Click for detailed image.
Most timelines of art, as found in classical texts, end at Pop art in the 1970s.
This Timeline of 20th c. Art and New Media was created to include relationships between art, new media art, science, technology, war and media theory.
Included in the timeline are:
- Major movements of 20th c. Art colored according to their degree of “subjectivity”, or rejection of logic/war, as indicated by writings. Purple = More subjective, avante-garde. Red = More structuralist, formal.
- New Media Art after the 1970s, with movements running in parallel
- Consumer Art, including comics, animation and video games
- A few key artists are shown for each movement.
- Rise of the avante-garde in Europe, and Rise of science in America, shown as increasing gray bars.
- Major wars shown in red, with thickness roughly indicating number of lives lost. (Eg. World War I = 16 million. World War II = 65 million)
- Major theories in other fields impacting art, including Saussure’s linguistics, Freud & Jung’s psychology, and Barthe, Strauss & Burnham’s semiotics.
- Media theorists (at top), including Walter Benjamin, Marshal McLuhan, Greenberg, Virilio and Manovich.
- Important moments in 20th. science (at bottom)
- World population increases for every 1 billion people.
For a more complete analysis of this timeline, see the posting Subjective Media: A Historic Context for New Media in Art.
Permission is granted to use this timeline for educational purposes to students and teachers, with copyright mark maintained. Permission is not granted for commercial uses (please contact me).
Very interesting! I still feel that new media is not quite yet respected as traditionnal art is (what should replace “new” now that’s is not so new? is the term “digital” wide enough? is it a term too technical? (that technique that is often too proeminent in digital work? )).
May I suggest an addition to your mapping? Marcel Duchamp! Many art theorists agree that he is one of - or the most important artist of the 20th century (Thierry de Duve).
Regards,
Katherine
Thanks! Good point, I’ll definitely add him.
in French the two visions of the sign by Ferdinand de Saussure: are written “signifiant” and “signifié”
Bravo for your fantastic timeline!
If you have Edward Tufte on your chart, then you know the very act of trying to put this chart together with the important movements, books, artists, authors, historical events, movies, etc. is flawed from the start.
Aside from that, well done, and interesting, though there are probably many more key figures, books and movements that you wanted to put in but would have made the chart unreadable.
Fantastic work. I renferenced your timeline on my site http://bit.ly/4zZFcE .
Regards from Bujumbura, Burundi (Central Africa)
Luc
http://www.lucg.net
Interesting. Quick nit - I think you mean Mark Ryden, not Mary.
I saw your very interesting multi-timeline of 20th Century Art and New Media. I myself am preparing
a complex timeline of work in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, etc. I have been looking for
good software to assist me in this. Did you use a software package to do your timeline work? If so, which one, and were you happy with it?
Edward Feigenbaum
Prof. of Computer Science, Stanford University
feigenbaum@cs.stanford.edu
Thanks for the interest. The timeline was done with Adobe Illustrator. I am a fan of very dense, manually designed timelines that are carefully laid out to pack as much meaning into one space as possible. I have worked with timeline generation software, but find they ultimately fall short because there are simply too many things one wants to visualize simultaneously, and timeline software is not sensitive to the many other things I intend to include. Thus, I take a graphic design approach instead.
This is an incredible timeline - visually exciting and I find it clever how you map contemporary art within the context of popular culture and political events - You have taken the tool of ‘timeline’ to extraordinary limits - the complexity of this time period woven neatly into bar sizes, colors and connections.
I teach art and have been thinking about creating my own art time-lines lately, just for my own personal research. I also find that the only way to create a good timeline with all the complexities of subtle variance, graphic design tools are the best. I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop, I am not as well versed in Illustrator.
Thank you for posting this!
Hello,
I really liked your infographic; it’s very good.
One question: where is Marcel Duchamp? I can´t seem to find him.
Best regards
Andre Cardoso