In previous posts I focused on the effects of modern mobile communication technology on how and where we live and work and how it alters our lives. I tried to show how those changes impact not just the individuals themselves but society at large. In one of those posts I described how a retired judge used the technology to make it easier to change careers and become a fairly well-regarded sculptor in bronze.
Much more recently, I travelled to New York City where I met up with another artist, the well-known sculptor of many notable public art installations in California and Washington, Brian Goggin. He was on the East Coast working on what he describes as an immersive sculptural installation. A work of art that also will function as a restaurant to be called Preserve24 located at the corner of Houston and Allen Streets in the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side of Manhattan. (It has opened since the original version of this post was written.) His intention was to turn the entire space into a single integrated work of art using primarily pre-used materials in an artistically novel design. A design he believes will be “reminiscent of an expedition society.”
I caught up with Brian at a metal shop in Brooklyn where he was busily working on assembling the dramatic sculptural staircase that will lead patrons into the restaurant. The staircase is designed to look like an entrance to the elevated subway line.
I asked him if modern communications technology, mobile phones or applications has made a difference in how he goes about his business as well as where chooses to live and work.
He pointed out that he uses his smart phone and other technology in their most basic form as a tool, to gather information and to communicate visual images, text and vocal information. Nevertheless, he believes that it has made a substantial difference in how he goes about his art.
He describes what he does as similar to a film director creating a team to manifest a project; engineers, welders, carpenters and the like; the artist as director and inventor/visionary. In a way, he mused, his art can be thought of as almost the same type of business as producing flash mobs.
Photos of projects in progress and materials can be sent to his assistant as well as to clients increasing his ability to include visuals with conversation. Changes can be proposed and implemented immediately. There is no longer a need to take slides, duplicate them and send them through the mail. Costs are lowered and time waste reduced. He and his collaborators can work directly from drawings shared through text and email to enable him to work over great distances with his team members .
He can now manage much of his projects, like the one he is working on in New York, from his home in California half of the time. He can work in teams with other artists living and working in places all over the globe to produce a single collaborative work.
He said that although he now can live and work anywhere, he prefers to be where he can still interact directly with other people; conceptualization can occur at home and fabrication at suitable remote sites.
Cities have always been where artists gathered to meet clients, share ideas and fabricate their art works. Now, through modern communication technology, in our cities a new Renaissance may be in store for us as artists regather, not in low-cost deteriorating warehouse districts on the peripheries of urban areas but at their centers.
Peter Grenell director of the San Mateo Harbor District and a keen observer of history as well as an accomplished raconteur once observed:
“Never forget It was just 35 years more or less from Shakespeare to Louis XIV ; From the French and Indian War to the Louisiana Purchase ; From ‘Et Tu., Brute’ to the kid in the manger; From Fred Allen to Laugh-In.”
We tend to look back into history and see social change as a slow process when we view it through the prism of technological transformation or the speed in which the changes are disseminated. But those born into the frugal world of the Bard died in the extravagant age of the Sun King. Many of those that heard the cheers or jeers that accompanied the imperial pretensions of Julius Caesar ended their day’s hearing the whispers of a new king born in the East. Social change is generational. Its scope and reach often technological. But social change is also reflexive. The reaction to the changes also changes things, often in ways that cannot be predicted.
Tomorrows urban areas, impacted by modern communications technology will not be the same as the urban areas of today. The Cities of our fathers or grandparents that were the smoky chaotic centers of industry and trade were not the same as the urban areas of our time; uncertain places, slowly decaying as motorized transportation took people, industry and commerce away to less stressful environments. The Cities of the future, fashioned in part by the effects of the communications technologies of today will be different still, probably in ways we cannot imagine. They will be neither as bleak as feared or as paradisiacal as hoped, but in my opinion the experience of those changes and how we accommodate to them are much of what life is all about.
(The above post is taken from my blog that appeared in Smart+Connected Communities Institute.)
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Today's Quote:
"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things…. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough….
The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill….
To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere in next to no time and for nothing, but though a crowd rushes to the depot and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—-and it will be called, and will be, “a melancholy accident.” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it….
“What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt."
Henry David Thoreau (1854): Nothing to Say.