visioneca: innovation and art

Innovation and Art

Artists explore the use of media and its impact on our sensory apparatus. They create new things, and new methods - innovations that often involve the creation of new media. This has been true since prehistory - since the smoke and pigment paintings of Lascaux, since the modeling of clay and the bone-carvings of the Neolithic.

The impact of art-experiment on the last century or so of the development of our modern media of communications and expression has established this kind of innovation as both a source of  inspiration and often the causal effect of mass production, mass media technologies, and mass media content.

Artists inspire. And now a new generation of artist-researchers-practitioners inspire business innovation - the making and bringing to market of new products, new services, new content.

I suppose a classic example is the development of multi-touch interfaces and touchscreen technology by among others,  Jeff Han and Johnny Chung Lee. These artists were exploring a theme of great interest to researchers, engineers and computer-scientists going back to the 1970s, but their widely publicised demos in the mid noughties seemed to prepare the ground for Apple’s iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). Other recent examples would include webcasting, semantic network interfaces, geographical information sysatems, social network mapping, projection mapping,  and data visualisation. In all these areas, work by researchers and artists directly leads to commercial content management and geographical information systems (Google Earth and Maps) or database visualisation (LivePlasma)...

More importantly, the classic demos of Douglas Engelbart and his Augmentation Research Centre in the late 1960s - in which he showed his seminal invention - the mouse (!), and earlier, the Sketchpad PhD thesis of Ian Sutherland (1963) - which virtually kick-started the  nascent interactive computer graphics industry, and in turn inspired Ted Nelson (inventor of Hypertext), Engelbart and Alan Kay (the Dynabook, the Alto GUI, Smalltalk etc)

In terms of art-experimentation, the immersive media environments of Stan Vanderbeek and Jeffrey Shaw, the interactive art of Roy Ascott, the Joiner pictures of David Hockney, the time-slice experiments of Tim Macmillan, the multiscreen, multi-media experiments of Andy Warhol, the filmic experiments of Meya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, John Whitney and others, the multi-print and painting techniques of Robert Rauschenberg - all these played a part in forming the sensibilities and inspiring artists, designers and engineers working in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason Visioneca focuses on these art and media interventions, is precisely because of their importance as an inspirational source of ideas.

Much of the important breakthroughs in content design stems from ideas first materialised by artists - the rapid montage of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttman presaged the fast-cutting of commercial and feature films by several decades. Our sensibilities eventually caught up with that of the artists:

Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan Notes on Burroughs (1964)

Written about William S. Burroughs for The Nation, Dec. 28, 1964 (pages 517-519)

Reinforcing this, another comment by McLuhan concerned his opinion that to the rest of us, artists seemed to be ahead of their time, because we ‘looked at the present as through a rear-view mirror” - we called the first cars horseless-carriages, the first radio the wireless, etc. The artist appears to be ahead of his time because he/she is the only one who actually perceives the present.

From innovation to place-making and regeneration

The idea that arts organisations provide a wellspring of innovation for the creative industries and wider economy is now broadly accepted, although quantifying the extent to which the arts sector performs this role and the mechanisms and means by which it does so, is more hotly disputed. The least disputed interaction between arts and innovation is the continual, often disruptive innovation that artists and organisations pursue while engaged in their core artistic activity. NESTA, which has been leading research into the dynamics of innovation in arts and cultural organisations, describes a four-dimensional framework consisting of audience reach, artform development, value creation, and business models.2 This framework goes some way to describing how innovation can currently be perceived and measured within arts and cultural organisations.

from Tom Flemming and Andrew Erskine: Supporting Growth in the Arts Economy

The role of festivals, conferences and exhibitions in this arts-innovation-business ecology is that of both an inspirational hub (an overview of the leading edge current technologies and content innovations), and an important source of competitive intelligence - an indication of where the market is heading, what digital innovations are emerging, and what the competition is in this sector  Such new events then, provide essential briefings on these important market opportunities. Visioneca will provide this kind of inspirational overview and competitive intelligence hub, with leading practitioners, artists and researchers talking about their work. For artists, commercial content developers, media providers, broadcasters, publishers, event management businesses, PR and marketing companies, in fact all the sectors affected by digital media innovation - Visioneca should be on your list of intelligence sources.