Technology: The Dark Arts of Art

Tom Penney Art, Spirituality and Technology

Technology:

The Dark Arts of Art

Tom Penney


How compatible are spirituality, art and technology? Does the use of computers,

machines and digital processes reduce an artist’s spiritual potential? We tend to link

the spiritual function of art with the unique identity of the artist. Technology carries

with it connotations of control, power and left-brain thinking. In an age of “information

overload” we might assume that technology removes people from their unique self,

rather than draws them closer to it. Artists of deconstructive postmodernism use

technology to expose and de-mystify art. Some theorists have claimed with scorn

that technology is to blame. Others look to a change in ideology that brings them

closer together. These optimists focus on the role of new media art and the future of

life and mythology when interfacing with cutting edge sciences. Artists are finding

ways to conceptualise technology as a spiritual metaphor, and as the extension and

result of a human’s imagination. The drawing together of quantum physics with ideas

of an interconnected spiritual universe facilitates this understanding. Ultimately, “The

challenge facing the postmodern artist is to make art that brings material, spiritual,

and media worlds together in creative interplay” (Alexenberg, 110, 2006) and not to

adhere to attitudes that dismiss their connection.

From The Enlightenment to Postmodernism, spirituality and technology in art have

been consciously set apart, essentially as opposites. William Blake once said “Art is

the Tree of Life… Science is the Tree of Death” (Kuspit, 163, 2004), and this was

reflected in art of the time. William Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her

Last Berth to be Broken up (Image 1) shows a dirty tugboat, symbolic of technology

in industrial society, bringing about the end of the crafted, feminine majesty of the

Temeraire. For a contemporary equivalent, Dennis Gabor (who invented the

hologram) once said “I sincerely hope… that machines will never replace the

creative artist, but in good consequence I cannot say that they never could”.

(Reichardt, 70, 1969). At the base of this thinking today are separate ideologies; that

of modernism holding the unique individual and his spiritual self at the centre of art,

and that of deconstructive postmodernism that uses mechanical processes to

expose and demystify visual culture entirely. The former advocates the unconscious

connection and transformative state between artist and artwork where the latter

disrupts this connection by conscious use of a tool (Alexander, 2001). The presence

of these two ideologies in conflict creates a problem for the artist today, who feels

that if he or she adopts technology, will be then lumped into the category of the


deconstructive postmodernist or “post artist”; “elevat[ing] the banal over the

enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred [and] cleverness over creativity.”(Kuspit,

i, 2004) One feels that technology can only be used in art that contradicts art, and

that being a painter or following some traditional craft will allow us to remain “true” to

the nature of high or spiritual art, considering our proximity to personal mark making

and the relationship to the medium.

1. William Turner,

The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her last Berth to be Broken Up, 1838

Donald Kuspit is a theorist who situates himself within this conflict and upholds that

painting and traditional crafts are the most spiritual practises in art. Kuspit follows the

words of Arthur Danto when he claims “The End of Art” in Postmodernism via

technological processes that remove the artist from his religious craft. According to

Kuspit, the art of Andy Warhol (“an art of death” (Kuspit, 170, 2004)) has set a

precedent for “postart”; a term coined by Alan Kaprow to refer to postmodern art void

of a higher purpose and of “shallow, unreflective banality” (Cole, 2004). Kuspit

alludes to concerns of writers like Walter Benjamin who have discussed the use of

technology, especially photography and printing, as causes for the loss of originality

and humanness in art. Kuspit uses Gauguin’s words; “photography… is not

“beneficial” for art… It belongs to the “aberration caused by physics, chemistry,

mechanics… which suggests that Warhol, who identified with the machine… was not


an artist.” (Kuspit, 163, 2004) Kuspit would prefer that we return to art-as-religion and

take Vincent Van Gogh as our model, to whom painting was a faith. Kuspit’s solution

is epitomised in a group he calls The New Old Masters, who include Lucian Freud,

Paula Rego, Avigdor Arikha and James Valerio (images 2-4). These artists follow

past models set by the Old Masters of painting and are painters themselves. I think

that Kuspit’s thinking is a resignation to the past and a denial of the possibility that

humans and technology have potential together. Technology is, after all, a product of

human innovation and creativity. Kuspit’s is a contrary attitude jumping to the most

immediate ideology opposite of postmodernism. There are ways to advance and

combine the functions of spirituality and technology in art in fascinating ways, so that

one helps to achieve the aims of the other.

The New Old Master painters:

2. Lucien Freud, Reflection, 1985


3. James Valerio, Monkey Still Life, 1994

4. Paula Rego, The Maids, 1984

I’d have to emphasise that art and technology are historically inseparable, and that

technology can be used to achieve the spiritual aim of the former. From the earliest

cave paintings, artists have had to adopt forms of technology, or tools, to achieve the

desire to express. In early paintings, the act of grinding pigments could be seen as a

form of tool that helps art and the communication of the spirit world (image 5). Even

a paintbrush is a manufactured object that sits between the artist and the canvas.

Artists have always employed even the most rudimentary of technologies to achieve

a mark. Mark making results in the drawing of something recognised as something

other than what it is, whether it be a figurative drawing (the pen represents a real-


world object) or a canvas that conveys mood (the paint represents a feeling). Art will

forever be the arrangement of matter (via technology or not) to endow it with

significance above the value of the actual material itself (Pepperell and Punt, 93,

2000). High Modernist abstracts were never purely just marks, as they conveyed

spiritual, psychoanalytical, and intellectual principals. Technology has facilitated

many movements in art over the past 200 years from printing presses, to portable

paint tubes, to the camera. The “marks” of photography and video, (printed or

projected pixels and dots) form images of that which they are not, and therefore

carry meanings beyond what they are as raw “materials”. In Bill Viola’s art,

technology serves as an aid but does not remove the artist from his idea and his

desire to meaningfully express. “Media magic” never takes over the archetypal

subject of his work, it only enhances it. Technology, from its primitive state to its

most advanced state is always a means to an end. Postart is only a type of art that

allows the dominance of technology to become part of its subject.

5. Cave Painting from Lascaux, France, 15 000 to 10 000 BCE


Spiritually-focused artists have often claimed mark making as a process of

alchemy, where the raw materials and resulting marks are transformed into objects

that carry “higher” meaning. Joseph Beuys believed in alchemy. In Fat Battery,

Beuys used electricity as a metaphor for the spark of life, giving a higher spiritual

purpose to a piece of technology (Image 6). Alchemy is both scientific and based on

artistic transformation. Aristotle believed that all matter first exists in a state called

Prima Materia, and that certain forces applied to it would give it the distinct

properties we know as separate materials, elements and compounds. A relationship

between technologies, living things and materials is that they are all composed of

codes of matter, and in the case of living things and computers, both seem to be

animated by some force that uses these codes to change their basic state into

something spiritually charged or alive.

6. Joseph Beuys, Fat Battery, 1963


Artists have capitalised on this idea of code in technology as a metaphor for spiritual

animation. In this way, artists of technology use digital processes as a raw material

carrying meaning the same way a painter may do so with their paints and canvas.

Mel Alexenberg both theorises and puts into practise the codes of technology as a

reflection of the code of life. He bases this on the practise of Gematria – using

mathematics to find spiritual significance within the Hebrew alphabet. He believes

“The twenty-two sacred Hebrew letters are profound, primal, spiritual forces. They

are in effect, the raw material of Creation…” (Alexenberg, 110, 2006) Each letter has

been assigned a colour by Kabbalists. Using this connection, Alexenberg created the

interactive artwork Torah Spectrograph – where lines of text are translated first into

the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and then into a colour experience. Everyone

enters their birthday into a computer and can “watch his bar mitzvah portion scrolling

down the monitor in bands of colour”. (Alexenberg, 111, 2006) Alexenberg also

translated the bible into colour this way. He claims that codes in the spiritual realm of

the Hebrew letters and in the physical realm of atomic structure find a “parallel in the

realm of digital media” and that by translating them into a fluid colour experience we

can uncover “hidden patterns of the Torah”. (Alexenberg, 111, 2006) Perhaps this is

“alchemy” – Alexenberg animates the prima materia of bits and bytes with a code of

spiritual origin to create an artwork with meaning and significance. This shows that

technology can be employed to say new things about traditional spiritualities in

refreshed, even universal, ways. The Torah can now be “experienced” fluidly and

aesthetically in a transformed state without the more worldly issues of word-

interpretation. Colour is a sensory medium that unlocks the experience to everyone.

The idea is certainly original, and not retrospective or resigning its use of technology

as something that hinders innovation in art, or in the communication of spirituality.

There are philosophies that support this technological/spiritual fusion in art. The

major theories behind quantum physics correlate with and describe many features of

mystical traditions; that the universe is not made of separate parts, but rather

everything is the whole, and part of a unified interconnected web of energy. Carl

Jung saw this. His theory of synchronicity, based on the Chinese divination of the I-

Ching, was inspired directly by quantum physics – both theories describe

occurrences in the universe as based on chance, tendencies and patterns rather

than Newtonian physics that provides set rules and causes. It could be that the


problems of deconstructive postmodernism in art discussed earlier reflect a world

that has resigned to this Newtonian paradigm. “the chance, labyrinthine,

manipulatory play of signs without meaning” (Gablick, 179, 1990) is Jean

Baudrilliard’s reflection upon visual culture in a world with only cause and no

purpose. We think we know everything, and quantum physics helps to inspire

scientists that there is “more to what is seen”; like a mythology in its own right –

existing in theory but not yet proven to be. I think in this thinking lies a solution to

respectfully fuse art, spirituality and technology. A change in paradigm can create

new mysteries and myths ahead of artists, so that they may be original in exploring

what is beyond them.

A complimentary view is held by Suzie Gablick who believes that the path away from

deconstructive postmodernism in art is to “remythicise consciousness”. We must

rediscover mythic thinking and the “transpersonal dimensions of the psyche… where

there is no boundaries, so that all things flow into each other” (Gablick, 185, 1990) to

escape a dead-end in art. An interconnected thinking appears in the transformational

work Manscape (Image 7) by Richard Rosenblum and Gablick praises it with the

words:

“If a paradigm refers to the pattern of beliefs, perceptions and ways of seeing that

are characteristic of a culture, then Rosenblum’s sculpture breaks through the

dualism of the Newtonian-Cartesian worldview, which has dominated Western

consciousness for over two hundred years” (Gablick, 186, 1990)

7. Richard Rosenblum, Manscape, 1984-85


Roy Ascot embodies this optimistic vision of art, spirituality, science and

technology as both a thinker and artist. Since the 1960s, Ascot has followed a path

parallel to mainstream deconstructive postmodernism. Under Gablick’s thinking, we

would consider him to be a “reconstructive postmodernist” – the less visible shadow

of mainstream postmodernism, “actively seek[ing] pragmatic solutions and to restore

health and aliveness through an empowered new vision” (Gablick, 179, 1990). Roy

Ascot has developed a holistic philosophy that reflects interconnected thinking in

spirituality and new sciences alike. He extends the optimism of modernist thinking

beyond the idea of a “perfect object” (Packer and Jordan, 2000) to relational art

based on connectivity and consciousness. “Remythicised”, interconnected thinking is

reflected in Ascot’s concept of “syncretic reality” (see image 8) where consciousness

and experience involve aspects of all disciplines and universal thinking. In 1989,

Ascot made a work that reflected “the many aspects of the Earth, Gaia, as seen from

a multiplicity of spiritual, scientific, cultural and mythological perspectives” (Ascot, 9,

1990) it was called Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways Across the Whole Earth

(Image 9). Concepts of universal spirituality were combined with views of scientists

and artists, as invitations to participate in the project were sent to a diverse range of

thinkers, from scientists, musicians and architects to aboriginal artists and native

artists of the Americas (Ascot, 9, 1990). The work was interactive, each participant

sent their images and sound files via modem from different nodes around the world.

The aim was to create a harmonised artwork in a state of flux reflecting a world that

is “endlessly transforming” by “reconstituting the worldwide flow of creative data”

(Ascot, 9, 1990). According to Ascot, art of this type reflects earlier modernist artwork

based on transformation and a fluid dialogue between artist and art in a state of non-

duality and transformation. One of his examples is Jackson Pollock, whose

relationship with the canvas reflected the shamanic states of North American sand

painters (Ascot, 237, 1990). I believe that in removing the focus from art objects,

Ascot’s thinking expands the valuable aims of modernism beyond the hang-ups of

the past and places it in the realm of innovation and originality through looking to the

future and the unknown via expanding scientific and technological territory.


8. Diagram of Ascot’s Syncretic Reality showing the relationship of creativity, science

and new technologies within consciousness.

9. Images from Roy Ascot’s Aspects of Gaia, 1989


Artists like Roy Ascot don’t seem to be the best known yet. Other than Bill Viola,

artists of spirituality and technology are relatively experimental and in the

background. Some artists like Olafur Eliasson might employ mechanics to create art

contradictions that force viewers to question spirituality, like in Reversed Waterfall

(Image 10), but a celebration in linkage of the two is not widespread. Some Artists

from different areas of the globe are part of Ascot’s Planetary Collegium - A

transdisciplinary collective that unites new artists and thinkers of optimistic human-

technology relationships. They include Yacov Sharir (Images 11-14), who explores

wearable computers in dance performance, Karin Søndergaard who works with

augmented reality (seeing virtual objects in a real world space using a virtual reality

headset), and finally Eduardo Kac who creates new bacterial strains based on

biblical code (Image 15) and is most famous for Alba, the bioluminescent white rabbit

(Images 16, 17). Despite their lack of fame, there is certainly an excited new group of

artists waiting to step into the light and take art forward into the concerned territory.

10. Olafur Eliasson, Reversed Waterfall, 1998


11. 12.

13. 14.

11 – 14. Images of Yacov Sharir’s wearable dance computers with virtual forms that

follow the movements of the dancers, 2006

15. Eduardo Kac’s, Genesis, 1999 exhibits a bacterial strain made from DNA formed

by translating the bible into code. Internet users can participate in its mutation by

turning ultra-violet lights on and off.


16. Left: Eduardo Kac, GPF Bunny, 2000

17. Right: A photo of Eduardo Kac with Alba the rabbit, who had a gene from a

jellyfish imported into its genome.

Despite the suspicion and apprehension towards technology artists hold in

exploring spiritual concepts, discussion and experimentation is taking place. To deny

technology in the artistic process is stubborn. In the case of Donald Kuspit, denial is

through polar opposition to deconstructive postmodernism, but this seems rash.

Using technology to remove the humanity and uniqueness of artworks has been the

cause of this attitude, but technology never has to necessarily result in this,

especially considering that it has forever aided the artist even in the most basic of

forms. Technology can be as much a part of art-as-spirituality in using code as a

metaphor for the spark of life. Concepts of interconnectedness in spirituality and

quantum physics in science together draw two opposing fields into a mythology that

artists can investigate. Roy Ascot takes up this challenge by employing a holistic

interconnected, transformational thinking in digital media and communications.

Members of The Planetary Collegium form a dispersed group of artists that are ready

to reflect a new paradigm and are an extension of modernist optimism in art.

Through using technology, we can do as Eduardo Kac, and fulfil our function as

creators so long as we do not become arrogant and controlling of life. We must

maintain a healthy inquiry and concern for our world, and if technology can help us to

do this, then the sky is the limit. Fascinating technological discoveries in art can

create mysteries for the whole world; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is

indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke, 1961). vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv


References

Alexander, V.N., Art Versus Science, 2001, accessed 14/10/2008 at

http://www.dactyl.org/directors/vna/Okeeffe.htm

Alexenberg, M, The Future of Art in a Digital Age, 2006, Intellect Books, Bristol

Ascot, R, Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?, 1990 in Art Journal, College Arts

Association of America, New York

Cole, E, Emmet Cole Interviews Donald Kuspit, 2004, accessed 14/10/2008 at

http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/kuspit.html

Gablick, S, The Reenchantment of Art: Reflections on the Two Postmodernisms in

Sacred Interconnections ed. Griffin, D.R. 1990, University of New York Press, New

York

Kuspit, D, The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004, New York

Randall, P and Jordan, K, Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, 2001,

accessed 14/10/2008 at http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Ascott.html

Pepperell, R and Punt, M, The Postdigital Membrane, 2000, Intellect Books, Bristol

Reichardt, J, Cybernetic Serendipity, 1969, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc. Publishers,

New York

Other Reading

McDaniel, C and Robertson, J, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980,

2005, Oxford University Press, New York

Rush, M, New Media in Late 20th Century Art, 1999, Thames and Hudson, London

Tekiner, D.H. Spirituality in Contemporary Art: Struggles for Critical Vitality, 1992,

U.M.I Dissertation Services, Michigan

http://www.dactyl.org/directors/vna/Okeeffe.htm

http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/kuspit.html

http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Ascott.html

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Technology: The Dark Arts of Art