CURSOR 4
CURSOR4: On comparing media
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
INTRODUCTION
Comparative juxtaposition of new media to “old” is worth doing. Such a comparison suggests points of departure or origination for an enlightening dimensional analysis. Really, the old/new media opposition is an apples-to-oranges fallacy, but don’t tell that to the art world! You would be depriving art mediators of a rich supply of canon fodder.
Western art is rooted in a dualistic system, primarily epistemological. How old and new (fill in the blank) comport is typically the stuff of lectures and essays by experts. One job of the art expert is to populate the walls of the museum or gallery with justifications. To get a picture of the status quo on our topic, Google “old versus new media art.” As a point of departure for dimensional analysis, the relevance of the topic is made clear: This isn’t just a problem for artists.
As my friend Jason Coulston put it, in the context of discussion about my recent 4D landscape series and an experience he recently had on a beach near his Costa Mesa home: “Captured data has become more important than raw data. If you can paint that, I’d love to see it.” (http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=833)
Earlier this evening I spoke with my former apprentice Shane Kennedy about research he’s doing on Twitter. Recently Twitter was hacked, Shane said, and the company’s internal memos were published on the web. What struck Shane was the Twitter people don’t really know what they’ve created or what its effects on people will be. I suggested that tweeters are being trained to translate complex thought into an extremely reductive format, which requires an inventive operation of personalized or learned linguistic coding, and the real-time numerical adjudication necessitated by the 140 character limit. As for the consequences, I’ve already noticed that critique as a practice is being impacted. The phenomenon began with MySpace commentary, likely was refined significantly by texters, then found its nexus in Twitter. Twitter started in 2006 as a side project and as of February 2009 hosts more than 7 million users (although their retention rate is less than fifty percent, according to Neilson). Art historian Shelley Esaak (who blogs at About.com), Ruth Jamieson of The Guardian, and others have commented on visual art identified with or reliant upon Twitter. Some genius has coined a name for visual art that is Twitter-specific: twart; which is possibly one of the most lamentable titles for an art genre ever invented.
Digital art is, as Twitter demonstrates, contributing tools to the artist toolbox at an astounding pace. Although suggesting that twart is art requires bending or busting the traditional definition of art (painting, sculpture), other new media tools for artists, like Twitter in its upgraded iteration, don’t even rely upon computers for production. Witness SteveJohn’s iPhone artworks (published on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/frommystudio/). The following paragraphs derive from the artist’s statement in his Flickr profile:
I created my very first artworks back in November 2008 with iPhone apps on a 1st generation iPod Touch. Things have moved on quite a bit since then both in the development of my work and in app development. I now use an iPhone 3G and an iPod Touch 2G. The iPhone has allowed me to use Photography in my work and the improving quality and range of creative apps has led to higher quality Artwork.
I feel it is important to emphasise that I create all of my Artworks solely on an iPhone with apps from the App Store. Any modifications to photographs that I take on my iPhone or Paintings are done inPhone. My work is Never! processed pre/post production with any other desktop software and never goes anywhere near a computer accept when I store them in iPhoto etc.
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Today, I tutored my friend David Mix in Photoshop. He’s a musician who needs the imaging software to design flyers and invitations for gigs. My pal is also a digital photographer. His father is Walter Mix, an outstanding painter who instructed students at Mt. Sac and CGU for decades and is recognized as a prominent figure in the area’s most famous generation of artists, which includes Walter Benjamin and others, known as the California Hard Edge Abstractionists. In the Walters’ era, the art teacher taught craft as a discipline inseparable from art. The definitions of art and artist in the intervening years have expanded exponentially. Today, a person may self-identify as an artist (take SteveJohn as an example), based on very different criteria.
QUESTION:
Do you think this is a good or bad thing? Why?
