Hostage pt.1 - Frederick De Wilde Last week I attended one of Lighthouse’s monthly talks, which invites new and established voices in art, technology and new media. This Month it was writer, curator and culture pundit Michelle Kasprzak, who spoke about new media, curating and the notoriously tricky New Aesthetic. I really liked her plea to curators to not get too obsessed by the idea of ‘newness’, almost comparing artistic advances to those of the high-speed technology world. If you haven’t already come across the tumblr for John Birdle’s archive of the New Aesthetic, it’s worth a look. I won’t go into it too deeply, but it’s a relationship between art and technology, where the digital becomes the physical, as Bruce Sterling’s essay articulates. The internal workings of technology become the subject of the piece, and becomes common in design, marketing campaigns, and print design. It’s become particularly relevant recently, which has invited a whole host of essays and responses on the subject. Michelle Kasprzak made a very obvious observation of the blossoming of this ‘new’ art movement, that in fact this has been happened for DECADES. Take for instance Gerhard Richter’s Colour Chart Paintings in 1966, Kasprzak even presented the movie poster for Metropolis as an example. Perhaps it’s a case of art criticism catching up with art, and it’s gradually grown as we become involved with our devices, rather than dependent on them.  It’s really important to take this into account as a curator, as we almost expect this relationship to exist between art and technology. Kasprzak brought to our above painting by Frederick de Wilde which uses nano technology to create the darkest possible spot, trapping all light within the centre square, in an aim to redefine ‘the boundaries between art, science, technology and society’. If you click on the image and scroll down, you can see where technology has played a crucial part in the conception and idea behind the work, which really attracts us.
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Hostage pt.1 - Frederick De Wilde

Last week I attended one of Lighthouse’s monthly talks, which invites new and established voices in art, technology and new media. This Month it was writer, curator and culture pundit Michelle Kasprzak, who spoke about new media, curating and the notoriously tricky New Aesthetic. I really liked her plea to curators to not get too obsessed by the idea of ‘newness’, almost comparing artistic advances to those of the high-speed technology world.

If you haven’t already come across the tumblr for John Birdle’s archive of the New Aesthetic, it’s worth a look. I won’t go into it too deeply, but it’s a relationship between art and technology, where the digital becomes the physical, as Bruce Sterling’s essay articulates. The internal workings of technology become the subject of the piece, and becomes common in design, marketing campaigns, and print design. It’s become particularly relevant recently, which has invited a whole host of essays and responses on the subject. Michelle Kasprzak made a very obvious observation of the blossoming of this ‘new’ art movement, that in fact this has been happened for DECADES. Take for instance Gerhard Richter’s Colour Chart Paintings in 1966, Kasprzak even presented the movie poster for Metropolis as an example. Perhaps it’s a case of art criticism catching up with art, and it’s gradually grown as we become involved with our devices, rather than dependent on them. 

It’s really important to take this into account as a curator, as we almost expect this relationship to exist between art and technology. Kasprzak brought to our above painting by Frederick de Wilde which uses nano technology to create the darkest possible spot, trapping all light within the centre square, in an aim to redefine ‘the boundaries between art, science, technology and society’. If you click on the image and scroll down, you can see where technology has played a crucial part in the conception and idea behind the work, which really attracts us.