Andre Peixoto
The Influence of Digital Technology on The Creative Landscape
Copyright © 20 12 A ndre Peixoto andrepeixoto.com A AU ID# 0 2 2 2 3 576 School: A AU–Acedemy of A r t Universit y Course:MFA Gr aphic Design Class: GR6 00 MS V isual Communications L ab Instr uctors: Phil Hamlett Jeremy Stout
Andre Peixoto
ARTS and DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
The Influence of Digital Technology on The Creative Landscape
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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07 WHAT’S OUT THERE The digital world
19 WHAT’S GOOD The freedom to create
33 WHAT’S BAD The end of professional artists
47 WHAT’S NEXT The future of arts
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A DIGITAL WORLD
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Our world is becoming more digital then ever, and with art could not be different, the influence of technology on the way with create, costume and distribute art is undeniable, for example: photography has changed more in the last two decade them in the past 60 years, when photographers had to spend time and money buying materials (film, paper and chemicals) just to visualize their work, compared to modern DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) cameras, that are getting more affordable and powerful every year, where you can preview you photos on sight in a fraction of a second.
With this democratization of technology, the accessibility to tolls that once were exclusive to professional artists and the popularization of the internet, that had reach more 1.7 billing users worldwide, it’s creating an avalanche of content that is available on our fingertips, giving freedom for the non-artist public to access, costume, create and judge any king of artistic expression.
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MOST POPULAR CAMERAS ON FLICKR AVERAGE DAILY USERS
With 4.5 million photos uploaded daily, Flickr has a total of 51+ million registered professional photographers and amateurs members and 80 million unique visitors. In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according
to repor ting sources. Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website.
3,996 Canon EOS Rebel T2i Camera Type: DSLR Megapixels: 18 US$699
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4,211 Apple iPhone 4 Camera Type: Cameraphone Megapixels: 5.0
3,652
US$99
Canon EOS 5D Mark II Camera Type:DSLR Megapixels: 21.1 US$2.119
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AVERAGE AMOUNT OF VIDEO CREATED IN ONE HOUR For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. You can turn that number over in your mind as much as you want; at no point will it stop being incredible. Sixty hours every minute. That’s fi ve months of video every hour. That’s
5HRS 3 MAJOR US
NETWORK Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera Full HD 1080 US$149
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10 years of video ever y day. More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years And the pace is accelerating: last year the rate was only 48 hours per minute.
3600HRS YOUTUBE
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Sony NEX-VG10 Interchangeable Lens Handycam Full HD 1080 US$1999
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AVERAGE COST OF A BOOK VS AN E-BOOK Sales of electronic books have over taken those of printed versions for the first time at Amazon.com, a sign of the growing dominance of digital readers. Amazon now sells 105 electronic books for ever y 100 printed ones.
$13.99
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$26.00
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PHYSICAL VS DIGITAL MUSIC RETAIL On Februar y 24, 2010, the iTunes store ser ved its 10 billionth song download and became the number-one music vendor in the world; this milestone was reached in just under seven years of being online. As of October 4, 2011, the store served its 16 billionth song.
The store has more than 20,000,000 songs, including exclusive tr acks from numerous artists. Not all artists are available on iTunes, including some popular ones such as AC/DC or Tool .
2009 DIGITAL 36%
PHYSICAL 64% 16
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2010 DIGITAL 47%
PHYSICAL 53% 17
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THE FREEDOM TO CREATE
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It’s undeniable that the production time and costs of art has being reduce dramatically over the years, and the advance of technology had open the opportunity of creating something that wasn’t even imaginable a few years ago, art can be accessed from any where, can be interactive with the evolution of touchscreen technology, you can produce a full music album and distribute for free on the internet in one weekend using only a laptop computer.
Digital technology and arts are now deeply connected, and that’s a natural progression, technology comes first, then the artist will start to experiment with it creating new ways of art. With digital technology more accessible, more people will be accessing and producing new art and if you combine that with the capability of sharing and collaborate ideas with other artists through the internet, the possibilities are endless.
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TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T REPLACE TALENT
Photo © Inez van L amsweerde & V inoodh Matadin
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TECHNOLOGY BRINGS FREEDOM TO CREATIVITY Bjork’s Biophilia is and interactive music app that utilize one of the newest technologies, the iPad, to create a new dimension to music, Biophilia brings nature, music and technology together for a greater experience, as she describes. The app allows you to navegate and explore the ten tracks of the album in random order, a proof that technology can be great for arts if you have the talent to use it.
Bjork Biophilia iPad app
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FIVE MONTHS IN FIVE HOURS
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Digital Recording Technology has Changed the Way Music is Made By Dustin Schoof There was a time when musicians looking to replicate the sound of their favorite bands needed lots of dough and the right combination of amplifiers, amp heads and effects pedals. Talent played a part, too. But the days of slogging behind a massive control bo ar d the size of the T it anic ar e long gone. Advancements in technology and the transition from analog recording— in which audio signal s are stored as a continuous wave and transferred on to a vinyl record or magnetic tape on cassette —to digital production has changed the rules and pushed the boundaries of modern recording. “Kids who are Internet savvy and computer savvy, they can pick up a Cakewalk software package or a Pro Tools package and do it themselves,” says Scott Merring, a guitar ins tr uc tor at Dave P hill ips Music & Sound in Phillipsburg. The accessibility of
recording software such as Pro Tools and the popularization of the pitch-shif ting programs such as Auto Tune have made it easier for the average person to emulate the sound of a professional studio with a few clicks of the mouse. More and more unsigned bands and singers are opting for the do-it-yourself approach, recording their music at home to avoid hefty studio fees and maintain artistic control. “Technology has made things easier. Everything’s changed. It’s cheaper to just burn music to a hard drive and then dump it onto a compact disc,” says producer Paul Wasser, of Gargoyle Studios in Northampton. It’s a long way from when musicians would spend weeks or months piecing together songs on a four-track recording device or running through reel after reel of tape, now that can be done in a few minutes.
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“Technology always came before the artist. The artist didn’t create oil paint, video camera... But he took this technology and create new ways to produce art.” —Bill Drummond author of “45”, number 21 on the Observer’s list of “The 50 greatest music books ever”
Photo © Luc y Johnston
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POWER TO THE PEOPLE Life in a Day is a crowdsourced drama/ documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192
Movie Life in a Day
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nations. The completed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2011 and the premiere was streamed live on YouTube. The film was produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.
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THE END OF PROFESSIONAL ARTISTS
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The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture By Andrew Keen Our most valued cultur al institutions, our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; filesharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industr y. Our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual proper t y is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated— threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors. In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with
an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entr y on W ikipedia, the distinction bet ween tr ained exper t and uninformed amateur become s dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented. The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. Consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.
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MEDIOCRE IS THE NEW ORDER Rebecca Black video went viral on YouTube and other social media sites, “Friday” was derided by many music critics and viewers, who dubbed it “the worst song ever. ”The music video received around 189 million views, causing Black to gain international attention as a “viral star”.
Rebecca Black’s music video Friday
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“For a young serious film maker, this are very depressing times, when you leave everything to the crowd when everything became democratize and everything is determined by the number of clicks, you by definition is undermining the seriousness of the artistic endeavor.”
—Andrew Keen CNN colunist and author
Photo © Julia de Boer
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MORE PEOPLE SPEAKING THAN LISTENING
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Most people think they can make a movie, can write a novel, make music, that’s why so many people try to make bands, try to write a book, and buy a video camera and put stuff on youtube, the problem is with the accessibility to digital technology everyone is doing that, creating an onslaught of content that is larger than we can absorb, ending up just being bad noise to the true talent people.
There is no evidence this digital art democratization is creating better art neither helping it, what is really doing is creating an world of cacophony and self opinion, undermining the power and seriousness of the artistic act.
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“If everybody is a musician and everybody is making mediocre music, eventually the world is going to be covered with mediocrity, and people will start to be conformable with mediocrity.”
—Moby musician
Photo © Moby
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SOME PEOPLE HAVE TALENT SOME DON’T
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“When you fall into the trap of confusing the artist and the audience, when you believe that the audience knows more then the artist, is more creative and is more talent, then art end, and you have something else, you have cacophony, you have simply an apology for radical democratization, and it’s wrong to confuse democratization in cultural and political terms with the creation of art.” said Andrew Keen.
Everyone should have the freedom to create art, but should everyone be a good photographer, a great musician, or a successful artist? Of course not, there some talented people and there are people with no talent, and it’s a realit,y an unfortunate reality that most people don’t like, because most people don’t have talent.
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THE FUTURE OF ARTS
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It takes both society and an individual to create art. Great works of art always are, to some extent, interactive works. They have been formed not only by the impul se or feelings of the artist, but also by society’s influences on the ar tist as a person, by acceptance, rejection, and expectation of the ar tist and his or her works of art. Many professional artists, for example, will not even attempt works of art that they think will be unacceptable to the public.
Technically speaking, art that is affected over time by the audience’s needs and desires is not labeled as “interactive art.” However, as we progress into the future, we may see art forms become increasingly interactive, letting audiences influence and even determine the outcome or results. Digital web art offers this promise, for groups of people, sometimes at great distances from each other, can have access to the same website and contribute equally to the designs and drawings there.
In addition, increasingly some of our literary and stage arts are being deeply affected by public feelings as the works of art are being developed. This once is true in novels, which often appeared in serialized form in newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It were developed as serials over a period of several months or more. Often, wouldn’t know what was going to happen a week or a month in the future, and future installments was wrote partly on the basis of how the reading audience was reacting. In contemporary times, this happens even more frequently, especially in the artistic world of television and even the Web. On television, for example, many serial TV shows are developed from season to season according to how the audiences react to previous episodes.
All these new influences–electronic arts, the professionalization of the arts, and interactive art–may radically affect the future of all the arts. The changes can unfold slowly over decades or even centuries of time, or can happen in a few years, the pace of change is faster each decade, for example 10 years ago YouTube didn’t exist and today is producing more vidoes than we can can watch. These new influences may redefine the nature and meaning of the arts in important ways. At the same time, increasingly larger numbers of us will have more frequent access to the tools to produce arts, dicteating the unknown future.
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“It used to be, you didn’t become an artist just to become rich, you became an artist because you had an idea or emotion to share and that’s where we’re heading again. We are going to see more people doing more arts in more ways than ever before.” —Seth Godin author of most popular marketing blog in the world sethgodin.typepad.com
Photo © Joi Ito
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THAT’S JUST A PHASE
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Talent is the one thing that has the most value, and it’s true to any generation and/or technology. “With all the bad work out there, the good professionals will stand out.” said Marcelo Lima, participant of lab 7, hopefully, the really good artists will break through the noise and stand out, but that needs time. As in any new technology there is a phase where ever ybody want to get into, not carr ying about the qualit y, for example with the internet boom, the important was to have a website not even think about the
comsumer experience, now days if don’t have a well design website it will act more against you than in favor, that means the public is educated and mature about the subject, of course there will be always bad artists out there, but at some point the public will understand the difference between good and bad, giving the power that good creative artists deserve.
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IS MORE THAN WHAT YOU SEE In the present day using the web is a key part to communicate with the public. A website with more information about arts and digital technology will be essential to educate the general public about how ar t is being created on the digital era, will also create more discussion and engagement of the artistic comunity on how digital technology is effecting their profession and how they can take advantage of it.
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The website will have, videos, forums and examples of artists that embrace digital technology on their creative routine and have produce great work with it.
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Opportunity
ARTS and DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
News
Forum
Videos
Downloads
Digital Music
HOW TO ADAPT ON THE DIGITAL AGE In the present day using the web is a key par t to communicate with the public. A website with more information about ar ts and digital technology will be essential to educate the general public about how ar t is being created on the digital era... Read More »
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Available Now
Digital Movie
HOW TO GET FULL ADVANTAGE THE TECHNOLOGY In the present day using the web is a key par t to communicate with the public. A website with more information about ar ts and digital technology will be essential to educate the general public about how ar t is being created on the digital era... Read More »
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THE SURVIVAL GUIDE A series of books directed to the general public and the artistic community explaining the complexity of the creative process, and examples of good and bad creative using digital technology. The series will consist on four books: Digital Graphics, Digital Music, Digital Photography, and Digital Films. The books will explore the conceptual and technical process of those artistic categories, and how their are facing the popularization of digital technology.
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Opportunity
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TALK IT OUT The best way to solve a problem is to talk about it. What’s Next: Ar ts and Digital Technology Conference will have key speaker for various artistic fields sharing their positive and/or negative experience on how digital technology have influence their body of work and how we can educate the general public about the the true value of a professional art.
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Opportunity
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UNCOVER AND REWARD THE GOOD DIGITAL ART Rewarding the good creative and innovative artistic endeavor through a specialized art jury is one of the ways to ensure that the standards of good artistic efforts is not being overshadow by technological gimmicks. Uncovering the award winning art to the open public will help educate the masses about to the subject.
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Opportunity
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LEAVE IT TO THE PROS A campaign in partnership with local ar t organizations to stimulate companies and people that are in need of creative ar tistic ser vices to hire professional ar tist. The campaign will also highlight how important is to have somebody with the knowledge on the subject to ensure a good quality work.
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Opportunity
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SOURCES
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TIME Magazine - The Beast With A Billion Eyes By Lev Grossman The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture By Andrew Keen Digital Recording Technology Has Changed The Way Music is Made By Dustin Schoof Experiencing the Humanities By Richard Jewell The Future of Art: An Immediated Autodocumentary By Gabriel Shalomv wikipedia.org advertising.yahoo.com/article/flickr.html flickr.com/cameras youtube.com/t/press_statistics presspauseplay.com
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