Art, technology and the world around us

By integrating technology in the arts, is the human experience richer or poorer for it? This is the question posed by the panellists at the third Critical Conversations discussion in the lead-up to NUS Arts Festival 2020: Ways of Seeing.

Professor Audrey Yue from the Department of Communications and New Media has been researching media cultures, cultural policy and development and queer Asian studies for decades in both Singapore and Australia.

Dr Margaret Tan was a practicing artist, but is currently a Senior Lecturer and Director of Programmes at Tembusu College, and Co-director of the NUS Art/Science Residency Programme.

‘Arts in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and New Media: Looking for the Human’ will begin with their perspectives on how new media and technology is impacting the way we interact with art and culture.

We caught up with both Professor Yue and Dr Tan to better understand their views on this fast-changing field as a sneak peek to the discussion.

Professor Audrey Yue (Prof Yue)

Culture has a broader definition while the arts is more narrowly defined.  ‘The arts’ refers to the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. Culture includes the arts, but also encompasses a broader process of intellectual, spiritual and artistic development, including as a particular way of life of a people, period, group or humanity in general.

Dr Margaret Tan (Dr Tan)

Arts and culture are inextricably linked; the arts shape and are shaped by the culture of their time. For example, as our world change, the art-world also endured profound changes not only in the notion of art, but also how it was made. The arts shifted from private to public, from material to idea, from object to context, from product to process, from passive reception to active interaction, and from sole creator to collaborative producers. Speaking specifically to the topic of the panel, the arts of the 20^th and 21^st centuries have been shaped by scientific and technological developments, they have, in turn, enriched scientific and technological innovations, as well as provided us critical distance to reflect on our techno-scientific culture.

Prof Yue

New media is loaded term. In traditional parlance, it refers to how analogue  media (aka old or legacy media) is replaced by digital media (aka new media). New media is digital media in all its forms, from the aesthetics and hyper-realism of remediation, to the interactivity of immersion and virtual reality, to transformation of media economies through convergence and platformisation. I hope to discuss these various aspects of new media, covering textuality, genre as well as their political economies of production, distribution, consumption and regulation.

Dr Tan

The term “new media” began to take root in the 1990s and “new media art” became an umbrella term covering a very diverse and constantly evolving art practice ranging from interactive media to bio-art and AI art. Other terms, such as “digital art”, “information art” or “cyberart”, have also surfaced to describe similar works generated at the intersection of art, science and technology. I am not enamoured to a particular term. In the case of “new media”, Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media has provided the most systematic and generally accepted description. He describes five characteristics that distinguishes new media art from previous art forms. They are: numerical coding that allows for the media to be programmable, modularity whereby the media elements are made up of discrete and interchangeable parts that can be assembled, deleted and replaced easily, automation of its product and access, variability whereby the media object can have multiple versions or is replicable, and transcoding whereby the code underpinning the media object is transferable across different systems.

Prof Yue

Urban media art and the development of large screens have had the greatest impact on my work. I was trained as a film scholar, and throughout my career, saw the transformation of cinema and the cinematic screen across the new media age.  These days,  I am always excited to see large urban screens everywhere. They are exemplary of contemporary visual culture.

Dr Tan

I do not have a particular new media or digital art work that has made a huge impact on me, but I do have several works that I like very much. I’ll highlight two of them. One of the earliest I was exposed to was Natalie Jeremijenko’s One Trees. In the work, she cloned one hundred oak trees and visitors could request for the seedlings to be planted somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, opening up debates on genetic engineering (cloning) and the effects of nature and nurture, as these genetically identical trees grow and express the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed. I also like Angelo Vermeulen’s Biomodd that intricately connects biological living systems with recycled computer systems, incorporating notions of energy recycling, computer recycling, ecological growth and non-oppositional relationship between computer electronics and biology. Vermeulen’s work has attracted the attention of the European Space Agency for its MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) programme focused on developing regenerative life support systems to enable future long-term manned space missions. I like these works not because of their media, but because they use technology in very poetic ways to discuss the technology itself as well as biology and, ultimately, our human condition.

Prof Yue

I started working on urban screens looking at the transformation of cinematic screen and its ubiquity in public spaces. Quickly I began to see their democratizing potential as new aesthetic forms, and as networked platforms for creating connection, community and place-making. These capacities were very early on realized by projection artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko. As screen technologies continue to evolve, we will see these trends—projection mapping, light art festivals–become more popularly deployed by artists and curators. Hopefully we will see bigger and bigger crowds at these installations.

Dr Tan

It really started when I was given an opportunity to create a new media artwork for the Nokia Singapore Art (2001) at the Singapore Art Museum. I was then practising in the areas of installation and performance art, and had no programming background. To realise my idea, I was hosted as an artist-in-residence at the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Initiative at the NUS University Scholar’s Programme, where I had a group of computing students working with me on the project. That opportunity pricked my curiosity and I decided to pursue my Masters in interactive media and critical theory and, subsequently, also applied and won a residency at the Artist-in-Labs programme in Switzerland. Upon my return, I taught New Media Art at Lasalle College of the Arts, and the Aesthetics of New Media at NUS. The work I made in Switzerland inspired my initial PhD research topic, although that subsequently changed. Nevertheless, I remain interested in new media art even though I don’t actively research and write on the topic or have the time to continue my practice.

There are trends that I am worried rather than excited about, especially in the context of Singapore. The city-state is small, dense and getting ready to be a Smart Nation, with wired and wireless networks and pervasive technologies constantly tracking and sorting us. While it seeks to be sustainable, Singapore is also gearing up in big data and analytics, and has one of the highest concentration of data centres in the world. It has a supposedly tech-savvy citizenry who are huge consumers of digital technology and new media and, at the same time, very ignorant or cavalier about the implications and paradoxes of such technologies. We have very few Singaporean artists who are actively engaging these technologies and highlighting their issues or ethics.

Professor Audrey Yue

It is important not to fetishize the digital for the sake of embracing the high-tech. The arts serve many purposes; for state-funding of public art, we need to ask what is the public value of the arts, and how the arts can help us create public value, such as towards new commons that can heal divisions in society, while at the same time celebrating communities’ diversity and difference. Digital artistic innovations, together with the more traditional art forms including folk art and craft, can all equally help to achieve this function of public good.

Dr Margaret Tan

I have personally been involved in projects that have received funding from the private and public sectors. With the urgency to develop and groom more new media artists, I  am very glad to hear that National Arts Council is keen to fund new media art. However, funding alone is not enough. There needs to be an eco-system, where artists who are interested in this field feel supported, where those who may not have the necessary technical skills can be put them in touch with relevant students, scientists and engineers through artist-in-residence programmes, where the risk-taking and collaborative process is valued more than the end product, where new media artworks are celebrated for their potential to be political (e.g. conscience of society), and not just spectacular, and where there are qualified people to assess and write about the works. Of course, all these should not be done at the expense of other art forms. There should be enough support and space for all sorts of art practice in Singapore.

Arts in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and New Media: Looking for the Human is part of the NUS Arts Festival 2020: Ways of Seeing. Visit the Festival online for more details.