Is technology becoming art?

5th Feb 2010

A cun­ning guise to trick fool­ish consumers…

At first glance I thought this a silly ques­tion. To me art and tech­nol­ogy are so dif­fer­ent that the two should never meet. How­ever, tak­ing a closer look at the (arguable) beauty of the iPhone, the out­landish­ness of Alienware’s Aurora desk­top and the choice to add a Mike Ming cover to a new Stu­dio 15, it’s easy to see where the line has become blurred, espe­cially with tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments in day-to-day objects on a rapid increase.

But there is a cru­cial dif­fer­ence to make between art and tech­nol­ogy, ren­der­ing them fun­da­men­tally dis­tinct. Art is a largely sub­jec­tive con­cept. It encap­su­lates the ideas, beliefs and motives of the cre­ator. In many respects art has the pur­pose to evoke feel­ings or emo­tions but in just as many instances it has no pur­pose at all but to be cre­ated for the sake of cre­ative­ness. Some­one can hate a piece of art but appre­ci­ate the intrin­sic ‘artis­tic’ qual­i­ties about it. Tech­nol­ogy, on the other hand, is the off­spring of design. Design can­not be appre­ci­ated for sim­ply exist­ing; the pur­pose is to be func­tional.  All tech­no­log­i­cal gad­getry is devel­oped for the pur­pose of being sold and used, be it a set of head­phones, a lap­top or a mobile phone. The ulti­mate goal is to design a prod­uct that is acces­si­ble and liked by as many peo­ple as possible.

Prod­uct design revolves purely around plea­sure for the end user. The iPhone is smooth so you enjoy hold­ing it and has a touch screen so you enjoy the ease of its use. Regard­less of how artis­tic it may appear it exists only for com­fort and enjoy­ment of use, not to be appre­ci­ated in a sub­jec­tively con­cep­tual manner.

Alien­ware caters to the niche mar­ket of gamers who like hav­ing a desk­top that looks like it came from Star Trek and get a thrill from the social sta­tus they gain from own­ing a high-end sys­tem. ‘Art­work’ by Mike Ming isn’t for the beauty; end-users get plea­sure from the ide­ol­ogy it rep­re­sents. Tech­nol­ogy isn’t art; it has sim­ply embraced the illu­sion of art to max­i­mize use of the end product.

Writ­ten by Jonathan Hundson

What would Da Vinci be thinking…

Today, roads are lit­tered with cars of all shapes and sizes, pock­ets are lit­tered with the small­est, sleek­est mobile phones and kitchens are decked out with the slimmest, shini­est appli­ances. The Bake­lite days of the 1950s are dis­tant mem­o­ries and now, when car sales­men attempt to make a sale, the aes­thetic aspects of the design will always play a promi­nent part in the pitch. But surely a car is a car, to get to places in? A teapot is a teapot, to pour tea? This is no longer the case.

When antiques are sold, func­tion is in fact a bonus. In main­stream store chains like Laura Ash­ley, fur­ni­ture seems made to be seen and not sat on. We can wake up in the morn­ing and drink cof­fee made in a del­i­cately pretty espresso machine. Even build­ings that we inhabit are designed with aes­thet­ics in mind and some, like The Eden Project attribute some of their fame to this idea of dual appear­ance and func­tion­al­ity. Bridges we cross and stairs we climb are now analysed based on whether they are, and this is the cru­cial point, ‘stylish’.

The ‘style roots’ of tech­nol­ogy itself lie in art. With­out Leonardo Da Vinci, we would not have half our means of trans­port, with­out Clarice Cliff, china would be dull and with­out the likes of Tiffany and Cartier, lamp shades would be, well, just lamp­shades. The Art Deco and Bauhaus move­ments pro­vided us with the S-shaped chairs now seen in most liv­ing rooms and even con­tem­po­rary art uses tech­nol­ogy in exhibits, in instal­la­tions and even artis­tic uri­nals, made in the shape of open mouths.

The min­i­mum expected from tech­nol­ogy is func­tion. It’s hard to believe that the artis­tic mer­its of a toaster can make or break it but there you go, it’s often the sell­ing point of today’s objects. How many times are we stu­dents told not to be fussy about what an appli­ance looks like, when secretly we would pre­fer some­thing, ‘a bit nicer’? And why not have some­thing pretty that also works? It cer­tainly makes sense and undoubt­edly ‘adds some­thing’. When watches con­tain gold hands and clocks have jade faces, it isn’t dif­fi­cult to see the temp­ta­tion in tech­nol­ogy that not only car­ries out its func­tion but also matches the cur­tains and carpet.

Writ­ten by Rosie Price