Paola Antonelli: Why I brought Pac-Man to MoMA
The
best design is created by technology.
Paola Antonelli a curator for the Museum of Modern Art used her TED Talk
to tell her audience that the idea of design is more than “cute chairs”. She relates the transformation of design art
work to video games.
Right now we are
in the daring and courageous stage of design and it is because of this that Tetris
and Pac Man were officially installed in the collection at the Museum of Modern
Art. These games were the beginning of
the intelligent design era. In response
to this new installation many criticisms were published displaying the pretentious
horror that a video game could be considered art. Antonelli, having made the
choice to allow the games to be part of MoMA, defended her decision. In response to critics that said Pac Man wasn’t
art because it was simply code, she said “Then Picasso isn’t art because it is
oil paint.” She later said that she was
working with video game companies to actually acquire their specific code for
display but was having trouble because the designers don’t want their code
published. She used this idea to
establish the value behind technological art.
Antonelli’s
lecture was full of humor, intelligence and a broad appreciation for the term “art”
but even more importantly the term “design”.
Questions for Paola Antonelli:
What criteria do you use to decide what video games make it into the MoMA?
Do you see design patterns changing to a less intelligent state anytime soon?
Mary Flanagan
The lecture presented by Columbia University’s
Center for New Media Teaching and Learning featuring Mary Flanagan introduced
her as a “researcher in experimental cultural practices” primarily cyber
cultures and she very much looked at technological art from an anthropological
stance.
I think Mary Flanagan would have fascinating
conversations with Paola Antonelli because the first thing she mentions in her
lecture is that all art is code. She
discusses that whether it is paint and paper or actually ones and zeros it is
all code that is translated by our brains.
It is clear from her lecture that Flanagan is
incredibly intelligent but with that her way of communicating is very much
stream of consciousness. Though it is
important to choose an intelligent speaker, it would have been more beneficial
to the audience if she was more prepared or maybe less easily distracted. Also, ironically, Flanagan had a hard time
using the computer to present her material.
The overall theme of work is to evaluate what
real people are doing with the Internet. She uses these ideas to create online
experimental performance pieces. Much
like Paola Antonelli, Mary Flanagan had her own traditional critics. She told an anecdote of a man waling up to
her and saying that her work was not a performance because she was only
pointing and clicking. Flanagan opted to
then define the idea of a performance.
She utilized these critics to find new ways of presenting her art. She decided she wants it to viral and she
encourages the free dispersion of her work.
This lecture was a part of Columbia’s Art and Technology
lecture series. Though it is
understandable why Flanagan was chosen for this series, her thought processes
were hard to follow and there fore difficult to appreciate.
Questions
for Mary Flanagan:
Where do you see the modern American
relationship with technology in 20 years?
What is your favorite
combination of art and technology?
Don Levy: A cinematic journey through visual effects
This TED Talk by
Don Levy literally looks at movie magic.
He refers to the 3 main rules of magic “Assumption, Presumption and Context
in reality.” He says that film makers
and ultimately digital artists use these rules to trick their audiences into
believing their illusions. He describes
the changes our world is enduring due to technology and explains that these
changes are good for the future of film.
Levy used the code
of magicians to truly ingrain the idea that the film effect world is the same
as magic. He said all magicians know
that they can “never betray the illusion” and it is because of this rule that computer
effects continue to improve. Digital
artists and computer graphic engineers don’t want audiences to know when a
green screen was used or a crowd of people was generated on a computer. To demonstrate this he showed 15 movie clips
that demonstrated the progression of visual effects. The first and most significant was the
contrast between Georges Méliès A Trip to
the Moon and Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. He also compared Ben Hur to Gladiator and 1925’s
stop motion animation film The Lost World
to the academy award winning Jurassic Park.
The magic of the
movies is present in every film we watch.
Levy used his lecture to appreciate the change in the industry and to
demonstrate that it will continue to evolve and continue to surprise audiences.
Questions for Don Levy:
What is your favorite film that
displays “movie magic”?
Where do you see the future of visual effects in 20 years?
