Last Updated on August 9, 2024
The crux of today’s conversation is twofold: the technologies used to create art and the relationship between technology and art.
It may seem hard to believe by modern standards but in centuries past, the technologies used to create art included simple devices such as paintbrushes, palettes, and canvas that had been stretched and primed.
Of course, we don’t see these tools and technology today, but there was a time when they were brand new, when they offered revolutionary utility to artists of different cultures and motivations.
Today, technology is synonymous with digital technology and its various features and programs, and similar to how our ancestors found ways to use the cutting-edge tools of their time to make the art they wanted to make, there are a number of leading artists currently exploring how contemporary technologies can aid and alter the art creation process.
One of these leading artists is Jing Dong, originally a software engineer by trade, who went on to become a media artist. Her work has fascinated us for quite some time, but it was only recently that we were able to meet with Dong and discuss her work, her process, and her motivations in depth.
Jing Dong: software engineer turned artist
To understand Dong’s art, we first need to understand what led her to explore art. A computer science major back in school, Dong worked as a software engineer for several years. To the average person, that probably sounds like a highly technical job, but as Dong pointed out, at least front-end engineers have many chances to come into contact with design and art, since they’re also interacting with UI/UX design, which relies heavily on artistic and graphic design concepts.
Over time, Dong started to explore the work of several notable artists, including Anthony Gormley, John Cage, Louise Bourgeois, and Ai Weiwei.
I gradually realized that I have a huge passion for art and that I wanted to work on it my whole life. Also, because of my engineering background, I started exploring how to integrate technology and art and express my unique point of view.”
That exploration has been highly successful for Dong. She was asked to join the California Institute of the Arts as a visiting artist in 2021, during which time she held her re: connections exhibition. Her work has also been included in numerous other exhibitions, including Release: Heard in LA Exhibition at the James Irvine Japanese Garden, Nomad Exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum, Ars Electronica Festival and Online Exhibition, the Coaxialarts Art + Technology group show in 2020.
Her practice includes interactive installations, sound-visual experiences, software systems, and AI art.
We’ll be talking extensively about technology in the artistic process throughout this article, but we also don’t want to imply that using technology to create art means that the artist doesn’t need to be deeply involved in the process.
“The ability to be proficient in tools is very important, but technology alone is not enough. What I want to create and what I want to say are much more important. I think artistic creation just complements what I lacked when I was an engineer, that is, self-exploration, sensibility, critical thinking, aesthetics, and creativity.”
Technological techniques
So, what is the real value of technology to an artist like Jing Dong? Well, that value is extensive, but Dong attempted to summarize how technology offers a number of opportunities that simply wouldn’t be possible without the use of technology.
“Different technologies can be tools for art making. It can be light, it can be software, interactive installations, generative art, or data visualization. Technology has the power to make invisible things visible.”
This addresses the art creation process and using these technologies to access new possibilities, but for Dong, the relationship goes much further than that. Technology is also a subject for discussion and critique.
“Technology itself is an influential topic that can be discussed in art because of the huge impact technology brings to our world. It seems more and more important to think about and critique technology from the perspective of art and the humanities.”
This is a crucial component of Dong’s work, in our opinion: the opportunity for critique. The fact that her work often uses different technologies does not represent an implicit endorsement of those technologies and all of their possible uses. The work seems to address both positives and negatives of this technology and our interactions with it.
The hidden networks of art and technology
The relationship between art and technology is not a straightforward one. We can’t just observe that technology can assist in the creation of art and leave it at that. There are so many ways in which the two interact, collide, benefit, and even interfere with one another.
This is a subject of enduring interest to Dong, and she enjoys making sense of what can otherwise be a confusing and complicated convergence.
“As a professional in both computer science and multi-media art, I can better understand the perplexing relationships between these two fields. That is, I’m well positioned to make sense of how they can be disentangled and how their hidden networks can be revealed.”
Dong’s work aims to identify aspects of these networks and question those aspects in meaningful ways.
“Driven by my full and unconditional embrace of the present moment as an artist and software engineer, I create art that purposefully raises questions about the ways in which technology currently and potentially affects our relationship with the world as well as the ways in which the intertwining of art and technology can become more relevant and socially responsible.”
That final point about technology and social responsibility is a particularly vital part of Dong’s technology-focused artworks and installations. Once again, the message of this work is not that technology is always a positive force. Technology is not inherently benevolent, nor is it inherently malevolent. It’s something that humans have the power to control, and artists can provide a real service by examining the effects that technology has on our lives.
Obviously, technology is extremely dominant, aggressive, cold, and confining, which is precisely why I believe that artists need to foster a more thoughtful and intentional balance between invasive technological innovations and the struggle for human dignity, particularly in relation to marginalized groups who already suffer more from inequality, isolation, and injustice. I derive understanding and hope from art’s humane, poetic, and liberating potential to offer a therapeutic remedy to technology’s lifeless, narrow, and confining trajectory.
The strengths of speculative art
It seems inevitable that we will continue to evolve alongside our technology, though the specifics of that tech-integrated future are still very much up in the air.
We can’t predict the future, but we can speculate as to what that future might look like, and this is the area where speculative art shines.
You’re likely to find varying definitions of speculative art online, but at least in a basic sense, speculative art is concerned with possible futures.
Relevant to Dong’s artistic work and intentions, speculative art is incredibly powerful, and there are a few of Dong’s works under this category that we’d like to mention here.
I’ve created several works recently, including The Hidden Space, Poetic Imagination, and The Universe as It Was, that mainly revolve around the following topics: the nonexistent things created by machine intelligence, such as poems or images, dealing with chance and dynamics, and collaborating with the artist in various ways.
Of course, the topic of machine intelligence/artificial intelligence has been a central theme of recent discussions having to do with imagery or text that was created in whole or in part by an AI.
In particular, Dong focused on AI-generated text in her piece Poetic Imagination to explore, “the collision of the human body, text, and machine intelligence.”
We’ll let Dong describe the work in detail.
In this dance performance, the artificial intelligence software built an environment that invites artists to participate and interact. The generated poems are triggered by specific movements of the dancers. Dancers improvise new moves after reading the generated poems. Then the improvised movement produces new poetry. The whole process is like a feedback loop.”
This work mimics and reflects technological processes on multiple levels while also including undeniable elements of human creativity and inspiration. The piece doesn’t exist at all without the simultaneous participation of both humans and technology.
As speculative art, Poetic Imagination turns our attention toward the possibilities of the future, toward a future where this collaboration continues unfettered.
Ultimately, we, as a people, get to decide what that relationship and collaboration will look like in action, and speculative art like Dong’s can raise important questions in our minds, making viewers and participants more conscious of the art-technology and the human-technology relationships that have only become more central and unavoidable over time.
Outro
That brings our journey to a close. Special thanks go to Jing Dong for taking the time to speak with us.
If you’d like to take a closer look at Dong’s work, please visit her official website. And if you happen to live in the Southern California area, Dong also told us that she plans to have a solo exhibition sometime during 2024.
In the meantime, she will continue to explore the relationship between people, technology, and nature, as well as AI interactive art.
