How New is Technological Art?

COLLOQUIUM PRESENTATIONS© 1999 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 303–306, 1999 303 The following is a selection of short texts presented at “The Aesthetic Status of Technological Art” colloquium at Les Treilles Foundation , south of France, 3–9 March 1997. The colloquium was attended by 15 participants, including artists working in technological and traditional visual art forms; composers of electroacoustic music; and others from the fields of aesthetics, sociology, mathematics and physics. The texts published here and in the following issue of Leonardo indicate the variety of artworks and perspectives discussed at Les Treilles. HOW NEW IS TECHNOLOGICAL ART? Jean-Paul Allouche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Bâtiment 490, F-91405 Orsay Cedex, France. E-mail: . This text is a shortened version of “L’art technologique est-il nouveau?” first published in Alliage: Statut esthétique de l’art technologique 33/34 pp. 34–38 (1998). Is technological art really new? Artists seem to have always used recent technical discoveries for reasons that range from curiosity to the desire to be fashionable or to possess social justification [1]. Some motivations of technology workers include prestige, monetary gain or the (paradoxical) desire to be useful. Straightforward examples of artistic technical discoveries include prehistoric painters’ discovery of pigments; the welltempered clavier; and the saxophone, the industrial production of which boosted the number of composers who wrote for it. We can also include the tough battles to impose standards such as digital audio tape (DAT) or compact disc (CD). Let us finally mention the discovery of cinema, its passage from silent film to “talkies” and from black and white to color, as well as the predictable disappearance of the traditional nitrate process in silver-based photography. Are the present technological arts, e.g. the use of the Web and the concept of virtuality, simply further examples of this progression? T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F T E C H N O L O G I C A L A R T How specific is contemporary technological art? To begin with, what is technological art? A. Bureaud [2] mentions space art, electronic art, mathematical art, robotic art, genetic art and interactive art. R. Berger indicates that New technologies . . . cannot be considered , as they have been till now, as instrumental improvements. . . . Technology not only produces other objects, but makes us see things in a different way [3]. We must also consider the concept of “cyberception” developed by R. Ascott [4]. When they use techniques such as hypertext, multimedia and the Web, artists create works that depend on these techniques or technologies. But what does this dependence mean? Would Mozart have composed for the accordion if it were available in his day? Would modern-day writers exist if printing had not been invented? The answers to both questions might well be yes. And are interactivity, hypertext and virtuality really new? A rudimentary form of hypertextuality or interactivity is possible with traditional books: one can skip pages, leaf through, read back, etc. Some texts were even written with this purpose: F. Shuiten and B. Peeters mention Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Jacques le fataliste by Denis Diderot, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan by Jorge Luis Borges, as well as works from the Oulipo workshop such as Cent mille milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau, La vie mode d’emploi by George Perec and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino [5]. Another attribute of technological art might be humor, as shown by M. Mendès France in his presentation at Les Treilles. Relations between (technological) art, humor and mathematics might reflect the occurrence of the unexpected inside the familiar. The so-called “mathematical beauty” that I described variously as “linguistic ” [6], the intellectual jubilation at a subtle joke and certain reactions to a piece of art would reflect the feeling of what P. Bootz in his Les Treilles presentation calls a “strange world where one feels at home.” This is a far more convincing explanation than the familiar claims (made more often by scientists than by artists) that art and science...