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Art and Technology
| Article
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11539 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
10,932 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
Time magazine, on January 3, 1983, greeted the new year, as usual, by naming its Man of the Year for the preceding year. This time, however, the choice was revolutionary. Instead of a person, Time named a machine - the computer. The editors explained their choice this way:
"For the past 55 years, Time's Man of the Year covers have depicted real individuals or, on four occasions, a symbolic representation of a group of people: G.I. Joe (1950), the Hungarian Patriot (1956), the Young (1966) and Middle Americans (1969)… Several human candidates might have represented 1982, but none symbolized the past year more richly, or will be viewed by history as more significant, than a machine: the computer… A new world beckons, created by a technological upheaval that is bringing computers to millions. Since no one person dominated this process, Time's Man of the year for 1982 is not a man, but the computer itself."1
Time, as a magazine of great prominence attuned to millions of readers throughout the world, is not so far ahead of mass taste as to be avant-garde or revolutionary, but it is also not so far behind as to give only tardy reports of what is already part of the mass culture. Naming a machine to fill a place that had traditionally been filled by a person or persons seemed to elevate a machine and endow it with the kind of symbolic powers heretofore reserved for the historical portrait (The Man of the Year) or the allegorical image (The Young).
The cover picture of Time seemed to show a man seated on a yellow chair in front of a red table on which rested a high-tech computer. If you examined the picture more closely, however, you saw that nothing on this cover page of Time was real; all was artifice. There was neither a real computer nor real man on real chair at real table, but an artistic creation, a sculpture of a man seated on a chair before a table holding a mock computer. The man, chair, and table were created by world-famous sculptor George Segal, who almost never accepts commercial commissions, but who enthusiastically agreed to this project. The machines on the cover were mock computers, created by a Columbus, Ohio, design firm.
This cover picture could be taken as emblematic of the situation in the arts nowadays. George Segal, the artist, succeeded in expressing something of the human experience of men struggling, for the first time in history, with a machine that calculates, programs, seems to reason, deduces, draws, sings, and plays musical instruments.
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