Giant Mechanical Flower

I can think of no better example of the blending of artistic and technological evolution than the huge mechanical flower of Buenos Aires, Floralis Generica. Unfortunately I don't believe there is a functional purpose for the behemoth sculpture, but one could imagine modifications that would allow solar collection with high efficiency. There is a also a flickr group of associated images, Floralis Generica. We have discovered new forms of self and group expression, enabled by advanced technology.

Art Dova

My friend Shana Carp is pushing the boundaries of digital identity and the experience of social media with the project she started Art Dova on Facebook. While there is certainly overstepping of standard Facebook policy, the people involved are all aware a public account is befriending them (according to creator of the profile). By befriending Art Dova you are essentially uncorking the bottle and allowing anyone to see your shared material. Privacy is a big issue with Facebook and other social media corporations, but the essence of the project is one of artistic exploration, as described by Shana. By probing the boundaries of our comfort zone we help to answer the challenging question of virtual identity and how much faith we put in it. The profile is a collaborative creation and has grown beyond the initial input and statuses it was seeded with. Unfortunately it was recently hijacked and turned into a spambot, and then removed. I see the project more as an experiment of policy breaking, but appreciate the shared web experience it offered. Shana describes some of the ideas behind the experiment here on another friend Vladimir Vukicevic's blog, Beyond the Cave. The following quote captures Shana's sentiment:

It's about exploration of an issue. Especially in a post-Duchamp world. So you have to suspend yourself and embrace the controversy. Most people don't realize that most of what we see in classic painting and sculpture were considered riotous. Right now the "art world" is moving very fast and loose because of Duchamp, money, and the 60's revolution, among a few other things. We've been liberated from the idea of the canvas, the idea of purely 2,3, or 4 dimesions. We're allowed to talk about women in art. We're allowed to talk art in context of space. We're allowed to talk about purely color. We're allowed to talk about media.

Other Artistic/Technological Overlaps

I'd love to hear about your discoveries of style, technology and art all co-evolving. Art beckons for our attention and challenges us, while technology yields new avenues of exploration for the digital evolving self/collective.