Utopianism, Technology, and the Avant-Garde: The Artist Shaping the Social Condition

The effects of art and Technology and there interference in the social and political discourse have been existing since the turn of the 20th century. Starting with the Modernist movement to the Futuristic. It has been always the artist that controls the vision of the society towards the social conditions and the government. That's because the artist is the warrior who goes against any ideologies or theories and opens the eyes of the society to see beyond these restrictions by the government. Another example is the Dadaist movement who went against the idea of the high art society and took a totally different approach with different kinds of art. During the 30s, the Bauhaus movement started defending against consumerism and the repetition of daily genres. They also went against the society's norms and treated some political and mass media figures in a God-like treatment, which affected the society's way of thinking about them and seeing pop culture. At the turn of the millenium, artists like Peter Weibel changed the way people look at the political and social conditions by emerging technology and the internet into the new ideologies. He created the net_condition exhibit that deals with the different conditions in the society. Our social conditions, political discourse, artistic and scientific developments, and our way of communication have changed because of the new advances in technology and the net. The net is becoming the driving force that is controlling the society's behavior and its members' way of communication.

Additional sources
http://www.zakros.com/bios/utopianism.html
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/shanken.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky

Networks & Social Transformation

Globalisation in the 21st century is controlled by the net and the effects of technology on the economic, social and political conditions of the society. That is why they called the exhibit net_condition exhibit. Peter Weibel enforces the idea of how the new millenium is shaped through the changes that are happening in the media world and how every second is valued in the production phase and not the product that is valued. Basically, the consumption phase became more valuable and appreciated than the production phase and time became the number one priority for all consumers and marketers. Because our society became an information society, all it depends on is the data and how it communicates through technology and the net. Our social conditions, political discourse, artistic and scientific developments, and our way of communication have changed because of the new advances in technology and the net. The net is becoming the driving force that is controlling the society's behavior and its members' way of communication. It created a virtual space to make it easier from people around the world to exchange ideas, stories, and skills. For example, video games, blogs, net based music, net intallations, etc... The more our societies depend on this virtual force of the cyberspace, the more our social, political, and economic conditions will build based on it and will control us.

More on this topic
http://on1.zkm.de/netcondition/curators/weibel/default_e
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6176/1.html
http://easylife.org/netart/catalogue.html

A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations by Lisa Jevbratt

Jevbratt created a star map by collecting a number of IP addresses that are translated into colors. She started this poject in 1999 and updated it in 2001 and she is still adding to it. If you click on a certain color or IP address, it takes you to that specific address or website. She created the ping language to show how the internet and the internal functionality of the world wide web is working and how the information migrates through different IP addresses. Jevbratt is trying to communicate through the language of color and light. This language or map is not meant to guide the viewer to a certain place or time because it has so much information that they can't specify or limit. This map is meant to respresent the sublime and to make us ask ourselves the question "do we base the quality of the work on how relevant the information to us or the visuals and aesthetics are more important? This concept brings a lot of debate and contraversy where a lot of viewers think the starmapping approach of the sublime has no function and that it is completely tangible.

Links about topic:
http://jevbratt.com/
http://www.altx.com/mappingtransitions/jevbratt.html
http://jevbratt.com/projects.html
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/jevbratt/biography/