Art Rants
  • Art Theory  ( 8 items )
    This section is a collection of writings concerned with understanding the nature of human art making activities.
    It forms a background against which is a develop a specific investigation into what is special or different about interactive art (or, that is, if there is anything special or different about interactivew art) and in the same vein considers technology-based (digital) art.
    This discussion leads on to the main event - the concept of meta-art or a synthesis of the arts, long dreamed of by great thinkers and artists, and now made possible thorugh the medium of the desk-top computer work station and the internet.
  • Interactive Art  ( 4 items )

    What makes new media art differrent to other forms of mixed-media art such as cinema?

    It's the introduction of user interactivity.

    Here are Dr. Baz's musings and research on Human/Computer interface theory and ideas concerning interactivity in art.

  • Meta Art  ( 6 items )
    Concepts of meta-art, or a synthesis of the arts, have inspired many historically important artists, including Wagner, Scriabin, Kandinsky, Cage, and the Bauhaus and Futurist artists. Such thinkers dreamed of combining the diverse means of traditional artistic expression into a total, transcending
    art experience.

     

    A meta-art machine was visualized by the German author Hermann Hesse in his Nobel prize-winning novel The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi). Hesse imagined a machine which has evolved to become the ultimate in art technology, a multidimensional machine/human interface, depicted (in a precomputer time) as a fantastic creative and conceptual abacus, employing all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the ages.

    This once futuristic vision is becoming a reality, with the rapid evolution of the contemporary personal computer, which offers ever more sophisticated, multi-dimensional, multisensory art-making tools, within one machine. Wired to the Internet, this nascent meta-art machine can deliver multimedia art to the world.

  • Moving Pictures: Video and Animated Art  ( 1 items )
    Concerning the moving image in new media.
  • Online universe and virtual existence  ( 1 items )
  • The Music Channel  ( 1 items )
    Music is "an art of organizing sound in significant forms to express ideas and emotions through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony and colour." [The Macquarie Dictionary, third edition ]
     
    It is therefore an important  channel for communicating meaning in multimedia art. A discussion of its functional role in the multimedia experience must begin withan historical overview of the evolution of relevant music technology.
     
    Computer music is nearly forty years old. Electronic music is twice that old, dating back to the invention of the Theremin Vox. In that time, computer music has brought together many diversedisciplines, creating hybrids such as psycho-acoustics and algorithmic composition, aswell as spawning its own diverse branches. These range from performance instruments to music printing, from MIDI sequencing to automatic transcription. Such diversification is an indication of the success of the field. [Jaffe, 1995, p.1].  
     
    Digital music and audio techniques are an important contributing sub-set of multimedia as meta-art. As in other sections of this dissertation, a context for the discussion of contemporary approaches to this field is offered in the form of a brief history of electronic music  For the purposes of this discussion, electronic musical instruments are defined as: Instruments that synthesize sounds from an electronic source. This definition leaves out a whole section of hybrid electronic instruments developed during the last century that used electronics and tape recorders to manipulate or amplify sounds in the style of Musique Concrète (see below).  
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