Reference no: EM133641089
For this discussion, ensure you have read the "Future of Digital Arts" paper included in this week's readings. In your response post, speculate on the future of digital art. In particular, explore the role of the 'sensorial' experience. Please find an original and unique example of sensorial art and/or design to illustrate the points you make. Include screen shots and links for people to follow and research.
"future of Digital Arts" reading:
Andy Warhol once said, " The reason I am painting this is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do. We all want to be the machine, or perhaps the perfection of the machine, or the desirability of the machine, or the ideal of the machine."
Each wave of new technology innovation brings us to fulfilling more elaborate fantasies of a fuller sensual life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously theorized "I can never be certain that my 'blue' is your 'blue"; I can only persuade you to share a consensual languages-game whose referents are sufficiently stable to function. Through such cultural mechanisms 'modernity' believed it had anchored the common human senses. Post modern digital artists turn some of those modes of 'representation' against themselves, destabilizing, disrupting, hacking the comfort level of shared perceptions.
Are digital artists of the present moment charting new path of experience or further aestheticizing the fragmentation and colonization of the body (senses) that was modernity's signal achievement?
Caroline Jones in the introduction of her book "Sensorium" says, "new forms of subjectivity (self perception) were theorized from cyborgs to digital excursions to networked hive-minds. The early 21st century registers a subtle shift in the discourse. On the level of consumer products, prosthetic supplementation is increasingly acceptable and even desired; cosmetic neurology is proposed by scientists; venture capital flows into biometric products hybridized of polyester and cartilage; and bio computers have been tested at the Nano-scale. Contemporary artists continue to press for an edgier awareness of the implications of this new techno-sensual comfort zone."
Historically art has been segmented for one sense at a time - paintings for vision, music for ears, food and fragrance for taste and smell, textile for touch and feeling and so on. But we are reaching a state of technology where some of these senses can be combined to enhance the artistic experience as a hybrid involvment for the patron.
The aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment goes something like this - modernist segregation of senses is giving way to dramatic sensorial mixes, transmutations, and opportunities for intensified and playful mediation.
Our overlapping senses form the threshold of desire (and experience) and limit, and increasingly technology tests how far we are willing to go. Cosmetic neurology? Personal olfactory headspace design? Recreational prosthetics? Art constitutes a powerful stimulus and response to such sensory possibilities, allowing us to try on concepts, experiences and altered states and producing cultural space for debates about the merits (for example) of a temporary visually induced schizophrenia or an aesthetic simulation of the 'smell of fear'.
Some artists exploring new sensorial experience in digital art:
Mathieu Brand - spiritual paths and controlled schizophrenia
Ryoji Ikeda - mind bending son et lumiere
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers - evocative psychological soundscapes
Natasha Sadr Arnings - curatorial essay
Bruce Naumans - night visions
Francois Roche and R&Sie(n) - body fluid architectures
Anri Sala - human replications
Sissel Tolaas - odor saturated walls
Jeffery Wall, Gregory Crewdson - hallucinogenic cinematic photography