Art in the 21st century is created in the context of digital technology, embracing, critiquing, avoiding, and correcting its promises and pitfalls. This course focuses on art experiences that are immersive (puts you inside the art) and interactive (requires your participation), with special emphasis on experiences that combine sound, image, movement, and performance. Students will learn about the roots of immersive and interactive art in traditional mediums of painting, sculpture, installation, and performance art, as well as new media and digital art. The time frame is the 1950s to the present, with particular attention to the legacy of the Bauhaus (established 1919, so 2019 is the centennial) and the greatest of all interdisciplinary art and education experiments: Black Mountain College. We will consider themes such as: collaborating with technology, representing the self with avatars, plasticity, democratization of art-making, accessibility, modernism/postmodernism/metamodernism, minimalism, imaging the future, and utopia/dystopia.
Topics include: virtual reality, video games as art, immersive music experiences, multisensory immersive experiences, interactive museum and gallery installations, virtual worlds, immersive live theater, augmented and mixed reality, role of the artist, physical and virtual spaces, screens, 360-degree experiences, 2D and 3D, improvisation, machine learning/artificial intelligence. Artists include: Marina Abramović, Doug Aitken, John Akomfrah, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Nick Cave, Chagall, Paige Dansinger, Char Davies, Critical Art Ensemble, Nonny de la Peña, Thomas Dolby, Elizabeth Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Charity Everett, William Forsythe, Goro Fujita, Nona Hendryx, Lynn Hershman, Jenny Holzer, Hyphen Labs, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt, Christian Marclay, Eva and Franco Mattes, Chris Milk, Nam June Paik, Maya Paris, Punchdrunk, Queer Technologies, Scott Snibbe, Stelarc, Camille Utterback, Yao Wang, Ai Weiwei.
5. WHAT
IS
TECHNOLOGY?
Origin
Early 17th century: from Greek
tekhnologia ‘systematic
treatment’, from tekhnē ‘art, craft’
+ -logia (see -logy).
The application of scientific knowledge for practical
purposes
13. Class session structure
Welcome and Intros
Opening exercise
Lecture
Screening
Collaborative exercise – Workshop – Group work
Denouement
Coursework
20% Midterm Exam
25% Final Exam
20% Research
30% Responses
5% Positive contributions to class community, discussions, activities
14. THEMES
collaborating with technology - representing the
self with avatars - plasticity - spatialized -
democratization of art-making – accessibility -
modernism/postmodernism/metamodernism -
minimalism - imagi(ni)g the future -
utopia/dystopia
22. minimalism
Sol LeWitt
One-Two-One with Two
Half-Off
1992
DIMENSIONS
304.8 x 457.2 x 243.8
cm (120 x 180 x 96 in.)
MEDIUM OR
TECHNIQUE
Sprayed enamel on
aluminum
MFA, Boston
25. FILMS (51, listed in order of first appearance):
Starship Troopers
Minority Report
Death Race 2000
Running Man
Death Race
Gamer
Surrogates
The Island
Zero Theorem
Snowpiercer
Wall·E
Idiocracy
Fahrenheit 451
The Purge
Total Recall
Repo Men
I, robot
Soylent Green
The Lorax
Demolition Man
Elysium
The Giver
Serenity
Metropolis
Aeon Flux
Logan's Run
Divergent
A.I.
Babylon A.D.
Blade Runner
Cloud Atlas
THX 1138
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Sleeper
Escape from L.A.
Dredd
Total Recall (2012)
Freejack
The Hunger Games
Fortress
Gattaca
Code 46
Never let me go
In time
1984
Brazil
Scanner darkly
Equilibrium
V for Vendetta
A clockwork orange
Johnny Mnemonic
26. Reading for Monday:
Chapter 1 in Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media
Questions?
llanday@berklee.edu
Office Hours: Thursday 2-4
Room 202 in 7 Haviland
TO BE CONTINUED!
Notas del editor
That leads us to ask: (click)
That leads us to ask: (click)
In contrast with modernism, postmodernism rejects the idea of stable relationships between signifiers and signifieds and claims there are only signifiers. For postmodernism, there is no direct correspondence between signifier and signified in the Sussurian definition of the terms; there are only signifiers with no signifieds, surfaces without depth.For Jean Baudrillard, another major figure in the postmodernist movement, there are no originals, only copies-- or what he calls "simulacra" (Baudrillard 1994). To Baudrillard, simulation leads inevitably to the extinction of the original. Thus, postmodernism is a movement toward fragmentation, provisionality, performance, multiplicity and instability. It casts doubts on the validity of many social and cultural systems (religion, democracy, class system, etc.). A more recent definition of postmodernism has been given in an article published by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “It [postmodernism] can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyper reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2015, Webpage).
Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle
