Software takes command
Is Art After Web 2.0 still possible?
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Is Art After Web 2.0 still possible?How does art world responds to these challenges? Have professional artists benefited from the explosion of media content online being produced by regular users and the easily availability of media publishing platforms? Is the fact that we now have such platforms where anybody can publish their videos mean that artists have a new distribution channel for their works? Or is the world of social media – hundreds of millions of people daily uploading and downloading video, audio, and photographs; media objects produced by unknown authors getting millions of downloads; media objects easily and rapidly moving between users, devices, contexts, and networks – makes professional art simply irrelevant? In short, while modern artists have so far successfully met the challenges of each generation of media technologies, can professional art survive extreme democratization of media production and access? On one level, this question is meaningless. Surely, never in the history of modern art it has been doing so well commercially. No longer a pursuit for a few, in 2000s contemporary art became another form of mass culture. Its popularity is often equal to that of other mass media. Most importantly, contemporary art has become a legitimate investment category, and with the all the money invested into it, today it appears unlikely that this market will ever completely collapse. In a certain sense, since the beginnings of globalization in the early 1990s, the number of participants in the institution called “contemporary art” has experienced a growth that parallels the rise of social media in 2000s. Since 1990s, many new countries entered the global economy and adopted western values in their cultural politics. Which includes supporting, collecting, and promoting “contemporary art.” When I first visited Shanghai in 2004, it already had has not just one but three museums of contemporary art plus more large-size spaces that show cotemporary art than New York or London. Starchitects rank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando (above) and Zaha Hadid are now building museums and cultural centers on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi.227 Rem Koolhaus is building new museum of contemporary art in Riga, a capital of tiny Latvia (2007 population: 2.2 million). I can continue this list but you get the idea. In the case of social media, the unprecedented growth of numbers of people who upload and view each other media led to lots of innovation. While the typical diary video or anime on YouTube may not be that special, enough are. In fact, in all media where the technologies of productions were democratized - music, animation, graphic design, (and also software development itself) - I have came across many projects available online which not only rival those produced by most well-known commercial companies and most well-known artists but also often explore the new areas not yet touched by those with lots of symbolic capital. Who is creating these projects? In my observations, while some of them do come from prototypical “amateurs,” “prosumers” and “pro-ams,” most are done by young professionals, or professionals in training. The emergence of the Web as the new standard communication medium in the 1990s means that today in most cultural fields, every professional or a company, regardless of its size and geo location, has a web presence and posts new works online. Perhaps most importantly, young design students can now put their works before a global audience, see what others are doing, and develop together new tools and projects (for instance, see processing.org community). Note that we are not talking about “classical” social media or “classical” user-generated content here, since, at least at present, many of such portfolios, sample projects and demo reels are being uploaded on companies’ own web sites and specialized aggregation sites known to people in the field (such as archinect.com for architecture), rather than Flickr or YouTube. Here are some examples of such sites that I consult regularly: xplsv.tv (motion graphics, animation), coroflot.com (design portfolios from around the world), archinect.com (architecture students projects), infosthetics.com (information visualization projects). In my view, the significant percentage of works you find on these web sites represents the most innovative cultural production done today. Or at least, they make it clear that the world of professional art has no special license on creativity and innovation. But perhaps the most amount of conceptual innovation is to be found today in software development for the web medium itself. I am thinking about all the new creative software tools - web mashups, Firefox plug-ins, Processing libraries, etc. – coming out from large software companies, small design firms, individual developers, and students. Therefore, the true challenge posed to art by social media may be not all the excellent cultural works produced by students and non-professionals which are now easily available online – although I do think this is also important. The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of web culture – its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability. To summarize: Alan Kay was deeply right in thinking of a computer as generation engine which would enable invention of many new media. And yet, the speed, the breadth, and the sheer number of people now involved in constantly pushing forward what media is would be very hard to imagine thirty years ago when a computer metamedium was only coming into existence. 1 http://money.cnn.com, accessed January 21, 2008. 2 Ibid. 3 http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/softstudworkshop, accessed January 21, 2008. 4 See Truscello, Michael. A review of Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software, in Cultural Critique 63, Spring 2006, pp. 182-187. 5 Martin LaMonica, “The do-it-yourself Web emerges,” CNET News, July 31, 2006 < http://www.news.com/The-do-it-yourself-Web-emerges/2100-1032_3-6099965.html>, accessed March 23, 2008. 6 Friedrich Kittler, 'Technologies of Writing/Rewriting Technology' <http://www.emory.edu/ALTJNL/Articles/kittler/kit1.htm>, p. 12; quoted in Michael Truscello, “The Birth of Software Studies: Lev Manovich and Digital Materialism,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 55, December 2003 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n55truscello.html, accessed January 21, 2008. 7 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software, accessed January 21, 2008. 8 http://www.nanikawa.com/; http://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/?aid=9074340, accessed July 13, 2008. 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_(computing), accessed September 3, 2008. 10 http://www.mtv.ru/air/vjs/taya/main.wbp, accessed February 21, 2008. 11 The two best books on the pioneers of cultural computing, in my view, are Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (The MIT Press; 2 Rev Sub edition, 2000), and M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking Adult, 2001). 12 For the museum presentation on the web, see http://www.computerhistory.org/about/, accessed March 24, 2008. 13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_backlot, accessed April 6, 2008. 14 Henri Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006); Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture (Doubleday Business, 2007). 15 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2007); Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio Hardcover, 2008 expanded edition); Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (The Penguin Press HC, 2008.) 16 http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/pictures/display-mirror.html/. 17 Kay has expressed his ideas in a few articles and a large number of interviews and public lectures. The following have been my main primary sources: Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, IEEE Computer. Vol. 10 No. 3 (March), 1977; my quotes are from the reprint of this article in New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (The MIT Press, 2003); Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk, ” (HOPL-II/4/93/MA, 1993); Alan Kay, “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston, August 1972; Alan Kay, Doing with Images Makes Symbols (University Video Communications, 1987), videotape (available at www.archive.org); Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View,” The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 191-207; David Canfield Smith at al., “Designing the Star user Interface,” Byte, issue 4 (1982). 18 Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” in New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (The MIT Press, 2003), 399. 19 Videoworks was renamed Director in 1987. 20 1982: AutoCAD; 1989: Illustrator; 1992: Photoshop, QuarkXPress; 1993: Premiere. 21 See http://sophia.javeriana.edu.co/~ochavarr/computer_graphics_history/historia/, accessed February 22, 2008. 23 Since the work of Kay’s group in the 1970s, computer scientists, hackers and designers added many other unique properties – for instance, we can quickly move media around the net and share it with millions of people using Flickr, YouTube, and other sites. 24 However consider the following examples of things to come: “Posters in Japan are being embedded with tag readers that receive signals from the user’s ‘IC’ tag and send relevant information and free products back.” Takashi Hoshimo, “Bloom Time Out East,” ME: Mobile Entertainment, November 2005, issue 9, p. 25 25 Kay and Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, 394. 26 For more on 3D virtual navigable space as a new media, or a “new cultural form,” see chapter “Navigable Space” in The Language of New Media. 27 Ibid., 393. 28 Ibid., 393. The emphasis in this and all following quotes from this article is mine – L.M. 29 Ibid., 394. 30 This elevation of the techniques of particular media to a status of general interface conventions can be understood as the further unfolding of the principles developed at PARC in the 1970s. Firstly, the PARC team specifically wanted to have a unified interface for all new applications. Secondly, they developed the idea of “universal commands” such as “move,” “copy,” and “delete.” As described by the designers of Xerox Star personal computer released in 1981, “MOVE is the most powerful command in the system. It is used during text editing to rearrange letters in a word, words in a sentence, sentences in a paragraph, and paragraphs in a document. It is used during graphics editing to move picture elements, such as lines and rectangles, around in an illustration. It is used during formula editing to move mathematical structures, such as summations and integrals, around in an equation.” David Canfield Smith et al., “Designing the Star User Interface,” Byte, issue 4/1982, pp. 242-282. 31 Ibid., 399. 32 Ibid., 395. Emphasis mine – L.M. 33 Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View,” p. 199. 34 M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Liicklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking, 2001), p. 287. 35 Complete video of Engelbardt’s 1968 demo is available at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html. 36 Ted Nelson, “Stretchtext” (Hypertext Note 8), 1967. < http://xanadu.com/XUarchive/htn8.tif>, accessed February 24, 2008. 37 Douglas C. Engelbart. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. 1962. Available at: http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/augmentinghumanintellect/3examples.html#III.A, accessed March 8, 2008. Although the implementation of hypertext in Engelbart’s NLS was much more limited that Nelson’s concept of hypertext, looking at Engelbart discussion in Augmenting Human Intellect shows that his ideas for new systems for organizing information were at least as rich as that of Nelson’s. 38 Theodor H. Nelson, “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate” (1965), in New Media Reader, 144. 39 Noah Wardrip-Fruin, introduction to Theodor H. Nelson, “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate” (1965), in New Media Reader, 133 40 Ted Nelson, “Brief Words on the Hypertext" (Hypertext Note 1), 1967. Download 0.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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