Visual Arts - Art and Technology - Essay Example

Art plays an important role in the cultural development of the society. People need a medium to voice their opinions, and sometimes words are not enough to incite a feeling of content/discontent or different thinking. This is where art plays a major role, where it helps to instigate and incite feelings about abstract things in life which have a very basic purpose, but at the same time are very important and which have been forgotten in the cloud of corporatization and commercialization of human values and dignity.

Art is a human expression which defies boundaries, caters to every aspect of human emotions, and envisages an idea which might seem different and alien at that time, but on the other hand it looks for the future, a time when we would not have artificial inhibitions protruding our desires. Art is a beautiful form of expression, and at the same time it can also serve to be an expression of an evil mind, but still, even at that particular time, it is serving for something innocent or understandably non committal which just flows out of the mind and spreads on the canvas.

So the next question which needs to be answered is how much influence has art played on the people and the society? The theme which has been picked for this part is technology and its advancements. The essay shall analyse the technological advancements and how art has played a role in shaping technology drastically. Technology has been regarded as a medium where in the past, there was very less scope for art to progress. It was said by many people that something which relates to circuit boards and engine, chips and floppy disks cannot be painted on a canvas, or cannot be designed in such a way that the human eye meets beauty.

Then came Apple; a company founded by Steve Jobs, a man who looked at things extremely differently. Steve Jobs propagated the idea of technology being merged with art. According to him, a gadget was considered to be a piece of beauty which could be constructed in an artistry form, and be more appreciable to the consumer, rather than having a bulky looking machine with intimidating features. The Macintosh was released in 1984. The year marked the first time that people saw a computer equipped with a Graphical User Interface.

The computer was extremely easy to use and consisted of a mouse which was never seen before. It was a machine which could be used and operated by people in their houses and for their daily personal basis, not necessarily inviting people belonging to corporate honchos exclusively. The Mac was a favourite among the consumers. It was small, not bulky, consisted of an interface which was as artistic as the hardware, the chips were placed in a beautiful order even though one could not see them, the casing was completely cubical, the mouse was small and fitted a human hand, and the floppy disk was right below the screen so it was easy to navigate.

All these features made the Mac an artistic product which deserved its place in the Museum of Modern Art. The product signified technology and consumerism. It stated that even technological gadgets could be artistic in nature, and that it dwelled in the culture of technology and development, where it was identified as a piece of human development, with the advent of personal computers we were now venturing into a new territory which now seemed inevitable since everyone uses a computer to accomplish their daily tasks, and the Mac was the