Many of our mental schemas of the fine arts may resoundingly contrast with our mental images of technology. Art is an emotional visual expression through painting or sculpture, while technology is emotionally neutral, aimed at facilitating our daily tasks and advancing human society.
To many of us, the merging of modern technology and art is highly unorthodox. Art is a mere pastime, while technology drives human civilization’s progress. I mean, we very well might be wasting $400,000 on our Cornell degrees to end up unemployed at the hands of AI.
Despite fatalistic views about modern technological advancement, its fusion with art powerfully awakens a deeper appreciation for and revival of the fine arts. Artists can use technology for self-expression, intertwining traditional and modern mediums to reach a broader audience and express complex themes in tangible ways.
I stumbled across one such example in the Schaenen Galleries of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. The Winter in Paradise Exhibition presents the work of London- and Tehran-based artist Shahpour Pouyan to the Cornell and Ithaca community.
Pouyan’s exhibition critiques tyranny and repression while honoring the historic beauty of the Middle East through ceramics and drawings. The artist explores architecture as a symbol of power by emphasizing the destruction and vandalism of historically significant structures. While viewers can overlook these profound themes, the striking, immersive virtual reality experience is unequivocally engaging to all.
The virtual reality aspect allows museum-goers to spend a frigid winter inside an astonishing eleventh-century Persian mosque, experiencing a medieval taste of paradise. Even in this chilly room, the virtual reality experience presents a luscious getaway for viewers and absorbs audiences into understanding deeply philosophical and socio-political concerns. While Western media demonizes the Middle East, an engrossing collaboration between art and technology allows viewers to experience a forgotten history of magnificence.
A significant part of this exhibit is an ode to Qubba Imam al-Dawr, an Iraqi shrine demolished by ISIS. While Pouyan never physically explored the monument, he portrays his emotional connection to the architecture through ceramics and drawings. Through creating artwork, he toured a place he was never able to visit. Now, we can do the same in virtual reality experiences in museums. We can explore a heavenly, often misrepresented region. We can look around and notice each disorienting brick, losing ourselves in overwhelming gardens. We can conceptualize our own now-palpable notions of paradise, just like a skilled artist.
This exhibition is one progressive example converging what we historically call art and technology, engulfing viewers into an artistic realm that marks artistic evolution toward digitization. Museums around the country have embraced cutting-edge technologies, like augmented and virtual reality to show people how all sorts of media can be artistic. During a time when the arts are overlooked, museums have the power to inspire a rejuvenation. Instead of hiding behind technologically deterministic outlooks, innovative artists embrace these new technologies and merge them with their work, creating their most powerful pieces for audiences.
Fine art is a traditional technology asserting its place in an ever-innovating modern world. While art is commonly deemed irrelevant, such innovation advances both technological and artistic fields, allowing their co-evolution. Now, artists have the power to transform negative views of traditional art given the new digital age we have entered, share the allure of artistic immersion and communicate disregarded themes with more clarity. How this dynamic will transform society remains to be seen. But a Winter in Paradise seems like a good place to start.
Ava Tafreshi is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].