CHRIS ROBINSON
A Case for Seeing - Art & Technology
Abstract
This presentation will give an overview of the history and influence of art & technology and provide examples of how the arts have, can, and must continue to play a critical and instrumental role in the development of science, technology, and culture.
Art and technology has a long history in the visual arts, but never a comfortable one. CP Snow explained the absence of a common language in The Two Cultures, acknowledging the differences of understanding between the arts and sciences, and decades of exposure to additional insight has provided little additional empathy, in the broader art world, for the progressive, linear logic of science and technology or, in broader society, for the heartfelt intuitive emotion of the arts.
However, the advent of the industrial, digital, and information ages, along with the quickly consuming Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical revolution often associated with the emergence of nanotechnology pose issues and questions we can no longer afford to ignore.
Contemporary artists have moved into the realms of digital manipulation, space development, nanotechnology, and it is getting harder to tell, in a new Renaissance, where one discipline stops and another starts. Astronautics, bioengineering, cybernetics, and mathematics all offer compelling changes in our way of life that are too interesting and/or too potentially dangerous to ignore. Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and recently Bill Joy have all heralded the wonders, and potential consequences, of scientific and technological progress.
What role should the artist play? Should we trust the determinations of the societal implications of laser light, miniaturization, space exploration, the Large Hadron Accelerator, and the very notion of seeing solely to science and technologists? Should we ignore the technological inventions that ease and enhance our work – acrylic paint, digital manipulation, and responsive environments? Just as significantly, should we evaluate from a point of ignorance and naiveté, or seek an informed position about what is transpiring and what it means for culture?
The rapid emergence of science effects every aspect of our lives, should be the observational substance of contemporary art, and begs for some method of social measure, evaluation, leadership, and mediation - to an ever curious and increasingly technologically alienated public. It is affecting the way we see, the way we communicate, and will affect the way we lead our lives.
The presentation will offer up-to-date examples of the rapidly evolving science and technology that is changing our world and models of the art that can and will influence and balance our future.
Speaker's Bio
Professor of Art/Member of the NanoCenter, University of South Carolina
Chris Robinson is a professor of art and member of the nanoCenter at the University of South Carolina. He has produced artworks and installations about science and technology throughout his career in subjects ranging from laser light, the early use of computers in the arts and 3D computing, space development, scientific exploration, and recently as a US National Science Foundation funded principal investigator on interdisciplinary teams exploring the societal implications of nanotechnology and bio/nano mechanics. His work is presented and exhibited throughout the United States and Europe at scholarly conferences, museums, and in related publications.