Tangling with technology? It’s an art

Artists have been using various kinds of technology since before there was language to describe it, but now the accelerated pace of change has drawn even technophobes into the game. This year, two of the most talked-about films -- the critically acclaimed “Tarnation,” made for $218 mostly on a Macintosh, and “The Polar Express,” the critical bomb made for $170 million with innovative “performance capture” sensors -- both made headlines for their unconventional technology.

But it was also a year when Steve Reich, who made his name with tape loops in the 1960s, presented a mostly acoustic piece, “You Are (Variations),” with roots in ancient and Renaissance music, and when Laurie Anderson retreated from science in a piece commissioned by NASA.

In perhaps the oddest and most self-consciously technological performance of the year, the Los Angeles-based group Osseus Labyrint offered a piece called “Modern Prometheus LLC” that used so much electricity that audience members with pacemakers were advised to stay home. Some artists, of course, remain Luddites.

Much of the cultural coverage this year involved love-or-hate-’em figures like Mel Gibson or Michael Moore, or long-awaited, crisply orchestrated events like the reopening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Underneath it all moved intangible currents that eventually could be more important: One of them was the gradual peacemaking between artists of all kinds -- including those of skeptical and anti-establishment natures -- and technology.

2004 saw personal technology -- iPods, DVDs, TiVo -- continue to seep into the mainstream of American life, both for artists and for the rest of us. The cellphone is increasingly a venue for everything from personalized ring tones to soap operas and novels.

A range of artists from several genres spoke about how technology was affecting their work, as well as their lives as cultural consumers.

From Jeff Tweedy describing how digital technology makes it easier to rehearse his band Wilco, to writer Virginia Postrel suggesting that we are entering a second, tech-inspired Arts and Crafts movement, to video artist Judy Fiskin lamenting the loss of her earlier, more sensual way of working, artists are intrigued by technology even if not unaware of its costs.

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JEFF TWEEDY

Tweedy is the singer and guitarist behind Wilco, a band that started in the world of alternative-country but has stretched into more experimental and undefinable territory. Here he discusss his creative process and the anti-technological “cult of authenticity” among some country and folk purists.

I think technology has changed a lot of things about how I interact with all art forms.

It’s fantastic to load all of your demos onto an iPod and listen to them anywhere, or burn CDs for everybody in the band. We have a footlocker at the loft where we record that has 400 or 500 CDs of all of our songs, in various stages, from the last five years. That’s an incredible resource: You can save a lot more of your ideas.

We use ProTools [recording software and equipment] and digital technology to do things that would take days and days to do on tape -- to lay down, like, 80 tracks of backing vocals and pick the best four for a really layered vocal track. Or we’ll fly in a dulcimer part or something.

We want the music to sound the way it would with our hands, fingers and throats, and then document it, and we use the technology available to document it.

Country music embraced technology: The Grand Ole Opry was one of the first radio shows to be successful nationwide. Country was important to the early days of radio and the early recording industry: Those were new technologies at one time. I actually collect cylinders of banjo tunes and stuff like that.

As a way of extending the reach of an oral tradition, technology has been a part of country music for a long time. Folk music is a natural part of your environment, and even though people don’t want to see it this way, the digital world is a part of our environment now. I don’t see any reason not to use it to share our stories.

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JUDY FISKIN

Fiskin is an artist who teaches at CalArts. In the 1990s, health problems forced her to move from photography to video art, which was less physically strenuous, and the shift had unexpected aesthetic consequences.

I am not a tech-head, and as a photographer all of my efforts were to do it as simply as possible. I was interested in a certain kind of delicate printing. Technology wasn’t my temperament.

In video, I wasn’t ready to make the commitment to digital: I used a Hi-8 camera. But then I got digital equipment and taught myself to do all of it; by 2000 I had made the switch. I was kicking and screaming the whole way. But I’ve really enjoyed the process of learning all this stuff.

From practically the first day I took up photography, every five years or so people would be saying, “There’s a new product, and it’s gonna revolutionize everything.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, sure, show me.” And it never happened, until digital video and editing. And I think it has also changed the way artists do video: More artists are doing film. The guy who won the Turner Prize [Jeremy Deller]: His piece sounds like experimental documentary film to me.

When I was doing photographs, I really was trying to make them beautiful in some way. When I started doing video, I just gave that up, video was something that could never be beautiful. What came in to replace that was narrative. It’s not like that was my intention, but switching media opened up something inside me.

My work changed completely. I lost a lot. There was something tactile about making photographs -- there’s water, there’s holding on to the tongs, holding something in your hand. Then in video, it’s all dials and buttons. That was really huge for me, that was very painful.

At my age, 59, I have a limited capacity for all the technology: “Don’t even show it to me, leave me alone, I don’t have time for that.” I think there are a lot of people my age who are resisting it. There was even a mini-trend at CalArts, just a few years ago, where kids were coming in and defiantly saying, “I love film and I’m staying with film and I’m not going digital.” That was great for me.

I don’t have an iPod and don’t want one.

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ADRIAN TOMINE

Tomine is a Berkeley- and Brooklyn-based artist and writer who produces the sleek and alienated “Optic Nerve” comic. His latest book, “Scrapbook, Uncollected Work: 1990-2004,” surveys his entire career.

It’s very egotistical, but I think I’ve found the correct balance between keeping up with the times, but not getting too carried away. When I look at other comics artists and I can clearly tell the point in their career where they bought a computer, that’s annoying. And I get irritated by my more Luddite cartoonist friends who don’t even know how to use a scanner, so sometimes their artwork comes out printed horribly.

I try to make sure every line in my work is drawn by hand, even mechanical things like the panel borders: I still get out a ruler and draw them by hand. What I do is a more high-tech version of what old cartoonists used to do: I hand cut the shapes of each color, but using a mouse.

I’ve always had this mandate that I don’t want to do anything that couldn’t have been done before the advent of the computer. I want everything to look as if it technically could have been done when everyone was doing hand separation. When you look at the work of most mainstream comics, there’s this insane airbrushing, everything’s modeled and faded, sparkling with highlights, it’s like Photoshop run wild.

My life would be so much easier if I followed the example of other cartoonists, who have made a font of their own hand-lettering. It’s a point of pride and aesthetic value for me to wreck my hand muscles and sit there squinting my eyes.

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ESA-PEKKA SALONEN

Salonen is a composer as well as the conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One of his recent projects involved conducting Wagner alongside images created by video artist Bill Viola. He discusses his own use of technology and the declining importance of music recorded to fit the length of a vinyl record or CD.

I bought the first generation of iPods the minute it was released. It has changed my music consumption habits, because I have basically all I listen to during the year on my iPod.

The iTunes kind of thing hasn’t particularly affected my life yet -- the repertoire isn’t exactly strongly represented. But even that might change. I spoke to the director of A&R; at Deutsche Grammophon, and he said they had a very positive and surprising experience with iTunes and might invest more. The format of classical music is not the LP. In rock and pop music, the format quite often is that of an LP; once you break out of those dimensions it becomes fractured. But it’s a completely arbitrary number of minutes. It was completely a case of the medium dictating the art itself, which is completely crazy.

In classical music the format can be 6 1/2 hours for a Messiaen opera, or 35 seconds for a piece by Webern, or anything in between. So for us, breaking the LP format is not a disaster by any means. Symphonies were meant to be heard as one, but there’s a whole lot of classical music where the format is smaller, or the pieces were not conceived as belonging together.

The nice thing about music being online is that the record companies can’t go online and delete something after six months if the sales don’t go above a certain number. So for a classical music lover this is good news.

I could see a very likely situation where synthesizers will become instruments in orchestras. For that to happen, the instrument has to be standardized, the same way the violin was standardized in the 1600s, with the number of strings and the way it was tuned and so on.

The essence of what we do has not changed drastically in about 150 years, so I’m not expecting the basic function of classical music to change much. There’s a room where a bunch of people play music for other people. That’s a classical music concert. But, of course, how we distribute this to people who are not there is going to change quite radically, I’m sure.

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COLIN MELOY

Meloy is the lead singer of the often backward-looking Portland, Ore., band the Decemberists. The group has recorded its new album, due in March, using digital technology in a 100-year-old wooden church that would not have accommodated traditional recording equipment. Here he discusses the DIY -- do-it-yourself -- ethos of punk.

As far as technology in music goes, I feel I inherited through the indie-rock community this antagonism toward digital recording: “Analog is best, it sounds best on vinyl.” And when the Decemberists started, the music I was intent on creating was acoustic and used older, anachronistic instruments: upright bass, accordion, mandolin, hammer dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy. Our first EP was recorded in analog and mastered to tape, all those things.

But the second record [and first LP], “Castaways and Cutouts,” because we knew somebody with a ProTools studio and we didn’t have any money, I swallowed my pride. But I’ve come around to the idea that digital is not bad. The vision I have for the music can get bigger and bigger, and the digital medium of recording lends itself to that. You can actually be more DIY -- when I started recording and was working a day job and trying to figure out home recording, it was pretty expensive. I think the whole DIY indie-rock aesthetic has come around to seeing digital music as acceptable.

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JENNIFER STEINKAMP

Steinkamp is a video and installation artist who teaches at UCLA. In one of her recent projects, which usually take the form of video projections, trees change seasons or blow in the breeze. Though her work often uses a natural subject matter, it gets more technological every year.

Everything I create is made from software -- none of it is from reality. It’s all code to create images. I like that world, nonreality putting itself into reality and transforming reality. If the power goes out it doesn’t exist anymore, and when you take down the piece it doesn’t exist the way a sculpture might.

The software can generate trees, and there are menu options that let you alter it. As the tree grows, it twists. And a lot of the things that happen with real trees happen here.

I start with a spring tree with green leaves and put flowers on it, and then in summer there are no flowers but more leaves. On a fall tree, I pick fewer leaves and make them red, as if a few of them had fallen away. And in winter I remove a lot of them. You can either change the season with the keyboard or make everything change every two minutes. It’s cyclical, an endless loop.

The trees in “Dervish” whirl like a Middle Eastern dervish. The software allows you to make the trees twist, but I use the software in a way it wasn’t intended.

My next show at Acme [Gallery] could be hair, but I haven’t decided. I’m going to project it and see what I like.

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MIKE LEIGH

Leigh is a British director known for films of contemporary social realism, such as “Secrets & Lies” and “Naked.” His latest movie, set in the working-class London of 1950, is “Vera Drake,” which used digital technology to enhance its period feel.

I grew up with a wind-up gramophone and 78s of classical music and jazz that came from before the war. I cherish my vinyl, but they were always dusty and noisy.

Up until a few years ago I proudly attached a little logo to the end of my films, a pair of scissors with sprocket holes, that said, ‘This film was edited on film.’ I clung on to this Luddite gesture. But for me as a consumer, as well as a filmmaker, the digital revolution is miraculous.

We shot a scene in “Vera Drake” where she’s interrogated by the police, and it rained on the station’s glass roof. In the old days that would have meant a massive editing session with the actors involved. But here, the sound editor just removed the sound of the rain. It meant we didn’t have to make people repeat very emotional performances in artificial circumstances.

It’s great to take technology that’s used in a self-conscious way, and use it subtly, for craftsmanlike work.

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VIRGINIA POSTREL

Postrel is a Dallas-based author and economics columnist whose latest book is “The Substance of Style.” Here she discusses the cultural roots of changing technology.

In a sense we’re having a new Arts and Crafts movement, similar to the one 100 years ago. Except this time instead of being anti-technology it’s very much using technology. It’s partly because the nature of the technology in the two eras: In William Morris’ time technology was associated with mass production and taking things away from the individual craftsperson or artist and putting them on a big bureaucratic scale.

Whereas today what technology does -- because it’s much cheaper -- is allow much more customization and more craft. There certainly are artists who feel the technology removed them from their true art, but the dominant attitude is that it furthers art. Even things like jewelry making have become one craftsperson using computer design to further their art.

Computer technology, once they got away from punch cards, was very much tied to a kind of counterculture attitude, “This is gonna empower individuals; it’s an alternative to large structures.” This came out of hacker culture, in the Bay Area and MIT, in the mid- and late ‘60s. These people were not artists, they were nerds. But they were nonconformists. They saw themselves as an alternative to IBM.

It gave computer technology a feel that, say, chemistry doesn’t have. It led to gaming and to Internet, this fooling around with the computer the way an artist might, with cleverness and self-expression. It seemed cool, if a bit geeky at the same time; it didn’t seem monolithic, corporate, anti-expression. And what’s happening in the arts is the working out of that revolution.