Art and Technology
- PDF / 3,211,825 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 576 x 777.6 pts Page_size
- 49 Downloads / 192 Views
14
extend our power to sense, feel, or do things beyond our immediate selves, an area of overlap occurs between art and technology. Art serves to transform illusion into meaningful experience and is thus a very useful technology. Most often we confine our experience with "art" to museums or concert halls in an effort to relive the experience of someone in times past and compare our experience of an artifact or performance with theirs. This is usually a very safe experience in which what we experience has an official stamp of approval as recognized "culture." The articles in this issue of the MRS Bulletin are meant to expand the definitions we apply to art and technology and to show where the two disciplines overlap and become intertwined, even inextricably matted together.
Technology has long been a concern of art. The means of making art provided through an understanding and use of modern technology are as much the provenience of modern art as the ancient craft secrets of master artisans. Otto Piene, director of the Center for Advanced Visual Study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes the interaction of art and technology are the proper concern of modern artists wishing to make statements about the 20th century using the media of the 20th century. Through the Center for Advanced Visual Study, Piene operates a competitive program for artists who participate in laboratories at MIT, and he has fostered interdisciplinary curriculum development where analysis of how and why things look or behave the way they do is intimately tied to how they were made and what aesthetic effect they can achieve. This point of view has a strong parallel with the paradigm of materials science and engineering in which interactions among structure, processing,
properties, and performance are the focus of research. Technology has often been required to produce objects with outstanding artistic qualities in the service of art, and often artisans have been at the cutting edge of technology. In one example documented by Martha Goodway, a metallurgist at the Conservation Analytical Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution and head of the Historical Metallurgy Society, and the late Prof. William Savage, a physicist at the University of Illinois, wire for harpsichords was made using special compositions and heat treatments in advance of that developed for or required by industry. In a turnabout which is uncommon today, this high-strength wire was then adapted for scientific instrumentation, in this case by Coulomb in his famous pendulum. Underlying this article is a considerable amount of direct measurement of the properties of artifacts as well as a multiyear program of detective work which was required to reconstruct this double connection between art and science. A modern application of this study may be the production of modern harpsichord wire which has the same properties as the ancient wire and which can be strung on ancient instruments, yielding a high degree of acoustic integrity in the production of ancient music. Tec
Data Loading...
