Folks are inclined to understand artwork and know-how as two separate schools which might be as totally different as day and night time.
After we consider artwork, most of us naturally image framed work and sculptures in a museum corridor. Technology, however, brings to thoughts computer systems and futuristic machines.
Nonetheless, they’re not precisely worlds aside. Tech has had a rising position within the artistic world for years, serving to artists push boundaries and specific their concepts in methods they couldn’t have finished earlier than.
The potential for making digital artwork was an important leap of innovation when computer systems first arrived. Whereas we’ve got grown accustomed to such improvements, the affect of tech is clearer than ever right now.
After we go to artwork reveals, we regularly get blown away by not simply their magnificence, but in addition by how ‘sensible’ they’re by way of their capacity to work together with us. Nonetheless, that is simply the tip of the iceberg as we proceed to discover additional the combination of artwork and tech.
We spoke to 2 native artists to be taught and perceive extra about this intertwined relationship, and the way precisely they’re utilizing tech to remodel the artwork world.
Haikel Yusuff
Experimenting with tech is an enormous a part of Haikel Yusuff’s job as Chief Artistic Technologist at MeshMinds, an IMDA-incubated artistic studio that specialises in digital actuality (VR) and augmented actuality (AR).
We’re positively at some extent the place know-how is considerably ubiquitous in the best way we create. From ideation to completion, we’ve got entry to a lot {hardware} and software program at our disposal, and that’s wonderful.
“Implementing tech permits me to create an interactive interface between the works and the consumer, [adding] one other dimension to the expertise,” says Haikel.
So as a substitute of simply viewing with their eyes, folks can use the actions of their our bodies and their voices to participate within the art work too.
One of many trusty instruments below his belt is Fb’s Spark AR, which offers the face-tracking know-how that permits him to design enjoyable Instagram selfie-filters.
Selfie-filters are an enormous pattern on Instagram proper now. Persons are hooked on sharing all kinds of bizarre and wacky iterations — from filters that inform you what kind of Pokemon you might be, to enjoying video games by blinking your eyes.
Haikel tells us his very first Instagram filter was made as a commentary to “counter the selfie tradition”. It obscures your options with a mixture of cut-outs from vastly totally different faces, rendering you unrecognisable.
Folks have change into part of his artwork by snapping and sharing their ‘selfies’ with the filter “over 9 million instances”.
“Take a look at how main tech corporations are investing in wearable know-how like AR glasses. When [AR devices] change into the brand new norm like how smartphones are right now, I believe we are going to see an abundance of artwork round us, even when it’s by digital means,” he says.
MeshMinds’ work will likely be displayed at Singapore Art Week 2020 until 19 January. In collaboration with six native artists, they produced an interactive strolling path. Referred to as AR.T Path, it lets folks expertise public artwork within the Tanjong Pagar district each bodily and digitally.
Sculptures and murals have adorned our city surroundings for years, however with this new path, guests will get to work together with them in a brand new and recent approach because it allows artwork to come back alive on-screen.
Urich Lau
As an skilled artist and impartial curator who has exhibited in nations all all over the world, Urich Lau constructed his profession based mostly on a stable basis in high-quality arts.
His “geeky pursuits” led him to select up coding and analysis “scientific theories and technological strategies” might be utilized to his work.
As an avid camera-lover, Urich cites it for instance to clarify how know-how all the time had a job in making artwork.
About 200 years in the past, the digicam obscura (pinhole digicam) was invented. And since then, artists or image-makers have continually been adopting new instruments to work with.
“Even after they weren’t electrical or digital, new instruments such because the paintbrush had been additionally applied sciences of their time that enabled artists to create. I don’t see know-how as a change, however a pure development to creating artwork,” says Urich.
Urich even shaped a collective known as INTER–MISSION that’s devoted to exploring discourses of know-how in artwork.
One in all its latest initiatives utilised digital manipulation to get folks enthusiastic about how know-how impacts our recollections.
Outfitted with VR goggles, guests checked out pictures of Singapore’s landmark buildings and had the ability to ‘take away’ them from sight, leaving the areas empty the place they as soon as stood.
At Singapore Art Week 2020, Urich is one among 9 artists behind DE:VOTED, a seven-day stay audiovisual exhibit from 13 to 19 January, that includes installations, workshops and guided excursions.
The exhibit options the usage of a 360-degree digicam to seize all of the exercise taking place from the center of the gallery, permitting guests to change into a part of an “open surveillance”. They will additionally watch the playbacks of those recordings every day.
“I’m adopting the concept that tech is in every single place, seen or unseen,” says Urich.
Tech Is Everywhere At Singapore Art Week 2020
The best way Haikel and Urich see it, know-how has been utilized in artwork ever since folks began innovating.
In latest years nonetheless, the pattern is rising in a approach that opens our eyes to it greater than ever, as know-how permits individuals to get extra deeply concerned.
Past this duo, many different artists are additionally showcasing this phenomenon at Singapore Art Week, which returns for its eighth version from 11 to 19 January 2020.
With the theme ‘Art Takes Over’, this annual celebration is full of greater than 100 artwork occasions taking place islandwide, together with the Gentle To Night time Competition 2020: Invisible Cities, and Singapore Biennale 2019.
Guests can get a style of ‘sensible artwork’ at Gentle To Night time’s Art Skins on Monuments: Metropolis States of Thoughts, the place the facades of seven landmark buildings will likely be remodeled by projection mapping.
A number of the areas additionally characteristic an interactive component that permits you to scan a QR code together with your smartphone, so you’ll be able to contribute your individual customisable tile to the projected picture.
On the Singapore Biennale, Lawrence Lek’s 2065 brings guests right into a gaming station set 45 years sooner or later, the place they will get immersed in “a totally furnished parallel universe” by a online game expertise.
Past witnessing the wedding of tech in artwork, you can too personally be taught extra about it from artists at The Open Workshop.
By a sequence of exhibitions and public workshops, artists forged the highlight away from their art work and shine it on the technological processes behind their art-making as a substitute.
Thanks To Technology, We’re All In On The Enjoyable
Technology has given rise to numerous methods of accumulating significant suggestions from massive teams of individuals, and Singapore Art Week 2020 can also be using a enjoyable mechanism to search out out what guests loved most on the occasion.
Utilizing facial recognition know-how, an interactive digital display screen outdoors Metropolis Corridor MRT station will detect folks’s faces as they go by. As an alternative of clicks and ‘likes’, passersby can merely flash their smile to vote for his or her favorite art work.
And as right now’s saying goes: ‘If it wasn’t on Instagram, did it actually occur?’ That stated, it’s protected to say that folks will likely be posting Insta-worthy pictures of their favorite reveals on social media all through the occasion.
Furthermore, Singapore Art Week 2020 has two AR filters out there throughout the period of the occasion that you could play with and see how ‘Art Takes Over’ your Instagram tales.
To seek out out extra about these exhibitions and discover the complete checklist of programmes, go to the Singapore Art Week 2020 web site right here. You too can observe the occasion’s Fb web page and Instagram profile to remain up-to-date, and use the hashtags #sgartweek and #ArtTakesOver to affix in on the enjoyable!
This text was written in collaboration with the Nationwide Arts Council.
Featured Picture Credit score: Urich Lau / Singapore Art Week