More than conversation at the user interface, we need the creative elaboration of the particular dynamic capacities that these new media afford and of the ways that through them humans and machines together can perform interesting new effects. These are avenues that have just begun to be explored, primarily in the fields of new media, graphics and animation, art and design. Not only do these experiments promise innovations in our thinking about machines, but they also open up the equally exciting prospect of new conceptualizations of what it means to be human, understood not as a bounded, rational entity but as an unfolding, shifting biography of culturally specific experience and relations, inflected for each of us in uniquely particular ways.

SUCHMAN, L. (2009) Human-Machine Reconfigurations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

As of late I have been contemplating the relation between art and graphic design, and come to a postulation that perhaps they are more closely entwined than I had previously recognised. Having cogitated a variety of text that equates art and graphic design as merely an extension of our natural ability to communicate to one another has alleviated my recent quandary. If I were to isolate art and design to their respected attributes then delineations can be deduced, Thomas Widdershoven (creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven) stipulates that “Art is much more self-conscious, self-initiated, but also solipsistic. Design is much more open to the world”, a notion shared with John Maeda (former president of the Rhode Island School of Design) illustrated in a number of his TED lectures (fig.1).

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Fig 1: John Maeda: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders

Nevertheless, by reducing art and graphic design to a constituent element of visual expression has evoked a thought provoking conception of ideas from which I plan on developing further. My resolve has no doubt been stimulated by recent perturbations, particularly the emphasis on technology as an extension of nature that has now resonated with my understanding of visual expression existing as an extension of our innate capacity to communicate orally and also physically with regard to body language. Having stipulated that I perceive visual expression to be an extension of our biological means of communication I see no reason why the creative act cannot be ascertained as a form of technology. Humanity remains bound and determined for a metamorphosis of crucial significance, an entanglement with technology that encompasses every aspect of our lives.

Visual Communication, or perhaps sensory communication would be more apt considering the breadth of expression now attainable following the influx of technological means of transmission whereby the multisensory ensue. Our entanglement with technology in correlation with expression has provided an ever-evolving catalyst of emancipation from our consciousness, highlighted by Marshall Mcluhan in Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man:

In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.

MCLUHAN, M. (1994) Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.