Gold Monocle

John Park brought up some incredibly poignant issues that are completely relevant to all of our lives right now. Digital technology: is it good? Bad? How can we use it without becoming mindless sheep? I would like to touch on few of the problems with technology that Mr. Park mentioned on Tuesday.

First off, Mr. Park mentioned the problem of the screen. How can a glowing, flat, 2-D object communicate to a real person? Even though graphics are getting better and better every year and programs are being more and more powerful in order to create the most life-like images, it is still not a tangible thing: you cannot hold it in your hand or interact with it. The answer to this problem is not that much of a stretch, actually. Programmers and artists are coming together to make art interactive and to move off the screen and into space. John Park mentioned an initiative that I was actually familiar with: The Fun Theory. This company is fighting the boundaries of digital art, bringing it into the real world and interacting with real people. With projects like the World’s Deepest Bin and the Speed Camera Lottery and the famous Piano Staircase, they are reaching out to people and letting them be a part of the technology and being a part of the art. David Byrne (one of my favorite people in the whole world) also accomplished this with his Playing the Building. That organ allowed the audience to be more than just an audience, they were a part of the art. They became the artists. Digital art has the ability to bring art out from behind the scenes and out from behind the curtain to the masses. When the masses can be a part of the art, they are interacting with it and creating as well. Creating is not just an exclusive action for artists, anyone can be a creator*.

            Or do we want to completely disengage? Complete interaction does not always have to be physical interaction. What Janet Cardiff has accomplished is complete immersion. She brings the viewer, who is often more than just a viewer, completely out of reality and into an amazing world that is beautiful and frightening at the same time. I personally love her installations and her walks just because it transports me away from whatever is going on and into this mystical and emotionally charged world. I would love to take one of her walks, but unfortunately, she does not have one for the U of O campus. Maybe I should make one.

This brings me to another problem that Mr. Park mentioned: the zombie apocalypse. Moving into the digital age, there is a looming threat of becoming totally plugged in, completely tuned out. People are afraid of becoming completely dehumanized with the rise of powerful digital technology. So how do we keep digital technology from becoming completely controlling? Some artists have began to put the human back into the equation.  “I Want You To Want Me” works by putting the people back into the art. This project is all about the people and how they work and feel. Another project by Jonathon Harris and Sep Kamvar is We Feel Fine which is a real time collection of lines from blogs written by people all over the world, but always beginning with the words “I feel…”. The result is an intimate and exceptional feeling of being a part of everyone in the whole world. And, optimistically, the most used word has always been “better”.

Paul Pfieffer also puts the human into the situation by taking the people out. His art has the interesting double punch of having the art be able to speak for itself, but also having the art show off the craftsmanship. Sometimes, with digital art, it is so easy to lose the artist and to imagine everything as the work of a faceless machine, but with Pfieffer’s work, you can see the workmanship, the ‘brushstrokes’ as it were.

            So while the digital age seems synonymous with apocalypse, this might not be the case. The world is filled with incredible talented, rule-breaking and creative people who will use tools to not just make but create. I say here that I had two visual examples but not only did our professor take one, but both of them. I was going to use the Virtual Haircut and was sadly beaten to it. I was also going to use We Feel Fine, but I think using the same artists is kind of cheating. So I am not really sure what to do right now. For now, I will rely on We Feel Fine, seeing as this is due in 20 minutes, but if I think of anything else, I will definitely update. 

* This actually ties into another heavy debate going on right now. Is anyone with a camera an artist? Is a girl who takes black and white macro pictures of lawn chairs really creating? What is art? High Art? Low Art? This is a debate for another time.