Digital Art and Culture

The digital age and the music industry

For a long time the digitalization was seen as a tread for the music industry. Everybody was able to upload there music cds, so other people could download the music for free. In this way the musicians didn’t get paid for all their hard work. People called this illegal downloading ‘sharing’ so it didn’t sounded as bad as it was. Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) said once in an interview, that sharing of music was the weirdest thing he’d ever heard. It isn’t normal to share cars with random people, why should he share his work (and income) with people he doesn’t know?
Nowadays the music industry embraces the digital age. It gives them more and more opportunities to spread their music and create a fanbase all over the world. The figured a way out so it was possible to let people pay for the online music. One of those new initiatives was iTunes. In the iTunes store you can buy digital music. You can choose between whole albums of separated numbers. I like this initiative, but the price for a digital album is the same as for a real album. So iTunes is only for the lazy people who don’t go to a record store. A better on, I think, is Spotify. With this program you can discover new music and listen to albums for free. The only limit is that you can listen ten ours for free per month. This sounds great, but who get the musicians paid? There are two kinds of subscriptions. The one is the free one, but the listen time is limited and between songs is place for commercials. With the income of the commercials, Spotify can pay all the holders. It isn’t much for the most bands, but it is something. The other kind of subscription is a paid one. For five or ten dollars per month you can listen to all music, without limits and without commercials. And again, with that money you pay, Spotify can pay the musicians.
With these new initiatives the sharing idea of music still exists, but in this way it is much more honest.

A cover of the backin up song by Walk off the earth.

Better safe than sorry?

It’s a long lasting discussion: where does privacy stops and surveillance begins? On which level is it allowed to check the actions of people and when does it become of violation of privacy? Is safety more important than privacy? All these questions becoming more and more relevant in our society where the gaze seems to be more and more present in our daily lives, everywhere.

During class, we talked about a subject we’ve been talking about for a couple of times now: the panopticum. This system is important for understanding the work of surveillance systems. The concept is introduces by Foucault, and it is updated for the digital age by Deleuze. The gaze means knowledge and power, it has to do with visibility and being visible.  The gaze is being internalised into your body, into the body of the prisoners, with disciplining yourself as a result. This is called top-down surveillance, the higher power is looking down upon the prisoners, or in the daily life upon the citizens. They are not able to look back, and they start to react in a decent way. In real life you know that the government is watching you, but you don’t know why, when and how. But, what was mentioned in class: ‘better safe than sorry’. So people are going to behave well, even if they’re not being watched. And that’s the power of the gaze.

But in the digital age, this concept of top-down surveillance changed. Deleuze connected this concept to the idea of the rhizome. The clear hierarchy that’s present in the case of the panopticum, is absent in the case of the rhizome, where there’s no higher key. So the result of this is that everyone is controlling everyone. Surveillance is everywhere, it has no beginning, it has no end. The higher key of traditional institutions is breaking up and flowing on the whole society.  What you get is a kind of horizontal way of organizing power, called coveillance. Instead of just the government watching down on the people, now all the people are watching each other. So even there’s no camera, you behave yourself.

Another form is sousveillance. The system is turned upside down, called bottom-up. Citizens can look at the high people, and have the possibility of making visible the missteps of the higher power, for example Wikileaks, of filming missteps of the policewith a mobile phone. The gaze has become multi-directional. The question is, does it have the same influence as top-down surveillance, and can we discipline the higher people from below? And besides this: do we have enough free space left? Surveillance also brings a lot of good things, so if the answer is no, is this even a bad thing?

Sascha

Replaceable love

Last week’s class we started with the function of technological. We use technological tools as an extension of our human body. We can fix, or improve our senses. For example, bad hearing people can use a tool like a hearing aid to improve their human body. During this lecture I was fantasizing about the future, cause in the future it is possible for humans to create everything.  Technological is an unstoppable development. But when is a technological tool not longer ethnical responsible.  
                During my dreaming the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) popped up.  This film, directed by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of a robotboy who can really love another person.  A family has a son who is in a coma for a while. Doctors say he will probably never wake up.  The mother is hard broken; she can’t give her mother feelings to someone. When they hear about a real loving boy, they buy one to replace their son. When he is activated he can give his new mum real love. It goes very good for a while. The tree together is a happy family. Until the ‘real’ son wakes up. The four of them tighter doesn’t work because there is too much competition between the two boys, they’re both fighting for the love of their mother. The father of the family decides it’s better that the robotson leaves. With means he will be destroyed.  Their follows an emotion scene when the mother tries to save her robotson (see video).
                The fact that a real human is able to love something technological like a child is frightening for me. I don’t think it is a good idea to replace everything that could go wrong in life. When the technological developments go on and on, we must know when we are going too far. Replacing a real human being just because we can, is for me a few steps too far. Even though in some cases it is a tempting option. We must know when to stop. Not everything is replaceable.

Sanne

Digital Art: Us, Cyborgs

factoryart:

anouk-demelza:

deliodac12:

artlessonsfrombrittandnathalie:

A few months ago I attended a reading from Anneke Smelik. It was about her book ‘Ik, Cyborg’. During the reading she explained the main subjects in her book and two experts asked her questions and the public could do that too. By my opinion it was a very interesting reading, even though I had not…

Well, i don’t think that we are living through, but are rather living with technology. People are well using things like facebook or whatsapp to communicate, but a real offline-conversation is still possible. We are also using cars, bycicles or whatever to move, but we are also able to walk on our own feet. In my opinion Cyborgs are only able to communicate, act etc. through technology, but we still have a diverse selection of possibilities for doing things.

So I really don’t think that technology has become one with our bodies and lives.

*Ioanna

 How would you call people who are disabled to communicate in any other way other then (than?) through technology? People who can’t speak by themselves and maybe are deaf also? Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought they have the possibility to communicate to all the others through technology: keyboards, joysticks and so on. They literally communicate in a digital way, but, are those people cyborgs? I don’t think so and still they have no other way to communicate (except for winking for yes or no, but that doesnt seems to be really communicating to me).

- Demelza

Well, I think everyone lives through technology and therefore, everyone is a cyborg. Technology isn’t something that people change, it changes people as well.

Let’s take cars for example. Before the invention of the car it was pretty impossible to travel a long distance in a short period of time on your own. The car enabled this. But the car didn’t only change reality outside the people, but it changed the people as well. When people got cars, they could suddenly think things like: “Hey, let’s go to Berlin this weekend.” The car changed the way people thought about reality.

But this counts for everything technological, even if it’s only remotely or not at all made by man. The plow or the ability to ride horses changed how people thought about agriculture or - again - distance. The biological species of Homo Sapiens has always been the Homo Cyborgus.

This doesn’t mean that the idea of technology taking over our lives or our ‘natural beings’ is something bad. The idea of the cyborg simply implicates the thought that humanity uses technology to (re)shape the world and always has. It is a new way to look at the assumed advance of human society through technological changes, independent of if those changes were good or bad.

I could talk about how indeed technology changed a lot of history, but we’ve already discussed that in class, so I’ll skip it.

- Simon de Vette

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t a cyborg the physical fusion of the biological body and artificial elements? And you can no longer say which part is machine and which part is biological? At least, that’s what I always thought. But during the class people were mentioning that an attachment with the most basic technology can make a human a cyborg. Due to the progress in the health care, the number of cyborgs raised, because of the pacemakers and other things. The natural mechanisms of the body are being enhanced by mechanical parts, with a feedback loop. But also in this case, you can tell which part is mechanical, and which part is biological. I agree with the fact that there are a lot of cyborgs on this planet. But for me it’s hard to understand that everyone who’s using technology, and in some kind of way is dependent from it, is a cyborg. Without technology I won’t be able to go to school, but does that make me a cyborg? Because in this case I can easily say which part is mechanical and which part is biological. And because the lack of a physical fusion, I think I’m not a cyborg.  For the same reason I don’t think cars (your example), are making us cyborgs. Or am I understanding you wrong here? And even if I was a cyborg, I think it’s going a bit too far to say that everyone is a cyborg, because there are still people on this planet who never touched a computer in their lives.

Sascha

Fashionable Technology

The Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht engages in ‘wearable technology’. She brings fasion and technology together in an unusual way, by creating systems around the body which seems to have an intelligence of their own. Her designs react to the environment around them. She seeks to create a ‘higher connectivity between the body and clothing’. The things we were have to respond in a physical and psychological way to us. She’s says: ‘We shaped technology, and from that point on technology shaped us; it defines who we are as persons.’ The technology has to become like a second skin. ‘By placing technology on the body, it becomes an extension of ourselves while working as human-interface systems and connecting to others in ways of expression, communication or defense/protection.’ She won an award for communication/ best interaction with a dress that provides the person who wears it with a juice. These dresses has sensors, which are reacting on your body.

Clothes have multiply aims, and one of them is to protect you from the gaze of another person. In this way it’s preventing the other person to take control of you. But the clothes of Anouk Wipprecht are different. The texture responds on your body, for example on your body temperature. In this way your body become an interface to communicate with the textile, and the textile is communicating to the world. It becomes hard to lie about how you feel, because your body can’t lie. Everybody get to see something that maybe you wanted to hide.

So what we see here is a different way to communicate with the world in this more virtual age. There’s a very personal input and output. The most important thing here is the relation with your body, which is, in this case, the interface for the digital. Because it is connected to your feelings, we can talk about a very intimate way of dealing with the body. Laura Mark says that the human body is standing further en further away from us. In cases like this, where the body gets involved in a digital process, the body gets back to his old position. It all sounds very good, but also a little creepy. So if it’s up to me, I’d rather keep wearing my own clothes, without showing the rest of the world how my body feels.

Sascha

 (Source: http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl)

Online Identity

This week class we discussed the online identity. This subject isn’t new for us, because talked about it before. Last time we talk about how your online identity could be something completely new. On the web you are able to create a person who has nothing to do with your own identity in real live. But this week class we’ve made some nuance to that.

Although you can make up a new you, that doesn’t make it likely that this always happens. For example on facebook. On facebook there is a need for a connection to the real you. This connection is quite clear. It appears on your profile image, or on those little massages under a post like: poster from Rotterdam. It says something about the real you. It makes your facebook profile more reliable.

This connection is blurred when we look to online games. A game creates a new reality, so a connection to the real world isn’t as much required as with facebook. But there is still a connection. Some people make their avatar (the virtual representation in the game) look like themselves, or they try at least. But even if it doesn’t look like the real you there is still a connection. I noticed that in last week class, when we tried to explain the choice of an avatar. If an avatar is a female it could be that the person behind it is a woman. But what could it be meaning when the person is a man? Some people will think the person is too feminine, others will say that this man likes to watch a good looking girl, or it could be a funny experiment. When you choose a fantasy character there is still a connection with the real person. Even an ork or a troll says something about the represented man or woman. Probably that’s why we had such a long a non-academic discussion about orks, trolls and whatever there is more in the virtual world. The online identity is a more sensitive subject than I suspected before this class. Now I know I have to be careful if I talk about orks.

Sanne

The New Way To Look Fabulous (by adobé)

theyoungfisherman:

Because, let’s face it: You are not perfect. None of us are. Not even the people on the covers of magazines. But technology such as Photoshop offers us perfection. Celebrities are no longer real. They are made. Not just made by managers, money or ‘society’, no. By technology. They become, very literally, a product. The over use of photoshop doesn’t amuse a lot of people. The masses expect a ‘real’ celebrity, not some picture, edited for 5 hours by a man in an office. This frustration becomes clear in the final lines of the video: Maybe she’s born with it? No, I’m pretty sure it’s photoshop. We expect reality. Not virtuality. 

-Sjoerd

So here’s my question: If you use photoshop to ‘brush up’ a picture of yourself: what happens to you? Are you the photoshopped person in the picture you just saved as: thisistherealme.JPG; or are you the real person, not perfect, sitting in front of the computer? Are you changing yourself? 

While I was reading your piece, the well-known commercial of Dove popped into my head (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U). This advertising campaign is called Evolution and is part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The advert challenges our concept of beauty by showing the transformation of a normal girl to a cover girl. It also illustrates how our perceptions of beauty are manipulated and distorted. Dove wants to show that those perceptions are based on something that isn’t real. You can maybe even call it the creation of a simulacrum (It’s maybe way too far-fetched but if we are manipulating our pictures, based on values of this simulacrum, aren’t we creating another simulacrum based on this first simulacrum?). What’s happening is that people spend way too much energy trying to look like fake creations, and it this way turning ourselves into things that we’re not. If our idea of beauty is based on an unreal world, and we are copying this world, what are we? Are we all representations based on concepts which aren’t real?   

 

Sascha

(Source: )

Opening the World of Digital Art: What if everybody would be famous?

lesmansart:

Andy Warhol told us: ‘’In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.’’ They are two explanations for this quote. Or Warhol meant that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes and then it would be over, or every individual will be famous for fifteen minutes and then…

Your story about a little town reminded me of something that happened last weekend. I’m from the north of Holland. I lived in a small town called Eenrum for fifteen years. When I was fifteen we moved to a smaller town. But I grew up in Eenrum, my friends lived there and I went to primary school in Eenrum. This weekend the grandparents of an old classmate form primary school (of course they also live in Eenrum) came to bring something for my mother. I haven’t spoken to that classmate for over eight and I never really spoke with his grandparents. So you can understand that I was surprised they still recognized me. But a bigger surprise was that they knew that I am living in Nijmegen right now. How do they know that? I guess they don’t have facebook, so they must have heart about it from a person. So maybe, Ron (that’s his name) looked me up on facebook (we aren’t facebook friends) and thought it was worth telling his grandparents. Haha, I am still famous in Eenrum.  

Sanne

The audition of Susan Boyle