OUGD401 - Context of Practice Lecture 8

Digital Production and Distribution

The digital revolution could be said to be more important than the development of print. Technologies have now moved beyond physical processes providing new tools to create with.

Marshall McLuhan
'we shape our tools, and the tools shape us'

This suggests that once made we become dependent on technology. There is a relationship between the medium and technology and how it impacts society, it can enhance, reverse, retrieve and obsolesces. There is a complex relationship between the media and the'ground'.

In order to understand technology we need to understand the context around it, particularly its historical context. 

In the 1990s there was the globalisation of the digital. This allowed a range of processes to be explored, it enhanced productivity, speed and allowed for ultimate editability. Technology allowed for individual creativity and layout techniques were broken, previously design was very standard. 

Limitations of digital tools were that they were costly and the memory was not very good.

The New Aesthetic developed out of the new technologies available. James Bridles work is a good example of this. The New Aesthetic marked the appearance of the visual language of digital technology and the internet in the physical world. This began to blend the virtual with the physical.

Examples of the digital aesthetic include the digital clock, virtual reality, hyper-reality such as green screens which combine animation with reality (e.g. Paddington which suggests a relationship between nostalgia and the innovation of bringing the digital into the physical).

Through innovation technologies are being merged with the physical world. Originally many of these technologies were imagined or visionary decades ago. These ideas now dictate what happens and become created in the real world (e.g. The Google Glass)

The way we envisage the future is dictated by the technology of today. We assess our relationship with technology through emotions and gestures etc. There are physiological changes when interacting with analogue and digital technologies. Analogue and digital technologies coexist in today's world. Analogue technologies are easy to visually see with more cues than digital. Digital technologies involve more cognitive function, there preciseness means they need working out more when compared with analogue. With analogue clocks you can see the time that has travelled as it visually passes by through the use of numbers or markings. This cyclical process gives more sense of consequence, whereas with digital there is no concept of what it is. 

In cars, the use of digital analogue dials shows the relationship between what we are doing and its effect in reality, we are able to make comparisons between cues ('gestalt').

The mechanical aesthetic involves the mechanical man, metropolis, cybermen, service droids etc. This aesthetic shows an alternative future in which the fears of technology are projected onto the characters. Archetypes reoccur through this aesthetic.

The technological aesthetic reflects the technology that we have and shows the development of technology that has been honed down into the best bits from years of previous technology.

The utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities such as sustainability, work life balance etc.

How will technology define us as human? How will it change our environment? Where will it take us? Dystopia rather than Utopia?

In the future there may be more of a relationship between normality and hyper reality. World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.  This war will be a cyber war won through hacking etc.

Digital behaviour is a replication of human behaviour.

With the analogue aesthetic there is a trust, which is why we look at it nostalgically. We go back to things that we know, engagement with an object allows us to know that it is real.

The Information age involves computerised information. The mobilisation of digital communication allows for larger distribution, which has turned information into a commodity. There has been democratised access to information. Viewers are discerning but not loyal.

Our return to nostalgic things however suggests that the future is not about becoming completely digital.