Art with a Technological heart and Technology with

Artistic brain—the need of the hour

-Ajaywww.creativegeekz

.com

Leonardo Da Vinci, Piero Della Franscesca disproves this. Da Vinci wrote to one of his future employer, a king, that, “apart from being an engineer and a doctor, I can also paint.” And Francesca, because of his added profession as a mathematician, helped art to invent and include perspective into art.

Arnald Hauser, in his classic text called “Social History of Art” says that “people in the classical Greek culture respected painters better than sculptor because the painters would touch paint with brush while the sculptures used their hands and made it clumsy!”

•One of the cliché among the common man is the presumption that “art and technology were introduced and made to interact with each other only in twentieth century”.

However, Art in itself is a technology of mind. And technology of brain ends as machinery.

Walter Benjamin’s article “Art Work in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, written in 1936, which is an English translation of the original German text, suggests the relation between camera and art.

And ‘Benjamin in the age of digital reproduction’ is another thing that is happening now. In other words, technology improvises. Hence technology in itself cannot be an advancement of human culture, if it doesn’t have an artistic touch or artistic twist to it.

This, is a wonderful idea that says that the phrase Art and technology is wrong and those phrases art as technology and technology of art are right.

• If we become familiar with the construction techniques of pyramids, perhaps we wonder less.

The wonder of technology equals to the yearning of the basic human mind. This incompleteness leads to gestalt, which means that the mind tends to fill up that which is incomplete.

• Interestingly, compare Christo and Jean Christo’s artworks which are generally termed as “wrappings”. They wrapped the Reichstag building, in Germany with clothes.

Now the question between the pyramids and christo’s art wrappings is this: the technology-of-making-art makes us wonder because technology was never used to such a large scale, earlier, as our memory about the Egyptian technology was unknown for some time, was re-discovered afterwards and is unused now!

Thus Art becomes a technological achievement, when earlier technology is forgotten. Technology becomes artistic when it grows beyond its functions. Functional aspect differentiates technology from art.

Function is the basics of technology, while technology beyond function becomes art!

• Yet, it is dangerous to equate art to heart and mind and then technology to brains. The heartfelt attempt by the scientist Madam Curie and the brainy discourse of artist Joseph Beuys are classic cases to disprove those clichéd associations of heart with mind and brain with technology.

• The relation between technology and art can be best described by a phrase by Bill Bryson in his best seller “A Short History of Nearly Everything”.

• He says that the microbes lived without human beings for millions of years. But humans cannot live even for a day without the microbes.

Thank You