Tech In Art
I have worked as a system administrator in Higher Ed for 22 years. The last 15 of it in a college teaching arts and architecture. There is no area of the arts that is completely untouched by technology. There's far too much of it to give an exhaustive list but I would like to highlight two of the more interesting ones.
Architecture
I'm sure you're already thinking of a million applications of technology in this field. Things like Computer-Aided Design (CAD), 3D modeling, virtual and augmented reality, etc. The one I want to focus on here is 3D printing.
Architecture is heavily focused on model making. That's still one of the two primary means of communicating and visualizing designs. (The other being 2d plans like blue prints.) 3d printing is completely changing the way that's done. It allows architects to create novel designs and incorporate them into their models much more quickly over building them from scratch by hand.
It also allows rapid prototyping of designs. An architect can have an idea, render it in 3D, fabricate it at scale using a 3D printer, and have a pretty good idea of if it's going to work or not inside of a day. That process used to take much, much longer.
Finally, and I think this is one of our most exciting projects, we are working on mobile 3d printers that use extruded concrete to build entire structures in the field. Those structures are fairly simple right now and they're limited to about 1/3 scale but they produce complete, durable, affordable, low maintenance structures that could be lived in, if they were at full size. The applications of that alone are staggering but when combined with our work on printable living mycelium based building materials and the sky's the limit. I really look forward to seeing what we're capable of in 5-10 years.
Music
Again, I'm sure you have any number of devices leaping into your mind. Music, perhaps more than any other medium, has been completely transformed and re-defined by technology just within the last 20 years, let alone all the ways in which technology has shaped and defined it going all the way back to the beginning of music.
The most interesting projects I've seen, however, involve the sonification of scientific data. That turns numbers into sound in the same way that visualization turns numbers into pictures. It's had some pretty interesting and significant uses in the sciences, but what about music?
Well, let's imagine that you were to take a simple electroencephalogram (EEG) and put it on someone's head. You've got some electrical waves in their brain that your EEG is able to sample and turn into numeric data that can be recorded and processed by a computer. This process isn't in any fundamental way different from the process used to turn acoustic waveforms in the air into numeric data.
It then becomes possible to manipulate that data in all the ways that we already manipulate data like that. You could, in fact, take those digitized brain waves and turn them directly into sounds quite easily. Those sounds could then be sent to a synthesizer that a musician could use to make actual music with them. Interesting but nothing ground breaking, right?
Now put the musician with the synthesizer in the same room with the person who's brainwaves are creating the sounds. As the musician plays, the person hearing them will react emotionally. His brainwaves will change, thus changing the sounds... which will then change the brainwaves and so on. It becomes a feedback loop. I live demonstrations of this, the musician was talented enough to figure out how the brainwaves will change depending on what he was playing. By anticipating those reactions, he could manipulate the listener to get the sounds he wanted. He turned human consciousness into a musical instrument.
