INFO-AESTHETICS: HELSINKI MAP 9.12.00
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PERIOD: 19th century - mid 20th century:
ECONOMIC/SOCIAL: Industrial Society
CULTURE:
19th century: historicist, eclectic; colonialism
1860s-1960s: modernism
1913-1928: Inventing new culture for industrial society:
1. New visual communication techniques:
new typography (assymetry, hierarchy of size,...)
film language
text/image layout
...
2. New representation techniques:
montage (in time, in a still image, in space, ...)
close-up (object, face)
multiple pov (transparency, cubism)
"new vision"
surrealism
...
3. New aesthetics / new forms: the cult of a machine; ornament-free geometry, grid, order; rationality; revealing construction; biomorphic aesthetics; "open plan"; "modern style"; ...
4. Icons / Representation of the new society:
(1) iconography: the city, industrial architecture, engineer, airplane, pilot, motorcar, industrial objects, workers, factory;...
(2) new representational techniques and aesthetic forms: montage; skyscraper, new furniture and object design;...
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PERIOD: 1960s - now
ECONOMIC / SOCIAL: Information Society
CULTURE:
1960s - ?: "postmodermnism":
--quoting; recycling past styles and content;
--heterogeneity; plurality ("Learning from Las Vegas),...
--chaos, complexity, evolution (rather than top down design), margin, "deconstruction",...
(Is informationalism a new stage of post-modernism or was post-modernism just a preparation for informationalism?)
2000s - INFORMATIONALISM?
1. New visual communication techniques?
software allows for new use of old modernist techniques:
--interactivity;
--from design to information design (meta-design);...
2. New representation techniques?
software allows us to use old modernist techniques in fundamentaly new ways. (See "Avant-Garde as Software")
3. new aesthetics / new forms?
--the effects of electronic media technoogy which allows to modify a signal in real time or to modifying a part of a media record: sampling;
--the effects of computer operations: transparency, blur, morphing, layering (compositing), vector graphics, noise;
--dynamic displays and constructions;
--pluralism (democracy of taste)
4. Icons / Representations of global information society (both of its economic/social aspects and its psychological aspects)
Question: how to represent information society given that some of its key dimensions are "invisible" / "resist visualisation"? For instance;
-computation
-network
-work & leasure (most work involves information processing, work and leasure use the same computer interface)
-global movements (of objects, parts, data)
-distributed processes and representations (a person, the company, the product, the media object such as a Web site does not exist in one place...)
Other dimensions:
-multi-tasking
-complexity (example: Windows OS)
-new subjectivity ("info-subjectivity")
Examples -- Representing:
work/leasure: Andreas Gursky, Miltos Manetas
complexity/AL/emergence/non-hierarchy: Guggenheim Bilbao
network: Knobotic Research
co-presence: Doug Aitken
interactivity: Jeffrew Shaw
5. The new primacy of telecommunication (chat, email, online environments, phone, reality TV, Web cams)
Telecommunication as culture?
The aesthetics of information access?
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WHAT IS INFO-AESTHETICS?
1. New Aesthetics / new forms, appropraite for information society
2. Icons / representations of information society
3. The aesthetics of telecomunication and of information labor; from functional to cultural