Art &Technology

A History of Style, Attitude and Technique in Artistic Movements
- Creative Use of Technology

"Techné", the Greek word for skills, was applied to engineering skills as well as to artistic skills. At that time art and technology were not separated and only later on in European history, a separation between art and technology was set up. As a consequence art and engineering became two separate occupations with different socological contexts to be placed in. It was Edgar Snow, who described the separation into two fileds in his book "Two Cultures". Snow complained about the lost link between Creative Technology and the Arts. Ever since Snow published his thesis, many things happened, which lead towards an understanding that art and technology might be overlapping activities, that artist need to use technology and that technological research often relies on artistic creativity.

The old German proverb "Schuster bleib bei Deinem Leisten!" obviously refers to a sociological setup, where distincitons between professional boundaries have to be respected. The proverb's iideological background which tries to keep the walls in between disciplines up, can easily be translated ifrom its literall English meaning: "If you are a shoemaker, stick to making shoes!" to a more general statement: "Don't cross over to other disciplines, don"t mix up technology with art."

There is a history of musicians achieving interesting results in nonmusical fields as there is of artists from non-musical artforms arriving at astounding ideas in the field of music and sound design. Taking the oeuvre of artists like Yoko Ono, Marcel Duchamp, Arnold Schönberg or Brian Eno to name just a few, one could even arrive at the question whether there is such a thing as artistic disciplines. The works presented on this webpage try to present a number of creative men and women, who were not afraid of crossing the borders.

It would certainly be most consistent in the sense of a non-hierarchical approach with the aim of destroying borders and tearing down the walls between fields of classification if I avoided historic borderlines as well as disciplinary ones. This would make sense because there is a number of works of art which can easily be disputed to belong to a specific one of the historical groupings or belong to none of them at all. Keeping this in mind and accepting that authors or works might belong to many different classificatory folders, I put them in one of them for pragmatic reasons. I would therefore like you to consider the rows in the table underneath to have soft borders, fuzzy borders or no borders at all.

	Futurism	1909 - 1930ies	Marinetti, Russolo, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Avraamov
	Dada	1916 - 1930ies	Schwitters, Arp, Tzara, Hausmann, Höch
	Fluxus	1958 - 1970ies	Kaprow, Brecht, La Monte Young, Cage, Paik
	Pop	1957 - 80ies	Warhol, Eno, Ono, Gabriel, Anderson
	Kinetic Art	1958 - 70ies	Schoeffer, Vogel, Piene
	Electronic Art	1958 - 80ies	Watts, Cage, Lucier, Neuhaus, Paik
	Happening	1959 - 1970 ies	Kaprow, Beuys, Liechtenstein
	Aktionismus	1960ies	Brus, Mühl, Nitsch, Schwarzkogler, Export
	Digital Art	1964 - now	Whitney, Knowlton, Hoberman, Weibel, Shaw
	Telematic Art, Web Art	1970ies - now	Ascott, Foresta, Fontana, Sermon, Knowbotic Research, Stensley and Wolford
	Sound Art		Neuhaus, Lucier, Leitner, Fontana, Zhen
	Space Art	1970ies - now	Piene, Kriesche
	Game Art	1999 - now	Arcangel, Morgana, McFlanagan, Ludic Society, Moswitzer, Jahrmann, Fuchs, Rumbke