"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.