Art of the Digital Age chapter 9: the future of digital art & The Guttenberg Galaxy

Ok, I've spoken a little about McLuhan earlier in this blog. It was merely an accident that I was exposed to him and read his white paper: The Medium is the Massage. I was so inspired by that white paper that I went to the library and checked out the only book of his that was on the shelf: The Guttenberg Galaxy. In it he expounds on the central thesis of his life's work: that the tool of communication communicates as powerfully as the communication suspended within it. Sometimes he's a little obnoxious, going on and on with all these double negatives that obscure his meaning beyond any rational use of the English language. Then there are other times that he writes eloquently and wields the medium very effectively.

Bruce Wands' concludes his book with a short little ditty about how the digital medium has changed the world of art irreversibly, yet in the future it will be normal maybe even standard for all art to weave in and out of digital space. He also briefly discusses the ephemeral nature of art that is instantly in an aging medium. Basically, when you create a new piece of art that is intended to be experienced through digital technology you are surrendering the immortality of the artifact to the whims of the economy. If you tape your magnum opus on Beta Max, then you might as well burn it, and if you only supported internet explorer in your net art during the '90s, then you probably had two to three months of good solid viewing before it was unviable. But I think that the digital medium is starting to flatten out to some extent. Many really good formats have won the battle, and they're not going away anytime soon.

This stability of digital technology will soon yield an overarching epoch of  a few centuries or more, where the formats change and improve yet the devices will still have reverse compatibility. At least, I think so, and I think that McLuhan develops that idea as he describes that transition between spoken and printed word in his book Guttenberg Galaxy. What seems to really bother McLuhan is that once the printed word became the lingua franca of trans-generational communication, we lost some of the skills associated with oral tradition and developed a handicap when coming to comprehend the thoughts of our forefathers.

I think that you can really see that in the nostalgia of the 2016 election cycle, with many politicians claiming to be just like one or the other previously successful candidate in their party. Except that none of the candidates are really like their predecessors. Hillary Clinton for example, is quite a bit like Barry Goldwater. Pro-choice, pro-business, anti-all-other-countries in foreign policy. Meanwhile Cruz and Trump couldn't be further away from Reagan and Nixon's policies on immigration or the environment. I mean, Richard Nixon actually started the EPA. Yet, all of the candidates freely quote their heroes as if they were friends, or their villains as if they were enemies. Nothing could be further from the truth, these characters from our past would never be our friends in the world that we live now. They were people of their time, and their words were words of their time. Instead it is probably better to view all of those old political characters more like family, like ancestors whose mistakes and successes we have now inherited but whose motivations are alien to us now.

Personally, I don't mind that my words won't mean the same thing a hundred years from now. By then my audience will probably, literally taste my words in their own mouths if they experience them at all. While for now, we'll just have to settle for reading them through a dull pane of glass and a searing beam of light. That future audience will likely be totally mystified by the attitudes and vocabulary of today, puzzling over the archaic tags that abut our every italicized, emboldened, and linked idea. But I still think that they will experience our thoughts in some way, and I tend to agree with Bruce Wands when he describes a future where art is created yet the interface with the digital is not even acknowledged.

Art of the Digital Age Chapter 7

Machines can make art, like robots printing out digital manifestations or driving interactive sculpture, but sometimes the machines themselves are the art. Sometimes the artistic expression is the instrument that could be used to create or experience. This is the case with net art, or art that is created for the interwebs. But before you even create a website you can create a database or a piece of software, better yet you can create a full fledged video game. I have often thought about the possibilities in video games, a medium that takes all of the story telling of a film and transposes it into an interactive experience. You have the freedom to give your audience freedom in their experience of a video game while also constricting the parameters of that freedom to show them only what is in the frame.

This makes sense as the pre-amble to the chapter on net art, but in some ways in the modern context it needs to be seen after you consider net art. The internet is everywhere, all things are contained in it and it is contained in all of the things that we know and use today. When you take something out of that interconnected context, you can actually see something new manifest itself. Take the idea of a Database art project for example: any data set that naturally collects and evolves can be correlated with the art of your choosing.

Waves Documentation from Matt Roberts on Vimeo.


Above you can see an art installation that uses the information from a database to drive the performance of the artifact. There are many projects just like this one, but as you will quickly see the lines between net art and database or software are fuzzy at best. Much of the artwork and technology that uses computers today relies heavily on the infrastructure of the internet.

For this reason, it is a sort of fools errand to try to differentiate between the forms of art that utilize the different aspects of technology. Instead, I think that Bruce Wands and other art theorists should focus on finding the stylistic heritage and the tropes that are used in the digital medium. Like the surrealists, the afro-latin-political muralists, or perhaps the impressionist movement, in each of those genres you can see many mediums formats and techniques applied, but there is a tenuous string holding them together and defining their expression.

Art of the Digital Age Chapter 8

I know, I know I'm starting to go a little out of order. Well that's just the way the class is designed. We wrapped up our little Blender 3d project last week, and now we're full steam ahead on to web design. We're not going too crazy just some Dreamweaver and Html action. For this very reason, my teacher chose to move us on in the text book to the chapter on Web art.

Bruce Wands begins by describing a little of the early history of internet technology. He explains how the advent of graphical browsers like Mosaic and Netscape led to a blossoming of digital art, that could be shared across space to anyone who should seek it out. Unfortunately browsers developed at such a fast pace that it was difficult for artists to keep up, by the time an artist was finished their work would often be obsolete. Since then much of the language that is used to build websites and web applications has been standardized. Even so, there are apparently museums with catalogs of older computers complete with older installations of this software to keep the old relics of Net art alive. After a bit, Bruce goes on to talk about the effect of GPS and art designed to anticipate the mobile internet.

Probably the most interesting line in the chapter to me discusses the place of Net art: "While it is apparent that net art will evolve and grow as an art form, its position in the traditional art establishment will remain in question until it finds a secure place within the broader field of contemporary art." There is no question, early art forms are always in that strange transition state between outsider art and traditional. So much of the work that is shown in Bruce Wands' book is surreal or bizarre in nature. They're like the hushed and diligent paintings of drug addled weirdos that later go on to command millions at auction. I wonder how much the world of art will just transition on it's own into this place.

Without regard for the needs and desires of bourgeoisie collectors, while shaping those needs as they parade through the market place laundering the ill gotten millions of so many. I mean, if something is worth money then it's meaning must be at least as large as it's valuation, right? So its valuation drives the exceptance of its meaning through to the conventional wisdom of contemporary art and over time the spectrum of the traditional. If that is then the case, then where do the free works of art go to live and die?

So much of the hype of the internet is based around these massive enterprises of freedom, where investors stash billions with no idea of how they will ever see a return. In many ways, we can look at any conventional tool on the internet (like Twitter, Google, or MapQuest) as an artistic instrument valued in the billions, but with no material worth. They each had to turn to selling ad space in order to figure out how to keep the lights on, but they also face hungry investors that view anything with less then a 100x yield as a failure.

Someday, someone, somewhere will make a piece of net art that transcends those international boundries. That scribbles across the folds of mentality the way all of these outsider artifacts have endeared the world of contemporary art, and it will be owned. And it will be sold. I think that it will probably own its self, but call into question everything that we believe about personhood, ownership and artistic expression. I'm just not sure if that will happen before or after all contemporary artists grow to accept and believe that it is them who is on the outside.

Working in Blender 3d

I have to say, that of all the tools in digital art, Blender 3d is my favorite. Of course it can be unwieldy and difficult for many to use, like Vector Graphics software there is this very steep learning curve. Once you really get to diving into the program, you realize that it can replace almost every other program that you might use for digital art. Everything from 3d modeling to image manipulation and film editing. You can even build video games and other interactive simulations. That may be it's greatest weakness, it's overwhelming strength.

In class we had to make a  3 dimensional model for 3d printing. I have quite a bit of experience with the software, so it was pretty fun to just spit out models.

I quickly realized that I couldn't make just any old 3d model, instead I had to make something that is 3d printable.

Here is a quick an dirty model that I made for a wine bottle rack. As you can see, there are lots of dynamic surfaces. Lots of overhang, and not to mention that this thing would have to be relatively large. Unfortunately I am limited to something that is 3in by 3in. So anything that can hold a bottle of wine is pretty much out of the question.

Here I decided to make a coaster. A really thick coaster. My idea is that the coaster is such an understated and strange concept. Like, if something needs protection from glasses of water maybe you shouldn't even have it as furniture. Since we do protect our furniture from glasses and the like, why don't we offer some real protection. one whole inch of serious coaster protection... Ok maybe you're not buying it.

Instead let's go for something with more function and less awkward swagger. Here we can see a paint brush holder and palette. My wife is a watercolorist (and a magnificent one at that) and this seems like something that she would actually use. Six brushes, and lots of little pockets to mix colors.

I could keep going, but really, half the magic of 3d printing is prototyping. Designing the thing and then actually holding it in your hand before you go back to re-design it again. Hopefully those pcokets are big enough! 

Art of the digital age ch 4

I can hang a painting on my wall, mount a sculpture on a mantel piece, I can even use pieces of art as furniture, but how are we supposed to incorporate an art installation into our lives? Well, I'm sure there are some super heroes out there with Dadaist installations greeting them as they walk into their apartments, I've just never been to those house parties.

Chapter four of Bruce Wands' book discusses the incursion of digital technology into the world of installation art. It seems obvious, if you want your installation to talk back or move when you move, then just hook up an Arduino. No big deal. In one example Diane Fenster projects these images of the women working in the Irish Laundry prisons on bed sheets suspended over old timey washtubs. The installation is said to have recordings of women singing or whispering in Gaelic. Check out the video:


It's pretty haunting and powerful. Could she have pulled it off without the use of digital technology? Sure, just break out the old eight track recorder and get those voices poppin on the boom box. No big deal, just art. But we have to admit, that some digital tech just makes the whole thing a little easier to pull off.


 He also shows off some work by Shih-chieh Huang Where he makes this huge interactive collage/sculpture. In the video above you can see some of Shih Chieh Huang's more recent work, using videos of eyes to control robots that do things. Pretty meta.

All joking aside, just looking through these installations and seeing how much easier digital technology has made them to exist, I feel like we should all have a little installation in our lives. Maybe in our homes, on our commutes... it should be a way of life.

AoTDA chapter 3

Wands dedicates the third chapter of his book to the medium of computer assisted sculpture. I found it curious, since most of the time that I have spent working on digital art has been invested on using these same sorts of tools (CGI, raytracing, 3d models and animation) but I have almost never thought of it as a series of tools for creating real life sculptures. Instead, for much of the time that I have spent working in Blender 3d, Wings 3d,  and POV Ray, I have been focused on the possibilities of Special effects in film making and creating virtual environments.

Bruce Wands mentions three sorts of artists who use digital tools to aid them in their sculptures. First there are artists like Bruce Beasley who use the digital space in order to plan out their conventional sculptures. Basically, they might use a virtual environment as a sketch book to work through ideas before engaging with the traditional mediums.

After that there are sculptors like Dan Collins use CNC milling machines to render computer models into a physical form. In his work "twister" he used a "full body laser scanner" to scan his image into a computer while he was spinning on a turn table. The result is that the data set was corrupted into this twisted image:

The third group of digital sculptors that Bruce Wands describes uses a the computer to create digital sculptures that are meant to stay in the virtual.

When I was a kid, I used to make all of these paper models of space ships. Mostly I was making my own custom versions of the Star Ship Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I developed my models as a sort of free-hand version of these 3d Paper model kits that you could find at Borders Books. A quick look online shows that there are many kits available now, though I hardly recognize them. I might be looking at the same kits for the Enterprise D and not even know it, it was so long ago. What's important is that building these models freehand gave me a strong grasp of the concepts behind vertices and shapes in 3d space.

I have thought many times over the years about returning to my artistic roots, giving up this life of crime to go make art to fill a gallery with. Forgetting all that stability 9-5 stuff and just sticking to abstract sculpture. Well, its a fun thought. Thanks Bruce for taking me on another digital art adventure.

Maybe Vector Graphics just has a steep curve

As slow as my start with Adobe illustrator was, I can really see how you can master the thing. The horizon is so close. It's just a different set of concepts, a different tool kit. Going from Raster to Vector is like moving from building mud huts to learning how to use power tools to build McMansions, once you've got the hang of it and you start to use the tools correctly, suddenly the whole project just explodes in scope and possibilities.

Like with so many artistic mediums I would suggest that success relies heavily on planning and tool comprehension. I always like to bring up the "ceramics example". When ever you make something from clay, you start by "setting the masses". That means that you have to start by giving your self enough clay to work with in each part that you are planning to carve. That same principal goes for Metalurgy and carpentry. That concept translates pretty well to CGI, as I will explain later, you should always start by creating the basic shapes that make up a 3d model. Once you have your "blobby" figure, you can manipulate individual vertices or NURBS to get to your final product. Finally, knowing your tools really informs what you can do to the primitive forms that you are working on.

In vector graphics you have the freedom to draw out or form something free hand, but again your final project will always be improved by planning using primitive forms.

Besides this silly artistic principal, the biggest thing that I found was that the more work that I put into a vector graphic, the worse that it got. Seriously, it's like every "improvement" just slowly works towards forming what ever good thing that you had further and further into a turd. I made ten logos, and the best ones were the simplest.

Take this logo for example. I have this goal to make a logo and custom font for use in a Zine that I'm working on. I spent hours and hours on this silly thing. Frankly, it's horrible. Way too involved, gross, boring, confusing. I'll need to re-approach it with the plain simplicity of some of my other attempts like these:

That last logo took just about ten minutes. I tried to "improve it, I spent a couple of hours trying to find a better more involved process, but every time it just got worse. It was like I could hear the art critic telling me "please stop helping". In the end I chose that logo, the "ARC", as my final submission for class. There was a close second in this one:

I formed the first word completely free-hand. The second word is an adjusted version of the "MOLOT" font from font squirrel. I wanted motion, and I was trying to reference electrical diagrams as well as eighties hair metal. I think that I can do better, but the core of the logo is definitely there. Maybe if I can figure out how to turn the "Electro" in to a paint brush stroke, and I switch out the Molot font for  something a little more.... Tron. Anyway, the Arc logo was complete. Simple. This project really taught me a lot about what is possible in the realm of vector graphics. 

Vector Graphics is hard

For our next project we are working on Vector Graphics and logo design, something that I have never been very good at. To be clear, I am very enthusiastic about learning something new, but I'm also a little intimidated.

I installed Inkscape onto my computer, but we are using Adobe Illustrator at school. I also found this interesting font generator  It uses a now antique font generation language, originally designed to form templates that could be easily used across characters and platforms. It was a very ambitious project, and helped me in finding some fonts to use.

Before really talking about some of my crazy amateur-sauce ideas, I think that it makes sense to give some context about the kinds of brands that I really have respect for.

Probably my favorite brand is actually ETS Laboratories. I work with them a lot as a winemaker, and I appreciate the simplicity of their design and marketing materials. To be clear, Their "marketing materials" are usually full of really important cutting edge continuing education for the wine industry. Their logo is also pretty great:

It says it all. They measure things. They are a laboratory. They're called ETS. Simple. Delicious.

I like Orange amps. Not only is their sound un-paralleled, they're also pretty slick in terms of design. First lets look at the Logo:

The font is reminiscent of what many consider to be the "golden age" of British guitar: '70s prog rock. During the '80s and '90s all of the producers got into these solid-state amps, and they got a really bad reputation. Ironically, I think that this '70s stoner style has enjoyed far more success throughout music in the last couple of decades then it did in the '70s. So what I like about Orange's logo and aesthetic, is the simplistic yet powerful communication. Also, if you examine the product it's self, you'll see the continuity of design. There's also a reference to Britain's noble heritage with the coat of arms:

One more logo that I really enjoy is the logo for Tor Books. They primarily focus on sci-fi and fantasy books, but I think that you might get that impression from their logo:

Tor means mountain. Their logo isn't really a mountain, but a mountain realm. Like a place of great natural beauty enclosed in it's own reality, a reality that is propped up by the company: TOR. It's scalable. Having only three letters in the name affords them an enviable place in the world of brand recognition. Their other marketing materials could use a little help. But once you see the amateur sauce that I slapped together for this blog, I think that you'll agree that I'm not the one who should provide that help. At least not yet.
Some of my ideas might work for a future winery that I might start some day, maybe they'd work for other ideas. I spend a lot of my free time writing business plans for my "billion dollar ideas", and some of those ideas are expressed in these:

1. Bodega Cassiopeia Martinez (a tiara in the shape of the Walla Walla Valley)

2. Arc ( a lightning bolt)

3. N.Martinez & assoc. (a barrel stack)

4. Binary Citizen (A nine pointed star with a one and a zero in positions reminiscent of a clock)

5. Hex industries (a bee hive, hexagons)

6. Shelter me roofing (tile shapes)

7. Electro-Moto (diagonal lines)

8. Cuttle-tronic (Cuttlefish/robot)

9. Faraday (a cage of concentric squares)

10. CromaT4 (a pointillist grouping of colors)


Another aspect of  logo/brand design, is the color scheme. Every year Pantone decides the "color of the year", and it seems inappropriate to hold any conversation about color choices without discussing it in that context. This year's colors are officially "baby vomit pink" and "oxygen deprivation blue". Don't ask me why those color names came to my mind, but see for your self.

For my color combos, I'll explore the color wheel in Gimp and name them as I sees them. Forgive me for the crass nomenclature, I'm just wandering alone in a forest on this one:

Then we need to find? choose? create? ten fonts. I'm really not sure. I certainly have never been very good at vectoring my way through a font, but I have tried.  So first I'll present three examples from the Metaflop modulator:

1. Sliding hightail

2. Sultry Thickness

3. High steaks

Now four samples from my favorite commercial font site, Font squirrel.


4.Almendra

5. Deutsch-Gothic

6. Kingthings-Versalis

7. Molot
      --This is one of my favorite all time fonts. I just never have a place or time to use it.

And now I will attempt to "draw out" three fonts in my Sketch book.

And now, armed with all of this brainstorming, I'll do my best on my journeys into the world of VECTOR during class this week. wish me luck.

Phinishing the Fotomontage

This project was easy to start and very difficult to finish. As I said in the previous post regarding this project, our assignment is to create a new story by compositing at least five of the images from our "100 photograph" assignment from earlier in the quarter using Adobe Photoshop. At first I was able to do some quick copy+paste and fuzzy select to breeze right through the initial rotoscoping. Once the images were roughly compiled I had to dial in the colors, mask out the fine edges and address the lighting concerns.

It was one of these things where, the more I did, the worse it got. For one thing, in Photoshop the adjustment layers feature creates a lens across all of the layers underneath it. You can mask-out the areas that you want to keep out of the color adjustment, but it's time consuming and difficult to control. One of my favorite pictures was of my daughter. She was at the center of the image, staring at the veterans monument on the left hand side of the image. Unfortunately, I really had to retake the image, since she really is the focus of the image and she was not at the same resolution as the rest of the image.

While I was retaking the image, I was constantly either taking a blurry picture (with a wide F-stop) or a dark picture (with a narrow fstop). I had to choose one of the dark, saturated examples which led to a color clash with the rest of the image. I threw down an adjustment layer, masked out the rest of the image and feebly played with the color. At first I tried Curves, but every little adjustment would only dramatically saturate the image in a new direction. Then I tried a brightness/contrast in the hopes of washing her out a little bit, back into the blue surrounding her. I could not get the masking from the previous adjustment layer to copy+paste into the masking for the brightness/contrast layer, so I was kind of trapped masking it all over again. Anyway, it was a poor choice so I left it out. Then I tried a saturation/ hue layer, again tediously masking the whole thing out by hand. Again, I could not adjust the layer appropriately. I felt like I was typing with swollen digits, like I could so easily fix the problem in Gimp and sneaker-net it back over. But in the end, I also knew that the right attitude was to really push my self to learn the tools of the trade.

Alas, all projects must come to an end. I did the best I could with the time that I had. Could have been better. :(

Photomontage Reaction

After our "100 photos" assignment, we were tasked with creating a photo montage using at least five of the pictures that we took. Through this project we get a chance to use the Adobe Photoshop suite to tell a new story with our 100 photos. I have quite a bit of experience using The Gimp, so I've had a pretty easy time of learning the Adobe Photoshop tools. Photoshop is kind of like The Gimp, with the interface of Blender 3d. Honestly, I still haven't found a tool in Photoshop that isn't in The Gimp. The tools are a little different, sometimes they're a little easier, other times harder. It's a toss up.

For my 100 photos project, I took photographs in three or four places. I have a bunch of photos in a grave yard, another bunch in a park, a few at home of my kids, and a few at my winery. At first I thought that I would try to create a brutalist, architectural landscape using the mossy headstones that I had photographed. The Rhetorical implications should be obvious, I hope. Eventually I realized that I really didn't have the photos taken from the right angles to pull it off. There were just too many perspectives in any given montage that I tried to assemble. To clarify, I would just quickly open five or six images, do some selecting and command-c, command-v action to place them in the same photo. I used the fuzzy select to select and cut out the un-desirable areas. Its pretty easy and quick way to shuffle the images and get a good idea of what you have to work with.

In general, I found that my images were taken at extreme angles. These extreme angles tended to make the photos difficult to  paste together and maintain any sense of reality. The light variation, focus..etc made it pretty clear that pasting most of the pictures together would yield a relatively long project indeed. At some point, I thought: "screw reality". Why not just take one of these orb headstone images that I had captured, and turn it into a little planet for my children to play on (a la little prince). Before long I had a pretty dramatic image, composed of only three images. From there it really became difficult to imagine how I could add anything without just ruining the composition. So I started to really drill down, and work on the images themselves.

I did my lazy "fuzzy select, remove" technique on the chain in my photo montage, but I could not do that with much success in pulling the children out of their photograph. Instead I had to mask them out. From there I clone stamped, and airbrushed my way to appropriate detail and light in the image. Through the work, I realized that I could add two more images as subtle details in the image. In the middle of the action, I realized that the resolution on the image of my children was so poor, that it would really stand out in print. I'll have to re-take that image with one of the school's fancy pants cannons. I'm a little intimidated, that I might not get the candid nature of the photo again. On the other hand, the kids do spend a lot of time in that exact same position in front of the tv. Just sort of awestricken, while hamming it up for the camera. The image is still, very much a work in progress so I really don't know how it will look in the end.

"Art of the Digital Age" chapter 2

Chapter two of this epic tome is primarily a visual introduction into the art of digital imagery. While Bruce Wands does take up some page real estate in the first chapter to show off some examples of digital art, in the 2nd chapter, he goes all out. Many of the works are abstract, or abstractions of photographs, and only a couple of images with easily discernable subjects. The "wordy" part of the chapter is mostly a description of the various approaches to Digital imaging techniques. The chapter then goes on to display works from different artists as well as short quotes typed out in ALL CAPS, describing the approaches and attitudes of the artists whose work is displayed.

I read the chapter a couple of times, at first I was making split second judgements about the artists and their pieces but on second look I took my time to really investigate each piece. I feel that the art displayed is very much a reflection on the time in history from which the art was generated. Of course, there is the obvious conclusion that you might draw from that statement that I'm just referring to the technological aspect in some oblique way, but really I'm trying to identify the style, the over arching trope of the work as a separate character from the medium. I think that regardless of the tools used, the art is obnoxiously post-Picaso. Post-Van Gough. Post-Mucha and Matisse and Worhol. It's almost as if the only unifying elements are the  nods to recent history, and the concepts of modernity. I'm not saying that the works aren't original, just that many are derivative and very current. Only time will tell if they can survive into the future (both in the literal sense and in the sense of taste).

I was inspired to play around in Gimp, and the attached work is the product of a half hour of doodling.

Introduction to Art of the Digital Age, by Bruce Wands

Copyright 2006. You can really learn a lot about the perspective of a writer by looking at the legal information page in a publication. What sort of interests are involved, what concerns did they have (vis a vis the proliferation of their material throughout the digital zeitgeist), and what time frame are they writing from. This is especially true about any authority on computer science.

2006 was an exciting time, Computers were gaining speed all of the time, getting smaller, and finding their way into everything. This is a year before the iPhone really broke through the market that tech entrepreneurs had struggled with for decades at that point. But there is something to be said about how little has really happened since then. Sure, we have a very mobile internet now. In many ways computers have entered into our daily lives more then ever before, but they haven't really improved. Not like from the time between 1996 and 2006. Now *that* was a tumultuous time. The typical processor went from clocking in at 350mhz to 3ghz, from 32 bit to 64bit. Instruction sets changed drastically. Powerpc was the reigning champion of Apple inc, and the x86 architecture seemed like a cheap piece of sh*t. That all changed right around 2004, when AMD released the first commercially available 64 bit x86 processors. It's worth noting that Apple had been using 64 bit and even 362bit on all of their computers for over a decade at that point, but still it was a tectonic shift in the tech industry. So, I think that Bruce Wands was in danger of writing a book that would be obsolete within the year, just like any book written in the decade since.

From a technical standpoint, almost nothing has changed. Yes, the computers have gotten smaller and cheaper. Storage is vast, and you can't spit without landing on a piece of computer that would have cost 1000s back in 2005, but we're still clocking our fastest processors at right around 3ghz.

But Bruce wands wasn't tasked with instructing a new generation of programmers to figure out how to work with what they had (instead of just kicking the can down the road for an engineer to solve over at AMD or intel), instead he was tasked with writing a treatise on how technology can be used as an artistic medium. As he explains, up until the mid nineties digital art forms were reserved for the most Avant-garde circles. At first digital art was even seen as "outsider art". To some extent, this was due to how little both artists and audiences even knew about what computers would do to the world. Even back in 2006, no one could have predicted how "smart-phones" would play such a pivotal role in the massive uprisings in the Middle east and New York.

Bruce spends a bit of time discussing the merits of the digital medium. First, there is the incredible precision of computer facsimiles.  The haunting exact-ness that gives artists un-paralleled control over their final products. He also gives some page space to demonstrate some examples of low-res digital art, such as Harmon and Knowlton's "study in perception" from 1966. Secondly, Digital art can cross genres. It can be purely visual, or auditory, or physical, or even a little of each. Digital art can even cross the mediums, for example and camera can take a picture and a computer can drive a set of motors to literally paint that picture.  Finally, there is the interactive element of digital art. While music can be heard, theater enjoyed, painting examined; the digital medium gives the artist the power to create an interactive conversation with the audience. Some of these "conversations" can be held through interaction with physical props such as the animatronic sculpture of  Collins' "Return to the Garden", while others can be maintained entirely through the internet. Then he really digs into the history of computers and their role in art over the decades leading up to the writing of the book.

I feel like Bruce was really missing something about the digital media. Namely that computers are not merely a curious tool for future artists to use as they stuff over-priced New York lofts with their "exhibits" and "works". No, computers are solving the far more vital problem of extending artistic literacy and expression to every echelon of society. Through video games, through web sites, and even through their use in all of the other mediums of art. Just as people are all rapidly becoming expert rhetoricians, identifying logical fallacies and thwarting opponents in every direction on social media, so they are also becoming connoisseurs of music and film. In ways that up until now only the most privileged in society could know. But I guess that's what happened since 2006. Streaming movies. Strong catalogues of music and information about each and every track, for free.

For our first assignment, we were to take one hundred pictures that tell a story. Not necessarily just one story, but really that each picture should attempt to tell a story. The funny thing is that it's not the picture that tells the story, it's the audience. Sure the artist can tell them selves that this or that story is being conveyed, but that story must be understood and most people do not have the same visual language. We all learn from our favorite media forms and stories told in those forms. For example, I enjoy sequential art. Comic books. I also enjoy film, surrealist art, and ancient epic literature. It's pretty rare to see all of those things at once, but they have taught me to see the world in certain tropes. Where I see the beginnings of a tessellating pattern, like the rhythmic meter of homer, other's might just see a pile of outdoor furniture.

I took my one hundred pictures, and I took every single opportunity to at least try to tell a story. I think that in some ways, I was taking a story. I learned that I like to take pictures of very small things. Textures and micro-landscapes. I really regret not breaking out some miniature models or action figures to try to force the majestic in the images. On the other hand, I also learned that I really know nothing about photography. Aperture? f-stop? still a little lost on how those things influence the photograph. My favorite picture that I took was this unsettling gem:

There's nature and then there's what we have. What we should be taking pride in? I'll let the audience tell me what is in the picture. While I take the story.

The McLuhan message

The first time that I heard the saying "the medium is the message", I thought that maybe the speaker was making a sarcastic occult reference. Like: "listen to the idea of the psychic, not the forecast of the psychic". But it was like a chant, a scriptural hymn that would follow me around. I wondered, is this just the Apple design motto? Is it like, "every decision that you make in the formation of art will impact the audience's perception of that art?"

A week or so ago I finally read up on this slogan. This blatantly oxy-moronic poetry. I read this.

At first, it seems like he's calling attention to the fundamental design of objects. He talks about light bulbs creating an infinite amount of information. He repeats himself in example after analogy after example. Within a few pages he starts to really get into the meat of it. He points out that if the fundamental design of an object is a form of communication in and of it's self, then the artist, the designer, the inventor all have a sort of responsibility. Then he starts aggrandizing himself with these proclamations that he is like Louis Pasteur, telling doctors to wash their hands.

I think that he was probably right. On every level. And he knew it, a little too well.

We live in an age with constantly new ideas, new mediums, where the designers and legislators haven't taken even a second to understand what they may mean. Intellectual property rights and Net Neutrality are great examples of this kind of ignorance that McLuhan meant. Democratically elected Governments are rushing all over the world to take rights away from their citizens and give them away to unbelievably large and powerful corporate interests. The rights of our very minds. The power over all of our knowledge (the bedrock of any successful democracy) is being sold to people who want to use it to make even more money. Money off of putting you and I in prison, money off of selling us infinite sequels, money off of remakes of remakes that some people don't know and never will know was once alive and well in another medium.

But besides the sobering effect of trade agreements and copy right laws, we could easily pull apart the thoughtlessness of the social media. The social medium. Every hope, every hate, every love, and every moment in our lives cataloged and shared at every moment. Governments and highest bidders know our business, but that isn't too much to worry about. In fact, the total lack of governance is an outright travesty. Through social media, more then a billion of us have become intimately involved in the action of public shaming, and lazy research. We politicize ourselves in extreme ways, while still expecting to maintain "friendships" with people that we slowly alienate. There just isn't any washing of hands. No one is thinking about how much this life is spilling into that life, undoing whatever moments of privacy we once had.

Marshall McLuhan definitely knew his stuff, and I think that I'll be thinking about his work for a very long time.

Computers have never been absent from my home. For my whole life I have watched, learned, and known the world as a connected and calculated place. I was maybe six years old when I first became the computer expert. My mother and I would sit in wait in a full computer lab. She would be doing her homework, and I would be drafting designs of the space ships with which I hoped to one day conquer the stars. Then a nervous student would stand up in the loud droning room to ask for help, and often enough I could show them how to save their files onto floppy disks and send their essays over to the dot-matrix printers. But then I grew up, I got a job, and for years I just disconnected from the video games and programming languages. I completely missed the first seven years of smart phones. So now I stand at a strange place, learning to use new computer systems like those nervous students back in 1996. Well not quite like them, I at least have the context that only someone who had watched, learned, and known computers from infancy could have. This blog is my weekly record of my first Art in Digital Technology class and the attached picture is the desk upon which I read my textbook.