Category Archives: Technology

Digital morphogenesis

Digital morphogenesis is a type of generative art in which complex shape development, or morphogenesis, enabled by computation. This concept is applicable in many areas of design, art, architecture, and modeling. The concept was originally developed in the field of biology, later in geology, geomorphology, and architecture. In architecture, it describes tools and methods for creating forms and adapting them to a known environment. Stanislav Roudavski describes it as similar to biological morphogenesis: developing gradually, without an explicit definition of the methods of growth or adaptation. Parallels can be seen in emergent properties and self-organization.” Developments in digital morphogenesis have allowed construction and analysis of structures in more detail than could have been put into a blueprint or model by hand, with structure at all levels defined by iterative algorithms. As fabrication techniques advance, it is becoming possible to produce objects with fractal or other elaborate structures. “In this inclusive…

Video game art

Video game art is a specialized form of computer art employing video games as the artistic medium. Video game art often involves the use of patched or modified video games or the repurposing of existing games or game structures, however it relies on a broader range of artistic techniques and outcomes than artistic modification and it may also include painting, sculpture, appropriation, in-game intervention and performance, sampling, etc. It may also include the creation of art games either from scratch or by modifying existing games. Notable examples of video game art include Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” and “I Shot Andy Warhol,” Joseph Delappe’s projects including “Dead in Iraq” and the “Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life,” the 2004-2005 Rhizome Commissions “relating to the theme of games,” Paolo Pedercini’s Molleindustria games such as “Unmanned” and “Every Day the Same Dream”, and Ian Bogost’s “Cowclicker.” Artistic modifications…

Victimless Leather

Victimless Leather – a prototype of a stitch-less jacket, grown from cell cultures into a layer of tissue supported by a coat shaped polymer layer. This is a sub-project of the Tissue Culture & Art Project where the artists are growing a leather jacket without killing any animals. Growing the victimless leather problematizes the concept of garment by making it semi-living. This artistic grown garment is intended to confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and confronts notions of relationships with manipulated living systems. Tissue Culture & Art Project The SymbioticA website explains what it is, “an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning, critique and hands-on engagement with the life sciences.”. The artists work with tissue, constructing and growing complex organisms that can live outside the body, making the new objects semi-living. Their projects are meant to question life,…

Xerox art

Xerox art, also known as copy art, electrostatic art, or xerography is an art form that began in the 1960s. Prints are created by putting objects on the glass, or platen, of a copying machine and by pressing “start” to produce an image. If the object is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, or the object is moved, the resulting image is distorted in some way. The curvature of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, and the distance of the cover from the glass, all affect the final image. Often, with proper manipulation, rather ghostly images can be made. Basic techniques include: Direct Imaging, the copying of items placed on the platen (normal copy); Still Life Collage, a variation of direct imaging with items placed on the platen in a collage format focused on what is in the foreground/background; Overprinting,…

Video games as an art form

The concept of video games as a form of art is a controversial topic within the entertainment industry. Though video games have been afforded legal protection as creative works by the Supreme Court of the United States, the philosophical proposition that video games are works of art remains in question, even when considering the contribution of expressive elements such as graphics, storytelling and music. Even art games, games purposely designed to be a work of creative expression, have been challenged as works of art by some critics. History The earliest institutional consideration of the video game as an art form came in the late 1980s when art museums began retrospective displays of then outdated first and second generation games. In exhibitions such as the Museum of the Moving Image’s 1989 “Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade”, video games were showcased as preformed works whose quality as art came from the intent…

Visionary art

Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences. History The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, first established in 1946, is considered to be an important technical and philosophical catalyst in its strong influence upon contemporary visionary art. Its artists included Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner and Arik Brauer among others. Several artists who would later work in visionary art trained under Fuchs, including Mati Klarwein, Robert Venosa, Philip Rubinov Jacobson and De Es Schwertberger. Definition Visionary art often carries themes of spiritual, mystical or inner awareness. Despite this broad definition, there does seem to be emerging some definition to what constitutes the contemporary visionary art ‘scene’ and which artists can be considered especially influential. Symbolism, Cubism, Surrealism and Psychedelic art are also direct precursors to contemporary visionary art. Notable visionary…

Urban art

Urban art is a style of art that relates to cities and city life often done by artists who live in or have a passion for city life. In that way urban art combines street art and graffiti and is often used to summarize all visual art forms arising in urban areas, being inspired by urban architecture or present urban lifestyle. Because the urban arts are characterized by existing in the public space, they are often viewed as vandalism and destruction of private property. Although urban art started at the neighborhood level, where a lot of people of different cultures live together, it is an international art form with an unlimited number of uses nowadays. Many urban artists travel from city to city and have social contacts all over the world. The notion of ‘Urban Art’ developed from street art which is primarily concerned with graffiti culture. Urban art represents…

Trompe-l’œil

Trompe-l’œil (French meaning for “deceive the eye”) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture. History in painting Though the phrase, which can also be spelled without the hyphen and ligature in English as trompe l’oeil, originates in the Baroque period, when it refers to perspectival illusionism, trompe-l’œil dates much further back. It was (and is) often employed in murals. Instances from Greek and Roman times are known, for instance in Pompeii. A typical trompe-l’œil mural might depict a window, door, or hallway, intended to suggest a larger room. A version of an oft-told ancient Greek story concerns a contest between two renowned painters. Zeuxis (born around 464 BC) produced a still life painting so convincing that birds flew down to peck at the painted grapes. A rival, Parrhasius,…

Trains in art

A locomotive or train can play many roles in art, for example: As a work of art in itself in addition to most functional considerations, especially in streamlined steam locomotives and luxury passenger accommodations of the early 20th century, known also as the Machine Age As a subject for a novel or film As a metaphor in song or poetry, particularly for physical power or directed movement (physical, romantic or other), as in Fisherman’s Blues: “I wish I was the brakeman on a hurtling, fevered train crashing headlong into the heartland like a cannon in the rain” In 1978, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris held the exhibition “Les Temps des Gares” with the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the National Railway Museum in York, and the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. In 2008, Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery held an exhibition entitled: “Art in the…

Tradigital art

Tradigital art is art (including animation) that combines both traditional and computer-based techniques to create an image. Background Artist and teacher Judith Moncrieff first coined the term. In the early 1990s, while an instructor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Moncrieff invented and taught a new digital medium called “Tradigital”. The school held a competition between Moncrieff’s students, who used the medium to electronically combine everything from photographs of costumes to stills from videotapes of performing dancers. Moncrieff also referred to her business entity (formerly “Moncrieff Studios”) as “Tradigital Imaging” around the same period. Moncrieff was one of five founding members of the digital art collective called “Unique Editions”. These five artists—Helen Golden, Bonny Lhotka, Dorothy Krause, Judith Moncrieff, and Karin Schminke—combined their expertise in traditional studio media and techniques with digital imaging to produce original fine art and editions. The artists met in June, 1994, at “Beyond the…

Fiber art

Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labour on the part of the artist as part of the works’ significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility. History The term fiber art came into use by curators and art historians to describe the work of the artist-craftsman following World War II. Those years saw a sharp increase in the design and production of “art fabric.” In the 1950s, as the contributions of craft artists became more recognized—not just in fiber but in clay and other media—an increasing number of weavers began binding fibers into nonfunctional forms as works of art. The 1960s and 70s brought an international revolution in fiber art. Beyond weaving, fiber structures were created through knotting, twining, plaiting, coiling, pleating, lashing, and interlacing. Artists…

Textile arts

Textile arts are arts and crafts that use plant, animal, or synthetic fibers to construct practical or decorative objects. Textiles have been a fundamental part of human life since the beginning of civilization, and the methods and materials used to make them have expanded enormously, while the functions of textiles have remained the same. The history of textile arts is also the history of international trade. Tyrian purple dye was an important trade good in the ancient Mediterranean. The Silk Road brought Chinese silk to India, Africa, and Europe. Tastes for imported luxury fabrics led to sumptuary laws during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Industrial Revolution was a revolution of textiles technology: the cotton gin, the spinning jenny, and the power loom mechanized production and led to the Luddite rebellion. Concepts The word textile is from Latin texere which means “to weave”, “to braid” or “to construct”. The simplest…

Sustainable art

The expression sustainable art has been promoted recently as an art term that can be distinguished from environmental art that is in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, which include ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy. Sustainable art may also be understood as art that is produced with consideration for the wider impact of the work and its reception in relationship to its environments (social, economic, biophysical, historical and cultural). History According to the contemporary art historians and curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes, the origins of sustainable art can be traced to the conceptual art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with its stress on dematerialisation and questioning of the functioning of the art system. They also connect the rise of the concept of sustainability to the ending of the Cold War in 1989 and the emergence of a new awareness of the global character of ecological…

Spin art

Spin art is an art form that uses paint, a canvas such as glossy cardboard and a spinning platform. It is primarily used to entertain and expose children to the process of art creation, although it can be enjoyed by people of all ages. Techniques To create spin art, an artist initially decorates or drips paint onto a canvas. The canvas can be anything; however, the most common form of canvas is a small rectangular piece of cardboard. Before the paint on the canvas dries, the artist secures the canvas to a platform that can be rotated at high speed. Once the canvas is secure, the artist can then begin spinning the canvas. Most spinning platforms are electrical or battery operated, with more elaborate platforms enabling the artist to vary the rotational speed. As the canvas rotates, centrifugal forces draw the wet paint outwards, creating intricate designs. The artist can…

Articulation in architecture

Articulation, in art and architecture, is a method of styling the joints in the formal elements of architectural design. Through degrees of articulation, each part is united with the whole work by means of a joint in such a way that the joined parts are put together in styles ranging from exceptionally distinct jointing to the opposite of high articulation—fluidity and continuity of joining. In highly articulated works, each part is defined precisely and stands out clearly. The articulation of a building reveals how the parts fit into the whole by emphasizing each part separately. Continuity and fusion The opposite of distinct articulation is continuity and fusion which reduces the separateness of the parts. Distinct articulation emphasizes the “strategic break” while the articulation of continuity concentrates on smooth transitions. Continuity (or fusion) reduces the independence of the elements and focuses on the largest element of the whole, while reducing focus…

Range-finder painting

A range-finder painting, sometimes called range-finding painting, is a large landscape painting produced as a training device to help gunners improve their accuracy. Historically, the best-documented use of such paintings was in the United States during World War I. History During World War I, some military gunnery training was carried out indoors. While it is relatively simple to train gunners in range-finding (that is, estimating the correct distance for their shots) outdoors, it is difficult to train them in long-range gunnery indoors. To solve this problem, the British and U.S. militaries tested the use of large landscape paintings showing distant sites for range-finding and target-sighting in indoor gun ranges. These so-called range-finder paintings proved so successful that a program was organized in the United States to produce them in larger numbers. They were also used to teach soldiers how to draw military maps in the field and how to identify…

Postdigital

Postdigital is a term which came into use in the discourse of digital artistic practice at the start of the twenty-first century. This term points significantly to our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. It points to an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital. If one examines the textual paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either the “postdigital” society has intrinsic meaning, or it is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes art as a totality. Either way, Roy Ascott has clearly demonstrated that the distinction between the digital and the “postdigital” is part of the economy of reality. Theory Giorgio Agamben (2002) describes paradigms as things what we think with, rather than things we think about. Like the computer age, the postdigital is also a paradigm, but as with post-humanism for example, an understanding…

Popular print

Popular prints is a term for printed images of generally low artistic quality which were sold cheaply in Europe and later the New World from the 15th to 18th centuries, often with text as well as images. They were some of the earliest examples of mass media. After about 1800, the types and quantity of images greatly increased, but other terms are usually used to categorise them. History: 15th century From about 1400, there began a “visual revolution that inundated Europe with images during the fifteenth century” (Field) as the woodcut technique was applied to paper, which was now manufactured in Christian Europe, instead of being imported from Islamic Spain. In the 15th century, the great majority of these images were religious, if playing cards are excluded. They were sold at churches, fairs and places of pilgrimage. Most were coloured, usually crudely, by hand or later by stencil. One political…

Pleorama

The name pleorama was coined from Greek elements. Like other 19th century novelties ending in -orama – diorama and cyclorama, for instance – the second half of the word has the sense of ‘something seen’. The pleo- part here is understood to come from a Greek word meaning ‘float’ which applies to Langhans’ boat in water idea. Pleorama is also the 21st century name of an innovative “floating house”. The best-known pleorama was a 19th-century moving panorama entertainment where the viewers sat in a rocking boat while panoramic views on painted canvas rolled past. The word has sometimes been used for other entertainments or innovations. Architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans introduced a pleorama in Breslau in 1831 with scenes of the Bay of Naples on both sides of 24 “voyagers” sitting in a wooden boat floating in a pool of water. The illusion was enhanced by light and sound effects: the…

Personal imaging

Personal imaging is the continuous realtime capturing, archiving, recording, and sharing of personal experience through images. Typically the images are accompanied by other media such as audiovisual streams, or with textual narratives such as diaries, and often in an interactive way, i.e. people viewing the images comment on the images in realtime while they are being captured, so as to influence the capture process. Personal Imaging is a camera-based computational framework in which the camera behaves as a true extension of the mind and body, after a period of long-term adaptation. In this framework the computer becomes a device that allows the wearer to augment, diminish, or otherwise alter his or her visual perception of reality. Moreover, it allows the wearer to allow others to alter his or her visual perception of reality, and therefore becomes a communications device. Mediated reality arises, for example, through the eyeglass-based version in which…

Art Deco

Art Deco, sometimes referred to as Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture and design that first appeared in France just before World War I. Art Deco influenced the design of buildings, furniture, jewelry, fashion, cars, movie theatres, trains, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as radios and vacuum cleaners. It took its name, short for Arts Décoratifs, from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) held in Paris in 1925. It combined modernist styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. During its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress. Art Deco was a pastiche of many different styles, sometimes contradictory, united by a desire to be modern. From its outset, Art Deco was influenced by the bold geometric forms of Cubism; the bright colors of Fauvism and of the Ballets Russes;…

Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African/African-American culture with technology. It combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of black people and to interrogate and re-examine historical events. It was explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by Alondra Nelson. Afrofuturism addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through a technoculture and science fiction lens, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afrodiasporic experiences. Seminal Afrofuturistic works include the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer, and the photography of Renée Cox; the explicitly extraterrestrial mythoi of Parliament-Funkadelic, the Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Deltron 3030, and Sun Ra; and the Marvel…

Origomu

Origomu (Japanese: オリゴム) is a movement originated in New York City by Chilean artist Tatiana Pagés in 2009. It is the practice of recycling plastic waste into wearable art. Artwear that inspires both creative thought and a greater sense of stewardship toward our planet. Origomu comes from the Japanese ori, meaning “folding”, and gomu, meaning “rubber”. Every year, thousands pieces of plastic and debris threaten the lives of shore birds and marine animals, harming our environment. Origomu can make a difference – no matter how far you are from the nearest shore. The Origomu movement advise people to cherish the environment, transform waste into beautiful artwear. Origomu go beyond environmental awareness. We need to inspire people to create solutions, such as a biodegradable plastic, or one that could rapidly break down without harming the natural environment. For example of the 6-pack carrier, whose company put an end to the environmental…

Penmanship

Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today, this is most commonly done with a pen, or pencil, but throughout history has included many different implements. The various generic and formal historical styles of writing are called “hands” whilst an individual’s style of penmanship is referred to as “handwriting”. Manual writing is the activity of writing by hand with a writing instrument, for example a pencil or a ballpoint pen. The result, especially for handwritten books and letters, is called a manuscript or a manuscript. Handwriting is also the name of the individual typeface typical of human writing, and in the figurative sense something that characterizes his work. Technically, manual writing has much in common with drawing. The same tools are used as writing and drawing instruments, as well as the same dyes and substrates (eg paper). However, manual writing differs from drawing in…