The exhibition on Futurism at Tate Modern is interesting for producers who are working towards convergence as it shows how the intellectual groundwork for has already been laid by several earlier art movements, the futurists and the Fluxus movement being two in particular.
Periodically shocking artists come along, often with manifestos (art is often a political act), to sweep away what has gone before, or certainly to show a new way forward. The futurists gloried in speed, “a roaring motorcar is more beautiful than the Nike of samothrace” said F.T. Marinetti. In the same way coders and developers seek faster internet speeds and compare ISPs and compression ratios. Faster broadband = more sounds, more visuals, more animation and so on. Many developers and coders may become the artists of our future.
Developers and coders can be professionals, but they are often bedroom creators who later became entrepreneurs (see Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and so on). These individuals understand the atomic structure of the net, the basic noughts and ones. We will all need to be transliterate to keep up with the languages of digital expression, whether we are producers or publics, as we are all becoming media makers.
Producers continue to experiment with convergence, and their experiments are often crude, mainly because it is sometimes necessary to try and link dynamic content which is being generated from different databases and/or on different platforms. The intellectual ideas around converged content are already here, the developers and coders are busy inventing new stuff, and the internet is getting fast enough to deliver new forms of converged content.
What is holding things back is the middle ’storage and retrieval’ layer – the database-driven content management production systems – which are often still in the digital stone age, lacking intelligence and the ability to respond in a nuanced way.
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