So, Why art?
There two main reasons why artists are essential to anyone wanting
to innovate:
First: artists are the quintessential experimenters of
contemporary society
Second: contemporary artists
work creatively with the tools that digital agencies use to make their own
offerings
Saying that artists are innovators may not be a surprising
statement—and it shouldn’t be. Yet, if your interest is experiential marketing
then your focus should be on the work digital artists—also labelled often as
Relational or Inter-medial artists.
‘Wait, digital art? ...what is that exactly?’
Digital art refers to the work of contemporary artists, who work
with any one kind of digital media platform or who are interested in creating
inter-medial experiences, that is, experiences that come as a result of the
combination of different elements in their work (for instance, video and
performance, projections and sculpture, or robots and lights). These artists
are constantly experimenting with one sole aim in mind: creating new
experiences for spectators.
These experiences can be, for instance, full blown multi-media
spectacles, as in the case of renowned performer Marie-Claude Pietragalla and
her ‘3D immersive spectacle’: Mr et Mme Reve.
An even more impressive sample of innovation, way beyond his time,
can be found in the work of artist Nam June Paik. His 1969 Electronic Opera, made through a
combination of negative video images, dancers, a background of music—where a
fourteenth century clavichord sets the mood—and vectorial movements—similar to
the popular screensavers in the 90s—work all in complete synchrony to deliver a
powerful experience of the senses and the mind: a topless dancer and three
hippies have their images manipulated distorted, and saturated with additional
color; Richard Nixon and other well-known figures are twisted up; Voiceovers
issue commands to the audience: "This is participation TV."—this is
an incomparably compelling experience with a clear message (albeit critical) to
it!
Artists working with computers can be traced all the way back to
John Whitney, who worked with outdated military computers in the 1950s and
1960s. His innovative work was pivotal in making the amazing credits sequences in Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo,
Northwest and Psycho! As reported
on Rhizome ‘Whitney was hired to complete the seemingly
impossible task of turning Bass’s complicated designs for Vertigo into moving pictures’.
Other, perhaps less known, although not a bit less interesting
artists are Frederik Heyman and Keren Cytter just two name two guys that always
come to my mind. Heyman works with a
combination of photography, graphic design, and video.
Wonderful samples of his
work can be found in his website or
while
Keren
Cytter 2011 Avalanche series of short films is a work that I truly enjoyed—it
makes you laugh, think and reflect on many aspects of filmmaking and storytelling.
The films play with time perception, with character roles and traits which
appear as bizarrely inconsistent, there is no clear story line, and the atmosphere
is purposefully sabotaged through the use of wrong props and incoherent
settings, etc. Take a look at one Cytter’s wonderful short films here.
Written by Daniel Vargas Gómez
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