MUSICA ELECTRONICA

DJ Patiffe

Empezando con el Futurismo y el Dadaismo en los años 1910/20 del siglo pasado, la musica electronica tenía su primer éxito comercial en los años 1940 con la aparición del “Disc Jockey”, pero su manifestación comercial con el uso de la guitara electrica en los años 1950 – Rock! La grande popularidad de musica Rock y pop se explica por la posibilidad de reproducción con LP.

El fluxus era un corriente que trabajaba contra ese uso comercial de la musica, un representante famóso era, por ejemplo, John Cage.
Hoy, musica electronica no es una exepción, pero es normal. Hay Teccno, Electro, Drum´n Bass, House, Goa (y otras y subgenres) que se llaman musica electronica. En la presentación en clase de Arte digital Lucía dijo que la musica tipo Tecno era a misma hora una manifestación de un estilo de vida libre, gay o DJ. Para mi, en este dia, musica electronica ha llegado a ser comercial – por ejemplo solo escuchar musica unplugged seria una expresion de su estilo de vida original. Musica electronica, gracies a ordenadores, LPs, CDs, Syntesizers, es todo.

TELEPRESENCIA

Comparado con la realidad virtual, la telepresencia significa la posibilidad de influir el espacio virtual con herramientas fisicas y viceversa. Telepresencia significa que es no ya necesario (o no posible) separar la realidad virtual y la realidad fisica. Un ejemplo muy plastico es el proyecto Telegarden de Ken Goldberg y Joseph Sanatarronona: Gente cuidan via internet una planta fisica. Todas los procesos como regar o abonar son mandados por los Users y ejecutados por un robot. La planta existe en la realidad fisica, pero nadie de la gente que la guidan puede toccarla o verla en esta realidad – por la gente, la planta solo existe en su ordenador – entonces, en cual de las dos realidades existe esta planta en verdad?

Bioart

“Bioart” es un tipo de arte que se produce de las corrientes Body Art and Land Art. Uno de los bioartistas mas importantes y también inventor del nombre es Eduard Kac. La pregunta central de la tendencia “Bioart” es la “hasta donde podemos llegar con la sciencia?” Cuales inventiones son eticos, cuales no?
Bioart se expresa con la sciencia mismo. En mi opinión, usando la herramienta de sciencia, quiere provocar para crear mas sensibilidád en este campo mismo – el ejemplo más conocido de bioart, Alba, el canillo verde fluorescente (inyectado con GFP=Green Flourescent Protein) me parece que non era suficiente provocativo – o porqué hay tanta gente en los US que compran GFP para crear su mascota fluorescente personal?

We are the web...will the web exceed human power?

Above: Synapsis in the human brain, Bottom: Visualisation of the www

Professor Kevin Kelly, founder and director of the magazine Wired, talked in his presentation at the e-week 2007 at Vic about the expanding power of the “machine” – this is how he calls the 55 trillion links, 2 million e-mails a second and one million clicks a day, that make the www – the exchange of information. He mentioned, that right now the web contains moreless the same amount of links and synapses as the human brain – but in the year 2040 it will have as many links as 30 (!) human brains!!

In Kevin Kelly´s opinion, according to this fact menkind has to face themselves with a new point of view: Whereas in earlier times Marshall Mc Luhan´s quote: “Machines are the extensions of human senses” defined the relation men-machine, now the claim is: “Humans are the extensions of machines”. Overall, Kellys relation to technologization seemed to be very positive, nearly without any critique.

K.K´s examples were the raising numbers of interfaces of “the machine”, many more than ordinary personal computers: GPRS-cars, jogging shoes with pulse-clock….the virtual world and the physical world are fusing more and more, he says. The goal of the future, according to Kevin Kelly, will be to delanguage the web – in order to getting an Artificial Intelligence someday.

In between the audience, quite a few questions came up after his performance: Can 30 times more information than the human brain mean 30 times more Intelligence? What is the negative side of the raising amount of information?

Game Art

Computer-generated soldier, dead. Source: http://www.unr.edu/art/DELAPPE/Gaming/Dead_In_Iraq/dead_in_iraq%20JPEGS.html

Game art involves the use of patched/modified computergames respectively the repurposing of existing games and game structures in order to create interactive or non-interactive works of Game art. Since the number of existing games is huge, there is also available a big diversity of aesthetics of architecure, game-related social codes and symbols and genres that can be used to create something new. For some works of game art, it is necessary to have a sense for the spirit/meaning of computer-game-related codes, for others not.

Using the aesthetics of computer games, game arts also allows to demonstrate a critical reflexion of nowaday's reality. Maybe it is easier to understand a virtual soldier lying dead somewhere in Iraq than seeing the same soldier on TV. Maybe it is even more honest, in a time we're all satured from seeing war on TV, in a time where we seem to feel more comfortable in entering a virtual reality than trying to understand events that ocurr miles away. Because a huge percentage at least knows what it means to die virtually - suffering GAME OVER.

Post-Cinema

As post-cinema, we´re defining any kind of moved or animated images that needn´t necessarily be showed in the physical location "cinema" and needn´t necessarily be filmed with a camera.

Douglas Gordon and Bill Viola are named as the leading artists of post-cinema. But for me, the discussion about post-cinema has much more to do with the phenomenon of sharing videos and Youtube (and young artists publishing their stuff there), or the multimedial costum of videos: on 4th-generation mobiles, I-pods or on the notebook while riding bus or train. Viola and Gordon are working with installations and techniqual tools like extreme slow-motion for enforcing sociocritical topics. But the phenomenon "post-cinema" can in my mind be understood better through watching critically the commercial way of consuming moved images/clips/videos.

An example for an unusal career through using videos after the cinema, but in a commercial way is the Ex-videogameprogrammer Matt Harding. His friend filmed him dancing on his "Around the world"-journey and put videos on Youtube from Matt dancing on various spots around the planet. Matt´s dancing videos are now one of the world´s top 30 of watched videos. He´s an Internet star. Or, a star of commercial post-cinema.



Matt Harding dancing for the masses on Youtube

Postfotografia

At the latest since the commercial use of digital photography, the question upon "the death of photography", namely of the "art of photography" came up. How can you value a well-selected View, a well-balanced illumination if everything is possible in postproduction? If you can´t even source the original look of a photo?

Well, art has never been a contest about the best technical skills - but if someone has to tell you something interesting or not. In fact, noone will care about a photo that is being converted a hundred of times if the artist is not able to tell us something by what he/she´s doing. It would be interesting, how many photos are circling around in the virtual space of the internet, uploaded by anyone. Barely in between this mass of photos: converted photos, snapshots, simple montages you can easily notice an idea that is really original and artistically motivated. I think that we´re all so overwhelmed with any kind of information that the hard work we have to do is the SELECTION between a thousand possibilities. ( And at this term i agree with the postmodern theories).

Post-fotographers wouldn´t be contempory artists if they suddenly refused to discuss questions of our information-technology-digital-based society by communication-tools we´re using in this society: And we´re using masses of data, we´re communicating via three messengers the same time, we´re overwhelmed by sounds....... you have to answer this phenomenon with instruments that can mirror it.

So, I don´t think the qualitative photography is dead, just because we have a lot more of technical possibilities - I think that photography that seems unstable, random, maybe even unfinished is just the appropiate kind of art for the time we´re living in.