History of Art & Technology

Sixteen years ago, in 1991, I would never have imagined that in the year 2000 I would be able to use something called the WorldWibe Web to show you digital images and text that actually exist on a computer in another location. I can safely assume therefore, that it is impossible for me (or anyone else) to imagine what it will be like in ten years time from now, in 2017.
As far as the present era appears to be portrayed in itself, we appear to have just cracked the ice on a major technological revolution. We are at this possition in time like John Ruskin
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin) excitedly holding up a Daguerreotype - a really really early form of photograph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype). For him it was "the most spectacular innovation of his century", but he could never have dreamed that
ahead of his time lay Magic Lantern projectors and glass slides, colour glass/35mm slides, cinematic filems, IMAX movies, or even 3-D IMAX movies.

So what is it that we shoudl look forward to? This new technology has already provided us with such enhanced abilities to be able to conduct research and to study artworks. Almost 83% of the worlds popuklation has ready access through the WWW to catalogues and databases full of data (e.g. encyclopedia, wikipedia), to huge image resources (e.g.deviantart, flikr), and even after all this we still have access to all kinds of information on many hundreds and thousands of websites.
For example, lets look at art historians.

To meet the "special needs" of art historians, digital technology offers a much more accurate way to record visual images. It can be used to achieve a degree of exact mathematical specification impossible to recreate through analogue chemistry.

If you have been unimpressed by digital images so far, be aware that most of the images that you have been seeing are most probably not the original digital images; most likely they were scanned from slides that in turn were photographs and then digitally enhanced using photo enhancing software. With the help of these new softwares, we are also permitted to being able to
manipulate images to the extent that it becomes unnoticable, e.g. the colour, lighting, scale, context. But whom are we kidding? These same factors have also changed in the hallowed "original". The colours of the Renaissance alterpiece in the museum have detiorated over the years, the lighting has varied, and much of the context has gone.

Yet the only thing that survives is it's scale. Moreover, slides and digital images reproduce the original as it looks now, or more precisely, as it looked at the time the photograph was taken. Until a few years ago, this is what Masaccio's Expulsion of Adam & Eve looked like (left), now it looks liek the image on the right. Which is the original, can you tell? Personally I wouldn't care, as long as I have an image that is clear and good enough looking to analyse without having too much depression. With the aid of new technology, we are permitted to experience things before that we couldn't do with books or photosho's, such as turninga piece of sculpture around with our mouse and be able to get a full 360degree view on our screens as if we are really there with it. I'm really proud I found this link, following this link you will find a page with an Egyptian statuette which you can revolve in a full 360degree motion with the control of your mouse. Other little fiddles permit us to flip images to let us see the other side of something - say a stautue, or even permit the addition of a movie clip in the Quicktime format.

These examples are slightly crude and ancient, but they supply us with some idea of what we may expect in the coming future. Imagine what it will be like teaching art history in 2017. Predictably the next major phase in tech revolution will be in compmuter hardware, as the shrinks discover some greater potential within the WWW and computers. In the coming future, when we re-discover what computers are really are, monitors that still look like tv screens, and where material is still organized on "pages" will be seen as a thing of another ancient era.

I suppose there will deffinately be changes in pixel sizes/numbers that will enable the creation of large digital surfaces, such as walls and ceilings. So for example, we could expect to see a classroom with digital walls and floors that no longer has the need for projectors or white boards. Talking about this reminds me of Ubicomputers - this will deff. have to be discussed another time.