Personalising our living space with the art we enjoy viewing is nothing new…but now that many of us have the world in our pockets, we spend less time in our living space and more in cyberspace. The possibilities of the art we can see are thus becoming unimaginable – and without even making a dent in the said pockets! In a bid to appear more attractive than the competition, a cellphone manufacturing company recently enlisted the skills of Arzan Khambatta, Michael Foley, Mukul Goyal, Rakesh Thakore, Anthony Lopez, Sumir Tagra and Jiten Thukral. With a cellphone model as their muse, these image-makers were asked to create a unique collection of mobile themes.

Among the designs that will enable mobile users to personalise their handsets, the wallpaper by industrial designer, Michael Foley, is a sign of our times – for it is designed to gradually change colour as day turns into night. This is in sync with the recent invention by a team of Japanese researchers from the Osaka University, who have created a set of emotion-sensing furniture that changes colour. The round table is fitted with a computer and built-in LCD display and the four chairs are linked to it via a wireless signal. Sensors in the table scan objects placed on it…and the computer floods the furniture with the matching hue! One of the designs even has a computer programme that permits users to arrive at their own distinctive screen savers.

The quest to be user-friendly has prompted technology to turn towards art…easy to digest in an age when art has graphically made its presence felt in every sphere. But what the conservative art audience finds hard to swallow is that art-makers are increasingly turning towards technology.

Contemporary Indian artists have become so computer-savvy that they regularly conduct their ‘business’ in a virtual world, so it was only a matter of time before this ingenious new tool threatened to make the traditional brush and paint extinct. Now, the only thing that can stop artists from creating paintings whose colour and form can be changed according to the viewer’s mood, is their imagination!

For someone like Arzan Khambatta, technology goes hand in hand with art, as he uses a variety of machines for sculpting. “These are not necessarily power machines, but tools – each one with its own uses,” he explains. “Then comes the balance of the sculpture on its base.” At times, especially when he is creating an optical illusion piece, science and an understanding of physics become imperative. Khambatta, who believes that cars and watches are examples of a successful marriage between art and technology, says, “Some watches are so exquisitely designed, even from within, that it becomes almost necessary to have transparent dials and backs for the wearer/viewer to marvel at these works of art.”

Independent curator, Ranjit Hoskote, picturesquely describes art and technology as twins that have been separated at birth. “They should be reunited,” he advocates. “Art can realise itself better through technology and technology can amplify its significance through art.” Citing the example of Baiju Parthan’s artworks like Code and A Diary of the Inner Cyborg, he observes that Parthan extends his painterly impulse into the realm of cyberspace and virtual reality, playing with gaming environments. In Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual, Hoskote has written about how the artist’s use of technology allows him to expand his art into an interactive and social space.

With the use of digital media and cutting-edge imaging technology, art that moves has acquired a new meaning altogether. “Masaki Fujihata’s Beyond the Pages, for instance, is an interactive work in which you build a dream environment around yourself, simply by clicking on a mouse, which activates projections and images,” illustrates Hoskote. Unfortunately, a major chunk of art lovers tend to view such art sceptically. Nalini Malani laments that when she presented her performance videos like City of Desires in the early ’90s, there was a huge amount of negative criticism and the form itself became a contentious issue.

Jaideep Mehrotra, a forerunner in the field of digital art in India, received flak for the prints he created using computer technology when it was in its nascent stage here. “There is a great mistrust of technology in large sections of our society. The art audience is still having a hard time accepting an art form like photography,” says Jenny Bhatt, an artist who held her first photography show at Cymroza in Mumbai last month, “so digital and new media art are way beyond. A popular view accepts only laboured, hand-painted images as art. If they see computer-generated imagery, they ask what part the artist had to play in it. They seem to think the computer created the art!”

Digital tools hold the potential to kill the creative impulse, as artists sans talent can churn out images, print them and paint the surface to play to the gallery, warns Vibhu Kapoor of Gallery Beyond. If you have the imagination, however, technology offers the solution. “For instance, photomontage, layered imagery, 3D objects, animation in both 2D and 3D as well as conventional tools for drawing and painting in software like Painter, Photoshop, Flash and Maya,” lists Bhatt, who has worked with such software using scans of her hand, photographs and drawings to create works in digital prints and animation. “Computer software also allows infinite possibilities in terms of the effects you can achieve in the images as well as manipulating them. At one time, Photoshop had filters called ‘Van Gogh’ and ‘Seurat’…and you could apply these filters to get your photograph to look like a painting by these artists!”

The sky is indeed the limit, insists Mehrotra, who had once done an audio-visual installation using top screening that was beamed on a pool of water while the surround music was played through tiny speakers hidden in clay pots. “Some years down the line, for a show in Dubai recently, I was able to use 3D digital technology as that was available to me at the time,” he discloses, adding that the extent to which ideas can be taken depends on the capability of technological innovations. To underline the connection between art and technology, he points out that the idea of the cellphone was itself conceived from the portable phones in the Star Trek sci-fi series years ago.

This gadget has become so intrinsic to our lives today that we cannot imagine a time without it. As Khambatta puts it, “The cellphone has become more like a pacemaker attached to the human today than a gadget.” And if you can store family photographs on it, why not art? “Some may shudder at the thought of Michelangelo’s David flashing on a cellphone screen, or Leonardo Da Vinci ’s Last Supper being positioned as a screensaver,” says Hoskote. “But if that is the entry point into art for people who otherwise wouldn’t look at it, so be it. This is not dilution of art, it is dissemination.”

Purists may frown on the blossoming relationship between art and technology, but what is radical today becomes traditional tomorrow…and progress in any field comes with the winds of change. “The invention of tube paints was a technological advance,” points out Hoskote, adding that “conservatism always resists innovation, and is sooner or later swept aside.” Reassuringly, he predicts that new art will find new audiences. Tech that!