Tate Britain and Tate Modern

Today was "Cultural Day" in London led by Pratt SILS' Dean Tula Gianaini.

The day included trips to the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern.

Most of my time at Tate Britain was spent viewing the JMW Turner Collection. In keeping with the ideas presented by the course so far, mainly the notion of technology changing people's perceptions, behaviors, and exceptions about the delivery of information, I viewed Turner's paintings through this lens.

In an era before photography and cinema, Turner's massive canvases presented a medium for people to view mythology, historic and current events, and far away places - much the way cinema (or YouTube) is used today. His art was a visual storytelling/informative device.


In a way, Turner's work can be seen as an emerging technology, as he was pushing the envelope of color and light theory to produce new kinds of image-making. The interactive Color and Line: Turner's Experiments  exhibit demonstrates used scientific experiments to revolutionize watercolor and print making. 

Turner's The Field of Waterloo as exhibited 1818, three years after the battle.

I also viewed and exhibits  related to technology and expectations about its impact on the future - an idea the preoccupies the course.

The Tate describes Gerard Byrne's 1984 and Beyond as 

an installation comprising video, photography and a vinyl text. Across three monitors, the artist presents a re-enactment of a round-table discussion published in Playboy in 1963, in which twelve science-fiction writers - including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke - speculate about what the world might be like in 1984. This discussion is brought to life by Dutch amateur actors who follow the edited text to discuss technology, politics, sex, everyday life and the possibility of finding alien life, all of which appear naïve and anachronistic today.

The video is set in two Dutch locations, Gerrit Rietveld's Sonsbeek sculpture pavilion (which now houses sculptures by Barbara Hepworth) in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, and Hugh Maaskant’s Provinciehuis in Den Bosch.

In contrast to the progressiveness and idealism that characterise the dialogue and setting, the video is surrounded by twenty black and white photographs taken in 2005. Shot at different locations across the United States, they depict ordinary scenes that could have been encountered either in the 1960s or today. This interplay between past, present and future creates a paradox, simultaneously evoking past preoccupations and anxieties and speculating about a future that would never come.

Further reading on the exhibit can be found in the Guardian's recent article on the artist. 

1960s Sci-Fi writers discuss their expectations for the future in Gerard Byrne's video instillation

 

Will e-books and new technology really change the world as dramatically as we are predicting, or will we appear "naïve and anachronistic" forty years from now?