(If you think I’m stuck in the past now, trust me, I’m a big step forward from dressing like a buck-skinned little Indian or a coon-skinned Daniel Boone in elementary school. I have made progress.)
To summarize my background and process of thought, I’ll show an example of the buildings I would tour back home. You see, after growing up in ye olde log cabin and organizing various toy collections with typewritten labels, I crawled out of the woods with my trusty film camera and documented the local surroundings. And, at the time, it only made sense to etch those surroundings back onto stones and plates.
After kicking around in abandoned coal chutes, it was only logical to wonder what on earth happened to those workers inside the factories and mines and the strange machines they operated. I couldn’t help but intuitively sense a strange distrust of the empty promises of technology and of course, the economy. I then thought it would be a good idea to spend some time with original office propaganda from the originating era. I had been picking up maps, ledgers and inventories in these factories, so I also checked out business magazines from 1913 to see what the hubbub was all about. It seemed that human perfection in worker motion and office organization were absolutely ideal, and the answers to all of mankind’s dilemmas in life were to be found in a multitude of time-saving devices.
I also watched several films from the 1920s, illustrating man’s inferiority to the machine. An excitement about new technological devices of communication grew to such an extent that Dziga Vertov’s "Man With a Movie Camera" portrays how a typewriter might even be integrated into the brain. Other films like Fritz Lang’s "Metropolis", however, are a little more wary of the latest and greatest, as he warns us of a great enslavement and sacrifice of the human race to the assembly line and time clock. How could one not be afraid, I wondered, after reading quotes like Vertov’s hopes that technology can “reach the stage where we will surprise and record ‘human thoughts’ and finally…[the] direct organization of thought (and consequently, of actions) of all of mankind” and Henry Ford’s, “There is every reason to believe that we should be able to renew our human bodies in the same manner as we renew a defect in a boiler.”?
I also studied other portrayals of time, effort and money-saving devices, spending time with a lovely advertisement that expects consumers to believe that their latest typewriter is faster than a speeding train… or maybe even a bullet. I wondered what other artists of the Industrial Revolution thought of technological progress. The American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler was no consolation after I read his statement that his work is an “illustration of what a beautiful world it would be if there were no people in it. " Somehow I still wasn’t feeling a warm and fuzzy feeling about the integration of humans with industry and communication technology. I was, however, intrigued by a quote written about him as I continued to ponder how exactly these studies can lead to a portrayal of human interactions with technology today. It reads, “Turn-of-the century artists had their feet in two worlds simultaneously. Their subject matter was up-to-date, but their stylistic presentations, which involved well-established painterly or picturesque conventions, inadequately conveyed the radical newness of urban and industrial America. In response, Donald Kuspit has written, “This use of a traditional manner to treat an untraditional subject was as much a defense—or offence—against the subject as a sign of the artist’s inadequacy to it. It suggests a resentment of modernity, a reluctance to accept its inevitability.” –Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, p. 26.
This caused me to ponder just how I could possibly take out of context and inadequately portray our current icons of digital interface in a slightly outdated manner. I had also just seen some strange perversions of CYMK process on a printmaking blog. The piece is by Evelyn Kasikov, working in a series called “Printed Matter” that attempts to combine craft and modern technology. So that is how my train of thought eventually arrived at the four-color process enlargement of the scroll bar, and then icons from Microsoft Word printed onto the actual objects they represent. It is a strange time we are living in, still hanging on to physical representations of objects in order to navigate our world of 1’s and 0’s with some sense of meaning. I will admit to having an anxiety about a complete erasure of the past and total detachment from most physical objects whatsoever. There are many lost motions and human talents, transformed into a wealth of superficial knowledge bereft of firsthand experience. I scratch my head and ponder what exactly it is we are doing day in and day out, staring at screens and texting while we walk or even drive. Thus, I am trying to come at this analysis from every angle I can think of, with my latest work functioning to take our icons and actions out of context and time, causing them to appear absurd. I will finally show then, a still of my mostly unnoticed performance of “texting” on the way to class.
Until next time, I will leave you with a quote describing the writings of Friedrich A. Kittler, who:
…invites the plotting of a historical graph in which the human being is reduced from its original function as homo faber to an accessory in a scenario of technological apocalypse, in which the “omnipotence of integrated circuits” will lead to a fine-tuning of the self-replicating Turing machine that relegates human ingenuity and idealism to the junkyard of history. –Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Translator’s Introduction, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. xxxiii.
your avid typist,
-Rachel
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