Undeniably we live in a historical age which shows a wide art diffusion. Art is one of the most inflated words, and although we may think it is not enough, art permeates almost every realm of our culture and our expressions. Artistical production is often performed in mass media contexts and channels. There are major events, like the Venice Biennale, like ARCO or like monographic exhibitions on art masters of the past which are mediatic events before being cultural events, which attract thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands whose large majority are art amateurs. Art is also a form of economical investment with a solid although risky market, and experts encourage new investors and say that this market is growing.
This democratization of the art world in the sense Walter Benjamin outlined has lead our culture to a pervasive spreading of art ideas, but often simply reduced to styles, exteriority, behaviours, moods, fashions, communications, publicities. And the spreading of the art culture has enforced the awareness of what we can call the cultural and economical power of the art realm, which, especially in the latest decades, seemed to assume under its wings almost every new form of expression. Let’s think here for instance of video art, computer art, art holography, interactive art, net.art, and so on…
The art’s overturning
The spreading of art has lead to weaken its identity, so we assist to a sort of overturning. By the second half of the Nineteenth Century photography had to assume some of the styles of paintings and emulate pictures to become art, in order to share the power of imaging and representing. Baudelaire, who had understood the “natural alliance of photography with multitudes”, wrote in 1859 his famous letters to the Revue Française in defense of art which he feared would have been “ruined and substituted by photography”. We know that history went otherwise and that photography did not replace paintings but went alongside them. Only painting applications that photography could achieve better disappeared, like, as Walter Benjamin still recalls the miniature portraits, because photography could make them more reliably similar to the original subject and at a cheaper price. Instead, painting had to refocus its language, starting on the path which lead it to abstraction, that is precisely what photography cannot achieve. In fact a photograph is made by a process of recording the light reflected or emitted by the subject . A photograph can be defined as a trace of the subject which it represents, because it is never possible to avoid the actual presence of its reference during the process of image achieving: without a subject which reflects or emits light during the shooting, there is no photography (according to Roland Barthes, photography is a proof of reality; in front of a photograph I can never deny that what is in the image has been – for some occurrence, in some moment of its life, for some reason – in front of the objective). This is also true for photomontages, with the difference that it can be said for each photographic part of the image. And although photography can be considered a proof of reality, a photograph, like any other signs, can have no relation with truth, that is, as we know, a photograph can lie (which is precisely a definition of sign in semiotics).
What has been previously said can be of some use to understanding the rising of a new medium and its settlement inside the mediascape, the realm of the existing media. Every new medium evolves from an early self referential stage, especially keen on its language and on technical processes, to a mature stage where technics tend to become transparent, and allow the user to concentrate on the results, the goals. Any new media expands the mediascape – adding more chances of expression and communication – and steals space from the other media where it possibly works better than them, forcing the other media to refocus and redefine their languages. So the mediascape is in an endless adjustment state, or in a remediation process as Bolter and Grusin call it [8], both because of the evolution of its inner media and because of the arrival of the new media.
So, to get back to our overturning, if in the past any new media had to emulate paintings to equal art’s heights, in recent decades we often assist in the opposite: traditional art which emulates and takes inspiration from media events, mass communications, new media . This is not negative per se, of course, but enforces the idea that maybe a better way of interpreting our current world and culture is achieved by art forms which use media and technological instruments. And exemplify the idea that media and communications are today a crucial topic for art.
A quick look at information and communication technologies
Maybe it can be useful to give a quick look at information and communication technologies, which are basically, although not only, digital based technologies. The advent of the microchip in 1971, by Intel, and hence the birth of the Personal Computer in 1976, by Apple, lead to evolving handy, flexible, general purpose, highly standardized and cheap machines. Especially in the last decade computational technologies have grown incredibly in power.
Slide 01
This slide represents the spectacular growth of the computing power in the Personal Computer area (with one CPU), expressed both in MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second, in blue) and in MHz (in red), starting from the invention of the microchip in 1971. This power growth rate has even been overcome by the evolution of the video boards, which today allow us to flawlessly work with images, video, multimedia, videogames, three dimensional graphics on larger monitors and at higher resolutions.
The Personal Computer area is most interesting for us and for artists too especially for being economical. But to give a more general idea of power computing growth, I can recall that Deep Blue, the machine which in 1997 defeated the chess world champion Gary Kasparov, had a computing power of roughly 3 millions MIPS, while one of today’s most powerful supercomputers, the NEC Earth Simulator with 4096 CPUs, reaches about 30 millions MIPS.
One of the most complete and interesting studies about power computing trend, especially compared to the human brain power and the evolution of robotics, was made by Hans Moravec one of the most prominent scientists in this field. In his studies he foresees an evolution of robotics which in about fifty years from now will lead robots to surpass humans and progressively substitute them in all activities, leaving humanity suspended in a sort of limbo. These robots, that Moravec calls “the children of our minds” because they are the legitime sons of our culture and no more of our biology, will evolve towards new conquests leaving humans in the dust. Although we may or may not agree with Moravec, undeniably robotics is going to become one of the hot sciences in a near future, posing huge questions about philosophy, ethics – both for humans and robots –, society, about the obsolete distinction/opposition between “natural” and “artificial”, and highlighting new approaches to the meaning of knowledge, life, biology, intelligence… And also artists started to work around these ideas, in many ways.
Slide 02
These and other technological acquisitions also lead to reconsider the role of the body, since sciences and technologies raise new possibilities of acting on the body’s physiology, psychology and appearance. But what is even more important is the body’s centrality in the cognitive processes raised by the biology of knowledge and robotics approaches . A new paradigm which recomposes the historical “mind vs body” opposition into a unitary and indivisible system, so undermining the famous cartesian statement “cogito ergo sum”, which in its consequences is still a pillar of our culture.
To get back to computers, the experts think that the exponential-like growth of calculation power will hold at least for a decade from now, possibly using different computing technologies (multicore, multiprocessing, clustering, optical technologies), and, in an unpredictable future, maybe also quantum computers.
But this growth in power would be of almost no interest for us without the decrease of calculation costs.
Slide 03
This graph by William Nordhaus , in some way specular to the first, shows that the power calculation has become cheaper and cheaper, spreading the use of computers as everyday tools. Moreover, since the microprocessors costs are continuously lowering and chips do not add significant costs to the objects which they can be added to, chips – and often dozens of chips – are embedded into any common objects and means: cars, watches, washers, toasters, telephones, TVs, toys, photo and video cameras, Hi-Fis, VCRs and DVDs, faxes, household appliances… And chips are also in artificial prosthesis or are implanted in human bodies. A population of obscure and obedient entities which untiredly work in a discreet and invisible way.
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