LOTS OF ONES

11/11/11 Now that doesn’t happen very often now, does it? Once every one hundred years, if I’m not mistaken. You may have a very short animation I made earlier to celebrate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTTt1QiZSq8). Anyway, moving on… This week, I’m going to be wasting your time talking about the recent acceleration of technological development. As an introduction of sorts, I’ll begin with Moore’s law. Coined in 1965, the law states that “the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years”, or to phrase that differently, computers become twice as powerful or complicated every other year. For the most part, this rule has proven to be quite accurate, despite the fact that it’s 46 years old. Of course, this exponential improvement comes with its downsides, the most annoying being obsolescence.

Don’t you just hate that word? It’s thanks to that word your computer is only half as good as everyone else’s a mere 24 months after purchase. ಠ-ಠ The other main downside to technological advancement is that it happens so fast, some people get left behind. It was this idea that lead to the theory of Digital Natives/ Immigrants. Thought up by Marc Prensky in 2001, Digital Natives are people who were born after 1985, meaning that they will have spent most of their lives surrounded by digital technology, so they should have a sound understanding of how it works. Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, will have grown up without digital technology and tend to remain sceptical of innovation. This theory suggests that there is a clear cut-off point where people are more adept with technology, meaning elderly people are more likely to use a manual tin opener to get at their spaghetti hoops rather than an automatic one (which is ironic, since automatic tin openers were designed for the elderly). But surely something like being able to use a computer can’t be decided simply by your birthday? Dr. Ofer Zur thought so, and thus  suggested that Digital Immigrants fall into one of three categories; Avoiders (Avoid technology and only involve it with their life when they really need to), Reluctant Adopters (Can see the benefits of technology, but still try to avoid it) and Eager Adopters(enthusiastic toward technology and comparable to Digital Natives). I think that this tiered approach to defining a Digital Immigrant is a lot nicer, and not only because it reminds me of cake.

WHAT IS ART? BABY, DON’T HURT ME; DON’T HURT ME, NO MORE.

               Well here we are again; it’s always such a pleasure. So, what is art? Is this art? Well, you could argue so, since it does disrupt and challenge the ideal methods of formal assessment. But, to focus on that question again; “what is art?” Defining this has proven quite problematic in the past, but I’m sure it’ll be easy now Google’s here to do our thinking for us! So, art is (as defined by Google) “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” As I’m sure you’ve deliberated, this is quite a broad definition. Apparently, anything is art, so long as it’s manmade and required imagination to make. But, hold on, surely EVERYTHING we do requires some level of imagination, be it getting dressed, writing blogs, or deciding whether or not you should put the toast on before you heat up the spaghetti hoops.

            So, do those things classify as ‘art’? Evidently, the popular answer is “Umm, NOPE!” despite the fact that, from a technical perspective, these things seem to fit the definition. It’s this kind of thinking that sums up the “dada” movement. Artists like Marcel Duchamp really pushed the boundaries of what we consider ‘art’. One of his particularly famous pieces was simply a urinal with “R MUTT” scrawled on the side. Needless to say, this proved to be rather controversial back in the early 1900’s. Many believed it wasn’t art, that it no right to be in a gallery, but the fact that people were thinking about that proves that it is art. His piece prompted people to challenge their beliefs of what art is, in a sense, the art was not in the urinal itself, the art was in the question “What is art?” This lead to the creation of ‘anti-art’, art created specifically to provoke that famous question, and, of course, poke fun at traditional art. And, in turn, this created something called 'anti-anti-art'. The worst part is; I'm not even joking.

And here it is; Marcel’s (in)famous “fountain”, still controversial nearly a century after its creation.

                These days, we are all well used to conceptual art; it has actually proven to become quite fashionable, but Marcel Duchamp was the pioneer. His fountain was one of the first notable examples of conceptual art, the art being in the concept of a piece of art challenging our perceptions of art (Inception, much?). So, thanks to Marcel, we are now swimming in art that would not traditionally be classed as art. It seems for every genuine, wonderful idea (e.g. A Score for a Hole in the Ground- Jim Finer), we get some rubbish churned out by some money-wasting pseudo-artists (Interior Semiotics, anyone?). Needless to say, I enjoy the Finer things in life.