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150 years ago the colour photographic process was
being invented; at the same time the Impressionists began to
re-imagine the world through painted interpretations of light,
something that is now so normal as to appear saccharine or twee. It
would be another 100 years before the technology of the photograph
would be commonly framed, or presented as art. We are now immersed
in a digital world; so how close are we to the generation of
artists that will transform our world through their interpretations
of data? When might "digital art" become just "art"?
Our data-marked world is often represented as
benignly utilitarian -- filled with smart cities and networked
objects -- a functional, benefit-led data-driven place, flipping
classrooms and crowdsourcing solutions. Yet in this world there are
relatively few artists or data sculptors such as Aaron Koblin, the wired
poets of the new reality.
This new art will not be painted, or static, or
televised, or found in a gallery. It must be digital, and digital
means dynamic, constantly changing. Digital means algorithmic,
generative, collaborative, crowdsourced; the output is unique to
the user, to the time, to the place. It stands to reason that
digital art should be all of this and seek to reflect the state of
contemporary reality using contemporary platforms. What might that
look like? Art that might game our behaviours and our environment
into new ways of understanding.
We are told the world is going mobile; it seems
hard to argue. We prefer to swipe, push and prod rather than sit
and click. Small screens are getting larger. We check the news in
line at Starbucks. Share photos on the loo. Setting up a direct
debit on the train seems normal, as is shopping on the bus. What
used to be a "click" is now a swipe, a scan, spoken, shaken,
or touched, or better still -- "it just knows". Our phones and
tablets have become remote controls for an alternative reality that
hovers around us like a scene from Keiichi
Matsuda's prescient Augmented City.
And this raises many challenges, such as how to
move you, dear viewer, between the real world and the digital one?
How will this "art" start? Let's imagine you are standing in the
street, in the middle of an exhibit, but you wouldn't know. Or
everyone else in the building is immersed in a location based
performance work, but you are not. You are out of the game. How do
you enter this world, what do you click, where is your ticket, is
that an app or just a url, and either way how do you get it?
It is a question not of clicks but of context.
What used to be conceptual is now contextual. How do we tell your
device to initiate an action? What triggers the art when you remove
the need for it to exist on a screen, or at a certain time, or even
in a certain place? The artists can use ambient measures like
temperature, location, frequency, velocity, orientation, sounds,
volume, weight, speed, humidity, density, face recognition, emotion
recognition, touch, keywords, time, or any combination of these.
And these can all become the equivalent of a "click", like pressing
a button, or opening a door into one of those old white cubed
galleries. Potentially it is chaos, or beauty.
We are comfortable with digital art immersions,
literally. There have been consistent two hour long queues for Random
International's Rain Room at the Barbican -- an exhibit which
uses location aware software to follow the "viewer" around the room
and moves the "rain" around them. Maybe the new form means viewers
have to contribute to the work in order to experience the
cumulative piece. Perhaps it could be an extravagant interactive
experience, or augmented reality, or just as simple as trees that
whisper secrets to you (if there is no one else around).
And you may even have to subscribe -- art that
requires you to authenticate yourself. When we can create a
conventional market for work with that potential for intimacy,
magic and scarcity, then we will have a whole new art. The Tate can
sell tickets to an exhibition that occurs where you are, and that
exists around you.
A new international commission from
Bristol's Watershed might shine light on this. The commission
provides £30,000 for artists using creative technologies to explore
the theme of the Playable City in and around the streets of
Bristol. Turning the hard purposefulness of the data-driven smart
city into a context-driven chaos, a cacophonous playful, playable
city, or reflecting the darkness and the absurdity of our
device-driven sensibilities.
We are raised and educated to understand the
world visually, and this is why we understand today's art. It might
be hoped that the next generation of artists will be raised to
understand the world digitally and so understand data as art, and
they will illuminate our endless volumes of self-generated data and
make them beautiful. Playable City seems to be just the very start
of that. Digital art is not about touch-screens or clicking things
-- but it is about removing the constraints of the past thousand
years and using data and hardware to generate extraordinary
transformative experiences, just as photography did. The first step
towards this is funding artists properly to make this work rather
than relying on galleries, schools or brands to stimulate and
subsidize. From the urban spaces of Bristol, Playable City will
hopefully be the first of many commissions for contextual art that
transcends technology and show us new ways to see the world.
article source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-12/06/tom-uglow-playable-cities
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