So there I was last night at the bookstore again. It was on the way to pick up a friend to go shoot another underground club for Strobe Light Diaries and I stopped there all done up in my "photographer" duds for a cup of coffee and a chance to watch people. Of course the art section beckoned and High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman by R. L. Rutsky seduced me.
For a few weeks the question of appropriate depiction of technology in art has puzzled me. Magazines from Wired to Dazed and Confused make use of images playing on "technology." Nike makes shoes that use "technology" in a visual way, though it's only visual. Most technology is invisible.
So the title of the book itself caught my attention. Modernism, vs. Post-Modernism, vs. Romanticism is often confusing, and the book sheds some more light on those groupings. But that wasn't why it was interesting. It's a cluster of essays on depiction (rather than use) of technology in art.
Honestly, there were a few boring parts. Hard to believe, but true. But there was the wonderful essay that tied in the technč-noir style of Blade Runner and the William Gibson cyberpunk books as examples of the use of technč in art, and visual art at that I'd expect that the set budget for anything like that would be out of my reach.
More importantly though, is that an appropriate depiction of technology of the artist's time and place? (Is it even necessary for an artist to depict his own time and place?)
The picture above is sort of "techie." The colors are glowsticks, pretty common on dancefloors and when fishing or camping, or at kids' parties, but probably quite rare for most citizens of the current year. It was a documentary photograph, done for the paper, and is therefore, pretty much by definition, appropriate to my time and place. But high tech it's not.
This picture makes a sort of high tech effect through the use of strobe lights (invented by Harold Edgerton in 1931 - not real state-of-the-art), but with a decidedly avant-dressed subject (who, with other Goths, claim a culture descended from 5th Century Gotteland, in modern-day Sweden).
But there's a "feel" to the picture of technč, even if there is nothing actually in the picture that can be pointed out as high tech.
In the magazines mentioned earlier, inclusion of technč is often done with photoshopped-in bits of circuit board. Circuit board is now being used in some places for jewelry, though it's the obsolete stuff that looks the best. And in any case, that technology is mostly invisible. Cel phones are visible, but are far too common to use as a high tech prop. (Used one the other day in some commercial work aimed at advertising adult oriented business, though.) The French Photo magazine of July/August 2000 has an incredible layout by Zach Gold that's as techno as it gets, albeit through heavy digital imaging.
Anyway, the book had me thinking. Still not sure which way I'm going to go, but it certainly is a challenge to see what, if anything, I can do under my self-imposed restraints of poverty and Luddite virtues.
-Don