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Derek Forrester
Lisa Hutton
VSAR 405
18 October 2014
New Media History Paper
Throughout mankind, technological advances have greatly impacted the art world and
allowed an ever increasing number of creative channels to further develop and diversify the
many mediums of art, as they are known. Through the development and implementation of
technology, the creative practice and process was accelerated and expanded, with more and more
artists taking part, with more and more ideas to contribute. Though the subject of the art is
always a primary source of focus, there is a dematerialization of the art object, resulting in a shift
from a direct representation to a more expressive and conceptual representation of the art form.
The technological revolution greatly contributed to expanding the conceptual art world and its
media, but it also made it more challenging for artists to define and distinguish their work from
the greater masses of other freelance and amateur artists. Very often, conceptual ideas from the
past are built upon and reformatted with the advent of modern technology. By comparing and
contrasting Vertovs movie camera database and Bookchins artwork from YouTube titled Mass
Ornament, we can define parallel lines of creativity and further understand how media became
new and what it meant for the art world as a whole. Having introduced the main ideas, the first
idea will lend some insight into how technology advanced art and inspired new creative practice
and innovation.
Before the days of the computer chip and camera, art forms were based in the basic
mediums of drawing, painting and sculpting with some variations among the three. It is believed
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that the Greeks painted their idealized statues and sculptures with very beautiful and colorful
detail. Artists would most often draw a composition before they painted it. It is interesting to
note that for the greater part of early art history, drawing was not considered a credible and
respectable form of art. It took a backseat to the technical art form of painting, which was valued
to be a true skill and talent. Though there was undoubtedly much to be accomplished within the
early mediums of art, the compositional framework and conceptual ideas were fairly similar and
conservative. Although the art could certainly express and represent emotions, events and ideas,
it was often presented in a true to life and realistic manner. One piece of technology that had a
profound effect on breaking up the traditional expectations and standards of art was the camera.
This piece of technology allowed anyone to fill the role of capturing and portraying real life and
realistic scenes. Because many artists felt that their craft was being taken over by this
technology, they started to create and innovate new compositional ideas for their artwork and
preferred mediums. They sought to break away from picture perfect realism in painting for
example, and instead focus on the subjective, expressive and underlying characteristics of the art
object. Though the camera had a very large impact on the artwork in the sense of influencing
compositional changes in the widely accepted painting medium, it also had many more effects on
society and how artwork as whole was defined and created. The camera allowed for new
perspectives to be captured that would have been otherwise impossible to paint from. Though
the exposure time was delayed and time consuming by modern standards, it was revolutionary of
its day. Photographs could capture a landscape from the basket of a hot air balloon and show the
world a view and perspective that they had never before imagined. This idea of revolutionary
technology and perspective was only further enhanced and exponentially exploited with the
invention of the moving picture camera. The movie camera broke down time and space inside
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the minds of artists and art patrons in a way that could only be described as divine. It brought
about a new wave of creative thinking and allowed for the study of the surrounding world that
the painting medium could never hope to accomplish. It provided a window of escape from the
outside world as it was known. Film images would sooth movie audiences, who were too eager
to escape the reality outside, the reality which no longer could be adequately handled by their
own sampling and data processing systems.(1 Manovich) The concept of time and space
became not only a physical phenomenon capable of frame by frame analyzation, it also proved to
be a very profound and powerful conceptual idea. Whereby artists could manipulate the concept
of time and space to create varying and dramatic psychological responses from the viewer.
Vertovs passion for the movie cameras potential to create a fresh perception of the world by
freeing time and space- coordinating all points of the universe- is captured in the montage of the
cameraman towering over crowded streets. (4 Lovejoy) This work was an example of a spatial
narrative by which a composite image was created to display an oversized cameraman towering
over the city streets.(6 Classroom) The artists Bookchin and Vertov both used this idea in
different ways; using technology to innovate and create new art forms. Vertov sought to create a
movie camera database and BookChin later built upon it for her conceptual framing of Mass
Ornament, which rapidly displayed acquired YouTube selfie scenes to create an artistic narrative.
Now that some context has been developed about how artists use technology to advance modern
art, it will be easier to make the connections as to how and why dematerialization of the art
object itself occurred.
For the greater part of art history, the subjects of art compositions were photograph like
representations of everyday objects, persons, places, or things. Artists sought to make their
artistic imagery based from the real world such that patrons would value and credit their artistic
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skill based on how realistic or true to life their work appeared. With the advent of the advanced
technological camera, everyday people could now replicate images faster, cheaper and with
greater detail that any artist could hope to compete with. Thus, artists very quickly shifted from
making life like representations, and instead chose to focus on the concept of the art itself.
Major technological change raised fundamental questions which fostered expanded
consciousness in the arts, literature, music, science, creating the radical innovation which, even
today, underpins cultural development. (4 Lovejoy). This dematerialization of the art object
meant that artists began to give artistic precedence to the conceptual ideas instead of focusing on
the widely accepted traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The artworks message and intent
became more psychologically motivated and focused instead on making the patron or viewer
discern for themselves what the subject is about. These conceptual style compositions, born
from the advent of technology, even challenged the very idea of what actually defines art.
Marcel Duchamp was an early conceptualist who used a signed urinal and declared that it was art
if he said it was art. Duchamp was widening the question posed originally by photography
about the reproducibility versus the uniqueness of a work and the necessity of hand skills. He
shifted the possibilities for art making to place the most important emphasis on the conceptual
process.(4 Lovejoy) Though this certainly shocked the art world, it marked a historical turn of
events, by which the very definition and requirements of art were challenged and perhaps forever
changed. Much of the motivation and innovation for these ideas are attributable to the
implementation of technology within the art world and society itself. The technology that lead to
the dematerialization of the art object set forth many new genres of artistic movements. Though
this easy to acquire technology presented some new struggles and adversity in that- it also
allowed an ever growing number of participants to compete for acknowledgment and fame.
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As technology was introduced, shared, modified and improved upon, it reached more and
more would be artists who found a new interest in snapping photographs, or arranging video
productions, for example. Within this rapid dissemination of technical ability, the art world
suddenly gained many new and unheard of amateur artists. This phenomenon was certainly a
positive attribute in regards to the development of creative thinking and inspiring new art
movements, but it also presented a challenge for defining ones self among all the other would be
artists. With so many compositional works being created, copied, and improved upon, it left
considerably less leeway room for gaining recognition based upon individual accomplishment
and originality. In this great mixing pot of artistic participation, a career based artist who pays
their bills from their work faced new challenges when striving to distinguish their particular style.
For this reason, technology hindered individual expression by allowing so many other works to
be so similar or otherwise copied and reproduced. It is often said that there is no such thing as a
new idea, but instead only an idea that has been rethought. If this saying were to be regarded as
true and valid, then it is also important to consider that someone may have indeed thought of it
first.
In conclusion, the advent of technology set off a rapid explosion of diversification of the
art world and society as a whole. It represented a very complicated and multifaceted revolution
by which one idea or advancement led to another. The Experiments in Art and Technology
concluded that neither the artist nor the engineer alone could have achieved the unexpected and
extraordinary results. Interaction must have preceded innovation. (5 Lovejoy) The power and
extent of this interacting technology forever changed the art world, society and the world as a
whole.

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Works Cited

(1) Manovich, Lev. New Media Users Guide. How Media Became New. PDF
(2) Manovich, Lev. Vertovs Dataset. Language of New Media. MIT Press. 2001
(3) Paul, Christine. IntroductionFrom Digital Art. Thames & Hudson,
2003, pgs. 7-25
(4) Lovejoy, Margot. The Machine Age and Modernism. Digital Currents: ART IN THE
ELECTRONIC AGE. Routledge Press 2004, Pgs. 36-61
(5)Lovejoy, Margot. The Electronic Era and Post Modernism. ART IN THE
ELECTRONIC AGE. Routledge Press, 2004 Part II Digital: Postmodernist Experiments
in Integrated, multimedia Interactive Art: Post Information Age Techno culture
Experiments in Integrated, Multimedia, Interactive, Immersive Art
(6) Class Discussions