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Technology makes the art world more competitive 

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Technology makes the art world more competitive 

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With so many amazing artists being able to publicize their work, it is hard to make a name for yourself in the art world. Anyone can be amazing, but it takes something special or unique to make a name for yourself.

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There is a tutorial online for almost any kind of art. Whether it be playing guitar, dancing, or painting.

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Online Dance Class - Beginner Contemporary - "Skinny Love"

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EVERYONE! PLEASE, PLEASE READ THIS! DO you have a song or dance request? I'm going to start doing classes again! Let me know in the comments below!! THANKS :D Online dance class! Contemporary (beginner) Song: "Skinny Love", cover by Birdy I do not own the rights to the music at all.

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Artists are able to view images of every place, person, or piece of art imaginable through the internet, and are able to gain inspiration from things they would otherwise be unable to.

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Technology offers artists new ways to express what they are trying to portray

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Technology offers artists new ways to express what they are trying to portray

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Artists were often unable to express what they were trying to say through traditional art methods. With new advances in technology and art, artists are now able to more easily express themselves.

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Umbrellium at the Barbican.

At the Liverpool Biennial this month, I had an epiphany: the video installation is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In a world where almost everyone I know carries a video recorder around in their pocket - and where Google is trying to get us to wear them on our faces - the mere act of committing something to tape is no longer alienating enough to kick the mundane into that strange sphere we call "art". In 1972, when Ana Mendieta made Untitled (Death of a Chicken), an art gallery was probably the only place you could see a naked woman, splattered in blood, holding some recently deceased poultry. Now we have Reddit.

At the biennial - alongside several great exhibitions, including a well-curated selection of Whistlers at the Bluecoat - there were some spectacularly dull video installations. One was even canny enough to make a feature of its dullness by asserting: "Uri Aran plays with the way endless repetition can strip the banal of its meaning." Oh, does he now? I resent artists who make me feel like this - like I'm some great big square who doesn't get the ineffable postmodern profundity of resting a box of raisins over a vitrine filled with snot and would probably just prefer an insipid watercolour of a bee.

Nonetheless, I maintain that the feeling of "Yeah, but I could have done that" is lethal to the enjoyment of modern and conceptual art - and without the obvious artistry evidenced by mastery of a skill such as painting, sculpture or ceramics, it is easily evoked. Artists, take note: you can't just film an orange for seven minutes and pretend it's a meditation on solitude.

A small cheer, then, for the Barbican's new exhibition "Digital Revolution", which is devoted to the effect that technology has had on art and design. There is a video installation here that is enough to make anyone a convert to the medium: Chris Milk's The Treachery of Sanctuary (pictured below). It features a triptych of video screens in a dark room, mirrored in a pool of water, which project your silhouette on to a white background. You see yourself stomp, fidget and gesticulate.

In the first screen, your silhouette disintegrates into birds and flies away; in the second, the birds peck you to nothingness. The final screen allows you to become a bird: fling open your arms and your silhouette suddenly has gigantic eagle's wings, unfurling with a satisfying "whoomph". The artist's notes reference religious fervour, self-doubt and the cave paintings of Lascaux but even without any of that knowledge, the experience is memorable. It is art of this precise moment in history. First, it uses Kinect - the motion-sensing hardware developed by Microsoft that lets you pretend to ten-pin bowl or jet-ski from the comfort of your front room. Second, it uses that technology to answer a need created by another: specifically, that CGI moment in a science-fiction film when an ordinary human being suddenly sprouts wings (the X-Men movies do this well, as does Kevin Smith's Dogma). Watching those films, surely every viewer wants to know what that might feel like? It turns out that even a small approximation is immensely satisfying. Every adult who stood in front of Milk's triptych looked as wonderstruck as a child.

The other huge opportunity that the advance of the digital realm offers to artists is the possibility of crowd-sourcing. Elsewhere in the show, Milk has collaborated with another artist, Aaron Koblin, on The Johnny Cash Project, which offers people around the world a chance to redraw a frame of their choice from the video for the song "Ain't No Grave". Some are faithful replicas, others wild interpretations in a pointillist or impressionist style. The finished video, updated regularly on YouTube, is both recognisable and eerily estranged from its source material. Again, this is a work that speaks to a specific cultural moment. Technology has created the shared reference, through the mass-media power of the music video, and supplied the means to mimic it, through Photoshop and other software.

The reason I got this reviewing gig is that the exhibition also features games. There are early classics, which show how the commercial power of titles such as Pong, Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros drove innovations in hardware, alongside examples of later experimental and indie games.

A breathless pause here to deal with Roger Ebert's question, which has haunted the medium for the past decade: can a video game be art? The answer, on this evidence, is yes. Ebert, a film critic, suggested that the interactive element of games showed there was no guiding creative intent: "I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would Romeo and Juliet have been better with a different ending? . . . If you can go through 'every emotional journey available', doesn't that devalue each and every one of them?"

But what many of the best games do is show their workings - they uncover the straitjacket of context within which your choices are made. My favourite title, BioShock (not on show here), is a good example, because of its unreliable narrator. The Barbican gives you a chance to play last year's bleak indie hit Papers, Please,which forces you to act as an immigration official in a crushingly monotonous Soviet bureaucracy. Every choice leads to misery; there is no way to "win".

Cute Circuit.

The problem with Ebert's question was that it prompted a retrenchment. As a journalist born in the 1940s and a representative of the more established medium of film, he unwittingly pushed the button in every gamer marked: "But grown-ups don't understand me!" And so, for several years, games manufacturers decided the best way to gain the approval of the cultural gatekeepers was to mimic cinema. The 2000s became the decade of the interminable cut scene, in which you were forced to watch mediocre mo-capped actors plank their way through utter bibble about lost home worlds and tactical assault teams before you got to the good bits (that is, shooting people in the face).

Finally, though, games are shrugging off their inferiority complex and the irony is that only now is their artistic potential being realised. While it's true that the mega-hits - the soldier-simulations and dystopian rampage fantasies - are often immensely dumb and cliché-ridden, the same could be said of Hollywood blockbusters. At least in the game world, indie titles have an easy route to consumers, through the Steam software for PC and Mac and the Xbox and PlayStation marketplaces.

Avant-garde games have gone in two distinct directions, both driven by the urge to get away from the desire to "win" or "lose" and a desire to be more self-consciously "artistic". Some, such as Dear Esther, Dys4ia or Gone Home, try to tell small-scale stories through a game mechanic focused on discovery; they are perhaps better described as "interactive fiction". Others, such as Journey, Flower or Proteus, do away with any measure of progress and concentrate instead on creating a pure sensory experience.

What this exhibition delivers is a feeling of abundance, of creativity, of the potential of this palette of tools to turb0charge the human imagination. There's more, too: a sense of connection unimaginable even 30 years ago. Inside the online game Minecraft, there are vast cities built by the mouse clicks of thousands. The indie title Fez has puzzles that are so difficult they can only be solved by an online horde comparing notes on a forum. But underneath it all, there is fragility. The Barbican's first section, "Digital Archaeology", reminds you that what is cheap to create is also easily discarded. In 2012, New York's Museum of Modern Art started collecting the source code of old games, reasoning they could easily be lost for ever as the consoles needed to play them broke down or were thrown out as rubbish.

There's the rub of artistic expression in our digital world: we can send data across the world at a keystroke, but in 100 years' time, the highest achievements of our culture might be inaccessible to us, locked away in a digital space to which we no longer have the key. Mind you, when it comes to video installations of solitary oranges, I'm not sure that's any great loss.

"Digital Revolution" is at the Barbican Centre, London EC2, until 14 September

The Liverpool Biennial runs until 26 October at various locations across the city

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Digital revolution: how technology has changed what it means to be an artist

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Umbrellium at the Barbican. At the Liverpool Biennial this month, I had an epiphany: the video installation is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

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Technology has opened new business opportunities for artists. 

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Technology has opened new business opportunities for artists. 

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Artist can place coin or card swipe panels over their street art. Once the visitor swipes or inserts coins, the panel opens and you can view the art for a few minutes.

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Technology has increased engagement with art 

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Technology has increased engagement with art 

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Many artists, and those involved with the arts believe that they are able to create a larger platform for their work, and are able to share others work more easily through the use of technology.

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Technology is changing the way art is made

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Technology is changing the way art is made

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new forms of art are being created with digital format

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Where would the Impressionists have been without the invention of portable paint tubes that enabled them to paint outdoors? Who would have heard of Andy Warhol without silkscreen printing? The truth is that technology has been providing artists with new ways to express themselves for a very long time.

Still, over the past few decades, art and tech have become more intertwined than ever before, whether it's through providing new ways to mix different types of media, allowing more human interaction or simply making the process of creating it easier.

Case in point is a show titled "Digital Revolution" that opened earlier this summer in London's Barbican Centre. The exhibit, which runs through mid-September, includes a "Digital Archaeology" section which pays homage to gadgets and games that not that long ago dazzled us with their innovation. (Yes, an original version of Pong is there, presented as lovable antiquity.) But the show also features a wide variety of digital artists who are using technology to push art in different directions, often to allow gallery visitors to engage with it in a multi-dimensional way.

Here are seven examples, some from "Digital Revolution," of how technology is reshaping what art is and how it's produced:

Assemblance by Umbrellium - Powered by Pangolin and KVANT

Let's start with lasers, the brush stroke of so much digital art. One of the more popular exhibits in the London show is called "Assemblance," and it's designed to encourage visitors to create light structures and floor drawings by moving through colored laser beams and smoke. The inclination for most people is to work alone, but the shapes they produce tend to be more fragile. If a person nearby bumps into their structure, for instance, it's likely to fall apart. But those who collaborate with others-even if it's through an act as simple as holding hands-discover that the light structures they create are both more resilient and more sophisticated. "Assemblance," says Usman Haque, one of the founders of Umbrellium, the London art collective that designed it, has a sand castle quality to it-like a rogue wave, one overly aggressive person can wreck everything.

Another favorite at "Digital Revolution" is an experience called "Petting Zoo." Instead of rubbing cute goats and furry rabbits, you get to cozy up to snake-like tubes hanging from the ceiling. Doesn't sound like fun? But wait, these are very responsive tubes, bending and moving and changing colors based on how they read your movements, sounds and touch. They might pull back shyly if they sense a large group approaching or get all cuddly if you're being affectionate. And if you're just standing there, they may act bored. The immersive artwork, developed by a design group called Minimaforms, is meant to provide a glimpse into the future, when robots or even artificial pets will be able to read our moods and react in kind.

If Rising Colorspace, an abstract artwork painted on the wall of a Berlin gallery, doesn't seem so fabulous at first glance, just give it a little time. Come back the next day and it will look at least a little different. That's because the painting is always changing, thanks to a wall-climbing robot called a Vertwalker armed with a paint pen and a software program instructing it to follow a certain pattern.

The creation of artists Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas, the Vertwalker-which looks like a flattened iRobot Roomba -is constantly overwriting its own work, cycling through eight colors as it glides up vertical walls for two to three hours at a time before it needs a battery change. "The process of creation is ideally endless," Haas explains.

Give Russian artist Dmitry Morozov some credit-he's devised a way to make pollution beautiful, even if his purpose is to make us aware of how much is out there. First, he built a device, complete with a little plastic nose, that uses sensors which can measure dust and other typical pollutants, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and methane. Then, he headed out to the streets of Moscow.

The sensors translate the data they gather into volts and a computing platform called Arduino translates those volts into shapes and colors, creating a movie of pollution. Morozov's device then grabs still images from the movie and prints them out. As irony would have it, the dirtier the air, the brighter the image. Exhaust smoke can look particularly vibrant.

Virginia Tech: Eric Standley

Eric Standley, a professor at Virginia Tech, is one artist who doesn't use technology to make the creation process simpler. Actually, it's just the reverse. He builds stained glass windows, only they're made from paper precisely cut by a laser. He starts by drawing an intricate design, then meticulously cuts out the many shapes that, when layered over one another, form a 3-D version of his drawing. One of his windows might comprise as many as 100 laser-cut sheets stacked together. Standley says the technology allows him to feel more, not less, connected to what he's creating. As he explains in the video above, "Every efficiency that I gain through technology, the void is immediately filled with the question, 'Can I make it more complex?'"

It's one thing to project laser light onto a stationary wall or into a dark sky, now pretty much standard fare at public outdoor celebrations. But in an art project titled "Light Echoes," digital media artist Aaron Koblin and interactive director Ben Tricklebank executed the concept on a much larger scale. One night last year, a laser they mounted on a crane atop a moving train projected images, topographical maps and even lines of poetry into the dark Southern California countryside. Those projections left visual "echoes" on the tracks and around the train, which they captured through long-exposure photography.

The Treachery of Sanctuary- Chris Milk - Creators Project 2012

Here's one last take from the "Digital Revolution" show. An art installation developed by video artist Chris Milk called "Treachery of the Sanctuary," it's meant to explore the creative process through interactions with digital birds. That's right, birds, and some are very angry. The installation is a giant triptych, and gallery visitors can stand in front of each of the screens. In the first, the person's shadow reflected on the screen disintegrates into a flock of birds. That, according to Milk, represents the moment of creative inspiration. In the second, the shadow is pecked away by virtual birds diving from above. That symbolizes critical response, he explains. In the third screen, things get better-you see how you'd look with a majestic set of giant wings that flap as you move. And that, says Milk, captures the instant when a creative thought transforms into something larger than the original idea.

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7 Ways Technology is Changing How Art is Made

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Technology is redefining art in strange, new ways. Works are created by people moving through laser beams or from data gathered on air pollution