Artists’ Love-Hate Relationship With Technology

 

Steve Jobs' Handwritten Notes

As I've been going through diaries for my InSum series I've been taking note of what artists have been saying about technology.

In June of 1984, Keith Haring wrote in his journal:

"The problem facing modern man now (the reconciliation of intellect and feelings/brain and heart/ rational... is compounded by the increasing power of technology and its misuse by those in power who wish only to control. The mentality of people who are motivated by profits at the expense of human needs is perfect for the computer. Computers are completely rational. They save time and money, they can keep records of every transaction….money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The worlds of art and money are constantly intermingling. To survive this mixture the magic and hurt has to be applied in new ways. Magic must always triumph."

But he also saw the possibilities in digital art:

June 1989:

"The computer has totally changed the whole concept of what composes and defines a “picture space.” The whole relation between the creator and the viewer has changed. The relationship between the physical gesture of drawing and the resultant image has changed. It is totally abstract now, with very little relation to the original “act” of drawing or painting. Images can be moved, stretched, multiplied, shrunk, enlarged, recolored, altered, rotated, flipped, digitized, edited, refined and obliterated in fractions of a second. The image has been reduced to electronic information (programmable) that is totally lucid and malleable."

 

In Brian Eno's Diary (1995) he harrumphed about having to deal with computers in a creative flow:

"...why is it so hard to pay attention to anything on a screen?). I feel no difficulty whatsoever in ignoring most of it....Worked with my new super-fast computer on Photoshop to generate Swarowski images - geometry. 

From a 2016 article on Eno's release of  a Fela Kuti vinyl box set:

"We can sort of do and undo everything. And of course, most of the records we like, all of us, as listeners, are records where people didn’t do everything to fix them up and make them perfect.“There’s a very interesting exercise...when you’re writing something...If you say to yourself, today I’m going to write exactly as if I was sitting in front of a piece of paper and writing...it’s a whole different mind-set."

 

In my own life I've embraced technology fairly easily. When I got my first synth in 1983, I was totally fascinated by it and it seemed to have lots of possibilities. Other synths I've owned were too complicated and had far too many presets, yet some of them I loved and used repeatedly. Over the years musical instrument manufacturers have pandered to the public, which continues to today--in just about everything. Now people have very tiny (or virtual) keyboards or don't use a traditional musical instrument interfaces at all.

In visual art, artists tend to vacillate between things that are manual and things done with computers, or never engage in any manual processes. When I play acoustic instruments I can get a break from computers which can become boring--as can start playing guitars more--which is why I add them and take them away on each consecutive record.

When the first PCs became available, people primarily used them for playing games and learning how to program. It wasn't until Adobe Illustrator was released ~1988 that people began using it for creating vector-based designs and for typography (font design). Steve Jobs may have been one of the "vectors" in that shift as he had already been into calligraphy. Photoshop was released shortly thereafter and for anyone that had a PC, that type of software (including MS Excel) was the thing people did with them.

But even before then, programmers may have been using it more aesthetically, more on the lines of typewriter art, but done on a CRT.

As you may know, Andy Warhol made his first piece of art on a computer in 1985 which was perhaps the point it started to trend. All you need is an art-star to legitimize a piece of technology, as David Hockney did with the iPad. Since Steve Jobs correlated calligraphy with computers, art has been the inspiration for using computers. With many inventions created for specific purposes, one of the first things people tend to do is attempt to make art with it. That's what happened in the early days of the internet with the bacchanalia of screen decorating and digital photography. This is where AI is now but alas, will probably follow the same trajectory as the web.