THE NEW REALISM AND INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY
In the following essay I will try to lead to words, from my artistic perspective, the problem of the influence of technology, in principle seen from the visual arts and secondly, with respect to its effects on the reality-image relationship.
To develop it I will make various interrogations that will serve as points to build the main idea and arouse new interests. I do not intend to perform a deep analysis of each concept that I name but to reach a general approach of the problem and cause awareness in people of an evolution, product of technological advances, in images and in our reality.
What is Tékne? To introduce ourselves I will return to remote times, the ancient Greece. According to the Aristotelian sense of art, Tékne is any manufacturing procedure with rules that leads to the production of beautiful, utilitarian, material and intellectual objects, through which it is possible to transform the natural into artificial. Tékne became the art of human doing, a necessary knowledge for the construction of images.
How did this resource influence the history of art? Initially, man served as the work of art to satisfy the human need to escape the inexorability of time, close to life and artificially set carnal appearances. This defined its character of similarity with realism, depending on mimesis, possible thanks to the use of the different tèknes. For example, in painting, we can talk about subjective realism, since when creating, the person should not necessarily be present in the face of reality that is being represented. Later, with the appearance of the dark camera and then the daguerreotype, we talk about photography, an objective realism introduced by the machine, where its essence is to witness that the object to existed in a certain time and space and in space and inWhere man only intervenes when choosing a frame and capturing with help from his hand. We advance to the cinema, a temporary realism, I see the screen and live the moving images as a present that happens at that moment, the system exceeded the natural perception of man and created a symbolic prosthesis as a substitute for the viewer’s body. We continue with television, we incorporate the living and live, a duplication of reality. And suddenly we reach the present, virtual realism, computer intelligence, replace? The evolution of images over reality, the increasingly reduced presence of man in machinistic arts and the construction of a strong visual culture where technologies become images of image of a new realism.
So today … What is reality? Do various types of realities coexist in the 21st century? I face the problem of wanting to answer these questions with certainty but the influence of technologies in my day to day generates the confusion of not knowing if the real is my true existence or my existence as an image in a virtual network formed by numbers and signselectronic.
We are faced with a new world, with new rules of communication, new languages with its new signs, new sensations, ways to create relationships … and more. The change is accelerated and absolute.
During at least half of the day people, we live in the virtuality of social networks offered by the new extension of our body, the cell phone. This almost human object brought with it a revolution in the human life form ..
Can we talk about a path made the tongue extinction by images? At birth we live with the images of our parents’ cell phones, and without knowing how to read or write, we have the aptitude to use and recognize the applications without problem. Likewise, when chatting with someone for WhatsApp, we use icons, stickers or selfies to describe our actions, experiences and sensations.
Is there a massification of images in the 21st century? Because? Clearly, if, creating images is no longer kept for artists or special moments, it is no longer about showing reality but about evidence our presence in the event, it is a "having been there" of the person to attest to faithIts real existence in the virtuality of social networks. There is, therefore, a perverse image manufacture.
What other value do the images take today? We know people and establish relationships through social networks without having ever seen us, but we do know who it is, we have photographs of their face, family, experiences, etc.
In the form of conclusion, could we talk that our real existence is replaced by images? To be more concrete, are we images? Not yet, but we are in the process of being … we are homo photographicus, we produce and consume images simultaneously with total naturalness. Even so, isn’t an image ecology necessary urgently? Current iconic saturation, not only that causes blindness but leads us to the paradox that images are no longer limited to representing reality but become reality itself. Today, art and reality melt. We live in the image, and in that situation it is the responsibility of the artist not to increase visual pollution. These are the problems that new realism entails based on technological machines and not only of humanism. Fight against evolution would be illogical and unnatural, but then, what solutions we find for this? We need to rethink the changes produced, in principle by the power of man and today, giving the place to the machines. If not, it is likely that the world we know and conceive as a natural habitat of the human being, it will no longer be for us. We will be destroyed by what we create? Or we will be recreated in an eternal and perfect virtuality?
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