Art and Technology – Where will the future take us?

There can be no doubt that the advancement of technology has had an impact on art. Not only has it increased the ability to share, consider, adore, contemplate, and purchase traditional works, it has in many instances birthed completely new forms of personal expression. It’s doubtful that artists 200 years ago could have imagined creating an artwork that referenced life, death and love in a studio with no paint, no paper, no canvas, charcoal, stone or wood.

(The Last Kiss by Adam Martinakis)

But thanks to software companies like Corel and Adobe today’s digital artists can do just that. With little more than a mouse and a laptop they can create beautiful, moving images. Images that, whilst different to the traditional forms of paint on canvas, have their own story to tell, their own nuances.

The mouse and the computer aren’t the only new tools in the modern artist’s kit bag. It was once a rare site to see someone taking a photograph of a sunset, a passing train, or the patterns in the bark of a tree. It was even rarer to see someone filming the floating path of a plastic bag or the slow dance of two mating insects. Today, it’s hard to go anywhere without seeing someone with a digital camera or smart phone attempting to create their own piece of art. Some would suggest you need only browse Flickr, Instagram or Vimeo to discover the budding artists of today. Without doubt you’ll find art on all of those sites. Yet, without doubt, all on those sites is definitely not art.

Most interesting to us, and most relevant to what we are attempting to achieve with artFido, is when art and technology come together to breathe new life into old works and traditions. This year the Louvre took the momentous step of ditching it’s traditional audio tours for Nintendo based video alternatives. The usage rate for its traditional audio guide had dropped to just 4% of its 8.9 million annual visitors. The museum figured that embracing technology was a necessary step.

“Society has gone digital in a radical way…From the Internet becoming such a central part of our daily lives to the revolution of smartphones, the Louvre’s role is to follow this evolution in society.” – Louvre associate director Agnès Alfandari

Most recently three Japanese artists, Kei Shiratori, Takeshi Mukai and Younghyo Bak, developed a smart phone application that takes well-known paintings and drawings and brings them to life as real-time virtual animations. Taking images as recognizable as the Mona Lisa and the Girl With a Pearl Earring and giving them a new appeal to a new audience isn’t an easy feet. However, the Japanese artists have done just that.

Will the traditional forms of art suffer the same fate at the hands of technology as that of traditional forms of communication? We don’t know, but we hope not. Will technology continue to introduce us to new forms of art and expression? We don’t know, but we hope so. What we do know is that there is nothing certain about art and technology. And maybe that is what makes them both so exciting.

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If you’re interested in seeing some of the most iconic pieces of art come to life on your smartphone, click here or download the ARART application from i-Tunes (it’s free) and scan the following images: