COP 1 Lecture 8 - Digital Production and Distribution

Today's lecture was based around technology and digital production.

We started by talking about how the idea of technology came from using tools and equipment back in the stone age.  We then looked at Marshall McLuhan who died in 1911, way before the digital age. He looked at the progressive development of technology to form the human condition and argued that we must study media and the chronological development of technology.

We also looked at the 'tetrad' and its four different sections based around the medium - enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsolesces. We talked about the effect technology has on these four elements.
In 1990, the globalisation of digital production began when the first Mac was made affordable for the public. This enhanced individual experience and productivity. It retrieved individual creativity - things were no longer about factory and machine production, people were able to design their own things. It reversed speed, capacity, memory and access due to the software used and it obsoleted traditional and hand-crafted production techniques such as letter press etc.

We talked about The New Aesthetic - the increasing appearance of visual language and the blending of the virtual and physical.
We then looked at The Digital Aesthetic. This was based around the idea of creating other realms and environments, surreal characters and animation and the age of digital clocks.  We looked at Paddington Bear and how that character has transformed with the times. When it was first created, Paddington was a physical puppet, but it is now a completely digital character. This creates a sense of nostalgia vs innovation.

Film impacts on how we think about the physical world. The heads-up display used in the Iron Man film is a representation of an imaginary and visionary world. Technology has an impact on how we imagine the world to be. The Bluetooth headset idea originated from a headset used in a Star Trek film, similarly to the flip phone. In the early 1990s Star Trek, the idea of the digital age included old school machinery and big buttons, whereas the more recent films feature touchscreens and software interfaces etc.

We talked about digital and analog clocks. Digital clocks have connotations of precision, technology and accuracy. Comparatively, analog clocks are a lot more visual and cognitive. It has been proven that an analog clock is easier to read as it requires less maths. An analog clock functions like a map and shows a cyclical process - time moves and travels within its own map. In cars, analog dials are still used due to how we process information. An analog dial changes the gestalt of the image, wheres in a digital image there is just a number change.

We then looked at The Mechanical Aesthetic and how robots were originally similar to analog styles with a nostalgic mechanical view - for example the film Metropolis, which has a very industrial look.
Nowadays, the development of technology has led to the demonization of robots. The old CP30 robot is now represented by the ultimate service robot iRobot, which demonstrates a recurring archetype of the 'iCulure' where everything follows  white, blue and chrome aesthetic.

We talked about a utopian aesthetic in the idea of the future, in which everything is a perfect state of being. We then talked about dystopia and how technology leaves us with a bleak outlook and future.

People are now going back to using vinyl records instead of CDS, which demonstrates nostalgia and shows we have almost come full circle. We tend to trust an analog aesthetic more than we trust an 'iCloud'. We like a physical engagement so we know things are real.

We finished off by looking at the Information Age, in which there is a shift from traditional industry to an economy based on computerized methods. Do we need to re-engage with the physical? Is this why we still visit art galleries, buy books and go to the cinema? Do we find these things more trustworthy than a digital interface?