How Artists Are Using Technology

[Music] - an artist willing to experiment codes and algorithms can be just as creative tools as the paintbrush here are four stories to prove that beauty has no bounds when art meets technology when an interactive artwork forms an engagement with people in the audience you can watch a sort of conversation develop the artworks not really fully realized until those interactions have been allowed to occur my name's Jeffrey Drake Brockman and I'm a cybernetics artist I work in the most isolated city in the world Perth Western Australia for a long time I had two parallel lives I was an IT guy a computer programmer and I was also a painter I kept the whole idea of art completely separate from computation and that just sort of led to a crisis I thought what am i doing Who am I kidding so I let it in and suddenly I was making art works which were robotic cybernetics is about interaction it can be made out of any kind of technology you can use electronics computers even clockwork to enable conversations to take place between people and artworks for me the whole point of using technology and art is to make an artwork interactive with interactivity you can get deep audience engagement people look at a piece for hours on end instead of just a minute when I complete an artwork I like to watch it respond to its audience I watched to see how the play between the artwork and the audience develops sometimes I saw people who are treating the artwork as though it was a person smiling at it waving to it talking to it I thought how far can we take this the part that I love most of all is when it's done when the vision is realized when I can set the artwork free and watch it interact with people it's actually doing what it's meant to do and creating what it's meant to create [Music] the main difficulties of working with any vulnerable or fragile work of cultural heritage is the respect you have to have for that object technology is at a point right now where we can record the surface of an object down to fractions of a millimeter and it's through this kind of understanding that allows you to communicate across time and across cultures and the task of heritage protection and preservation is a real challenge the mission of factum foundation is to record cultural heritage so in the event that there's a disaster or an accident we have the data to know what was there exactly as it is we're pioneering a number of methods to return that information into the physical world we're doing CNC milling we're doing 3d printing but we're trying to go beyond that a facsimile of the Borg are in each Apple the facsimile of the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings an exact facsimile our very noses wedding at Cana [Music] [Applause] the biggest project that's going on at the moment is an exact facsimile of the tomb of Seti the first which will be given to the people of Egypt as soon as it's finished two hundred years ago the concern was not one of preservation the concern was one of Indiana Jones and discovery and excitement and cultural acquisitions the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lasted successfully for three thousand three and a half thousand years but since they've been visited they start to decline and decay rapidly I think the facsimile is opening up a whole new level of possibility for display preservation conservation restoration communication dissemination of what's important about these objects if only we can preserve it like it is and document it and hand it on to future generations then there's hope I see my work as woven into the fabric of cities these soft fibers move and adapt to wind and light and rain and they are a way of being they are about interconnectedness I'm Jana deckle Minh I'm an artist I bring sculpture and form and light into the public realm so that we can literally change the spaces that we live in in cities my sculpture has traveled to five continents it takes an incredible team to create one of these sculptures I am working with computer scientists and artisans and aeronautical and structural engineers all over the world my studio is where we incubate ideas some of my newest work I'm using data sets from science whether it's human action or an earthquake and tsunami to reveal our relationship with the world and then I just start sketching whether it's with a pen or a paintbrush then we start to model it in three dimensions in the computer and we also make physical models they begin as raw fiber that is braided into twine and rope put onto bobbins and loomed using machines and the ropes are spliced by hand to take the work and install it in the city is a whole nother set of artistry the piece comes together as a single sewn garment for the city my work is about the dynamic nature of life and it's always unfolding during the day the colors of the sculpture change slightly as sunlight changes at night I'm projecting coloured light that is very slowly gradually changing it's never the same piece and you and the person you come to see it with might have completely different experiences the work invites people to engage with it people who are not in stem and kind of have an outside look at software development sometimes I understand how truly creative it is reading lines of code is like reading poetry it's an art form in itself and it's a culture of really bringing ideas to light I started coding when I was nine years old and I've been dancing since I think I was able to walk my father is a dancer so it was in my blood so there's one aim so I had a plan in life I had a direction I was going to be a professional dancer everything was lined up and then I got cancer it changed the whole path of my life while I was in recovery I'm not really good at sitting still so I was writing software from a hospital that I've gotten almost obsessed like it was something that just kept me going and when I came back home I wanted to dance again I was in the midst of trying to find ways to mix dance and technology and that's when I came up with the idea of the light suits and wirelessly programming them to make really amazing visual art all right I'm gonna stop at this cue when it starts we were up hours and hours and hours writing the software and trying different things and it was it was a lot of fun the end product is as simple as me pressing one button and the lights turn on and another button then they change color and a few buttons and a sequence happen we were performing in public spaces and the more positive reactions we got the more confident I was to just go for it and just a few months after that we were on America's Got Talent and the rest is kind of history it's groundbreaking what you do it's incredible you three [Applause] we work with Chris Brown that's Capra cutie Christina Aguilera black eyed peas then we also had our own show that has been on in the heart of Broadway for several years and is touring both nationally and internationally it can go on and on the future fra lumen a is definitely education I want to be able to have students from different backgrounds work and collaborate together because if you learn how to respect people who do something different than you and have them respect you back that kind of skill set will really take you farther in life

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 93,016

Rating: 4.9454546 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, New Releases, Great Big Reels, Frontiers, Weird & Fun Knowledge, weird, fun knowledge, tech, technology, science, art, creativity, cybernetic sculptures, high-tech, art installation, Miral Kotb, Geoffrey Drake-Drockman, Janet Echelman

Id: Nxh-5EXXGaM

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020