Jahi Nelson's List: ART HISTORY

• What is an Artist's Statement? 

  An artist's statement is a short document written by the artist  which provides a window into the artist's world. It offers insight into  a single piece or an entire body of work and by describing the artist's  creative process, philosophy, vision, and passion. It enlightens and  engages while at the same time giving the audience - potential buyers,  exhibition curators, critics, fellow artists, or casual browsers - the  freedom to draw their own conclusions. An artist's statement reads  easily, is informative, and adds to the understanding of the artist.

  • What is an Artist Statement?

• What isn't an Artist's Statement? 

  An artist's statement is not a résumé, a biography, a list of  accomplishments and awards, a summary of exhibitions, or a catalogue of  works. It is not insignificant and should not be hastily written. It  is not difficult to understand, pretentious, irritating, or (gasp!)  laughter-provoking.

• Why should I write an Artist's Statement? 

  People who love an artist's work generally want to know more  about the artist. Your statement will help your viewers answer  questions they may have about your art. When viewers have answers,  their delight in what you do increases, and they have more reasons to  take your work home with them. The artist's statement is therefore an  effective marketing tool, building a bridge between artist and audience.  But the artist's statement isn't just for them. In putting your art  into words, you might find that ideas and thoughts you once had become  more concrete. Your writing may open new channels in your mind and take  you in new artistic directions. You might discover more about  yourself.

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• • Gestalt Principles - Law of Pragnanz

• Gestalt is also known as the "Law of Simplicity" or the "Law of Pragnanz" (the entire figure or configuration), which states that every stimulus is perceived in its most simple form.  

   

  Gestalt theorists followed the basic principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, the whole (a picture, a car) carried a different and altogether greater meaning than its individual components (paint, canvas, brush; or tire, paint, metal, respectively). In viewing the "whole," a cognitive process takes place – the mind makes a leap from comprehending the parts to realizing the whole,    

   

  We visually and psychologically attempt to make order out of chaos, to create harmony or structure from seemingly disconnected bits of information.   

   

  The prominent founders of Gestalt theory are Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka.

• 1. Figure/Ground   

    

  This principle shows our perceptual tendency to separate whole figures from their backgrounds based on one or more of a number of possible variables, such as contrast, color, size, etc. 

   

  A simple composition may have only one figure. In a complex composition there will be several things to notice. As we look from one to another they each become figure in turn.

• Everything that is not figure is ground.    

   

  As our attention shifts, the ground also shifts so that an object can go from figure to ground and then back.
   Ground is sometimes thought of as background or negative space.     

    Figure-ground refers to the relationship between an object and its surround. Sometimes the relationship is stable, meaning that it is easy to pick out the figure from the ground. 
• Other times the relationship is unstable, meaning it is difficult to pick out the figure from the ground. Rarely, the relationship is ambiguous, meaning that the figure could be the ground or vice-versa.
• Grant Wood helped develop the US military's camouflage during World War I.

• • Repetition of forms or colors in a composition is pleasing in much the same way rhythm is pleasing in music the forms aren't necessarily identical - there may be tremendous variety within the repetition, yet the correspondence will still be discernable.  

    

  • Like static and dynamic tension a deliberate use of similarity in composition can impart meaning to the viewer that is independent of the subject matter of the image.  

   

  • Similarity or repetition in an image often has connotations of harmony and interrelatedness, or rhythm and movement.

• 3.  Proximity  

   The Gestalt law of proximity states that "objects or shapes that are close to one another appear to form groups". Even if the shapes, sizes, and objects are radically different, they will appear as a group if they are close together. 

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• The Hockney-Falco Thesis: Our thesis is that certain elements in certain paintings made as early as c1430 were produced as a result of the artist using either concave mirrors or refractive lenses to project the images of objects illuminated by sunlight onto his board/canvas. The artist then traced some portions of the projected images, made sufficient marks to capture only the optical perspective of other portions, and altered or completely ignored yet other portions where the projections did not suit his artistic vision. As a result, these paintings are composites containing elements that are "eyeballed" along with ones that are "optics-based." Further, starting at the same time, the unique look of the projected image began to exert a strong influence on the appearance of other works even where optical projections had not been directly used as an aid.

• The Irish Times
  June 13, 2013 Thursday
• • The early history of the camera.

• Although Chinese and Greek philosophers had described the basic principles of optics and the camera as early as the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and a Persian scientist Alhazen Ibn Al-Haytham had invented the first pinhole camera in about AD1000, the true story of photography started in 1826 with Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce. He took the world's first known photographic image View from the Window at le Gras after having perfected a photographic process called heliography that he had invented in 1822.

  He used a camera obscura which had previously only been used for viewing and drawing purposes. He showed how to let light draw the picture instead, though it did take eight hours of exposure to produce and the image faded quickly.

• In 1837, after having worked in partnership with Niepce until his death, another Frenchman Louis Daguerre produced the first daguerreotype an image that was fixed, didn't fade and took less than 30 minutes of light exposure. A few years later he came up with the first real practical camera and modern photography was born.

  Throughout the remainder of the 1800s, scientists would make gradual improvements on the camera and different methods of exposures. In the late 1800s George Eastman invented black and white camera film and a small box camera called the Kodak. By 1963 Edwin Land's company Polaroid had introduced instant colour film.

  From that time on, many improvements were made to cameras, with features added and quality improved. Photography became extremely popular as a hobby and began to be recognised as an art form and included in renowned galleries. Photojournalism also became an important part of reporting the news.

  In the 1990s digital cameras were introduced to the mass market by Kodak and today are the most popular type of camera.

• The Exfoliate for Facebook app developers found removing content by hand was tedious and practically impossible. They created Exfoliate to remove any post, comment, like or photo, whether made by you or by others, older than a time you specify. It can also remove posts, comments, likes, and photos put there by users on their friends' walls.

  Similarly, Tweetdelete allows users to protect their privacy by automatically deleting posts older than a specified age from their Twitter feed. The app allows users to delete all their tweets at once (up to 3,200 tweets), and also helps make it easier to delete multiple tweets in one go.

  Tweeticide and TweetEraser are other services to delete Tweets from Twitter. Both are simple web-based tools to delete selected tweets or tweets in bulk.

  The Last Night Never Happened app helps users undo social media wrongs by deleting incriminating digital evidence from an evening you want to forget. It links to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that you can delete selected photos, posts, and tweets for a chosen number of hours.

  Global sensationBut, as it warns, deletion is forever: "Should you choose to use Last Night Never Happened to delete your Facebook or Twitter posts, we will not be able to help you retrieve them. When we say 'Last Night Never Happened', we mean it."

  While this deletion may be forever, it is not always possible to completely remove certain things online, according to Cosgrove.

  "There is very little you can do when you become a global sensation for doing something funny or bad. This only happens to a small minority of people, but is more difficult for people with an unusual or unique name."

  He cited the PwC employees who found themselves in hot water over emails rating the looks of their female colleagues. "When you Google them it comes up. There's not a whole lot you can do to remove things from Google especially when they go viral."

  
  
  LOAD-DATE: June 12, 2013
  
  LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
  
  PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

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• In the late nineteenth century, dissension in the ranks of amateur photography societies in Europe began to erupt. The organizations had been formed in the mid-1800s to promote the medium of photography, but there was disagreement as to how this should be done. Some members were interested primarily in the technical aspects of the camera and its capacity for creating accurate reproductions, and some were devoted to the medium's artistic possibilities. Within this second group, there were two camps—those who preferred to exploit the camera's detailed description of the world in front of it; and those who wanted to develop its impressionistic and expressive potential. As the turn of the century approached, these divisions became increasingly sharp. One incident that crystallized the problem arose over the hanging of the 1891 exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, in which Henry Peach Robinson backed the inclusion of an Impressionist photograph by George Davison. Its refusal eventually led to Robinson's defection from the group; in 1892, he and several like-minded individuals formally seceded from the Royal Photographic Society and formed their own association, the Linked Ring. The group dedicated itself to the advancement of the art of photography and conducted itself much like a secret society—each member was a "link" and possessed a pseudonym to be used at the meetings, which were conducted as formal, Symbolist-inspired ceremonies. The controversy between the two aesthetic camps—those who insisted that photographs should not be altered at any stage of development and those who believed that such manual intervention was necessary to make clear the artist's role—was continued in lively debates that clarified the aesthetic role of photography in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art.

  • Pictorialism History

• Pictorialism in America
• After the introduction of the handheld amateur camera by Kodak in 1888, patrician gentlemen with artistic ambitions no longer dominated the medium of photography. As an army of weekend "snapshooters" invaded the photographic realm, a small but persistent group of photographers staked their medium's claim to membership among the fine arts. They rejected the point-and-shoot approach to photography and embraced labor-intensive processes such as gum bichromate printing, which involved hand-coating artist papers with homemade emulsions and pigments, or they made platinum prints, which yielded rich, tonally subtle images. Such photographs emphasized the role of the photographer as craftsman and countered the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium. Alfred Stieglitz was the most prominent spokesperson for these photographers in America, and in 1902 he and several like-minded associates in the New York Camera Club—including Gertrude Käsebier (1987.1100.13), and Frank Eugene (33.43.303), who came to New York from Ohio and eventually founded a school devoted to Pictorial photography. Other American Pictorialist photographers, such as F. Holland Day (33.43.158), who had mounted the first important exhibition of American Pictorial photography in 1900—The New School of American Photography at the Royal Photographic Society in England—chose to maintain independence from the group in order to pursue aesthetic goals away from Stieglitz's opinionated and often overbearing personality. Others, among them Adolph de Meyer (49.55.327), became associated with the Photo-Secession by Stieglitz's invitation.

• Introduction to Stereo Photography

  • Charles Wheatstone's Stereo Photography Discovery
• In what seems like an amazing coincidence, Charles Wheatstone announced his discovery of the principles of stereoscopic vision in 1838, and only 6 months later Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre announced their respective discoveries of photography. Ever since, people have been combining the two. In fact, some of the first stereo photos were taken by Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the positive/negative approach to photography.  

  3D or stereoscopic photography uses two images of a scene taken from slightly different viewpoints—called a stereo pair.
• At a quick glance the images in a stereo pair look identical but have small differences. When viewed side-by-side, with the left eye seeing only the left image and the right eye only the right. The two 2D images are combined in your mind into a single 3D image, a process called fusion, and the small differences in the images produce the illusion of depth.
• Once stereo photos started to circulate and grow in popularity, efforts began in earnest to develop a viewer that would make viewing them more convenient and less expensive. One of the first such viewers was invented by David Brewster, who exclaimed enthusiastically after seeing the results "No portrait ever painted, and no statue ever carved, approximates in the slightest to the living reality now before us." The most popular viewer was designed by Boston's Oliver Wendall Holmes—called the Holmes stereoscope. Once these inexpensive, easy to use viewers were widely available, views of foreign places, interesting people and events, and other scenes of all kinds, became the rage in Victorian homes. In an era when travel was slow and difficult, stereo cards opened an inexpensive window onto the world. Millions of these cards were sold in stores, by catalog, and even by door to door salesmen. You can find some of these cards on eBay and in almost any antique shop. Some, like those taken by famous photographers or showing scenes from historic events such as the Civil War, are very expensive and are rapidly disappearing as collectors gather them up. These mass—produced stereo cards (also called stereoviews, stereographs and stereoscopic photographs) have two prints mounted side-by-side on a 7 x 3.5 inch piece of cardboard. To see the 3D effect you insert the card into a Holmes viewer and view it through a pair of eyepieces. For almost a century people would gather in the parlor and pass a viewer around—exclaiming and discussing each stereo photo as it circulated.

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• xpatriate Englishman Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904),   a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing   animal and human movement imperceptible to the human eye. Hired by railroad   baron Leland Stanford in 1872, Muybridge used photography to prove that   there was a moment in a horse’s gallop when all four hooves were   off the ground at once. He spent much of his later career at the University   of Pennsylvania, producing thousands of images that capture progressive   movements within fractions of a second.

• A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE
   CARTE DE VISITE
• Carte  de Visite   photographs--small albumen prints mounted on cards 2-1/2 by  4 inches--were wildly popular and made for decades in countries  around the world. The format was an international standard; for  the first time, relatives and friends could exchange portraits,  knowing they would find a place in the recipient's family  album--whether that album was located in Brooklyn, Berlin or  Brazil. In addition, unlike earlier photographs made with such  processes as the daguerreotype and ambrotype, cartes de  visite could be sent through the mail without the need for a  bulky case and fragile cover-glass. Their small size also made  them relatively inexpensive, and they became so widespread that by  1863 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes would write, "Card portraits, as  everybody knows, have become the social currency, the  'green-backs' of civilization."
   
    The  predecessors of cartes de visite were calling cards. During  the 1850s, it was the custom to present one's calling card at the  time of a social visit. These cards were smaller than today's  business cards, frequently consisting of a name engraved and  printed on glossy stock; in later years, designs became more  elaborate. Families would often provide decorative baskets or  trays to receive calling cards from visitors. During the 1850s,  there were sporadic reports of photographers in the U.S. or Europe  preparing photographic calling cards, in which the portrait  replaces the engraved name. The example shown here is a rare  survivor: a salt print 1-7/8 inches tall on glossy card stock, 2"  x 3-1/4". Other early salt print calling cards vary in size.

  • Carte De Visite - The Original Business Card

• Carte de visite

• The carte de visite (abbreviated CdV or CDV, and also spelled carte-de-visite or erroneously referred to as carte de ville) was a type of small photograph which was patented in Paris, France by photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854, although first used by Louis Dodero.^[1][2] It was usually made of an albumen print, which was a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card. The size of a carte de visite is 54.0 mm (2.125 in) × 89 mm (3.5 in) mounted on a card sized 64 mm (2.5 in) × 100 mm (4 in). In 1854, Disdéri had also patented a method of taking eight separate negatives on a single plate, which reduced production costs. The Carte de Visite was slow to gain widespead use until 1859, when Disdéri published Emperor Napoleon III's photos in this format.^[3] This made the format an overnight success, and the new invention was so popular it was known as "cardomania"^[4] and eventually spread throughout the world.

   

  Each photograph was the size of a visiting card, and such photograph cards became enormously popular and were traded among friends and visitors. The immense popularity of these card photographs led to the publication and collection of photographs of prominent persons. "Cardomania" spread throughout Europe and then quickly to America. Albums for the collection and display of cards became a common fixture in Victorian parlors.

   

  By the early 1870s, cartes de visite were supplanted by "cabinet cards," which were also usually albumen prints, but larger, mounted on cardboard backs measuring 110 mm (4.5 in) by 170 mm (6.5 in). Cabinet cards remained popular into the early 20th century, when Kodak introduced the Brownie camera and home snapshot photography became a mass phenomenon.

• A BRIEF HISTORY OF HIGH SPEED PHOTOGRAPHY 1851-1930
• The beginning of high speed photography might be considered to be William Henry Fox Talbot's experiment in 1851. He attached a page of the London Times newspaper to a wheel, which was rotated in front of his wet plate camera in a darkened room. As the wheel rotated, Talbot exposed a few square inches of the newspaper page for about 1/2000th of a second, using spark illumination from Leyden jars. This experiment resulted in a readable image.

• Collodion processes were capable of recording microscopically fine detail, so their use for some special purposes continued long after the advent of the gelatin dry plate. The wet plate collodion process was still in use in the printing industry in the 1960s for line and tone work (mostly printed material involving black type against a white background) as for large work it was much cheaper than gelatin film. One collodion process, the tintype, was still in limited use for casual portraiture by some itinerant and amusement park photographers as late as the 1930s, by which time tintypes were already regarded as quaintly old-fashioned.

   

  The collodion process is said to have been invented, almost simultaneously, by Frederick Scott Archer and Gustave Le Gray in about 1850. During the subsequent decades of its popularity, many photographers and experimenters refined or varied the process.

  • The Collodian Process

• The discovery of anaglypic 3-D appeared in the 1850's as the result of experiments by the Frenchman Joseph D'Almeida. Color separation took place using red/green or red/green filters and early anaglyphs were displayed using glass stereo lantern slides.William Friese-Green created the first 3-D anaglypic motion pictures in 1889 which first went on show to the public in 1893. These anaglypic films designated as plasticons or plastigrams enjoyed great success during the 1920's. The films used a single film with the green image emulsion on one side of the film and the red image emulsion on the other. In 1922, an interactive plasticon opened at the Rivoli Theater in New York titled "Movies of the Future". The film provided the viewer with an optional ending. The happy ending was viewed using the green filter whilst the tragic ending could be seen using the red filter.

• Demachy was, with Émile Joachim Constant Puyo, the leader of the French Pictorial movement in France. His aesthetic sophistication and skill with the gum bichromate technique, which he revived in 1894 and pressed into the service of fine art photography, were internationally renowned. With the gum medium, he was able to achieve the appearance of a drawing or printmaking process-in this photograph, he has added marks characteristic of etching during intermediate stages of development-in order to advocate photography's membership in the fine arts by revealing the intervention of the photographer's hand in the printmaking stage of the photographic process. The result attested to Demachy's mastery of his medium, but also proved his ability to unify a composition and select significant details from the myriad of facts available in his negatives. In this picture, Demachy has gently elided the background and erased the features of the left third of the image in order to emphasize the grace and delicacy of the ballet dancer that is its subject.

  • About the photographer - Robert Demachy

• Behavior
   The scenarios, rules, stimuli, incentives, and narratives envisioned by the designers come alive in the behaviors they encourage and elicit from the players, whether individual or social. A purposefully designed video game can be used to train and educate, to induce emotions, to test new experiences, or to question the way things are and envision how they might be. Game controllers are extensions and enablers of behaviors, providing in some cases (i.e. Marble Madness) an uncanny level of tactility.

   

  Aesthetics
   Visual intention is an important consideration, especially when it comes to the selection of design for an art museum collection. As in other forms of design, formal elegance has different manifestations that vary according to the technology available. The dry and pixilated grace of early games like M.U.L.E. and Tempest can thus be compared to the fluid seamlessness of flOw and vib-ribbon. Just like in the real world, particularly inventive and innovative designers have excelled at using technology’s limitations to enhance a game’s identity—for instance in Yars’ Revenge.

   

  Space
   The space in which the game exists and evolves—built with code rather than brick and mortar—is an architecture that is planned, designed, and constructed according to a precise program, sometimes pushing technology to its limits in order to create brand new degrees of expressive and spatial freedom. As in reality, this space can be occupied individually or in groups. Unlike physical constructs, however, video games can defy spatial logic and gravity, and provide brand new experiences like teleportation and ubiquity.

   

  Time
   How long is the experience? Is it a quick five minutes, as in Passage? Or will it entail several painstaking years of bliss, as in Dwarf Fortress? And whose time is it anyway, the real world’s or the game’s own, as in Animal Crossing? Interaction design is quintessentially dynamic, and the way in which the dimension of time is expressed and incorporated into the game—through linear or multi-level progressions, burning time crushing obstacles and seeking rewards and goals, or simply wasting it—is a crucial design choice.

  • Interactive Design Traits

• The Rosetta Stone
• A valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs, the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary
   of his coronation.

• In previous years the family of the Ptolemies had lost control of certain parts of the country. It had taken their armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta, and parts of southern Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back under the government's control.

   

  Before the Ptolemaic era (that is before about 332 BC), decrees in hieroglyphs such as this were usually set up by the king. It shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times that the priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were now issuing such decrees. The list of good deeds done by the king for the temples hints at the way in which the support of the priests was ensured.

   

  The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is immense.

   

  Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them.

   

  Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

   

  Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found.

   

  The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802, with only one break. Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable, 'important' objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at Holborn.

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• London—Several years ago, discussions of art and technology usually began with the handy citation of C. P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” assertion that art and science did not mix, that “literary culture,” traditionally the lodestone of the arts, was separated from “scientific culture” by a yawning gap. In the most modern arts today, the gap no longer yawns. It hardly exists.

   

  Even a passing glance at what is happening to the visual and performing arts will confirm that the scene is anything but Snow-bound. In London, as in New York, art and science intertwine like sine-waves crisscrossing on the screen of an oscilloscope.
• Artists, of course, have always responded to the technology that springs from scientific discovery. The interaction between art and technology might be traced all the way back to the prehistoric cave painters, or to Leonardo Da Vinci’s efforts to reconcile artistic inspiration with mechanical invention, or to the impact on studio painting of putting pigments in portable tubes. Modern artists have even used technology to ridicule technology. Pop artists Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg put down the paintbrush for the silk-screen stencil and made salable, venerated art works of Brillo boxes, soup cans and everyday newspaper photos, using the images of the supermarket and the scandal-sheet to mock commercialist, sensation-seeking society. Jean Tinguely’s jitterbugging junk constructions, programmed for sound as well as movement, sarcastically comment on society’s mania for mechanistic efficiency by purposely breaking down or even destroying themselves.
• Drawing By Number

  • Digigram-Drawing by Numbers
• The cathode ray tube is instrumental in creating various forms of computer-generated art. The picture of Norbert Wiener, a major deity in the cybernetic pantheon, was produced by computer methods. It is a “digigram” translation of a 35-mm black and white slide of the famous author of “The Human Use of Human Beings” and is composed entirely of numbers. It is the work of H. Phillip Peterson of Control Data Corporation’s Digigraphic Laboratories in Burlington, Mass.
• Roughly related to the half-tone dot structure of a newspaper illustration, the picture is composed of two-digit numbers which represent the density of color in the area they would occupy in the slide, based on a “gray scale” of 100 gradations. The higher the number, the darker the color. A Control Data Model 280 Digigraphic Scanner was used in conjunction with a Model 160 computer to scan the 35mm slide, averaging the color density in each of 100,000 “cell” areas. A Calcomp Model 564 plotter, driven on-line by a Control Data 3200 computer, was then used to plot the digits within the cells, which are .115 inch squares in the original plot.
• “Cybernetic Serendipity” promises to be an exciting and enlightening show , largely because of Miss Reichardt’s years of planning. As an illustration of how technology has affected artists and the art-technology exchange, it recalls the first major art-engineer liaison performance put on in New York in the Fall of 1966 called “Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering.” This program of ten “events,” conceived by Happenings veterans and artists and choreographers active in earlier Judson Memorial Church presentations in New York, was staged in the 25th Armory (home of the “Fighting 69th” Regiment of Jimmy Cagney fame), the same site of the legendary, taste-tottering 1913 Armory Show of modern art, which similarly drew howls and hosannas.

• E.A.T., Inc.

   

  Here, it should be mentioned that “Nine Evenings” evolved primarily from an organization pioneered by Rauschenberg and Kluver, E.A.T., Inc. (Experiments in Art and Technology) which was formed to familiarize the artist with the realities of technology while indulging the technician’s penchant to transcend mere practicalities of his discipline. EAT has consulting members such as Cage and Kepes and has enlisted support from I.B.M., A.T.&T., A.F.L.-C.I.O. It sponsors a variety of lectures and dialogues on subjects ranging from lasers and holography or polymers and acrylics to computer generated images or the physiology of sound and vision. It has grown rapidly, taking on correspondent groups in 35 cities in North America and Europe and was to have its first international conference this month in Manhattan.

   

  In London, Barbara Latham, wife of painter John Latham, originated a somewhat similar concept in the Artists Placement Group, active in getting industry to retain artists to work in factories (which, as a matter of fact, is a more likely haunt of today’s artist than most museums). The APG notion is that artists will supposedly generate new ideas for industry, while gaining an organic knowledge of the true properties of manufactured materials and process. In the sense that new art forms often grow from the inherent nature of materials, the APG (which has an eight-member board and receives 1000 pounds annually from the Arts Council) may prove to be a rewarding venture.

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• Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968) was one of the most important exhibitions of the 60s - kept open longer due to popular demand. That year, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, proposed a bold teleology of sculpture leading towards the cybernetic. So what happened to the robotic exhibition and computer generated art work? As proficiency with technology grew and computers became commonplace, the technological art exhibition seemed to become an anachronism. The only acceptable cyborg was the homemade kind produced by artists such as Bruce Lacey. Contemporary use of technology in art has become located in its own sphere of artistic practice, with galleries and groups dedicated to new media and new technologies with a special emphasis on the 'hope' of a super connected New Babylon. Why is there such a divisive split between art exhibitions and media art exhibitions? Should curators be more embracing of technologies? Is there good reason to be mistrustful of the use of technology in art and exhibition making?