Tom Uglow is looking forward to the day when today’s intimidating digital technologies seem as natural as a pen or a camera.
Do you ever stop to imagine what your great grandchildren will consider to be the defining cultural output of the early 21st century? It is unlikely to be to what we might think. One hundred years ago, in 1913, Schoenberg caused a near riot in Vienna; Marcel Duchamp stuck a bicycle wheel on a plinth; cubism landed, like an alien life form, in New York; and in Paris, Nijinsky and Stravinsky premiered the ballet The Rite of Spring (which Le Figaro called ‘a laborious and puerile barbarity’). It seems a pretty sensational year, to us today, reflecting an extraordinary and tumultuous time.
Yet we are living in a similarly transformational era, fuelled by the rise and rise of digital technology. While it is almost inconceivable that computers do not play a role in your daily life, on stage, in galleries, in literature, the computers lurk at the edges: digital is a tool rather than a medium. I’d like to suggest what might happen when digital becomes the form as well. When an exhibition unfolds around you, wherever you are, or a performance uses the huge quantities of data we generate to choreograph dancers; when dramatists allow their plays to seep off the stage into online social platforms, or poets perform inside video games.
These will be the artists, the works and the commentators to watch. You might not ‘get’ them, but to your great grandchild they will be Duchamp... (Click here to read more)
Do you ever stop to imagine what your great grandchildren will consider to be the defining cultural output of the early 21st century? It is unlikely to be to what we might think. One hundred years ago, in 1913, Schoenberg caused a near riot in Vienna; Marcel Duchamp stuck a bicycle wheel on a plinth; cubism landed, like an alien life form, in New York; and in Paris, Nijinsky and Stravinsky premiered the ballet The Rite of Spring (which Le Figaro called ‘a laborious and puerile barbarity’). It seems a pretty sensational year, to us today, reflecting an extraordinary and tumultuous time.
Yet we are living in a similarly transformational era, fuelled by the rise and rise of digital technology. While it is almost inconceivable that computers do not play a role in your daily life, on stage, in galleries, in literature, the computers lurk at the edges: digital is a tool rather than a medium. I’d like to suggest what might happen when digital becomes the form as well. When an exhibition unfolds around you, wherever you are, or a performance uses the huge quantities of data we generate to choreograph dancers; when dramatists allow their plays to seep off the stage into online social platforms, or poets perform inside video games.
These will be the artists, the works and the commentators to watch. You might not ‘get’ them, but to your great grandchild they will be Duchamp... (Click here to read more)