About Me

Washington, DC, United States
I have been, among other things, a bookshop owner, counterintelligence agent, writer, art critic, and grad student (literature and art). One of my blogs includes some examples of my art writing, from the past decade, with some new pieces forthcoming. But my most frequent new posts are to my crime fiction blog, International Noir Fiction.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Technology and art

© Glenn Harper

An unpublished 1999 essay


Art Papers magazine, while I was the editor, did an interview with a puppeteer who had taught puppetry for years, to people from school age to retirement age. He said that he first assigns the class to make a single puppet, from whatever material is at hand, and the results are widely diverse in what the puppets are made of and what they can do. But he said that when he has the class make a second puppet, whether the student is 14 or 84, the results are always the same: first the two puppets fight, and second, they have sex. Then they can go on to perform the eerie magic of puppets in a broader range of action. The fascination with technology today is, I think, related to the fascination that puppets have for us. A thing is acting like us. A puppet is a surrogate or a cyborg that can act out for us in a way we can't do in our everyday lives—and their uncanny nature can permit us to see through their actions to the truth of our own.

To continue reading this essay at artdesigncafe.com, click Technology and art. Click the following link to see the overview of writings by Glenn Harper at artdesigncafe.com.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

recently i saw a beautiful demonstration on how art and technology can complement each other. at a chicago trade show i saw a company called EyeClick that works with projected interactive images.they did some pretty cool things so i later looked them up and saw some of their demos.one of them was a collaboration with an art academy and it was amazing. check them out on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WyI2b_Jb9rE

Unknown said...

oh, and the company link is
EyeClick