire Bishop (2012) Digital Divide: Claire Bishop on Contemporary Art and New Media. Artforum. Issue: September Isn’t it striking that genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western art? All that #foodporn is still-life; all those #selfies, self-portraits. All those holiday views are #landscape; art-historically speaking, #beachday pics evoke the hoariest cliché of middle-class leisure iconography. As for the #nudes…