lecture 2

 

 

LECTURE 2

In1969, with the advent of the internet, we did not have the three screen display, as on the video, on one screen above, behind Hugh, there were a whole lot of screens, here in the Agora theatre.  It is spatial montage meaning there are multiple windows over a screen, we see a whole lot of images, collage and montage. This is a standard way to see images now, an example was in cinema, 1969 film, Woodstock and they had so much recorded footage and they wanted to create what it was to be at that concert at the time. In the late sixties, Martin Scoresby, pioneered this approach, we see it in television shows, in the show called 24. We live in social montage, wherein we have multiple screens, most of  you have a phone and a laptop, around the house you would have computers and television. In this room there are twice as many screens to people, so the breaking up of images, even the youtube interface has all these images. He has all these smaller ones, little ones to open up to bigger ones, it is collage. In this lecture, we look at this practice as it applies to media practice and we look at its history. We attempt to do this with all these lectures and find out what has been done before. One of the first examples of this, is in Triptych through Google spatial montage interface. There are ancient ones, it is a Christian form, taken up by Christianity because there is a balance with an image. There is this resonance between the two and it has been taken up more recently, and within triptychs are other images. In this lamentation, Jesus being bought down from the cross and people lamenting his crucifixion. The icons on our desktop are symbols and iconography. The cross represents it, the clothing, they have their own separate sets of meanings. He will look at different art works and what the meanings were. It is good to look at pictures, of how they were interpreted at that time. How would people at that time interpret images today?

Google art project is in the same way as Google has sent cars around the world, taking photographs of everything, in the same way that Google has amassed a whole series. Google does not own that space but directs you to it. Google goes around to major galleries in the world and scans all their art works. Google’s previous tagline was don’t be evil, Google is not going away, we don’t know how they will treat our images, they own our bloggers.

When we scroll through a picture, we get better detail than when it is in the flesh, getting this close, we can see brush strokes rendering pores in the skin. See single brush strokes of beard and jacket. This is like the linked in profile, there is a cv, this is linked with objects around them, everything about them is represented here,  the clothes and artwork. Not just them, it represents the world. They are ambassadors, they travel around the world and that is what they are offering, the seas, the heaven and the earth itself. They are not only offering scientific understandings of these things through objects of recordings, diaries, rugs and culture. Not simply offering an objective overview, there is a lot at stake here. There are a whole lot of symbols, so things are not as they should be. The music has been played and the book has been read, a string on the guitar is broken. All these things have a meaning, we see a collage, a collection of images. Last week we discussed perspective and in this pic we see a single point perspective.. things diminish behind them. What about the floor..in this image, there are two perspectives.

Then in the earthly delight picture, there are a lot of contradictory meanings, like going to a website and there are icons and flashing gifts and the larger overall message of heaven and hell and us in the middle. It is difficult to detect all these meanings as well.

From the week 2 reading, I leant that the computer, was considered the third tool of media artists and in many ways it revolutionised the media arts-to the extent that many observers of this art form refer to the variety of art practices based on computers and the Internet as the “new media” arts. The computer is based on Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine”-which was conceived in the 18^th century and became operational in the forties-it was not until the eighties that the computer began to be adopted on a significant scale for artistic purpose. (Manovich, 2001a,  2001b).

McCarthy, O (2002) The Development of the Media Arts