Many people have mixed feelings about modern art. Some people think it’s interesting, that it explores and pushes boundaries, or that it shows great creativity and imagination. Others think it’s pretentious, unskilled and a waste of time. Whether you like it or not though, modern art has for a long time been the natural evolution of art. Once artists had perfected the ability to capture an image on the page with absolute realism, where did you expect them to turn next? Experimentation was the only way to cover new ground.
But quietly there have been new movements developing in the world of art, and entirely new forms of self-expression have started to appear. Thanks to the creation of new technologies and the transformative power of the World Wide Web, artists and members of the general public alike now have new tools of creation and new ways to explore artistic concepts. They may not be artists, but millions of hobbyists and hackers are pushing the boundaries of art by using entirely new mediums. Let’s take a look at some of the most original and high-tech new frontiers for artists and others looking to express themselves and describe the world around them.
Bertran
Bertran is a completely novel artistic concept, which looks at programming code as a potential medium for poetry. That’s right – people are now using code as a way to describe the abstract and make people think. This is code that is designed to be read rather than run, and it tends to use creative variable names and unusual structures to try and make various points.
Here’s an example called ‘Daily Grind’ by Paul Illingworth from ContinentContinent.com. It is written in Java…
// DAILYGRIND
import java.util.Date;
public class DailyGrind {
public static final void main(String[] args) {
booleanits_time_to_go_home = false;
booleanaway_the_hours = true;
while (away_the_hours) {
booleanaway_the_hours = true;
Date now = new Date();
its_time_to_go_home = now.getHours() > 17
&&now.getMinutes() > 30;
if (its_time_to_go_home) {
break;
}
try {
Thread.sleep(60000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// ignore
}
}
}
}
Chiptune
For a generation that grew up with GameBoy games and polyphonic ringtones, ‘chiptunes’ have a pleasant nostalgic appeal. Like Twitter, the limitations that 8-bit music place on creativity provide interesting challenges for the composers, and the fun is in creating epic, sweeping scores while working within those confines. They also tend to have a chirpy and upbeat feel to them which makes them enjoyable for others to listen to as well – even if they get a little irritating quite quickly.
Instagram‘s masterstroke was in providing the general public with the simple tools they needed to become artists and to start capturing moments as they happened around them. By allowing users to instantly upload the snaps they capture, and then building a thriving community around them, it managed to make opportunistic, low resolution images into an art form. This is a community that thrives on taking photos of the mundane, but using them to tell a story and to show how even the most boring objects in our lives can actually be beautiful.
Indie Games
The indie game community has come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years and managed to gain a lot of attention with games like Limbo, Super Meat Boy, The Unfinished Swan and Thirty Flights of Loving.
These games manage to compete with the bigger game developers thanks to distribution platforms such as Steam, but also thanks to the creativity and originality of the creators. These games offer an entirely different kind of interactive experience that entertains the player while at the same time making a deep statement on life, or helping them to reflect on who they are. Thanks to the interactive nature of video games, people can be taken on a journey and shown a narrative in entirely new ways – and the art community is starting to sit up and take notice of the genre.
The internet then is a great facilitator of art, and is turning all of us it seems into people who enjoy and are capable of creating intricate artwork. The larger impact this might have on our culture and society remains to be seen, but for now just enjoy the pretty games, the artistic snaps, the chirpy music and poetic code…