Technology will liberate us - Lecture notes

Technology will liberate us.

(powerpoint copies & notes)

MACHINE AGE - MODERNISM

Technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness

Technology trigger important changes in cultural development

Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1936) significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change. 

Walter Benjamin believed reproducing or copying work can be seen as a work in its own right, not just merely a copy of the last.

Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction

The age of Technology and art

Parallel and specific to new developments; a duality expressing the zeitgeist (there here and now)

Dialectical due to the copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original – The whole issue that is called dialectical is due to the copy, the reproductive and the original. Because of photography and technology, there becomes a defined idea of ‘original’. Before technology there was no need to differentiate between original its uniqeness and what Benjamin labes as its aura. There is a uniqueness and quality (aura) to the original that will only be found in the original, not the copies and reproduction.  - The aura and uniqueness of art

The camera eye is widely written about as it is used to crerate multiple viewing points, through one look of the camera eye.

DZIGA VERTOV – man with the movie camera  - The variable gaze of the camera eye. Benjamin claims a new consciousness as a result. i.e represented idealism of faith and progress through technological progress. The camera eye represents technological progress.

‘We must expect great innovations to transform the entire techniques of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself  and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in the our very notion of art’  Paul Valery (1871 – 1945)

Early experimental techniques ‘photogram’ started to play around and push the limits of what technology had to offer in the art and design environment.

Benjamin and two Parallels Freud and Marx - Freud explored the instinctual subconscious side of human behaviour 2. marxist economic though gave new political models of thinking over new criteria for value of the work of art. (technology changes the value of a piece of work or design)

Photography had overturned the judgment seat of art – a fact which the discourse of modernism found hard to repress  (Lovejoy p36)

Kineticism – the idea of capturing movement, many art forms and movements were obsessed with capturing this form.

Etienne-Jules Marey. French photographer. His photographic research was primarily a tool for his work on human and animal movement. A doctor and physiologist, Marey invented, in 1888, a method of producing a series of successive images of a moving body on the same negative in order to be able to study its exact position in space at determined moments, which he called ‘chronophotographie’. He took out numerous patents and made many inventions in the field of photography, all of them concerned with his interest in capturing instants of movement. In 1882 he invented the electric photographic gun using 35 mm film, the film itself being 20 m long; this photographic gun was capable of producing 12 images per second on a turning plate, at 1/720 of a second. He began to use transparent film rather than sensitized paper in 1890 and patented a camera using roll film, working also on a film projector in 1893. He also did research into stereoscopic images. Marey’s chronophotographic studies of moving subjects were made against a black background for added precision and clarity. These studies cover human locomotion—walking, running and jumping (e.g. Successive Phases of Movement of a Running Man, 1882; see Berger and Levrault, cat. no. 95); the movement of animals—dogs, horses, cats, lizards, etc.; and the flight of birds—pelicans, herons, ducks etc. He also photographed the trajectories of objects—stones, sticks and balls—as well as liquid movement and the functioning of the heart. He had exhibitions in Paris in 1889, 1892 and 1894, and in Florence in 1887.

These are the start of how we represent time duration and space.

Dematerialization, once we start to look at the recorded image, it moves away from form and object and moves into the realm of just image. Once this is reached you can copy, replicate and the help of technology, edit and manipulate it. Technology and photographs have put us in a state where we no longer have to deal with the ‘object’

Richard Hamilton Dada, collage and montage (1922)images  or objects are ordered and coded and styled according to conventions which develop out of the practice of each medium with it s tools and processes Pg $ Lovejoy many different contexts change meaning. Dada and surrealist movements and the dematerilaization of art

Karl Marx & Technology.

He is associated with the term technological determinism and how technology determines economical production factors and affects social conditions.

The main dialectical issues…

Technology drives history

Technology and the division of labour – a labourer and someone making will not necessarily see there work from beginning to end, separates us from creativity

Materialist view of history –

Technology and Capitalism and production, because of the division of labour in the industry.

Social Alienation of people form aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism – workers do not own their means of making work, they sell their working labour – competition cancels out cooperation. Alienated form other human beings and from distinctive creativity and community shared by us.

ELECTRONIC AGE – POSTMODERNISM

Postmodern, post machine.

Many electronic works were still made with the modern aesthetic

Emergence of information and conceptual based works

The computer a natural metaphor -

A spirit of openness to industrial techniques – moves away from the modernist aesthetic and becomes tied up with consumerism and technology

Collaborations between art and science – seeps across boundaries, broken distinct boundaries between art and other contexts

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

1.    When art is reproduced, it changes how society looks at and experiences it

Opposed to the mona lisa being hung on a wall in le louvre, it can be hung on a wall in ones home, the same way

2 -  the greater decrease in the social significance of an art form (when art forms start to loose purpose and importance in society, becomes more accessible to the public? In turn allowing the art forms to be criticised and enjoyed in a more person a way, opposed to being told how to look at it.

The conventional is enjoyed because people tell us we should enjoy it whereas the new can be critised

The moment these responses become manifest they control each other – is this saying that it gets to a point

Art is linked to an elitist group of peopl

XII. Pleasure becomes fused with expert appraisal, in the relation of the masses with art. Simultaneous mass reception of painting is unthinkable, and does not naturally confront masses directly.

Art is again associated to an elite, individual activity, whilts it is essential that culture is public, and only in its publicity and public value, it can be culture. However, it is clear that a reaction of the masses cannot replace an expert opinion, when better informed, based on a broader interpretation, a finer analysis of distinguishing characteristics, etcetera. The larger public should take time to listen to experts, but should by no means be excused from an attempt to shape an informed opinion. Any suggestion to that effect is tantamount to cultural suicide (since culture is a general sign of the times).