Visual Arts and Technology

The history of art is, to a large extent, also a history of technology. Every art genre employs technology of some kind, the materials of visual art or the instruments of music making. There has been, and still is, continuous research on chemical processes for the development of paint varnishing that has affected painting in complex ways. After the introduction of monocular perspective painting by the fifteenth century Italian painter Filippo Brunelleschi the invention of the camera obscura also played an important role.

Similar to this significant change in the style of visual representation and the theory of visual perception, the invention of rapid serial photography by Etienne- Jules Marey and Edweard Muybridge in the 1870s and 1880s brought about a change in the way we perceive elements of visual motion and their representation.

In the early twentieth century the Italian futurists were fascinated by the machine and the motion of speed. Futurist esthetics valued the dynamic over the static and technology over nature. The cities with their noise and industrial rhythms were their preferred new material of art. Like the Italian futurists the Russian constructivists of the decade following the October Revolution of 1917 had an almost unlimited faith in the powers of industrial technology.

Unlike the futurists, however, some of whom sympathized with Italian fascism, they dedicated their art to the service of the (Soviet) State. For the constructivists, the artist was an artist-engineer who made use of art in a radical reconstruction of society; but not all art movements of the early twentieth century were so fascinated by technology. Partly due to the terrors of World War I, which was also called the ‘‘war of the engineers,’’ many artists realized technology’s destructive power. The dadaists greeted technology with irony and the surrealists alluded to the disquieting and frightening aspects of the machine.

The introduction of electrical engineering and applications such as electronic means of controlling movement evoked the interest of artists. This gave rise to the ‘‘Kinetic Art’’ movement which investigated the dynamics of motion and the way, motion affects visual perception. Already in the late 1920s the theorist-artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, associated with the Bauhaus movement, which developed far-reaching insights into the relationship between technology and the arts, advocated a new perception of art in which dynamic values replaced static ones.

The Bauhaus movement in Germany in the 1920s proved enormously influential in all parts of the world. In a way it was a model for the art and technology movement in the United States in the 1960s. In the early 1960s, Billy Klüver, a research engineer and specialist in laser technology, worked together with artists like Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, not only by providing technical assistance but as equal partner in the creative process. Collaborations with artists also led other scientists and engineers to make discoveries and achieve technical breakthroughs.

However, the success of this cooperation was rather limited; many of these collaborations were marked by tensions and misunderstandings. For most of the artists involved, redefining the function of art was probably too radical a step. The same applies for the scientists and engineers, because members of those communities were rather wary of artists in general. Still, since the 1960s many industrial corporations with artists-in-residency schemes have provided artists with an opportunity to become acquainted with research and development activities in industrial companies, an arrangement that has proved beneficial to both parties.

Consumers and media saturation are themes highlighted by the pop art movement of the 1960s in which artists like Robert Rauschenberg (who also participated in the art and technology movement) and Andy Warhol played a large role. Pop art abandoned the artistic principles of modernism and related directly to the image-making technologies of mass culture.

In Andy Warhols’s machine esthetic there was a subversive effect. His technique featured the repetition, banality and boredom of automated production. This subversive complicity may also be observed in the works of many postmodern artists who make use of media technology.

In its fragmented, multiple narratives, multimedia performance exemplifies postmodern esthetics. It draws on a variety of different mixed media movements: the avant garde events of futurism and dadaism, the mixed media works of the 1960s fluxus movement; for example, Nam June Paik’s sculptures made from television sets, as well the media-based interventions of the situationist movement. From the 1980s onwards, artists such as Laurie Anderson have incorporated digital technologies into their performances.

Anderson’s use of sampling and other sound-treating effects have to be seen in the context of her exploring technology’s effect on gender and subjectivity. The postmodern performance work of Heiner Mueller deliberately dehumanized characters—technology itself becomes a character in his productions. In Peter Wilson’s work, video and projected images are involved in a staged universe in which actors carry out repetitive tasks.

An art form that relies to a large extent on modern technological media is holography, a technique using light waves to record an image of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional photosensitive plate. In 1968, Stephen Benton of the Polaroid Corporation introduced a new form of whole light transmission hologram; both the vivid coloring and the clarity of the holograms had a great impact on artists interested in the new medium.

By the mid-1970s the gradual development of holography resulted in different holographic phenomena; for example, animated portraits using pulsed laser, motion pictures (‘‘multiplex’’) holograms, acoustical holograms, and facilities to mass-produce embossed holograms. However, the tension between highly developed technical skills and the artistic content has always been a problem in holographic art. Recently though, artists have managed to successfully explore its potential for communicating human and esthetic values. By creating a new, esthetically meaningful paradigm for holography the new generation of holographic artists abolished old stereotypes.