This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for awhile, and the day after Apple’s 2013 WWDC keynote is probably a good as time as any to discuss the intermingling of Art, Technology, and Design.
The chronological relationship between art and technology are something that is not discussed often enough. Coming from an Art background, I was always told of how Art inspires culture, and culture inspires industry and technology. However in recent years, the dialog has switched to how technology has enabled artists to create more that they could have ever imagined. Is this really true? Is technology now driving art and culture? Have we shifted to a new arbiter of culture?
I don’t think we have.
Art and technology have a deeply connected relationship:
Art inspires the creation of new technology through representations of things currently impossible.
Books like H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man or Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea enchanted generations of scientific thinkers with dreams of challenging the laws of physics to exploring the deepest oceans. In the 1960s, Television like Star Trek, imagines a handheld doctor’s office in medical tricorder, and 50 years later, we may actually be able to build one. Or maybe we already have.
Art is shifted by what a technology’s potential allows.
Early users of film cameras quickly discovered that a camera can extend far beyond the basic use of documenting life. They began to experiment with double-exposure, photo manipulation, and editing in the developing process. Suddenly photos gave artists the possibility to create and show fictions in a more realistic way than with previous mediums like painting or drawing. On the other hand, later photographers like Ansel Adams used established studies of sensitometry to create the Zone System, an exposure technique to create contrast
