Tagged: technology

What does technology want?

I’ve been researching technology on a philosophical level and came across this TED talk by Kevin Kelly. Kelly is an editor at WIRED magazine, but more relevant to this conversation, he was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. The WEC was originally published in printed form, but quickly moved online when the Internet became a thing, and was concerned with various DIY, counterculture, or pro-environment product reviews and essays. It never actually succeeded in containing the whole Earth, but as a sort of philosophical precursor to the World Wide Web it encouraged sharing, openness and democracy (that the Internet is any of these things is a myth [possible paywall], but that’s another discussion).

Some interesting takeaways from this talk are how Kelly equates technology’s evolution to biological evolution. Tech, like biology, moves toward diversity and complexity.He even goes so far as to name technology the Earth’s 7th kingdom (the official six kingdoms are plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaebacteria, and eubacteria). Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene posits that the idea that genes have a “selfishness” to them in that they look out for their own best interests, and technology could be seen to have that same selfishness; It wants to proliferate.

Technology cannot be destroyed, only slowed down. Everything from a random page in a mail-order catalog from a hundred years ago is still available today in some form or another. To conclude, Kelly suggests we have a moral obligation to continue advancing and creating new technologies because it allows humans to reveal their best qualities (also worst, but again that’s another discussion). Imagine Van Gogh without the invention of oil paint, or Hitchcock without the invention of film. Where would our culture be without technological progress?

We’ve cooled considerably in our technological optimism in the past several decades; we’re a long way from viewing human progress through the rose-colored glasses represented by Walt Disney’s ever hopeful and wondrous Carousel of Progress.

And that makes me a little sad. Speaking of Disney, I remember growing up in the 1980s and visiting Epcot for the first time. I couldn’t wait for the future of automated home and robot butlers. Well, now I have Nest and Hue to automate my home, and Roomba to vacuum my floors. So now what do I look forward to?

3-d printed sculpture by Nathan Sharratt, 3d scanned with an Xbox Kinect sensor.

Giving Artists New Tools Through Science And Technology

Building connections between seemingly disparate areas is one of the joys of being an artist. It’s also one of the biggest challenges. Conceptually, artists are trained (or train themselves) to look at topics from multiple angles and to build relationships that express the nuances of the proverbial “human condition” (one of my least-favorite artspeak terms, though it seems appropriate in this context). We take input from the world around us, process it through the lense of our personal experiences and knowledge, then spit it out in some novel way as artwork.

Art schools are generally pretty good at giving artists artistic tools, but the focus tends to be on traditional art-making practice and thinking. Even new-media programs seem to focus on accepted art and design technology, such as Adobe Photoshop and the like. But what happens when an artist wants to expand their research into scientific fields, or access big data? The tools are out there, but the learning curve is so steep as to be seen as insurmountable. I’ve heard from multiple artists that they’d love to access primary sources of information, but dont know how or where to look. Consequently they end up relying on possibly inaccurate second- or third-hand information, with the caveat that it’s okay because it’s art, not science. To a certain extent that’s true: (probably) no one’s going to die if an artist uses bad or incomplete data. However, art can expose and educate us to experience and information in ways that no spreadsheet could, and it connects us to each other by making us aware of perspectives that may differ from our own.

Here at GSU, the art program exists under the umbrella of the School of Arts & Sciences, but there is rarely any overlap unless an individual student wants to take an elective class or slog through the paperwork and approval process for more detailed extra-departmental collaboration. But then the artist is limited to the schedule and interest level of their collaborator, who is busy with their own research and agenda. So it seems that the best way for the artist (aside from a team of dedicated collaborators) is to access the data themselves. It’s certainly possible, there’s a heckuvalot of data out there, and the scientists seem to have no issue accessing it, with tools and technology dedicated to specialized information tasks.

But where does the artist start who wants to consider census data from 1792 with geographical markers? How do scientists make those beautiful infographics that correlate environmental legislation with global warming trends? How do I use ArcGIS or Google Earth in my artwork? How do you make abstract animations in Processing that interact with viewers based on body movement? How do 3d scanners work, and how can I use those scans to create artwork? What type of 3d scanning should I use for a particular project? Is 3d-printing technology useful for art yet?

As a SIF, I’d like to begin to bridge these gaps by collaborating with SIFs from geostudies, archaeology, computer science and elsewhere to create artworks using their technology and information tools. Once prototype projects have been completed, I’ll present the documented process used to achieve the results to artists who are interested.