impact of technology on art essay

Essay on Impact of Technology on Art

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100 Words Essay on Impact of Technology on Art

Introduction.

Technology has greatly influenced art. It’s added new tools, mediums, and ways to express creativity.

Artistic Tools

Digital tools like Photoshop have replaced traditional paint and brushes. Artists can now create without physical limitations.

Online Platforms

The internet has made art accessible. Artists can share their work globally, and viewers can appreciate art without visiting a gallery.

3D Printing

3D printing has revolutionized sculpture. Artists can now create intricate designs impossible with traditional methods.

Technology has significantly impacted art, expanding possibilities and making art more accessible.

250 Words Essay on Impact of Technology on Art

Technology has profoundly impacted art, revolutionizing its creation, display, and consumption. This intersection has birthed a new era of digital art, challenging traditional notions of what art can be.

Transformation of Art Creation

Technology has democratized art creation. Tools like Photoshop and Illustrator allow artists to experiment without the limitations of physical media. 3D printing, virtual reality, and augmented reality have expanded the canvas beyond two dimensions, enabling artists to create immersive, interactive experiences.

Digitization and Accessibility

The digitization of art has made it more accessible. Museums and galleries now offer virtual tours, bringing art to people’s homes. Online platforms allow artists to showcase their work globally, reaching audiences they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Art Consumption and Interaction

Technology has also altered how we interact with art. Social media platforms have become spaces for art appreciation and critique, fostering a more engaged audience. Interactive art installations, driven by technology, encourage active participation, transforming passive observers into integral parts of the artwork.

The impact of technology on art is profound and multifaceted. It has democratized creation, enhanced accessibility, and transformed interaction, challenging and expanding our understanding of art. As technology continues to evolve, so too will its influence on art, promising an exciting future of limitless possibilities.

500 Words Essay on Impact of Technology on Art

Technology has been a driving force behind numerous changes in various sectors, including art. The impact of technology on art is profound, as it has revolutionized the way artists create, exhibit, and sell their works. It has also expanded the definition of art, providing new platforms for expression and interaction.

Technological Tools and Artistic Creation

Traditionally, art was created using physical tools such as brushes, chisels, and canvas. However, the advent of technology has introduced digital tools that have transformed the creative process. Software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, 3D modeling programs, and even virtual reality tools have opened new realms of possibilities for artists. These tools have not only made the process more efficient but also empowered artists to experiment with new forms and mediums that were previously unimaginable.

Art Exhibition and Technology

The way art is exhibited and consumed has also changed drastically with technology. Virtual galleries and museums have made art accessible to a global audience, breaking the geographical barriers. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have further enhanced the viewing experience, allowing viewers to interact with art in immersive environments. These technologies have also enabled artists to create experiential artworks that engage viewers in novel ways.

Art Commerce and the Digital Revolution

The commercial aspect of art has also been influenced by technology. Online marketplaces and social media platforms have democratized the art market, making it easier for artists to sell their work directly to consumers without the need for galleries or agents. Furthermore, the emergence of blockchain technology and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has disrupted the art market by providing a new way to authenticate and monetize digital art.

Art, Technology, and Society

Lastly, technology has shaped art as a medium of social commentary. Artists use digital platforms to address contemporary issues, engage with audiences, and provoke discussions. This interaction between art, technology, and society has given rise to a new form of participatory art that blurs the line between artist and audience.

In conclusion, technology’s impact on art is multi-faceted and transformative. It has redefined the creative process, exhibition, and commerce of art, and has also reshaped the role of art in society. As technology continues to evolve, it will undoubtedly continue to influence art, providing artists with new tools and platforms to express their creativity. Despite these changes, the essence of art remains the same – to evoke emotions, provoke thought, and reflect the human condition. Therefore, while technology has changed the way art is created and consumed, it has not changed the fundamental purpose of art.

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Beyond the Canvas, Technology’s Influence on Modern Art

Living in Boston during the early aughts, I attended an unusual art exhibition that now feels prescient. Installed throughout the gallery were these stations where people could arrange objects into different configurations on platforms in front of cameras. The items were random, colorful things like a yellow fuzzy ball or a red plastic pail. These still-lifes were then “interpreted” by a computer that spat out textual responses to the visual prompts. The computer-generated “poems” were mostly gibberish. Every now and then though, an uncanny lucidness developed in them, only to fall back into nonsense. I didn’t like the idea of machines making art then anymore than I do today. But as an artist and writer, I feel the need to address the subject now that it has become more pressing. 

There’s been much discussion lately about the many ways artificial intelligence (AI) will radically alter our lives, our politics, and civilization as a whole. Much of the discourse is drowned out either by utopian prattle from cultish technologists or by dystopian dross from neo-Luddite naysayers. Don’t get me wrong: I aim to neither celebrate nor denounce AI. I have reservations about such brave new technologies. If you ask me, the jury’s still out on the Internet. Sure, it helped to make the world feel a little more like a global village for a few decades, but at what cost? Our democracy? From Obama to Trump, it’s easy to see how the positive (hope and change) and the negative (hate and fear) can become so closely juxtaposed with a jolt from the high-tech. How will more recent technologies like AI and Deepfakes further complicate our culture? 

If it wasn’t for an earlier disruptive technology , modern painting may have never arrived at abstraction. A few decades after the advent of photography in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a loose group of French painters began making pictures that went beyond photographic clarity. Impressionists sought to capture the activity of seeing itself, opting for a more gestural look over the crystal-clear focus of photography. 

Following Impressionism, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century European art became awash with painterly -isms: from pointillism and symbolism, expressionism and fauvism, to constructivism and cubism, futurism and surrealism, new painting styles kept popping up every few years. It was just a matter of time before the European avant-garde arrived at pure abstraction or non-representational pictures that do not depict things found in life. From interwar Europeans like Malevich and Mondrian to postwar Americans like Pollock and Rothko, abstraction became one of the most important developments in modern art. 

Something similar will no doubt happen in the near future with AI: artists will try to figure out ways to create things that computer-generated images cannot, forging as yet unforeseen art forms. Others will work with the new technology. Impressionists like Degas used photographs as sketches for their paintings. Before the second half of the nineteenth century, painters almost always centered their subjects in the middle of their canvases, as with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa . Nobody ever thought to crop out a figure, like one of Degas’ bathers, until a snapshot of such a moment revealed how abrupt truncation can dramatically alter a composition. AI will surely lead contemporary artists to make similar discoveries. 

Something about that exhibition in Boston reminded me of Dada and Surrealism, the interwar European avant-garde art movements that prized the irrational and the unconscious. The interplay between image, object, and text were of great interest to the Surrealists who invented the Exquisite Corpse , a parlor game where several participants collectively create a graphical or textual composition based on a few marks or words left by the previous person. Each player folds over most of what they add, leaving only a few hints–trace marks or dangling words–for the next person to build upon. Like the  “poetry”-generating machines in the gallery back in Boston, the end results were more often than not absurd and meaningless. But every now and then one would border on something like a great work of art, or at least a really good sketch for one. Why couldn’t a computer take part in this activity? 

AI-generated art has a harbinger with the Dadaists too, who, like the Surrealists, rejected aesthetics, logic, and reason. As is well known, Marcel Duchamp submitted a common urinal turned on its side as his entry for the 1917 exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in New York City. Outside of an enigmatic signature scrawled along its side (“R. Mutt 1917”), there is no trace of the artist’s hand on this machine-made, mass-produced, quotidian apparatus. Fountain was ultimately denied a place in the show, the original lost forever ( and perhaps not even by Duchamp. ) A few later versions were authorized by the artist over the course of his career. Yet, through photographic documentation (the best of which was shot by Alfred Stieglitz soon after the Society of Independent Artists show) and textual documentation in the form of endless references in art history and art theory publications, Fountain has become firmly ensconced as one of the landmark works of twentieth-century art. 

By placing a piece of plumbing on a pedestal, Duchamp figuratively knocked the artist off their own. If a found object—a porcelain urinal, in this case—may act as a prompt for philosophical discussions about art, was Duchamp not instigating a sort of low-tech, proto-AI-generated artform? Duchamp’s gesture helped turn the tide away from what he referred to as “ocularcentric” art, or art that stimulates the eye but not necessarily the mind, such as abstraction. This shift away from aesthetics and formalism towards the more theoretical would come into full bloom during the American postwar neo-avant-garde of the 1960s. What makes a work of art a work of art? Is it whatever the artist might select from a sea of images and objects? Does this not make the artist more of an editor or curator? If so, how different is the artist from the selector of prompts used in generative AI? Regardless of what the layperson may think about a urinal passing as a work of art, Duchamp radically altered the course of modern art history and helped to usher in what is now known as postmodernism. Rather than aesthetic appreciation, philosophical contemplation supports the Duchampian legacy, still very prevalent in contemporary art. 

What are the ethical ramifications of generative AI? The winner of this year’s Sony World Photography Award turned down the prize in April after revealing his entry was generated by artificial intelligence and thus not a true photograph. German artist Boris Eldagsen intentionally deceived the award organizers with Pseudoamnesia: The Electrician , an eerie black and white picture depicting two women huddled together, “captured” in a grainy, classic sepia. On his website, Eldagsen describes his Duchampian ruse as a “historic moment,” adding: “I applied as a cheeky monkey, to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not.” 

What if AI displaces human workers in the creative sector? From last May until early October, the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) was on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It was the longest interruption to American film and television production since the global closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Representing 11,500 screenwriters, WGA fought for, among more traditional disputes concerning pay models and benefits, protections against writers’ jobs being lost to AI. 

As technologies created to create without creators continue to advance, this issue will become more complicated. Nonetheless, there will likely remain the need for at least some humans to make the initial prompts that AI responds to and later edit certain passages that don’t quite read correctly. Machines are still imperfect. I am not only pro-human, I am pro-union, and my heart went out to the workers during the strike. Yet, I can’t help but think that much of the formulaic drivel that finds its way into scripts for movies and TV shows feels as though it was churned out by a machine anyway. 

The fact is, computer-generated art isn’t new and isn’t going anywhere. Algorithmic art , fractal art , and glitch art all employ the computer to create unpredictable visual outcomes and have been around for some time. When taking photos on your smartphone you have likely used the technology without even knowing it, as AI is increasingly baked into digital photography, helping to reduce visual noise and sharpen blurry photos. Most camera phone users care less about the art of photography than about taking selfies or “pics” of friends and family doing funny things to upload to social media. 

In his essay on the subject, “ On AI and the Intrinsic Value of Writing ,” Maryland Institute College of Art professor of creative writing and literature Paul Jaskunas asks, “If a computer endowed with ‘artificial intelligence’ can produce a more grammatically sound, deeply researched, and convincing essay than you can, and is able to do so faster than you ever possibly could, why not rely on the machine to do your writing for you?” By shifting the pedagogy to emphasize the process of writing over its end product, Jaskunas posits that AI may actually aid his profession as composition teachers will be able to impart how the act of writing itself is meaningful and rewarding. Like photography in the visual arts, disruptive technology may help us to paint and see, write, and read in new ways.

Work by the Turkish-American new media artist Refik Anadol (b. 1985) offers a sneak peek into the wild new forms generative AI may take in the future. His show Unsupervised , on view at MoMA through October 29th, asks the question: “What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art?” By programming a computer to interpret the publicly accessible database of the museum’s holdings, Anadol creates mesmerizing moving pictures that undulate into nearly recognizable images only to fall back into abstract compositions, which then quickly morph into… Well, something else . By using other artist’s work as prompts to inform the creation of his own animated abstractions, Anadol synthesizes the two main threads of twentieth-century art: the pre-existing art from the database acts like found objects or Duchampian “Readymades,” providing a conceptual framework, while the final “movies” satisfy our aesthetic needs with lava-lamp-like enchantment. “I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future,” the artist said, “and to make the invisible visible.” With exhibitions like Unsupervised , we catch a small glimpse of the future, a future that may appear wild, but not totally untamable. 

Editor’s Note: Artblog articles covering A.I.:

Clayton Campbell –  A Short Walk Through the Uncanny Valley of A.I. Art

Ruth Wolf –  Artificial Intelligence and ‘Your Brain on Art,’ thoughts on two provocative topics

Lane Timothy Spiedel – The Imitation Game – An Artist’s Role in Latent Space

Beth Heinly – The 3:00 Book

Oli Knowles – Socialist Grocery

Article Update: Refik Anado’s  Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations has been purchased by MoMA

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A.I. : art and ethics : Art and Technology : art movements : Artificial Intelligence : dadaism : Degas : Generative Art : Machine-generated : marcel duchamp : postmodern : Refik Anadol : surrealism : technology

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Tech Impact on Contemporary Art Trends: Exploring Effects

You’ve probably noticed that art isn’t what it used to be. It’s not just about painting on canvas or chiseling marble anymore. Thanks to technology, today’s artists are exploring new mediums and techniques, taking creativity to another level.

But it’s not all bright and shiny. This digital revolution has its critics, with some fearing it dilutes authenticity and stifles creativity.

And let’s not forget the audience. The way you engage with art has changed, too. Social media and the internet have made art more interactive and reshaped your expectations and behavior. Do you buy tickets months in advance or minutes before the show?

This article will delve into how technology impacts contemporary art trends, the concerns it stirs, the opportunities it presents, and how it’s changing your art experience. So, let’s dive in and explore this fascinating intersection of art and technology.

How Technology Influences Art

You’ve seen how technology has infiltrated every corner of our lives, but have you considered its transformative impact on the world of contemporary art? It’s taken creativity to new heights, helping artists translate their vision into unimaginable pieces in the pre-digital era.

Technology’s influence is undeniable, whether it’s digitally created music, e-books, or 3D-printed sculptures. Yet, it’s more than just a tool; it’s also a medium. Artists like David Hockney have even turned to their iPads for inspiration, proving that age isn’t a barrier to embracing tech.

However, this digital revolution isn’t without controversy. Some fear it could dilute the authenticity of art, while others worry it could stifle creativity as artists become too absorbed in tech’s capabilities.

Expanding Creative Horizons

Imagine the boundless possibilities now at your fingertips, as the digital realm has dramatically broadened the canvas for your creative explorations. Traditional mediums no longer restrict you. With technology, you can blend paint with pixels or harmonize acoustic tunes with digital beats.

The world is your studio and the digital tools, your brushes. You can craft 3D-printed sculptures or design immersive VR experiences. Your art can be interactive, inviting audiences to participate and influence the outcome.

But technology isn’t just expanding your creative horizons; it’s also granting you a global audience. You can share your creations, inspire others, and spark conversations with the internet.

So, embrace the digital revolution and redefine the boundaries of art.

Concerns and Criticisms

Despite the many exciting opportunities, it’s critical also to address the concerns and criticisms surrounding the marriage of art and technology.

Some artists and critics worry that digital art is an inauthentic version of the discipline with the potential to dilute the intrinsic value of traditional art. There’s also a fear that the overwhelming capabilities of technology could stifle creativity rather than enhance it.

• Authenticity : Critics argue that graphic designers’ and hackers’ reproductions and alterations of famous paintings strip digital art of its authenticity.
• Dampened Creativity : The limitless options provided by technology can be so absorbing that they hinder, rather than foster, artistic creativity.
• Quality Concerns : As technology increases competition for arts organizations with other entertainment forms, there’s a concern it may negatively impact the quality of live performances.

Changing Audience Expectations

As digital innovations continue to reshape our world, they’re also revolutionizing how we experience and engage with art, pushing audience expectations to new frontiers. You’re no longer just a spectator; you’re an active participant.

The internet has made art more accessible and interactive, allowing you to delve deeper, learn more, and even create alongside the artist. But these advancements come with new challenges. With a wealth of art just a click away, competition for your attention is fierce. Artists and organizations must adapt, offering quality and an immersive and engaging experience.

And while technology has opened up a world of possibilities, meeting these rising expectations on limited budgets can be daunting. So, don’t just consume art; be part of its evolution.

Challenges and Opportunities

You’re navigating a new terrain where opportunities and challenges go hand in hand, right?

Technology has been a game-changer in the art world, offering countless possibilities for art creation and distribution. Yet, it’s not without hurdles.

You’re competing with a myriad of entertainment forms, aren’t you? Digital art may be accessible, but it’s also challenging to monetize, especially regarding copyright and fair payments.

You’re also grappling with the reality of shorter attention spans and increased smartphone usage during performances.

But don’t fret. Remember, technology can also be your ally. It helps you reach diverse communities globally, break geographic constraints, and engage audiences in more immersive, interactive experiences.

You need to adapt and evolve. Don’t you agree?

Follow us on  Pinterest  for more tips, tutorials, and artist reviews! 

Outmane is the founder of Proactive Creative. He is an artist/designer.

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Home Essay Samples Information Science and Technology Impact of Technology

The Impact of Technology on Art: A Modern Renaissance

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Essay: Technology changes how art is created and perceived

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It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist; a play, a playwright. You could assume that the work actually erupted more or less full-blown from these folks. In addition, the book, film, musical composition, painting or play was a discrete object or event that existed in time and space. You could hold it in your hands or watch or listen to it in a theater or your living room. It didn’t really change over time unless the artist decided to revise it or a performer reinterpreted it.

Well, not any more. For years now numerous observers have described the process by which the very fundaments of art are changing from the old principle of one man, one creation. Songs have remixes through which anyone so disposed can alter the original music; videos have mash-ups that use footage to reposition and change the original meaning; the visual arts have communal canvases and websites; poetry has Flarf, which allows one to generate verse from random words; , and books have collages, like David Shields’ recent “Reality Hunger,” which was assembled entirely, paragraph by paragraph, out of other authors’ words. Recombinant art is the rage.

What all these forms have in common is appropriation and a sense of rampant collaboration in which every work of art is simply raw material for anyone who decides to put his or her imprint on it, which then allows someone else to put his imprint on the imprint, which allows still someone else to put his imprint on the imprint on the imprint, and so on ad infinitum. You could call it Wiki-Culture after its prototype, Wikipedia, because like Wikipedia, it is a new form of democratic cultural construction in which everyone can make a contribution.

Of course communal culture is not a new concept. The process began a long time ago in folk art — who is the artist of the Lascaux cave paintings? — and it eventually entered the precincts of fine art with the borrowings of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and others who deployed the detritus of popular culture in their work, albeit reformulated by them. If art was about life and life was now increasingly a product of mass consumption, then popular culture was a vast warehouse to be rummaged through and repurposed. That made the industrial designer of the Campbell soup can label or the Brillo box a collaborator with Warhol, Betsy Ross a collaborator with Johns, or little-known comic book artists collaborators with Lichtenstein.

Still, with Warhol and the Pop artists, there is a commanding sensibility: an artist using the larger culture for, and in a way, subordinating it to, his or her own ends. But over the last five years or so — and it is happening at a head-snappingly fast pace — the degree of appropriation and the number of collaborators has proliferated to the point at which there are not only literally millions of new art objects but also millions of new “artists” working in conjunction with one another, so that the very notion of authorship is becoming attenuated and archaic. Where people are invited to add to or edit an object, whose sensibility governs and who gets credit for the evolving creation? The most logical answer, as with Wikipedia, is that the author is the collective whole.

Naturally the Internet has greatly facilitated this process. It brings together far-flung collaborators and gives them the technological wherewithal to ply their talents jointly on objects. The Johnny Cash Project, for example, solicits fans of the late singer to share their vision of Johnny “as he lives in your mind’s eye,” by providing an image of him and a customized drawing tool to reimagine it. “Your work will then be combined,” says the website, “with art from participants around the world and integrated into a collective whole.” Call it Wiki-Art.

But if the Internet facilitates this new form of cultural construction technologically, it also encourages it ideologically by attacking the old, increasingly discredited cultural hierarchy. Traditional art was largely top down — delivered from elite cultural commissars who had always determined what art was. On the Internet, however, everything is bottom-up. Of course, long before, the Internet people were taking up their cudgels against those commissars; popular culture is itself an attack on them. But never before has that war been so broad or so effective. Now, anyone with a computer and connectivity has the means to air his voice, his opinion, his own authorship and authority.

Seen this way, Internet technology may be more an outgrowth of cultural rebelliousness than a cause of it. In a skeptical world in which authority has often failed, in an increasingly democratic world in which everyone is privileged, and, alas, in a narcissistic world in which many people feel the need to launch their egos, collaborative art is a radical rebuke that allows no one to be privileged above anyone else, no single art object to be a product of one sensibility, and no gatekeepers to tell us what is and isn’t art. In effect, Wiki-Culture sends the peasants marching on the virtual Winter Palace.

The cultural implications of Wiki-Culture are numerous and enormous. When there is no authority, only everyone giving opinions, we may have democracy but we may also lose standards. When even facts are the product not of rigorous verification, but of majority rule, we may be living in what one analyst has called a “post-fact society.” And when everyone is an artist, we may risk losing the individual artistic sensibility. It is no wonder that traditionalists are terrified.

But where art is concerned the single most important effect of Wiki-culture may be what it portends for the very idea of a tangible art object like a book or painting and what this would portend for industries dedicated to art. Take the Johnny Cash Project again. Like much Wiki-Art, it is organic and ever-changing. The work may reside on the Internet, but, in truth, there is no work — no single art object. It is an ongoing, dynamic series, potentially infinite.

Or take video games, which have not only expropriated the look of movies but also increasingly their franchise to the point where they now generate greater profits than the movies do. We know where a movie resides: on the screen. But if a video game is a kind of participatory film, a new narrative form, where does that film reside? Since the experience is different every time for every player, it is really evanescent. A play or piece of music may differ in performance, but it remains on the page. The template for a video game exists — on the disc — but where does the experience of the video game as played exist?

What Wiki-Culture does is dislodge culture from its moorings in art, history, tradition, knowledge, even time and space, and set it afloat either in the ether or in our own consciousness. Traditional culture is memorialized on the page, the CD, the stage or the screen. Wiki-Culture, which is constructed by nearly everyone and is extremely ephemeral, is memorialized, to the extent it is memorialized at all, in our heads and nowhere else. It is there on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter et al, and then it isn’t.

That may be why the Library of Congress recently decided to archive the collected works of Twitter — 55 million messages daily. The librarians there realized that to the extent one can concretize a culture that is so fleeting, free-floating and expansive, the Complete Twitter may come closest to doing so because it is closest to capturing the new collective consciousness. In fact, it is possible that Twitter will provide the next “Remembrance of Things Past,” a collectivized novel in 140-characters, or that some YouTube mash-up will provide the next “Citizen Kane,” even though these things barely survive outside our own reception and memory.

That is the direction toward which Wiki-Culture is nudging art. When every book, via Kindle or the iPad, becomes a raw source for the reader to reorganize and edit what he or she reads; when every song becomes a raw source for a remix; when every film or video becomes a raw source for some customized mash-up; and when traditional art itself becomes a symbol of antiquated cultural control, the collaboration is everything, the resulting object very little. In such a world, art may still exist, but we won’t always know exactly where to find it, which can be a scary prospect.

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The impact of technology on art: blending tradition and innovation.

Art has been an integral part of human life for centuries, with the ability to express emotions and ideas in a way that words simply cannot. However, as technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed, it’s not surprising that art is also being influenced by these advancements. From digital painting tools to virtual reality installations, technology is changing the way we create and experience art. But what does this mean for traditional techniques and mediums? Can they coexist with innovative technologies? Let’s delve into the impact of technology on art and explore how artists are finding new ways to blend tradition and innovation in their work.

What is Technology?

Technology has had a profound impact on the field of art. By providing new mediums and tools for artists to work with, technology has expanded the possibilities for artistic expression. At the same time, it has also made traditional forms of art more accessible to a wider audience.

Digital technologies have particularly transformed the way that artists can create and distribute their work.

Traditional forms of art are not being left behind in this digital age – far from it. Technology has made it possible to restore and preserve works of art that might otherwise have been lost to history. It has also made it easier for people to access and enjoy these works, whether they are visiting a museum or browsing an online gallery.

In many ways, then, technology is helping to keep the tradition of art alive while also opening up new possibilities for its expression. As the two continue to blend together, we can only imagine what exciting innovations lie ahead.

How Technology Has Changed Art

Technology has had a profound impact on art, from the way artists create their work to the way it is experienced by audiences. Perhaps the most obvious way that technology has changed art is in the tools and materials that artists use to create their work. For example, traditional painters now have access to a wide range of digital tools that allow them to experiment with color, composition, and lighting in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

In addition to changing the way artists create their work, technology has also changed the way audiences experience art. Thanks to advances in digital technology, audiences can now enjoy art in new and innovative ways, such as through virtual reality experiences or by interacting with artwork using augmented reality apps.

Benefits of Technology on Art

Technology has had a profound impact on the world of art. In the past, artists had to rely on their own skills and talents to create works of art. With the advent of technology, artists can now use a variety of tools and techniques to create stunning works of art.

Some of the benefits of technology on art include:

1. Technology has made it easier for artists to create their work. With the help of computers and other devices, artists can now create complicated designs and patterns that would have been impossible to create by hand.

2. Technology has also made it easier for artists to share their work with the world. With the help of the internet, artists can reach a global audience and showcase their work to a wider audience.

3. Technology has also made it possible for artists to make money from their work. With the help of online platforms such as Etsy, Artists can sell their work to a worldwide audience and make a living from their art.

4. Technology has also helped preserve works of art for future generations. With the help of digital imaging and storage, works of art can be preserved in pristine condition and passed down through the generations

Examples of Technology in Art

1. Art is being created using 3D printing technology. This allows artists to create sculptures and other objects that would be difficult or impossible to create using traditional methods.

2. Augmented reality (AR) is being used to create immersive experiences that allow viewers to interact with art in new ways. For example, the app Blippar can be used to view AR versions of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and other masters.

3. Virtual reality (VR) is providing new ways for people to experience art. For example, Tate Modern in London has launched a VR app that allows users to explore the museum’s collection from anywhere in the world.

4. Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by some artists to create completely unique works of art. For example, an AI-created painting sold for over $400,000 at a recent Christie’s auction.

Challenges Faced by Artists When Using Technology

As technology continues to evolve, so does the art world. While some artists embrace new technologies, others find themselves struggling to keep up.

1. Keeping up with the latest trends and technologies: Just as fashion designers have to stay on top of the latest trends, so do artists.

2. Learning how to use new technologies: Even if an artist is open to trying new technologies, they still need to take the time to learn how to use them properly.

3. Making art that is meaningful: In a world where anyone can create art with a few clicks of a button, it can be hard for artists to make work that is meaningful and stands out from the rest. Technology has made it easier than ever for people to create art, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of it is good art.

Alternatives to Traditional Art Forms

There are a number of ways to create art without using traditional art forms. Technology has made it possible to create art in a variety of new ways. Another type of alternative art form is performance art. This type of art involves the use of the body as a medium for expression.

There is also the option of creating art using found objects. This type of art is sometimes called ” assemblage.” Found object artists collect everyday items and arrange them in a way that creates an aesthetic effect. This type of art can be created with almost anything, from bottle caps to pieces of trash.

Technology has undoubtedly had a significant impact on art. By blending traditional methods with modern innovations, artists have been able to create new and exciting works of art that can captivate audiences in ways never before imagined. Whether you’re an artist looking for new tools to express your creative vision or a viewer seeking out unique experiences, technology can help open up the possibilities of what art is and what it can be.

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Section 6: overall impact of technology on the arts.

Yet at the same time, the majority of arts organizations surveyed also thought that mobile devices, ringing cell phones and texting create “significant disruptions” to live performances, and that technology contributes to an expectation that “all digital content should be free.” Survey respondents were split regarding their opinions of whether technology had negatively impacted audience attention spans for live performance, but they uniformly  dis agree that it has “diluted the arts” by opening new pathways to arts participation and arts criticism.

Despite comments in open-ended responses, only 35% of respondents agree with the statement that the internet has shifted arts organizations’ focus towards marketing and promotion, and even fewer (22%) thought that the internet and its endless offerings are leading to a decrease in attendance at in-person events.

Predicting impacts of technology and social media

Asked to forecast the impact that technology and social media will have on the field as a whole in the coming years, respondents mentioned everything from practical implications to broader, soul-searching ideas about the future of creativity.

From a practical standpoint, many organizations state that technology will make them more efficient:

[We have the] ability to serve more people and at a lower cost.

The internet makes it possible for our organization to market ourselves more effectively through online advertising, blog presences, and social media exchanges. We have been able to decrease our budgets and increase revenue by utilizing online resources effectively.

It is also greatly facilitating their ability to book talent, and to know what to expect:

For arts programmers, the access to high quality media to review artists in advance of assessing them live has been a huge step forward.  Spotify alone has made it so much easier to get a first impression of an artist–no more waiting for press kits, accessing only what they’ve posted on their websites, etc.

Others commented on how technology is changing the behavior of the ticket-buying public:

Last-minute ticket-buying and the trend away from traditional subscription packages will probably continue, as the internet has freed people up from having to plan for most event attendance far in advance. This will affect the predictability of revenue. On the positive side, social media has been a wonderful tool for word-of-mouth marketing.

While it is impossible to know what internet and digital technologies will be like in 10 years, the trend of more information communicated more quickly to a more finely targeted audience with more immediate feedback from the recipient is likely to continue. We believe that this leads people to delay their decision-making about how they will spend their leisure time. For our field, this has generally meant a decline in subscriptions, a decrease in advance ticket sales, and an increase in last-minute box office sales.

Moving beyond the practical, one of the prevailing positive themes is that technology increases – and will continue to increase – access to the arts. In some cases, technology is simply seen as a way to improve marketing and communication to get more “butts in seats,” but many respondents noted its power to broaden and deepen the audience experience.

Technology is helping them introduce more audiences to art:

The digital world is a very populist force, leveling the world between rich and poor, educated and uneducated. In our case, an organization with a name like “Historical Society” has an invisible shield that bounces people who are below median income, do not hold college degrees, who hold blue collar jobs, who are a racial or cultural minority, off.  The ubiquity of the computer, whether through your home machine, school, or local library, means that all of those things that cause discomfort don’t matter.  That is a big deal!

It has extended our visibility to many isolated individuals who may never have heard about our services, explored the artform, or who may have financial barriers to membership. We show to them every day what we do, rather than expect them to find a printed annual report and program summary. Social media are concrete and immediate examples of our living community in action.

Technology is also helping arts organizations extend their impact, far beyond a one-time performance or event:

The internet and digital media provide an amazing opportunity for arts organizations to extend the impact of the arts. A live performance can be complemented greatly by opportunities for further engagement and education, and the ability to share information online maximizes our ability to provide these opportunities at a more in-scale investment ratio. We can reach many more people with an article or video than with a one-time lecture, for example.

We are able to provide artwork that dates back more than 25 years to the communities we have worked with over the years. For many, these archives represent the only media history of their community.  The use of the internet has deepened and expanded the access for our constituencies that are often transitional, without a landbase, or have been historically isolated due to geography.

Technology is increasing access to the arts by breaking geographic constraints:

I think that it will greatly improve accessibility to the arts field – from a monetary standpoint and from a logistical standpoint. People who live outside of urban areas will be able to experience performances that are somewhat limited to large urban areas. Arts organizations will need to reconsider the level/type of interaction with their audience.

Technology is helping organizations reach more diverse communities – even on a global scale:

The greatest impact will be the ability for non-profit organizations to share educational content and stimulating art and performances worldwide.  It will also spark conversations between diverse communities and help individuals develop a greater understanding – and hopefully, a life-long appreciation for the arts.

The internet will enable the performing arts to reach beyond a local audience, promote tourism, and make cultural arts created within a region accessible to the nation – and world.

Technology is making it possible to  create  community around a piece of art:

There is a powerful opportunity for the arts to create communities around performances, shows, exhibitions and their themes and history.  For example, a Broadway show like ‘Next to Normal’ could (and probably has) created communities to discuss and share resources on mental illness.

Some organizations enthusiastically talk about the democratization of art and creation, while others expressed excitement about the challenge of meeting new demands and expectations:

Continuing the transition from passive to participation, from hierarchical to democratic, from traditional media to online media, from single art-form to inter-disciplinary.

The possibility to greatly expand and create a more diverse audience is very exciting because traditionally our audience has been older and whiter than the area we live in.  Increasingly, we’re seeing some of our content getting traction in surprising nooks and crannies of the internet – which definitely means a shifting audience.  The challenge will be for that audience to identify our content with the creators and the institution, and not simply have it exist as more entertainment or noise out on the internet.  In the next couple of years, the role of mobile devices will only continue to shift how people curate their own experience and engage with artistic content. In radio, this presents an exciting AND daunting challenge in terms of our funding structure and station loyalty.

The challenges that digital technology present

These arts organizations realize that with these benefits come drawbacks. While digital technologies have led to the creation of ever-more dazzling tools and apps, many arts organizations worry about the long term effect on audiences, the field, and their very mission.

A number of respondents worry about meeting increased audience expectations:

People will have higher expectations for a live event. For audiences to invest the time and effort of going to a live performance, the work they see will have to be more engaging and of higher quality. Events will have to be more social and allow for greater participation and behind-the-scenes access. The event spaces will have to be more beautiful, more comfortable, more inviting and more accessible.

The audience has already moved from “arts attendance as an event” to “arts attendance as an experience.”  This desire for a full-range of positive experience from ticket purchase, to travel, to parking, to treatment at the space, to quality of performance, to exit – this will only increase over the next 10 years.

The greatest impact of the internet on independent publishers will be audience expectations. Audiences will expect everything to be available digitally, and will require an engaging experience instead of a static one.

Some point out the problem of meeting audience expectations on a limited budget:

Managing expectations. The internet and digital technologies are powerful tools.  The public expects content to be free. There is a lack of awareness of the resources (funding and staff) that it takes to manage and preserve digital content.  These costs will need to be passed on to users.

Others express concern that the effort to meet audience expectations will influence artistic choices, even entire art forms:

Some ideas cannot be condensed into 140 characters or less. I hope technologies do not negatively affect the playwright.  I hope the playwright does not write solely for a Twitter generation.

Live performance will be diminished.  Younger people don’t want to show up at a specific time, specific place for live performance — they want to download music at their own convenience.  The power of live performance is lost and the civic convening – the community building is lost.

Some arts organizations have recognized this change, and are doing their best to adapt:

I believe digital technologies are here to stay, and we as an artform should embrace them and learn how to work alongside them.  We provide scripts to those sitting in our tweetseats, so they get the quotes right. We must work alongside or face alienating them.

I believe that audiences will continue to have shorter and shorter attention spans and will insist upon being able to use smartphones and other devices in the context of a performance.  As an industry, we should stop fighting and try to find ways to incorporate that reality into our daily lives.

We will need to become much less tied to live, in person programming and certainly less ties to anchored seats in concert halls. Programming will need to incorporate much more personal involvement by the consumers or they will not be interested in engaging.

A number of respondents worried about audiences’ decreasing attention spans, and the long-term impact on the field:

As attention spans decrease, programming of longer works (e.g., Beethoven’s Symphony #9) will become more problematic.  As we move forward, we may need to consider ways to embrace the digital, connected world to better engage live audiences or run the risk of making live music performances irrelevant.

The greatest impact could be the expansion of our audiences, but the worst impact is the attention span of the moment of interaction.  I worry that it may shorten our artforms’ performance times.

Technology has blurred the lines between commercial entertainment and noncommercial art, forcing arts organizations to more directly compete with all other forms of entertainment:

Basically, we are competing for the “entertainment slot” in people’s schedules, and the more entertainment they can get via HD TV, Netflix, Video Games, etc., the less time they have for live performances, which also entails making an effort to get to the venue (as opposed to slumping on the couch in front of the HD screen). Also, movies, video games, etc., are both more convenient and cheaper than live performances.

It has also blurred the lines between a virtual and real experience:

As the realism of participatory digital entertainment (video games, etc.) and the immersion ability of non-participatory digital entertainment (3D movies, etc.) increases, it threatens the elements that make the live arts unique–the sense of immediacy, immersion, and personal interaction with the art.  We’ve long hung fast to the belief that there’s nothing like a live experience, but digital entertainment is getting closer and closer to replicating that experience, and live theatre will struggle to compete with the former’s convenience and cost.

Some respondents addressed issues specific to their field or discipline. Film and cinema organizations talk about the pressure they face to preserve the “specialness” of the big screen when on-demand home viewing is already prevalent:

As a cinema approaching our fifth anniversary, we have seen significant audience growth in spite of the fact that many of the films we play are being released “day and date” on-demand. While streaming and piracy are increasing, we’ve been able to deliver the message that seeing films on the big screen with an audience is a singular, important cultural experience. I can’t emphasize the importance of the internet and social media in our marketing efforts enough. It’s most certainly a net positive value.

As a film exhibitor, our challenge is to go through the digital convergence for projection and exhibition, a supremely costly change that doesn’t even have a long-range viability (these systems will have to be upgraded and/or changed every 3-5 years).  Finding the revenue for these digital systems is an enormous challenge and threat to our ongoing activities.

Others working in film worry that the quality and quantity of movies will diminish:

In the field of film production and distribution, more internet and digital access will result in far fewer movie theaters, as audiences have greater access in their homes to the medium. Already, as marketing dollars become more limited for films, production companies are shortening the movie lifespan in a movie theater and moving them to digital and television media sooner and sooner.

Organizations in the literary book tradition are facing similar challenges with ebooks:

Literature and the book are being very impacted by digital technologies due to the growing popularity of ebooks and to the influence of huge online booksellers like Amazon. There are both good and bad effects associated with these technologies. These days books are more easily accessible to a greater number of people however it is difficult for the book industry to produce a sustainable amount of income whether for individuals and for organizations. It is crucial that the public understand the importance of supporting nonprofit literary orgs, publishers, independent bookstores, libraries and other supporters of book culture and in turn it is crucial for foundations and government to provide this support.

All literary magazines are in peril right now, so if magazines such as ours continue to exist it will be because of a paradigm shift in how literature is funded as an art form in the U.S. I am loathe to believe that print publications will cease to exist because they are still more beautiful, but all publishers will eventually have to create simultaneous digital and print editions, I imagine, which will make the whole enterprise more expensive.

Some respondents worry that these disruptive technological and cultural forces will make it harder for some big scale artforms to survive:

I believe that the more expensive arts producers ­– symphony orchestras, for example – will find it more difficult to draw enough audience to continue in the same manner they’ve operated for the past decades. Smaller groups will find it easier to adapt because they’re more flexible (they don’t require a large stage and hall). I am very concerned about losing some of the greatest music ever written — symphonic music — for this reason.

Others pointed to innovative experiments — like the Metropolitan Opera’s performances in movie theatres — as an example of what big institutions with funding can do:

For opera, it has made it more accessible, by providing low-cost performance broadcast of Met performances. This has increased the potential audience for our live performances. It is our companies responsible to promote effectively to those audiences. Overall I believe the effect is positive.

Museums have a unique perspective on technology’s impact. It has greatly improved their cataloging efforts, but some worry that it will eventually reduce audience interest in the “real thing”:

It will radically shift the way in which we catalog and share information about collections; the museum as less the all knowing authority and more the conduit for rich institution-driven AND user-driven information. It will also allow regional collections the ability to link to similar collections worldwide – as such our local collections can be recontextualize and made meaningful in ways not possible without linked data and semantic web technologies.

Digital technology and the resulting accessibility of information and images, while fostering accessibility of collections online, have the negative impact of diluting the desire of individuals to visit the museum to see works of art in person.

A number of organizations mentioned the demise of trusted critics and filters, which has happened as print media — especially local newspapers — have cut back on staff and struggled with decreased ad revenue as part of this digital transition. Without critics, they worry about how arts audiences will gauge quality:

Digital technologies have essentially made it impossible for book critics to support themselves in traditional ways; possibly the next 10 years will bring the shift of book criticism to academic world, where salaries are paid for teaching, and reviewing is a secondary activity. Twenty-five years ago, working critics had full time salaries from newspapers, magazines, other publications. Today there are only a handful of critics able to do this.

Our chief concern for the literary arts is the increasing “validity” of self-publication among reviewers, readers, and writers. Online publishing and book sales through Amazon (for example) contribute to this problem. If there are no gatekeepers, it will become even more difficult to draw attention to works of genuinely high quality.

For some, the absence of critics and mainstream media previews of arts events means that arts organizations are shouldering an even greater burden:

The demise of daily and weekly newspapers and the increasing fragmentation of traditional radio and television media outlets combined with the increasing consolidation of media ownership due to revised FCC regulations has marginalized arts coverage and criticism to a point where it no longer plays a part in the larger civic conversation. Hence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach and engage potential audience members and arts participants, and has shifted the entire burden (and costs) to arts organizations that are ill equipped and unprepared to both engage in their traditional function (i.e., support the creation and presentation of art work) as well as build support structures to take the place of traditional media organizations.

Some responses addressed the future of artists themselves. There is recognition that today’s artists must also be entrepreneurs:

Digital technologies will level the playing field for all and old school, professional artists will be left behind. It is the advent of the amateur. For those who are savvy and ahead of the curve, there is money to be made if the content is strong. It means the complete reversal of a contributed based model founded on single funding sources and moves toward an earned revenue model and crowd sourced funding. Now more than ever, artists need to be entrepreneurs and not just artists. You can’t survive now as an artist unless you have a strong business model.

Yet others worried openly about how artists will make a living as traditional revenue streams shift or disappear:

[The internet] is becoming the major distribution platform for documentaries, which is what we do. The DVD will be gone in ten years. Artists are going to struggle to monetize their work on the Web.

Access will be good for educational purposes and to increase awareness of the arts especially historical material in performance of all types.  However, issues of copyright and payment for that material, such as in apps and in streaming or downloading, are murky and hard to navigate for artists themselves as to value and fairness of payments to the artist for original content.

There were also some contemplative responses about the impact of technology on culture. One respondent pointed out that the ability to collaborate globally could lead to more cultural homogeneity while another worried about the future of non-digitized art:

Digital technologies allows for students and artists all over the world to be inspired by one another.  In some ways this is fantastic, in other ways, this breaks down the cultural differences that is so beautiful about having multiple countries involved in an art form.

Materials we have that aren’t available digitally will be lost from the human record.

Finally, several respondents summed up the issues facing arts organizations, connecting the challenges of meeting audience expectations with limited funding options:

Attendance at live performances will favor more fervent fans and those with disposable incomes who reside in cities, and the increased prevalence of simulcasts and livestreams will alter the viewing experience while also making it more democratic and affordable. Audiences will expect the digital presence of institutions to be well maintained and curated.

Organizations will continue to need to adapt and incorporate digital technologies into their programming. This will be a good thing for art consumers and patrons by increasing accessibility and improving collaboration. At the same time, organizations will struggle with funding to keep up with technology. Funders so rarely fund some of the infrastructure necessary to create top-notch digital programming, and that will be a major struggle.

Survey results reveal that on a purely practical level, the internet, digital technologies and social media are powerful tools, giving arts organizations new ways to promote events, engage with audiences, reach new patrons, and extend the life and scope of their work. “We can reach more patrons, more frequently, for less money,” said one respondent. “That’s been a huge change in the 30 years I’ve been in the business.”

But, technology has also disrupted much of the traditional art world; it has changed audience expectations, put more pressure on arts organizations to participate actively in social media, and even undercut some arts groups’ missions and revenue streams.

Beyond the practical, the internet and social media provide these arts organizations with broad cultural opportunities. Comments in this survey reveal an array of innovative ways that arts organizations are using technology to introduce new audiences to their work, expose more of their collections, provide deeper context around plays and exhibits, and break down cultural and geographic barriers that, to this point, have made it difficult for some members of the public to participate. Their responses suggest that the majority of these arts organizations, with enough funding and foresight, are eager to use the new digitals tools to sustain and amplify their mission-driven work.

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“Artist Perspective: Building Afrocentric Technoculture and Community”

By ari melenciano.

Photo courtesy of Ari Melenciano

There’s a powerful union at the intersection of art and technology, as the report Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium suggests—where art expands and humanizes the possibilities of technology, and technology creates entirely new forms of expression through art. As a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, I’ve been fortunate enough to sit at the nexus of these influential worlds.

The Creative Lab is essentially the creative think tank of Google, one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. The lab is situated within the marketing leg and tasked with finding ways to bring creative life to the tools, technologies, and opportunities Google offers to billions of people every day. Currently, much of my work surrounds learning the ins and outs of machine learning. We are working to become early pioneers of a likely pivotal moment in computation as machine learning is embedded in microcontrollers smaller than a capsule of lipstick, for the cost of a bottle of water. The potential for more of the world to have access to powerful technological infrastructure is massive. We’re also excited to begin investing in the developers’ ecosystem all across sub-Saharan Africa. We’re learning directly from people on the continent as to how Google’s tools can better serve these communities and how their lives can become easier with these technologies.           

This is a fruitful time in my career as my professional interests are aligned with many of my personal projects. The largest project I’ve built, Afrotectopia, is a social institution I founded while a graduate student at New York University’s (NYU) Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program (ITP). Afrotectopia began as a new media arts, culture, and technology festival where hundreds of innovators gathered around centering Blackness and Afrocentric design when considering new ways to create and design to mitigate racial disparities. Since the first festival, Afrotectopia has grown into a vibrant social institution experienced through think tanks, Black youth STEAM summer camp, alternative adult school courses, international fellowship, imaginariums, and a month-long series of online talks called Fractal Fête.

During the summer of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, I wanted to explore what happens when you bring together ten innovators from around the world to collaboratively imagine, speculate, and design vibrant and healthy Black futures. These curiosities inspired the creation of the inaugural Afrotectopia Imagineer Fellowship. The fellowship was designed to bring together an international, interdisciplinary, and intersectional cohort of ten Black innovators. This initiative was self-funded through donations. Fellows were selected from across every region of the U.S. and around the world (Ghana, France, and the U.K.).

 Since its fruition, Afrotectopia’s main areas of focus have been art, design, technology, Black culture, and activism. We’ve been keen on creating Afrotectopian environments that are welcoming of diverse and wide-ranging professions and practices. We are invested in “omni-specialized” innovators, meaning that they have a vastly wide array of disciplines and practices, because when designing futures it is crucial that it be done with an understanding in every facet of life. We were also intentional to not consider Blackness as a monolith but as a highly nuanced identity. The selected fellows all held a variety of cultural identities within the Black/Pan-African diaspora. Beyond their cultural identities rooted in racial politics, we also wanted to curate a group of people that held other different lived experiences and identities—from socioeconomic statuses to sexualities, and beyond.

And at the core of much of the fellowship, we emphasized the way Afrotectopia defines and identifies “technology,” not as synonymous with electric forms of computation but merely as an extension of human capability, and beyond that, an extension of sentient capability.

The fellowship was designed to cultivate a collaborative, research-driven practice through designing and developing theory and communal engagement. A core foundational value of the fellowship was the emphasis of “community over individualism.” Every fellow engaged with every project, creating space for them to contribute their expertise or lack thereof. The goal was to cultivate a deep sense of community amongst the fellows, be collaborative, and make sure all research and practice done within the fellowship was accessible to all.

The work of Afrotectopia has been celebrated by a variety of major institutions as it exemplifies a guiding light in the pivotal practice of collaboratively designing pluralistic Black futures, creating space for deeply radical imagination, and cultivating community around pioneering Afrocentric technoculture. We have steadily grown to reveal new possibilities when operating from an antidisciplinary and culturally specific lens.

The story of Afrotectopia was inspired by many life experiences—but particularly my life-changing experience as a student of NYU ITP. It’s a space of the most recently possible at the hands of emerging technologies. The program invites students to be imaginative, interdisciplinary, individualistic, and communal. Every student enters the program with their own objectives and is given the space to explore how they can use art and technology to manifest their personal ideas. For me, the opportunity to learn how to realize my ideas through the development of my own technologies was the highest level of artistic agency I had ever experienced. I was able to create projects such as the Ojo Oro, a new-retro camera that explored the interrelationships between fashion and technology, and between digital and analog modes.

Exploring imaginative uses of technology as a student of ITP was an exciting experience. But I began to shift my focus within my work to consider the roles race, culture, politics, socioeconomic status, and other identities play in technoculture of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. This reorientation was inspired by the change of leadership in the White House, and my experience in moving from my predominately Black hometown to being within a program where about four percent of the students were Black. I began to explore how I could use my work to challenge societal norms regarding race and use creative tech for pedagogy that incorporates political dissent. I experienced great frustration in the lack of racial diversity in technology programs countrywide, such as mine. I also recognized the lack of attention to both the social impacts of technology on communities of different races as well as the promising opportunities when considering race, culture, and tech in tandem. My lack of community of Black peers, mentors, and mentees within the creative technology world made it hard to exist, thrive, and be inspired within the field. These experiences encouraged me to develop Afrotectopia, with the support and generosity of ITP.

Like many of the artists featured in Tech as Art, I have since pieced together both my work and creative life by working with many different institutions. After graduating in 2018, I immediately returned to the classroom as a creative technology high school teacher. I managed a makerspace and designed creative technology/computer science curriculum as a full-time creative technology teacher at an all-girls prep school in Upper East Manhattan, as well as consulted with the NYC Department of Education on how to bring conversations around societal issues into the fold of STEAM curriculum for sixth-graders. In those roles, I learned about the power of simple and effective communication on what computer science technology means and how to create classroom environments that recognize the day-to-day applicability of these technical skills.

In this time, I also served as a researcher at NYU ITP, continuing to research the societal impacts of technology, Afrocentric design, and the imaginative possibilities of creative technology through the development of multisensorial experiences. During my research residency, I also began presenting to universities and companies around the country, and eventually the world.

As I’ve continued through my career, I’ve also been awarded various fellowships and residencies from institutions like Eyebeam, NYU’s Future Imagination Fund, Pioneer Works, Culture Hub, NY Live Arts, and MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art). I’ve also been invited to incubate work and become a part of inspiring memberships, including the New Museum’s New Inc, ONX, and the Guild of Future Architects. Residencies have served as both a great way to sustain my work financially while creating more opportunity to focus on my current projects, begin new ones, and have an expanded community to share it with.

My passage into creative technology has been a windy path created without any models. Part of why Afrotectopia has thrived is because, unfortunately, there are no other communities that are seamlessly offering such an interdisciplinary approach to new media in tandem with race and culture—there need to be many more. Financially supporting this work is difficult, both as a practitioner and as an entrepreneur. Building a community of this nature, and cultivating people-powered initiatives, is a laborious task that unfortunately requires a demanding level of perseverance and frugality. But in all the work I’ve been able to do throughout my creative technology journey, I’ve continued to remain in a state of awe and appreciation at the possibilities on the other side of grit, perseverance, continuous curiosity, and a deep optimism for the future.

Ari Melenciano is a Brooklyn-based designer, creative technologist, and researcher who is passionate about exploring the relationships between various forms of design and sentient experiences. She is a creative technologist at Google's Creative Lab, teaching and research fellow at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program, and founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture, and activism. Her award-winning work has been supported and exhibited by a variety of institutions, including Sundance, New Inc, New York Times, and the Studio Museum of Harlem. She is often guest lecturing at universities around the world.

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Role of Digital Technology in Art Creation

Art has always been a reflection of the human experience, a creative outlet that spans cultures and centuries. The methods and instruments used to create art have changed over time as they have adapted to the improvements in technology in each age. In recent decades, the development of digital technology has completely changed how artists conceptualize, produce, and disseminate their works, revolutionizing the art world. This article examines the enormous effects that digital tools and technology have had on the creative processes of several art forms, such as painting, sculpture, and digital art.

Transformation of Traditional Art-forms

In addition to having an impact on 2D art, digital technology has completely changed the field of sculpture. Artists now have the ability to precisely translate their thoughts into physical sculptures thanks to computer-aided design (CAD) software and 3D printers. Complex and complicated shapes that were previously difficult to produce by hand may now be produced by artists. The possibilities of sculpting have been broadened by the fusion of traditional skill with digital accuracy, enabling artists to push the limits of their creativity.

Traditional painting methods have given new life in the digital era. Digital tools provide painters with a wide range of options, from exploring unconventional digital brushstrokes to simulating the feel of oil on canvas. Artists have access to an infinite colour palette, the flexibility to undo and redo strokes, and the comfort of working without the limitations of actual materials thanks to digital painting applications like Adobe Photoshop , Corel Painter , and Procreate . This has sped up the iteration process and allowed artists to explore more freely, allowing them to create works that are more dynamic and detailed.

The Digital Art Era

Exploring digital art .

Digital art is a whole new genre of art that was created with the development of digital technology. Artists are no longer restricted to using tangible things; instead, they may create using pixels, algorithms, and virtual environments. By allowing artists to include aspects of sculpture, painting, photography, and even code into their works, digital art blurs the distinctions between conventional creative disciplines. This blending of media expands the possibilities for creative expression and questions conventional notions of what constitutes art.

Unveiling New Dimensions of Creativity 

Interactivity and generativity are concepts that have been brought to art production through digital technology. By becoming active participants rather than passive spectators, audiences may interact more deeply with artworks via interactive installations and digital settings. Inquiries regarding the notion of authorship and the function of the artist are sparked by generative art, which is produced using algorithms that generate distinctive variants with each repetition. It investigates the link between human creativity and machine intelligence.

The Digital Palette

Digital technology has significantly advanced the process of making art, but it also has drawbacks. The lack of tactile feeling provided by conventional materials causes some painters difficulty. Furthermore, as it is now simpler to duplicate and manipulate digital artworks, questions about originality and plagiarism have been raised by the ubiquitous availability of digital technologies. The digital world also requires technical know-how, which can be a hurdle for artists who are inexperienced with sophisticated tools.

Despite these difficulties, digital technology has several benefits for producing art. Digital media makes it simple to save, share, and disseminate artworks, democratizing access to art worldwide. Online platforms have made it possible for artists from different locations to collaborate. Digital technologies also speed up experimentation and modification, encouraging an innovative culture and encouraging artists to venture into unexplored territory.

Evolving Ways of Experiencing and Engaging with Art

Virtual Galleries and Exhibitions

Not only has digital technology changed how art is created, but also how it is displayed and appreciated. With the rise in popularity of virtual galleries and online shows, artists now have a worldwide stage on which to display their creations. Now that viewers can view art from the comfort of their own homes, it is accessible to a wider audience and transcends geographical barriers.

NFTs and the Digital Ownership of Art

The emergence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has revolutionized the concept of ownership in the digital realm. Artists can tokenize their digital artworks, creating a unique, verifiable proof of ownership. This has opened up new revenue streams for artists and challenged traditional notions of art ownership and authenticity.

Art Creation in the Technological Age

Digital technology has an indisputable part in the development of art. Digital technologies have changed the creative environment by reviving old methods and producing whole new art forms. The fusion of technology prowess and human intelligence has broadened the possibilities for artistic expression and allowed creators to push the limits of their imagination. Despite these difficulties, the digital canvas provides previously unheard-of prospects for global involvement, experimentation, and cooperation. The bond between art and digital technologies will only grow as technology advances, revealing new levels of creativity for future generations.

References:

Digital Media and VR Art Creation for Metaverse | IEEE Conference … Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9831547/ (Accessed: 02 August 2023). 

Yingjun Gong et al. (2021) Application of virtual reality teaching method and Artificial Intelligence Technology in Digital Media Art Creation , Ecological Informatics . Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1574954121000959 (Accessed: 02 August 2023). 

Zhao, B. et al. (2023) Computer-aided digital media art creation based on Artificial Intelligence – Neural Computing and Applications , SpringerLink . Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00521-023-08584-z (Accessed: 02 August 2023). 

Digital technology : It’s role in Art Creativity – Researchgate . Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Archana-Rani/publication/333472509_Digital_Technology_It%27s_Role_In_Art_Creativity/links/5dfb7684299bf10bc366de7e/Digital-Technology-Its-Role-In-Art-Creativity.pdf?origin=publication_detail (Accessed: 02 August 2023). 

G., T. (2021) The role of AI in art creation , Medium . Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-role-of-ai-in-art-creation-a53dbd562cdb (Accessed: 02 August 2023). 

Dhvani Mehta is an Architect, constantly looking for new experiences that allow her to grow. She staunchly believes “communication is the key”. In her opinion, Architecture is made up of numerous untold stories preserved in culture. Eager to comprehend and share different ideologies associated with art, architecture and culture.

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School of Art & Design History

Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture

Kingston University

HA6101 Dissertation

How Modern Technology has Influenced Arts, Graphic Design, and Architecture: Reflecting how Technology has Influenced the Arts and Graphic Design 2015-2016

Table of Contents

• Introduction. 3

1.1.       Problem statement 4

1.2.       Objectives/Aims. 4

• Literature Review.. 4
• Study methodology. 6
• Technology in arts and design. 6

4.1.       Current trends. 6

4.1.1.        Use of video/projectors. 7

4.1.2.        3- D printing. 7

4.1.3.        Virtual learning. 7

4.1.4.        BYOD options. 7

4.1.5.        Movement To cloud. 8

4.1.6.        E-learning and digital textbooks. 8

4.1.7.        Social media. 8

4.2.       Emerging Issues in Arts and Design as result of technology. 8

4.2.1.        3-D printing and 4-D projections. 9

4.2.2.        Digital curators. 9

4.2.3.        Robotics and artificial intelligence. 9

4.2.4.        Mobile learning. 10

4.2.5.        Environmental impact/concern. 10

4.3.       Impact of technology on art & design. 10

4.4.       Challenges that face use of technology. 11

• Recommendations. 12
• Conclusion. 12
• References. 13
• Introduction

In the modern learning environment, technology has been at the center in propelling education to new levels. There has been a lot if integration of technology in the learning curve which has seen the learning curve taken a different orientation. The trend has cut across all level of education, with the extent of use increasing with the level of education. In arts and design, the use of computers plays a central role in the creation and analysis of the different types of artistic works. It has opened doors to various options that in the past where only the creative works of the school of imagination. Currently, different platforms are being used in the learning environment to aid in achieving better results and also make the learning more enjoyable to the students and lecturers alike. They are being presented with numerous avenues that enable them to explore their full capacity. The full potential is yet to be unearthed since the use of Information, and Communication Technology (ICT) has not been fully embraced and become a central part of the classroom (Wishart & Green 2009; Assey 1999). This paper focuses on the evolution of technology in the arts and design profession and how it has influenced the learning curve. The currents trends and emerging issues that are pertinent to the students are discussed and how they influenced the learning process. It also analyses ways that IT can be smoothly incorporated into the learning process by handling the expected resistance carefully so that the core values and principles of the discipline are maintained and preserved for the future generation.

The field of Art & Design and its related disciplines has seen revolution since the emergence integration of technology in the learning curve. For the last few decades, there has been increasing use of computers in the field to perform different tasks which range from creativity to the advanced analysis of artistic works. In the modern class, it has become a mandatory for the students to employ the aid of various devices such as computers and laptops in their studies. This has changed the learning specter in comparison to the previous years. Lecture halls that were filled with charts on the walls and library with large volumes of books have been replaced with eBooks and an online library that are easy to access and offer a better ground when doing research (Poole 2012). The idea of college has completely changed and being given a new definition as the raise of technology continues to offer more and better options in the learning environment.

In the wake of this new approach to learning, the field of Arts & Design has been at the forefront in embracing these new trends both in the classroom, fieldwork and even research. Numerous approaches have been defined that have played a significant role in making the learning environment of being friendlier and even interesting. With the modern technology, works of arts that used to take extended periods of time are currently being done within a very duration. Moreover, it has enabled the creation of more complex and appealing designs that were only mere imagination in the previous past. With computers, it is possible to create advanced arts and design works hence making the field one of the most sought after carriers in the modern world. From advertisement to the creation of cartoon and animation programs, the new level that has been achieved can only be attributed to appropriate use of technology. There has also been the creation of applications that can replicate arts works or those which the user gives commands and then the produce the works.

It is thus important to understand how arts and to design has been influenced by the new era and how students are embracing this new definition. This paper focuses on in-depth research, critical inquiry and reflection on critical issues emerging in students/ own practice, and pertinent to the practice in Facility of Arts and Design (FADA).  It concentrates on how students have been able to identify the appropriate technology to use in their studies, how it has revolutionized the working environment, advantages and challenges that they have faced. The paper will analyze trends before 2015-2016 academic years then use the picture to reflect on how the current academic year has been about the immediate past. In the end, students will be able to develop their critical inquiry to a subject matter and be able to come up with a well-profound and clear conclusion.

• Problem statement

It is a well-accepted idea that technology is crucial to the modern world learning. Everyone understands that it play a key role in the modern classroom and the benefits it has brought. From the lowest level of learning to advanced institute if research, it is impossible to segregate the use of technology in the learning and learning itself. Both have become one and the same thing which brought with it numerous advantages. However, the full impact it has had on the classroom remain quite unclear. Also, there are also emerging issues that are developing each new day as students, and their lecturers try to make the learning environment to be more engaging and produce better results. In Arts and Design, there have been a lot of integrations of modern technology. It is no longer a field where students were limited to manual methods while executing various projects. However, there are some questions and emerging issues that are pertinent to students practices that remain unearthed or barely understood. A critical inquiry and reflection thus become vital in this new era. This requires the development of in-depth research that will focus on identifying these underlying issues.

• Objectives/Aims

To fully understand the issues of concern to students and the merging issue as a result of the increasing use of the technology in the classroom.

• Literature Review

The use of ICT in the learning environment has reached a higher that was only thought to be imaginary. McLuhan was the first to conceptualize the idea global village where the world will be interconnected by the electronic media in midm1960’s. Such idea seemed absurd at that time, but as time progressed, it developed towards realization. This faced some resistance as some people thought that conceptual art should by no means be replaced with art-and-technology. As advancement was made in electronic, computing and telecommunication, and, in particular, the advert use of the internet has provided tools which have enabled the artist to interrogate the conventional materiality and semiotic complexity of art objects. Over the last fifty years, information processing technology has influenced our notions about creativity, perception and the limits of arts. The boundary has been crossed and new methods being exploited each new day.

In his research, David Poole (2011) analyzed how technology has been used in the different types of arts and the impact it has had on the profession.  Evidently, it has contributed significantly to all disciplines especially those outside the performing arts. Students and lecturers as well have been able to use various platforms that are offered by the technology to advance further their studies. With the appropriate use, it has made it possible to come up with better analysis, creation and presentation of artistic works. Some applications such as Google’s Arts Project can offer detailed copies of original work which further encourages the shift to this new era.  It was noted that the most of the large museum do not have the right resources as far as technology is concerned to handle much of the artistic works though a lot of effort is being done to bring the situation to level.  In other scenarios, it was noted that the majority of the people who had access to technology did not make full use of its potential. They tend to limit themselves to the basic that computers, and information technology has offered. The ease of access to online museums is very limited (Poole 2012).

The use of ICT in Art Education has been shown to increase in the last decade. This has been major to the increased access to the internet and availability of device at relatively affordable prices. Students and their professors alike have shown and increase in the use of ICT in art classes citing that it offers them unique and capabilities which motivate them to learn. It improves the quality of learning in a modern learning environment. The teachers use appropriate tool that must match the current era of the Internet to facilitate the smooth learning. The approach is intended to enable them to relate the working environment with what is in the outside world and also bring the advantages associated with it. In a survey by Maria K., about 70% of all the students surveyed acknowledge the necessity of using technology in the learning, whereas 12.6% did not have any opinion about the issue. The rest were of the idea that it might have a negative impact on the convectional learning of art. Nevertheless, all the students indicated that they had a working knowledge of the application of technology in arts even if it involved the basic such as color manipulation. The new application, acceptance by the community, and the appropriate training of Art teachers, and how effective this will be in teaching and operational will constitute a major challenge for researchers who want to seek to continue studying this new norm in arts and design (Maria 2011).

Assey (1999) had predicted an era in art education when technology will be immersed in the teaching experience. In her argument, she pointed out that the lecturers and educators at all level should keep the curriculum in focus and only use it create a more challenging environment that will enable them to exploit their full potential. While maintaining the content relevant, ideal hardware and applications should be developed that aid in delivering the curriculum standards. All members should be involved in the preparation of students who are performers and consumers of arts while realizing the lifelong benefits. This seems to be the case in the current situation though there is a lot dependency on the use of technology in the art session. It is a caution to the stakeholders since maintaining contemporary art and design should be at the back of the mind. Use of artificial intelligence should not be a replacement to the formal curriculum but only a tool to advance it.

The inter-relations between technology and art are not a new concept. Throughout ages, the two have been intrinsically linked. This is evident from the pyramid of Giza to the latest cathedrals which have left many ages. Humans have been known to build not only to function but also with an eye to form. The inexorable relation by art and technology is that as one evolves so does the other. This implies that the way art is created and also the way it is viewed, appreciated and finally sold evolves as the world of technology changes (Gamboa 2014). This impact is being shown in ways that individual artist and even museum handle artist works. The new trend starts on the learning environment which is transferred to other market and other areas where hard fits in.

It thus evident that the conception of technology being used extensively in arts and design is not a new concept but an idea that has around for centuries. When the Information Technology took a different orientation in the 1950’s, so did art and design also take a new definition so that the two have remained at par over the decades. In the current situation, technology has reached its highest level that was a mere imagination in less than a half a century ago (Poole 2012). It is being used in class from the lowest levels of study to research in a large institution of higher learning. This is expected to be the trend in the foreseeable future, and all field of study should be ready to reap the best from this new this new platform of education.

• Study methodology

The study was done through systemic review of materials that have been published on the topic. The study involved online search in popular databases for art, design, and architecture materials. The primary databases used were Avery Index to Architectural periodic afilitaed to EBSCOhost, Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI), RIBA British Architectural Library Catalogue Online, and Art Source. Materials was searched using various keywords namely; “technology and education”, “Modern Education”, “Technology Impacts”, and “Technology in Arts and Design”. Materials were filtered based on relvanmce to the study topic and years of publication. The year filter was limited to a decade, with the aim to establish how technological change over the last decade has impacted the field of art, design, and architecture with specificity to the art and design class.

• Use of video/projectors

The use of video and projectors has become a common practice in arts and design classes. Lecturer and students alike are using this new aspect brought by technology to for normal lessons and also when presenting projects in arts, graphics and other rated disciplines. In modern classes, there is limited use of chalkboard which has been replaced by projectors which the lecturers use. The internet is filled with video uploads by professors and art students who take the advantage of its increasing availability to reach out to a greater number of interested individuals. The social media is also being used to share various forms of artistic works and even for discussion that to improve on particular areas (Ashley, 2014).

• 3- D printing

3-D printing is a feature that allows the creation of 3D print by importing already figures already drawn in other software. Through this capability, it is possible to create complex 3-D solid figures which will give artist endless opportunities to explore their creativity in design through visualization and to be able to bring the conceptualized ideas into a reality. In many institutions of higher learning have at least one 3-D printer especially for the creative arts & design facilities. It is worth noting that this is still a new idea in many colleges and universities hence full understanding is still in the course of study, and the trend will be evaluated once it becomes clear that all concerned groups are conversant with it.

• Virtual learning

It involves attending lessons without physical representation in classrooms. Under virtual learning, students and lecturers can interact from the comfort of their homes and offices through teleconferencing (Ashley, 2014). It has eliminated physical movement, and enhanced classes since notes and other learning material can be sent before hand or real-time sharing. It offers a unique interactive session which many have argued that it is an advancement of the traditional form of learning. It reduces the time and other resources associated with lecture halls while at the same time offering wide options which are not available the mainstream curriculum. Distance learning has been made a reality majorly due to e-learning options that many universities are offering.

• BYOD options

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has been a popular strategy that is being used to embrace digital technology. Students are required by their faculty to have their own devices such as tablets and laptops which are made to supplement the facilities that the school offers. Having a personal gadget in class eases congestion and scramble for limited devices that the school can offer. In arts & design, having a laptop installed with the right application can be a huge boost towards exploitation of one’s capabilities. Some schools recommend that students should have a device that can meet the certain requirement if possible to promote further the culture of integrating technology and class. It becomes even thrilling when a student realizes that they can do as much with their own devices anywhere as they can do in an actual classroom. On top of achieving the main goal of learning, it also becomes fun to have this new adventure (techthought, 2013).

• Movement To cloud

This involves putting the learning resources and other material in virtual library known as the cloud. It gives all the student s a chance to use their credentials and access different types of materials that are helpful in their studies. Clouds could be personalized to meet certain demands as per the area of study which can be accessed anywhere by the students. For the past two years, there has been tremendous growth in the shift to the cloud with experts predicting that there might be more than fifty million servers worldwide (Ashley, 2014). Cloud is an interactive tool which allows both peers to peers exchange and also discussion with teachers. On the broader picture, it has an option of allowing students from different institution be able to interact and share useful information.

• E-learning and digital textbooks

These two are closely related to the cloud and virtual learning. Students are given access codes to check assignment, do research, upload and even check the results in the profile. All institutions of higher learning have an online portal where the students can access resources as per their faculty. Information and material that one can view are limited to their schools which make it more convenient and easier to browse. The department of arts & design has created its own online portable and library where professors and students can search for information useful in their studies (Ashley, 2014).

• Social media

There are many social utilities that are suited to meet various demands by given sections of the population. Social media has been used for educational purposes by sharing information and resources used in the classroom. Artists even take the social media to promote their works where they can reach a larger number of their target. Students are also able to interact with their classmates by using various social media utilities. This has been a big boost to learning since it also makes it more fun and enjoyable on top of developing skills that are crucial to their learning process.

• Emerging Issues in Arts and Design as result of technology

In the last one year, there have been notable emerging issues that have been brought about by the increased use of technology in the learning environment. Those who are underserved might face the problem of being left behind by the digital revolution. As such as arts and design might be a conservative profession, it is important to be able adapt to these rapid changes to remain relevant shortly. Some of the notable issues are:

• 3-D printing and 4-D projections

These two methods are improving the works of art and design form one of the amazing uses of technology in the classroom. Creation of three-dimensional printout has increasing become popular among students who have access to 3-D printers. On the other hand, 4-D projections are merely 3-D images that incorporate a person sense as the fourth dimension or create the impression of space. In movies, for example, there are blasts of air, heat or moisture if the movie has scenes with events that produce such phenomenon. They can simultaneously hence creating the effects that the person watching is in the real world or the movie or create an impression that makes them attached to what is happening in the movie. They have become very popular in advertising and animations where the creator exploits the target person’s senses to create a better impression. This has the effect of becoming more appealing to the viewer. In schools, there are currently 4-D projectors that are used for educational purposes. Students have the chance to have firsthand experience of the possibilities that come with these new technologies by being able to produce their own designs.

• Digital curators

Under educational projects, students have the chance to become curators and involve them in digitalization of the museum collections. Digital duration is the selection, preservation and maintenance of different types of artistical works. It is about adding value to a trusted body of digital work for both current and future use. It can be described as active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire lifecycle. This job has been preserved purposely for the large museum. However, students are actively used as digital curators in their institutions where they search for different arts and design works preserve them in the school’s library. It gives them an opportunity to apply the different skills learned in the classroom in a real controlled environment. Different institutions have their own across the cultural heritage have different requirement and approaches to curating materials. Students thus have the opportunity to explore the various ways and compare notes to come up with even better criteria.

• Robotics and artificial intelligence

This is another feature that has become pertinent to the use of technology. Robots and artificial intelligence are being integrated with the conventional learning to increase the quality of the works produced. Robots have higher precision compared to a human who finds applications in areas where there is the need to have more accurate copies. They can be programmed to produce multiple exact copies due to their repeatability and execute a list of commands as fed in their software. Students are combining computing, robotics and arts & design to come up with a blend that leads to the ultimate production of unique works. The field of artificial intelligence is under immense research as scientist try to come up with machines that can make rational and independent decisions. If such conceived ideas can become a reality, robots could be used on behalf of humans to create artistic works to feed the ever raising demand (Robo|Arch, 2015).

• Mobile learning

It involves use of ordinary mobile phones to access academic materials. Mobile learning is basically the mobile use gadgets as the media of access to cloud, virtual learning and e-library. There has been an increase in the number of students who opt to use their mobile phones to access the necessary resources as opposed others such as personal computers (Wirshat & Green). This trend can be attributed to the fact that they have higher portability and offer other options used in communication. With the mobile phone, the student is able to both do a better part of their class work and communicate with their professors and students alike. It might seem a norm to have a phone but the impact it is having on the lives of students and transformation it has brought on the learning curve cannot be ignored.

• Environmental impact/concern

Environmental degradation has become an issue of concern all over the world. Actually, it ranks at the top of issues that governments and non-governmental organizations are concerned with and ways how to conserve the earth for future generation. Arts & Design as a profession has not being left behind in the fight towards achieving this and plays a central role in devising means that ensure that their activities do not by any means lead further pollution of the earth. This has been spearheaded by the use of appropriate technology that has eliminated extensive use of paper work while at the same time producing minimum side effects to the environment (Dunn, 2012). Campaigns have done through arts for the public to become more vigilant of their surrounding and engage in acts that help conserve the environment. There have been positive results towards achieving this goal as the target audience responds accordingly. More strategies are being planned each day to push further this accord to realization

• Impact of technology on art & design

These are several ways in which the use of technology has had on the field of arts and design. First, there is an increase in the number of opportunities for the designer. When the right technology is embraced, it offers almost unlimited opportunities to the designers. No matter how complex and advanced the technology becomes, it has some basic element s that must be utilized. This added development of interaction also offers even more potential that can b tapped for better benefits. Futurists predict that time will come when technology will be at the core of all disciplines and offer unmatched advantages (Allen, 2012).

Second, technology has brought efficiency to this field. The time required to do certain obligation has greatly being reduced. Researches, analyzation and even creation of artist works have been made a lot easier as compared to when using the manual methods. This increase efficient is recommendable since as technology is made to achieve better results within short time (Purcell & Raine, 2013).

Another advantage that has come about as the result of technology is the creation of better quality (Purcell & Raine, 2013. Use of computer applications which help in the design of various works leads to better quality of the produced material. Among the merging issue is the increased use of the robot and possibly artificial intelligence which is expected to lead even to more quality jobs within a shorter duration.

Technology has made learning to more interesting and enjoyable. As students use various trends that have taken the learning curve, the learning environment becomes even more interesting. In comparison to the traditional method of education, technology-aided education systems are by far more appealing to the current generation of learners.

Use of technology leads to full exploitation of the potential of the learners. When the appropriate means are put in place, technology opens up gates to the candidate which allow them to explore the new found freedom in art and design. They are therefore able to discover their potential to the maximum upper limit.

• Challenges that face use of technology

Computer literacy levels- even though a majority of the people has access to computers, the ability to use them in art and design is another different topic. Literacy levels that come with the right skills to use various applications for design are still a challenge among many students.

Replacement of “real thing” with the virtual world- conservatives are of the opinion that with the advancement of technology, it might come to period when all that human do in arts & design will entirely be done by robots and artificial intelligence. These might negate the human aspect from the equation.

It increases the pressure on the designers and artist- to meet various expectations by the market, the artists should be extraordinary in their duties. This mounts a lot of unnecessary pressure on the creators as they try.

It has blurred the lines between a virtual and real experience- as the realism of participatory and non-participatory has taken effects, it threatens the elements that make art be a unique experience. The digital platform is making a lot of progress is replicating the real world experience.

Challenges of handling e-book were there has been a culture if literary books- many organizations that are used to using hardcopies are finding it hard to adapt to the new era of education. There is also the thought that at one time publishers will require coming up with both digital and print editions.

Some people worry that these disruptive technological and cultural forces might make it hard for big scale art forms to survive- arts which have survived for decades might not be able to survive in this otherwise competitive world brought by the adaption of technology. Small firms might be able to adapt easily and take the new forms.

• Recommendations

The conservative and traditionalist will ever be arguing against the use of technology in school especially for arts and design. There might have a stronger ground for their argument since, in arts and design, it is more conceptualizing ideas and being able to deliver them through various methods which require handy actions by the use. However, the advantages that are being brought about by the use of technology cannot by all means be ignored.  There are tremendous and opens up the field for more opportunities. Moreover, the world is moving at a very high pace as far as technology is concerned and everyone needs to catch. It is, therefore, advisable to embrace the technology in the first place then come up with means that preserve the very building blocks that form the basis of all the different types of art and design works. This should be brought down to the specifics since all the works of art and affected differently by the use of technology. Rejecting this new ear might solve just a single current problem but create endless issues in the future (Catherine, 2015).

Technology advancement has brought a lot of changes in the modern. People are still trying to catch up with the actual state which keeps on changing each day as new inventions are being brought into the market. In arts and design, it brought up advantages as well as a few disadvantages. It should be clearly understood that in this dynamic world, staying ahead of the changes whenever possible is the surest way to survive. Change is inevitable and resisting it will only result to lagging behind in the long run. Though there might be some twist and unfavorable changes that might come up with the new era, the overall benefit bypasses such challenges. The recommendation provided above should be followed to ensure that in the wake of ICT, this discipline does not click on the old ways of doing things. It must match up and move with the current trends which the world is taking. Becoming resistive will only make the transformation have more friction than it is due. Generally, the paper has highlighted all the trends and emerging issue that are a day to day norm in the modern world. As we embrace the current and future technology, it is important to keep the core of the subject a central point of interest and not to drift away or alter the main course.

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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Second round of seed grants awarded to MIT scholars studying the impact and applications of generative AI

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Last summer, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Cynthia Barnhart issued a call for papers to “articulate effective roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI.” The response to the call far exceeded expectations with 75 proposals submitted. Of those, 27 proposals were selected for seed funding .

In light of this enthusiastic response, Kornbluth and Barnhart announced a second call for proposals this fall.

“The groundswell of interest and the caliber of the ideas overall made clear that a second round was in order,” they said in their email to MIT’s research community this fall. This second call for proposals resulted in 53 submissions.

Following the second call, the faculty committee from the first round considered the proposals and selected 16 proposals to receive exploratory funding. Co-authored by interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers affiliated with all five of the Institute’s schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the proposals offer insights and perspectives on the potential impact and applications of generative AI across a broad range of topics and disciplines.

Each selected research group will receive between $50,000 and $70,000 to create 10-page impact papers. Those papers will be shared widely via a publication venue managed and hosted by the MIT Press under the auspices of the MIT Open Publishing Services program.

As with the first round of papers, Thomas Tull, a member of the MIT School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council and a former innovation scholar at the School of Engineering, contributed funding to support the effort.

The selected papers are:

• “A Road-map for End-to-end Privacy and Verifiability in Generative AI,” led by Alex Pentland, Srini Devadas, Lalana Kagal, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan;
• “A Virtuous Cycle: Generative AI and Discovery in the Physical Sciences,” led by Philip Harris and Phiala Shanahan;
• “Artificial Cambrian Intelligence: Generating New Forms of Visual Intelligence,” led by Ramesh Raskar and Tomaso A. Poggio;
• “Artificial Fictions and the Value of AI-Generated Art,” led by Justin Khoo;
• “GenAI for Improving Human-to-human Interactions with a Focus on Negotiations,” led by Lawrence Susskind and Samuel Dinnar;
• “Generative AI as a New Applications Platform and Ecosystem,” led by Michael Cusumano;
• “Generative AI for Cities: A Civic Engagement Playbook,” led by Sarah Williams, Sara Beery, and Eden Medina;
• “Generative AI for Textile Engineering: Advanced Materials from Heritage Lace Craft,” led by Svetlana V. Boriskina;
• “Generative AI Impact for Biomedical Innovation and Drug Discovery,” led by Manolis Kellis, Brad Pentelute, and Marinka Zitnik;
• “Impact of Generative AI on the Creative Economy,” led by Ashia Wilson and Dylan Hadfield-Menell;
• “Redefining Virtuosity: The Role of Generative AI in Live Music Performances,” led by Joseph A. Paradiso and Eran Egozy;
• “Reflection-based Learning with Generative AI,” led by Stefanie Mueller;
• “Robust and Reliable Systems for Generative AI,” led by Shafi Goldwasser, Yael Kalai, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan;
• “Supporting the Aging Population with Generative AI,” led by Pattie Maes;
• “The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI,” led by Danny Fox, Yoon Kim, and Roger Levy; and
• “Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI,” led by Caroline Jones and Huma Gupta.

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AI Impact Papers: Preprints of Round 1

Dear members of the MIT community,

Last fall, Provost Barnhart and I were delighted to  provide more than two dozen research teams from across MIT with seed funds  to develop impact papers that would articulate effective roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI and its effects on society.

Today, I write to share  preprint versions from that first round of papers . These open access papers have been published online under the auspices of the MIT Open Publishing Services program from the MIT Press.

Because generative AI’s impacts are so consequential and the field is moving so fast, we are taking the unusual step of sharing these papers early in the process. The preprints have been read by selected MIT experts, but none have yet gone through formal peer review. We look forward to continued development of these ideas and their further impact.

And the progress continues: Because the response was so strong to our first call for abstracts, last fall we issued a second one. Sixteen projects were just selected for that second round; you can  read more in this MIT News article . We expect to follow up with a similar preprint announcement about them once the full papers are ready.

I’d like to express my appreciation to all of you who submitted ideas and developed the current round of impact papers. As I note in the preface, this collection offers a glimpse of a wide range of brilliant MIT minds at work on some of the most daunting challenges of our time. Exploring such frontiers is what the world counts on MIT for!

I also offer special thanks to Schwarzman College Dean Dan Huttenlocher and Deputy Dean Asu Ozdaglar, who co-chaired the review and award process; to all the members of the review committee and the staff; and to Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and chief innovation and strategy officer, who provided valuable guidance in planning the seed funding program.

Sally Kornbluth President

Technology and Its Impact in the World Essay

Introduction, technology impacts, works cited.

Technology is defined as the use of tools, techniques and methods of organization in solving real world problems, which aims at performing specific tasks.

Technology has a profound root in the society; this is because today’s world relies on the advances in technology. These advances in technology in today’s world has sped people’s lives and made the world a smaller place to live in as it makes different locations closer to one another.

In addition, the fact that technology has become omnipresent in the world today due to its widespread use, is vital because it helps people in carrying out their chores in their daily livelihood. It is therefore important that the technology that exists be easily adaptable and able to solve the current world issues as human progress rate is increasing at an alarming rate (Oak 1).

The advances in technology have brought huge changes in the world today. Some of the areas where technology has brought important changes are as follows. First, technology has enabled the world in automating its critical processes in industries and households. The automobile industry has evolved from mechanical to automated automobiles simply because of the driving force that is technology.

Technology is applicable in performing tasks that are not accessible to man and are vital in automating crucial industrial processes. The technologies that are applicable when performing these crucial tasks include the use of robotics and artificial intelligence in carrying out challenging tasks such as space exploration and mining (Oak 1).

Another positive effect of technology is that it has changed the manner of communication. This has been made possible through the use computer technology; computers have the ability to process huge chunks of data at one go. Information digitization has proved to be a vital technology platform since it has made it possible in storing information and helps in enriching the information quality.

The advances in technology enable harnessing of water from natural sources to homes through robust transmission systems. Technology has brought the discovery of electricity that is important in lighting up the world. Electricity is easily generated by using renewable energy resources.

On the other hand, with all the advances in technology, it is unimaginable that technology has its side effects in the society even when the world is at the epitome of technology. In the medical technology world, technology can affect and also harm patients in cases where it involves a machine that has radiation rays.

On environmental technology, there is a lot of waste in terms of chemicals, which directly go back to the environment. Lastly, technology has a negative impact on people since they tend to be lazy and rely mostly on technology (Oak 1).

In conclusion, the advances brought about by technologies, which are the Internet, cell phones, and notebook computers are vital necessity for daily living. Due to these advances, it is easy for us to forget about those who suffer while attempting to provide for their basic needs, such as clean water, food and health care.

It is a good gesture by the developed world to make use of their technologies to help the underprivileged groups of people in the society. Through the continuous use of these technologies, there are advances that targets medical services, improved economy based on the Internet, emerging technologies in information systems sector, advanced farming methods and industrial sectors.

More importantly, educational needs for the people are taken into consideration by these technologies, since they help them become prosperous nations who do not require help from others but are able to get their own resources. Moreover, transferring technology from the developed world to the developing world has various benefits. There will be improvement in living standards, production efficiency and become a base for economic growth (Oak 1).

Oak, Manali. “ Positive Effects of Technology on Society .” Buzzle. 2011. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 31). Technology and Its Impact in the World. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-technology-in-the-world/

"Technology and Its Impact in the World." IvyPanda , 31 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-technology-in-the-world/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Technology and Its Impact in the World'. 31 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Technology and Its Impact in the World." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-technology-in-the-world/.

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AT&T says leaked data set impacts about 73 million current, former account holders

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Leaders from Japan, the U.S. and the Philippines are set to agree on forming a defence network against cyberattacks by sharing information and expertise when they meet for a summit on April 11, the Nikkei business daily said on Wednesday.

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AT&T Resets Millions of Passcodes After Customer Records Are Leaked

Nearly eight million customers and 65.4 million former account holders were affected by the data breach, the company said.

By Aimee Ortiz

The telecommunications giant AT&T announced on Saturday that it had reset the passcodes of 7.6 million customers after it determined that compromised customer data was “released on the dark web.”

“Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation,” AT&T said . “To the best of our knowledge, the compromised data appears to be from 2019 or earlier and does not contain personal financial information or call history.”

The company said that “information varied by customer and account,” but that it may have included a person’s full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, Social Security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode.

In addition to those 7.6 million customers, 65.4 million former account holders were also affected.

The company said it would be “reaching out to individuals with compromised sensitive personal information separately and offering complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services.”

AT&T said it reset the passcodes for those affected and directed customers to a site with details about how to reset them. It also said that it was starting a “robust investigation supported by internal and external cybersecurity experts.”

A company representative did not address specific questions about how the breach happened or why it went unnoticed for so long.

TechCrunch, which first reported on the passcode reset , said it informed AT&T on Monday that “the leaked data contained encrypted passcodes that could be used to access AT&T customer accounts.”

TechCrunch said it delayed publishing its article until the company “could begin resetting customer account passcodes.”

In its report, TechCrunch said that “this is the first time that AT&T has acknowledged that the leaked data belongs to its customers, some three years after a hacker claimed the theft of 73 million AT&T customer records.”

AT&T had previously denied a breach of its systems but how the leak happened was unclear, TechCrunch reported.

AT&T said that it did not know whether the leaked data “originated from AT&T or one of its vendors” and that it “does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in theft of the data set.”

The episode comes after AT&T customers experienced a widespread outage last month that temporarily cut off connections for users across the United States for several hours. The Feb. 22 outage affected customer in cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York.

At its peak, there were around 70,000 reports of disrupted service for the wireless carrier, according to Downdetector.com , which tracks user reports of telecommunication and internet disruptions.

A few days later, AT&T offered customers affected by the outage a $5 credit in an effort to “make it right.”

Aimee Ortiz covers breaking news and other topics. More about Aimee Ortiz

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