The Future of Art

The Future of Art
an immediated autodocumentary

What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way artists produce and distribute artwork? The Future of Art begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.

This video was shot, edited and screened at the Transmediale festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany.

Conceived and Edited by Gabriel Shalom
Produced by KS12 / Emergence Collective
Executive Producer: Patrizia Kommerell
Assistant Editor: Clare Molloy
Production Assistant: Annika Bauer

Featuring:

Aaron Koblin www.aaronkoblin.com
Michelle Thorne www.thornet.wordpress.com
Caleb Larsen www.caleblarsen.com
Régine Debatty www.we-make-money-not-art.com
Heather Kelley www.kokoromi.org
Vincent Moon www.vincentmoon.com
Ken Wahl www.depthart.com
Reynold Reynolds www.reynold-reynolds.com
Bram Snijders www.sitd.nl
Mez Breeze www.furtherfield.org/display_user.php?ID=403
Zeesy Powers www.zeesypowers.com
Joachim Stein www.joaoflux.net
Eric Poettschacher www.shapeshifters.net

Including Video Material From:

Vincent Moon, Achim Kern, Born Digital, Daniel Franke & Christopher Warnow, Memo Akten, Ian Mackinnon, Taj Dhami, Liisalotte Elme, Zeesy Powers, Reynold Reynolds, Patrizia Kommerell & Gabriel Shalom, Aaron Koblin, Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio, Iepe, Akiz

Music, Sounds and Performances by:

The Arcade Fire, The Crowd, Daniel Franke & Christopher Warnow, Monolake, Daito Manabe, Zeesy Powers, Arlt, Ei Wada, Gabriel Shalom (8 years old), kom.post by Laurie Bellanca

Special Thanks:

Elyse Harrison, Studio Neptune, Cifarelli Art Consulting, Henrik Moltke, Beckie Darlington, Open Design City, Cara Bell Jones, Ela Kagel

CC 2011 BY-NC-SA
KS12 / Emergence Collective
www.emergence.cc

Join the conversation!
#futureofart

Now what we're seeing is people have more free time

they have more access to resources

and they have kind of infinite knowledge

at their fingertips which means

they can tap into

any form of creation almost

and I think to some extent that

trumps the Renaissance by orders of magnitude

The Future of Art

We don't know what happens when we get

more and more layers of infrastructure right

I think if we look back and see the boom

that happened since the web

and since the technical stacks that

became standardized and enabled

layers of innovation

to happen on top of them

We couldn't even predict 10 years ago

the kinds of things we're seeing nowadays.

I think I'm mostly interested in the ways

especially recently

that people can work together through the Internet

to create things that would otherwise

be impossible

I think now that we have kind of

more computer resources than we've ever had

both on the processing side

and also on the storage and organization

and communication side

you know what we're seeing is

richer and more full content

that more contextually, that's more human.

With the democratization that's come with a lot of the

social networking tools

and with the web being so democratically available

I think more people are trying to

take on the role of curator

even if it's in very very small parts of their life.

We will always and still have those "experts" but

I think that we will start to see more sort of

more democratic roles of curation.

There was this discussion at the beginning

when I was blogging

and they said,

"Oh bloggers are curators, you think you're curators"

No I'm not!

Sometimes I work as a curator

but it's something different from my blog.

The term is being expanded to say select or highlight

I work a lot with intuition.

That is the role that we play

making connections between things

that might not otherwise be obvious connections.

Well I think the switch was like a long time ago

when basically the amount of information

available and the amount of books available

suddenly became

more than the abilities of human beings

to read for all his life, to even understand.

And nowadays we're just surrounded

by so many informations

so how do we deal with this?

basically we deal with it on a daily basis one by one

by sort of like digging our own histories with that

It's really a very interesting subjective process

that I'm going to apply myself on a daily basis

Like grabbing informations here or there

and putting them in contact and see what happens.

Each time that I make films now I'm like,

"oh yeah let's do this film by getting inspired

by the images of that guy

and the ideas of that dude,

And okay I'm going to make a film today like this

and see what happens."

It's really exciting and just like

constantly remixing history.

Telling our whole history through that.

It's very exciting.

The idea of originality and proprietariness

also contributes to the whole "great man theory"

which is slowly sort of disintegrating.

The idea of the genius, you know, the Freud,

the Marx, the Leonardo

the Einstein that come up with an idea

that is completely related to

the man that came up with it

whereas today

ideas just get thrown out there and used

and it's that use that that in a way is the art

rather than the person

who comes up with the idea

[Take Away Show #41 The Arcade Fire "Neon Bible" by Vincent Moon]

I think we'll probably see more and more

non-linear, interactive experiences.

Lev Manovich says that the twenty-first century

will be defined by the database.

And I think there's some truth to that

but maybe even going beyond the database

into the interface

because I think that's really the intersection between

kind of all the rich data and rich stories

that we're wrapping our heads around

and the ability to say something about them.

Every single experimental film is about time

because film only captures time and space.

I think we will

in some strange way

enter into new types of film

probably starting with an idea of three-dimensional

and probably somehow interactive at the same time.

It's not something that particularly interests me.

I like certain limitations.

I think already film has almost

not enough limitations to be able to focus

and so I wouldn't be one to jump in

and start making 3D interactive

but I'm sure that people will start to do that

and you'll start dealing with spaces that are deeper.

I don't just mean 3D like James Cameron or whatever,

I mean more dimensions where when you move

through the space something else is changing

and you're getting a greater understanding.

And I think the visual capacity of people to think

is tremendous, it's really huge

but it has to be trained a bit

but I'm always impressed how quickly either

children or adults can pick up on visual analogy

and then move more or less through spaces

that are abstract

and when they become more dynamic I think

that will be kind of the front edge of art

because it will be at the front edge of expanding

how we understand reality

and how we can process information.

The funny thing about video mapping I think

is that it's getting part of the environment

so there's no border between you

and the content and the light.

So you think about it more naturally

and everything that happens

you adapt to it like it's real.

You don't make the shift

between the virtual layer

and the real layer anymore.

Where is art going?

I think it will more part of our natural environment.

and we don't see it as an "add-to" anymore.

So we react on it more naturally.

If these shifts were simply documented in a

holographic medium through mono-channelled P.O.V.

directionality similar to contemporary cinematic 3D

technology, the shifts would indeed resemble

traditional theater complete with the fourth wall

that maintains the tradition of theatrical realism

via an audience/performative vision.

If the holographic medium instead attempted to break

this fourth wall, such as augmented reality integrated

with artificial intelligence is progressing towards

the shifts could become an integral part of future

genre, creation, knowledge formation/codification.

[Spatial Sound Sculpture by Daniel Franke & Christopher Warnow]

I think mostly we're just seeing

what happens when you reach a point where

computational resources are no longer

the most significant factor in thinking.

We're really able to you know basically waste

cycles and memory and transfer speeds.

It lends itself to a completely

different type of creative process

where you can really kind of explore and experiment

a lot more freely than one could before.

We don't have to necessarily know

where we're going with a piece of software

when we start writing it.

We can actually explore and iterate

and potentially even throw away something

that would have taken days or weeks to make

without feeling any sense of investment

just start anew.

That's really powerful I think.

Perhaps most significantly

it lets us create our own limitations

and I think those generally

can be a lot more meaningful than

the ones that are arbitrarily put on by the media.

If you have an artwork for example

that basically just creates a set of data

which could be interpreted many different ways

like you could take the data

and you could make it into a photograph

that would be three dimensional

or have a relief

or instead of making lots of photographs

it would be a film or whatever

that means that the only original thing

is that set of data.

So where is the artwork?

Is the artwork the data?

Or is the artwork the output?

There's something really magic and beautiful about

being able to take something that was created for one

purpose and then put it towards your art practice and

make something really new and beautiful

and meaningful with that.

On the other hand

I'm not necessarily excited by

a technology that comes out just because it's new

or just because it's available all of a sudden.

There has to be a reason underlying why

it's being used to in some way support or enhance

the meaning or the beauty of what you're making.

I identified myself as a painter.

I was pushing away ideas and concepts

and things that I wanted to work with because

I didn't feel that I could really paint them.

The best way to approach a project or a problem is

to use the best tool for the job.

And sometimes it is painting

and sometimes that's programming.

Often time when I have picked up new technologies

and incorporated them into my work

it hasn't been because I saw the technology

and I thought, "okay I want to do something with this."

It's because there was another project

that sort of called for a technological solution.

Every once in a while you see something and think,

"Oh that's cool, I want to do something with it."

For myself, when I've approached things that way

it's really difficult to make the work

not about the technology.

People get sidetracked so easily

and fall into this like,

"What can the computer do?" versus

"How is it a tool helping me?"

The simpler works

are finally the more precise works

and have clear thought

and I think that will continue

and be even more poignant when get

noisier and noisier.

For example a concept which has been explored by

Transmediale and many other festivals was

surveillance!

And then I would go to the biennale of Lyon

which is a traditional biennale of contemporary art

and I would see a very simple artwork

without any technology

and it would investigate surveillance

and comment on it without any technology

and it would be stronger.

Performance art is making a big comeback now.

It's getting a newfound footing

especially in the major institutions.

And it seems to me that that's a reaction against

the computer space and the technology

so we have this extreme high-tech

and then it's balanced out by this complete

appreciation now where

it's only a person on a stage with no props

and no help

and it's the human doing something.

I'm really interested in going back to objects

and things that are tangible

and also on the other side of that

experiences that are maybe intangible

but that you have with other people around you

in their physical presence

and all the messiness that that entails.

In a lot of ways I feel like I have a sort of

split practice

where on the one hand there's the Internet work

because it's cheap, ubiquitous, it's available to me

I can put stuff up there

it does not take a lot of time

and you've got potentially this unknown audience

that you have no idea who they are

and can get very, very interesting things happening

when you relate with people.

But then on the other hand I have this live practice

sometimes more theatrical

sometimes more relational where

it's about actually staring someone in the face

or being in the same room with them

and imposing your physical presence on them.

Our specific desire is basically to create social links.

And the results are only the pretext to that.

the films, the music, the albums

or the pieces on the walls.

Basically we live in a world where

so many people create.

You have people talking about the decay

of the creative industry.

How the music industry can survive to adapt.

This is not the point.

I think the point is what's really exciting nowadays is

how do people create?

and how that way that they create

changes something in this world.

I was kind of taken by this

Bruce Nauman quote that like,

"Anything I do in the studio, I'm an artist

I'm in my artist's studio, if I do it here, it's art."

And I thought like, that seems really freeing and great

but then he actually limited it to his studio;

he can only feel secure in his studio

and I thought well, I'm going to try to shoot stuff

out of the studio

I was always shooting in the studio

now I want to do it in front of an art audience

call the whole process art

and not do it in my studio

and see if there's any barrier

and of course there's no barrier.

Anywhere you go and anything you do

you can call it art if you want to

if you're an artist

if you're brave enough to call yourself an artist

then you can say, "This is my art."

of course people can laugh at it, but it is art.

There is no obvious relation between the quality

of a piece of work for example

and the value.

The market is very much disconnected from

the actual object or the content

Artists got fascinated with exactly that fact

a hundred years ago.

When Duchamp introduced the readymade

that was exactly his point.

You can put anything in there and then it will

eventually become a commodity in that market.

We are beginning to see new ways of funding

happening and dissemination and artists participating

more directly in their own market

and not necessarily

being cloistered off in their studios

where you have the dealer acting

as the sole middleman between

the artist and the rest of the world.

I was in New York with my friend Yancey

who is one of the guys behind Kickstarter

and he mentioned something really interesting

He was like, "Oh yeah, you know

the way you live your life

you could probably live your life by having two

or three Kickstarter projects a year.

and that's it, you know?"

And it's kind of true.

I'm totally into this way of doing things

of crowdfunding

which is not a very nice word

but I really believe in it so much.

I just really think about it

from different positions in the world

and this is really amazing this Kickstarter thing

to a lot of cultures.

I think we're going to see

really fantastic things coming

especially in the next five years.

The word is going to be spread out

all around the world.

[Braun Tube Jazz Band by Ei Wada]

Well there has been a long tradition

of the national artist.

There are a number of names that you all know

nations are a really proud about that they are

British or Indian or U.S. artists.

I'm a nomad myself.

For us being in a tribe that moves around

is not a problem at all

because we don't care about places at all.

No matter if you are in Toronto, Berlin or Amsterdam

what matters for us is which kind of value

do you embrace for your work.

This doesn't matter whether you are based in Asia

Europe or in America.

Certain values are all over the planet

and you'll find them anywhere

and it doesn't matter if you're nomadic

or a resident of a city.

We've been seeing a rising of nomad artists

in the past ten years a lot

And basically it corresponds

to a real need in our society

of movement, of bodies in motion

who go from one place to another by basically

taking the pretext of making films or music

to move around, to travel

It's a very interesting idea of modern nomadism.

And I guess, I don't know, but well

that's what I'm doing and it's quite fantastic!

I think a lot of people are doing this nowadays

more and more, and it's not going to stop

that's for sure.

There's a real tendency towards that

in our generation.

And the Internet and all the digital tools

or small cameras

are an incredible way to work, to do this now.

What I appreciate in my life is

no matter where I go

there are at least seven to ten people

that I really know profoundly well

I can trust them, they trust me

and it goes far beyond a Facebook relationship.

And I think that's really crucially important.

You need to trust people, they need to know you

they need to be here for you in good and bad times

and not just only when you are in the "show mode"

when you present and you are the cool artist.

I couldn't imagine being an artist without that.

For these types of creatives

identity becomes a series of fragmented reality

sets that need to be constantly channeled

monitored and updated.

This fragmentation does alter

how we process the world via associated

emotional and psychological effects.

These identities, established through the use of

avatars or profile creation

alter according to the foibles of specific

platforms and interfaces.

A subject may a have a multitude of profiles

created across a wide distribution base.

These staggered profiles create a type of

socialphrenic functioning that eclipses

solo persona extensions.

Users may reference a fellow synthetic

by their character or avatar name

even when interacting in

phenomenologically-defined reality.

According to traditional psychological theory

these type of identity ecologies would represent

a subtle splintering of a primary identity

akin to schizophrenia.

The base categories denoting emotion

and psychological states need overhauling

in line with contemporary/synthetic conceptions.

I was kind of working with a lot of different voices

in my head and different little people on my shoulder.

I had an opportunity to do a program

at Yale University, and while I was there

I painted this big very somber black painting

and as a way to sort of break myself

of that cycle and kind of push myself

into a completely new direction

I painted a tiny little turtle down in the corner

of this very somber black on black painting

and that single little defacement

allowed a whole new part of me into the work.

I went from thinking of art as a strictly serious thing

and if you're going to make serious art

it has to be serious

but that you can make serious art

and have a very large amount of humor in it

and sometimes that's the best way

because you can use humor as a tool

to attach things in people's brains

and to kind of sneak things in the back door

and allow concepts and ideas and things

to move into the viewer's consciousness

without them necessarily knowing it.

One way that artists can strengthen their ability to

make these unusual connections is

through the power of the subconscious mind

that we normally experience as dreaming.

I would be very curious to get

to a level of experience

that would be dreamlike.

Where you could be walking through a space

in someone else's dream

and have more of a sense because

it's very hard for me to know if I dream

similar to the way you dream

or even to remember my dream so precisely

that I think it would be quite interesting

if somebody could make a piece

that's as real as a dream

and that you could actually make choices

maybe but you're not in control

and things like that.

And I think in a way that must be

the future of where art is about

I have an experience and I'm trying to

share it with other people

and I'm limited if I'm painting on a canvas

and it's square and it's this big.

For all you cared you could draw the universe

you could draw little martians

running all over the place

you could draw things you imagined

you could draw real life scenes

you could draw what you think about

you could draw dreams

you could draw people, in fact

lots of people say they can't draw people but

when you put your mind to it

you can really draw anything.

You know, maybe decorate the street

because the street's a very nice thing

but it's not the greatest to look at, you know?

but what I might do is

leave the arrows and all the little dots

and slashes and lines

but everywhere there wasn't that

you could make the most beautiful designs

you could ...

I'd make it a law that your car would have to have

wet paint on it every day on its tires

and when you rode around it would make

any colored track all over the road

but it couldn't be on the lines

and that

that would make

I guess the world a better place.

The Future of Art

Conceived & Edited by Gabriel Shalom

Produced by KS12 / Emergence Collective

Executive Producer: Patrizia Kommerell

Assistant Editor: Clare Molloy

Production Assistant: Annika Bauer

This video was shot, edited and screened at the Transmediale Festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany

CC 2011 BY-NC-SA KS12 / Emergence Collective

Join the conversation! #futureofart