New media has allowed mass information to travel among us. Photography, film, radio, printing press, etc. “Mass media and data processing are the complimentary technologies of a mass society” quoted from Lev Manovich, this week’s reading. what are the data and how are they being processed by technology?
The development of computers and modern media begin around the same time. The technology was essential to reproduce the same texts, images, and sounds to the mass. Could human brains handle the surge of information when it all started? have our brains evolved to accommodate the speed of information?
There’s the notion that human brains will evolve along technology, the more advanced our technology becomes, surely our brain will catch up to it. But if we look at the new media today, the internet, social media and whatnot, it seems as if the new media is growing at the speed that is faster than our human brains can keep up with. We let this new technology evolve and as society we were late on regulating rules for this new media until it affected us all globally, such as what happened with the US presidential election and UK Brexit.
Development of computers allows automation, which have seemed to help us in this aspect. we can rely on computers to read and analyze data for us. But there has to be a limit, right? Automation functions within rules. AI process and build, but they can’t initiate. It can’t create outside of the rules that we’ve created for it. can AI act on their own? Maybe not today. They’re just strings of codes and numbers. But I guess so are humans. What are we but series of complicated genomes?
Generative art would be predictable. What’s the point of creating a huge numbers of predictable art?
However, there’s no reason a computer should work on its own to create a work of art. I think a collaborative effort between us human and computer could make works that people couldn’t even have imagined before. Though I don’t exactly know how. Maybe something like those sketches I did earlier last semester? Anyways, I hope to learn more from this class.
Nilam Sari 