Gallery: Inside the Tech That Makes These Age-Defining Artworks Possible
01THE CLOCK (2010)
Every great artwork is a gadget, a cutting-edge device engineered to enrich our understanding of what it means to be here, to be alive in the world. What motivates art and what motivates technology is ultimately the same: a desire to know ourselves more deeply and to enhance our engagement with the universe around us. What artistic gadgets from our generation will endure in the popular imagination long after history has drawn its obliterating curtain across Microsoft’s forgotten windows?Indeed, what is Van Gogh’s *Starry Night* or Picasso’s *Guernica* but an expertly crafted contraption designed to bring the anguish of the human soul into sharper focus? Both of these exceptional works were, of course, originally synchronized to the personal and political traumas that occasioned them -- Van Gogh’s chronic psychological struggles, on the one hand, and the massacres of the Spanish Civil War, on the other. By surviving vividly in popular imagination, these paintings define their respective eras more profoundly than almost any other cultural shape one could name. After all, how many of us could call to mind American entrepreneur George Eastman’s invention of flexible photographic film, introduced in 1889 (just as *Starry* *Night* was being painted) as vibrantly as we can the swirling turbulence of Van Gogh’s troubled masterpiece? How many of us have, at the tip of our mind’s eye, an image of the ultra-linear amplifier, brainchild of English engineer Alan Blumlein, which appeared within months of Picasso’s unveiling of *Guernica*? Art has the capacity to outlast everything, even iPhones, 3-D printers, and Wii. Occasionally throughout history, the hand that paints and the hand that innovates has been one and the same. The most famous such hand belonged to Leonardo Da Vinci. In 1508, his chair swiveled from easel to drafting table, as revisions for a flying machine competed for his attention with the beguiling expression that was slowly revealing itself on his portrait of a Tuscan silk-merchant’s wife. While some of us are vaguely aware of the pioneering aeronautical designs, none of us can fail to picture the *Mona Lisa*. 'A three year old could have painted that, but can he write code?'But what of our own era? What artistic gadgets from our generation will likely endure in the popular imagination of those who come after us two hundred years from now, or three hundred -- long after history has drawn its obliterating curtain across Microsoft’s forgotten windows? At the tech end of things, it isn’t difficult to reel off a list of memorable breakthroughs from the past quarter century: the first DSLR camera, the first MP3 player, the first wireless laptop, the iPhone, TiVo. But when it comes to art, to artistic hardware that can compare with Guernica, Starry Night, or Mona Lisa for durability of design, for many of us the cursor freezes and the mind draws blank. Perhaps there is a prevailing suspicion that the remarkable strides in new technology made over the past two decades have in no way been matched in the contemporary art world -- that for every revolutionary algorithm java’d up somewhere, unlocking the unlit corridors of our digitized futures, a talentless splash of cheap paint is being sold by a cynical art dealer for a jaw-dropping price. Put simply, “a three year old could have painted that, but can he write code?” I recently set myself the challenge of identifying *[100 Works of Art that Will Define Our Age](http://www.thamesandhudson.com/100_Works_of_Art_That_Will_Define_Our_Age/9780500239070)* that will stand the test of time. In doing so, I was struck by how many of the pieces I chose (a list that includes paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, installations, and performances) would not, in fact, have been feasible at any other point in human history. Far from overshadowing the achievement of concurrent technological innovations, these works embody such strides. Not since the introduction of stretched canvas into Western artistic practice in the fifteenth century as a substitute for wooden panels has the history of art been so invigorated by the rise of a new potential: digitization. These works (all made after 1989) reveal how the digital revolution is responsible for some of the most important works of our time... Kelly Grovier [Kelly Grovier](http://kellygrovier.com/) is an art critic, historian, and poet. He is a regular contributor on art to the *Times Literary Supplement* and co-founder of the scholarly journal *European Romantic Review*, devoted to the study of nineteenth-century art and literature. His books include *The Gaol* (a history of Newgate, London’s most notorious prison) and *[100 Works of Art that Will Define Our Age](http://www.thamesandhudson.com/100_Works_of_Art_That_Will_Define_Our_Age/9780500239070)*.[](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/opinion) __Above:__ Christian Marclay, *The Clock* (2010) ------------------------------------- ### What It Is A twenty-four hour video montage comprised of thousands of short clips from Hollywood movies and TV shows. Each clip features a reference to a specific time of day (or night). When screened, the references keep perfect pace with the actual time in the real world. ### Who Made It American video artist and composer Christian Marclay. ### How It Was Made Six assistants working night and day scanned movies for the artist, looking out for any visual reference to time. Once identified, the relevant clip was digitally tagged and made available to the artist. Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro software, Marclay painstakingly sifted and spliced the thousands of short digitized clips. The grueling task nearly ruined his wrist and back. ### What It Means “No matter what minute of what hour, day or night, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn or Peter Fonda may be seen pausing to contemplate the suspenseful elapse of excruciating seconds on a wristwatch, which has been synchronized to the actual time it has reached in the real world. The result is a beautifully haphazard collage in which happiness and tragedy, courage and villainy, interweave unpredictably … In Hollywood thrillers, the ticking that sustains a plot’s momentum is always towards a potential explosion that must be averted in the bank or on a bus in order to save fictional lives. With *The Clock*, the unmentioned device that’s winding down and keeping us glued to our seats is us: our lives. Red wire, black wire. It hardly matters. Marclay’s is a time bomb no one can dismantle.” *Image: Courtesy White Cube. Photo Ben Westoby. © Christian Marclay* __*Essay for WIRED Opinion based on* 100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age *by Kelly Grovier. Images via author and publisher. Book available through [Thames & Hudson](http://www.thamesandhudson.com/100_Works_of_Art_That_Will_Define_Our_Age/9780500239070).*__
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Wolfgang Tillmans, *Freischwimmer* (2003-ongoing) ------------------------------------------------- ### What It Is A chromogenic color print depicting the interaction of photographic chemicals. ### Who Made It German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. ### How It Was Made By digitally scanning paper on which photographic fluids have been mixed and digitally enlarging the resulting image. ### What It Means In *Freischwimmer*, Tillmans isolates a semblance of human fragility by removing it from any figurative or discernibly representational context, as though vulnerability were a material substance that could be magnified on a chemist’s slide. Concocted in a darkroom, these pictures are not the product of light passing through the aperture of a camera’s lens in the manner of conventional photography, but instead record the volatile moods of the processing chemicals themselves. These images have the feel of something at once miniscule, glimpsed through a powerful microscope, and cosmically vast in scale, seen through a sophisticated telescope. The result is a ballet of what could as easily be a swab of bacteria as a nebula or a surging solar flare. These photographs merge expressionism and realism in ways that are more likely to recall the proto-Impressionist achievement of J.M.W. Turner than the work of contemporaries. *Image: Courtesy Maureen Paley, London © Wolfgang Tillmans.*
03Jeff Wall - After 'Invisible Man' by ralph Ellison the Porlogue T095 HR JW-IM-RP-L-72dpi
Jeff Wall, *After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, The Prologue* (1999-2000) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ### What It Is A silver dye bleach transparency, mounted to an aluminum light box, depicting a scene from American writer Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel *Invisible Man*. ### Who Made It Canadian artist Jeff Wall. ### How It Was Made By constructing an elaborate stage set and combining countless digital photographs of the scene into a single montage, before enlarging the unified image and mounting it on a light box. ### What It Means Ellison’s novel *Invisible Man* explores themes of black identity in America prior to the Civil Rights movement, and Jeff Wall recreates in his work a passage in which the unnamed protagonist of the story describes his subterranean Harlem abode: “Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible....In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it.” Converting his Vancouver studio into this imagined dwelling, Wall crammed the ceiling with a vast spider’s sac of lit and burnt-out bulbs (all 1,369 of them) that hovers at once dazzlingly and threateningly above the seated hero. To depict the socially invisible, the alluring luminosity Wall achieves by mounting his digitally engineered photo-transparency onto an aluminum light box vibrates with an almost mystical power. His re-enactment of Ellison’s imagination becomes a compelling metaphor for the role of every artist in every age -- an invisible soul who scavenges, hoards, and manipulates light. *Image: Courtesy the artist.*
04flatten
Pipilotti Rist, *Open My Glade (Flatten)* (2000) ------------------------------------------------ ### What It Is A single-channel silent digital video depicting a close-up of the artist as she smears her cosmetic-caked face across a pane of glass. The work was projected on a large digital screen overlooking New York’s Times Square in 2000. ### Who Made It Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. ### How It Was Made By digitizing the nine-minute video of herself, the artist made it possible to have short segments of the work shuffled into the usual broadcasting program of advertisements and news items displayed in Times Square. ### What It Means “Can art escape itself? Or does the act of creation inevitably confine the thing created? Though artists often speak of the liberation their art is intended to excite in the viewer, does the work of art ever participate in the resulting sense of freedom? Few works of contemporary art have compelled observers to contemplate the borders where art and life clash and blur as emphatically as this. Each clip featured a close-up of the artist’s face pressed disturbingly against the oversized screen like a ghost trapped in crystal. Broadcast as it was over a bustling crossroads in midtown Manhattan, where lives thread together in a tight mesh of humanity, *Open My Glade (Flatten)*, was seen by many as an uncomfortable metaphor for the inescapability of the everyday.” *Image: Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine. © Pipilotti Rist*
ASSOCIATED PRESS05David Hockney
David Hockney, *Bigger Trees Near Water or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique* (2007) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ### What It Is An oil-on-canvas landscape that measures 15 feet by 40 feet, and is comprised of fifty separate paintings. The work depicts the terrain near Bridlington, Yorkshire, England, not far from where the 76-year old artist grew up. \[pictured here in background\] ### Who Made It English painter David Hockney, whose exhibition is [currently open](http://deyoung.famsf.org/pressroom/pressreleases/david-hockney-bigger-exhibition) in San Francisco at the de Young Museum. ### How It Was Made A computerized grid enabled the artist to construct a composite painting and keep track of his progress. ### What It Means “The emotional territory mapped by Hockney’s enormous fifty-canvas work, which collectively measures a staggering 4.57 by 12.19 metres, is at least as intriguing as the actual terrain near Bridlington, Yorkshire, England, where the canvases were created … The use of electronic images, of which Hockney himself is a celebrated master, were crucial to the orchestration of the colossal work. The artist laboriously shuttled each canvas from the outdoor location in which it was executed, back to his studio, where he plotted his progress, canvas by canvas, on a digital grid of the full composite image. For Hockney, what all this restless to-ing and fro-ing ultimately demonstrates, is that the camera is a useful scaffold that must be dismantled in deference to the power of the painted image to communicate feeling -- how the language of one must give way to the language of the other.” *Photo: Sang Tan/AP*
Lorentz Wolf Rasmussen. Image: Kristian von Bengtson06Britain Auction
Andreas Gursky, *Chicago Board of Trade II* (1999) --------------------------------------------------- ### What It Is A large (73 x 95 inch) C-print mounted on plexiglass, depicting the chaos of a commodities exchange trading floor. \[pictured here on museum walls\] ### Who Made It German photographer Andreas Gursky. ### How It Was Made By making computer scans of several traditional photographs of the same scene taken moments apart and digitally combining sections of these separate images into one. The process creates the impression of motion within an otherwise static picture. ### What It Means “From a distance, the nearly three-yard-wide image reduces the thrumming crowd to a blur of indistinct pixels, the direct digital descendants of the dots that combined to form Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist masterpiece, *A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte* (1884–1886), which introduced to the world the technique of separating colors into individually painted dots that from a distance the eye mixes together. The German artist is unlikely to have known as he created his image that at that same moment Nikon was preparing to release the first affordable professional-grade digital camera, changing photography forever. Before long, the digital manipulations and enhancements that invigorated Gursky’s image would be available to millions as film and negatives became all but obsolete.” *Photo: Sang Tan/AP*
Marijan Murat07Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas, *Win, Place, or Show* (1998) ------------------------------------------- ### What It Is A two-channel video projection featuring looped variations of a six-minute confrontation between two fictional characters, Danny and Bob. \[pictured here is the artist\] ### Who Made It Canadian filmmaker Stan Douglas. ### How It Was Made The scripted interaction between the actors portraying Danny and Bob was filmed from several of angles, each of which was then sliced into short segments. These brief clips were then fed into a computer that was programmed to shuffle their order before rebroadcasting them. A total of 204,023 combinations of the six-minute encounter are possible. With continuous play, a recurrence of the exact same version of the confrontation will not occur more often than every two years. ### What It Means “*Win, Place, or Show* features in side-by-side windows on the same screen ceaseless loops of a spirited and ultimately violent confrontation between two men, Donny and Bob. The result is a knotted string theory of human interaction that manages to remain essentially the same while forever changing. ‘I have used repetitious structures from certain musical forms’, Douglas has explained, describing the inspiration for his complex patterning of experience, in an effort to achieve an uncanny ‘confrontation with the mechanical world’. Douglas’s dizzying display offers a metaphor for how we ceaselessly re-analyze instances in our lives and highlights the risk in devoting our time to what has been rather than to the endless possibilities of what still might be.” *Photo: Marijan Murat/picture-alliance/dpa/AP*
