This is apparently the current Meme of the day (ignoring what is going on in the rest of the world as far as revolts and nuclear meltdowns). I think it's probably obvious what my opinion is on this particular topic. But i thougth it might be interesting to throw it out for general discussion in light of an article i read today that discusses what is going on at South by Southwest this week.
Quote from the above mentioned article
Some films tackle the issue head-on. One, the documentary “PressPausePlay,” examines whether the digital revolution has helped or hurt art. That film has a narrative counterpart in “Otis Under Sky,” the story of a sad-sack video artist whose personal notes, early in the film, tell us that “digital killed video,” and it is killing Otis, too.
Here's a link to the documentary. My initial read of the NYT article was that the documentary was slagging technology related to art, but i think i may have that backwards after looking at the trailer.
Replies
for me John, I have to say it has kept me current and it helps me connect with resources an inspiration from around the world. I just got the iPad 2 last friday and in the first time in nearly 8 + years I am drawing again with my hands. I am left handed and this device seems to have opened a channel / current I long thought dead/ dried up. I am excited by SA4 and by what I am doing on the iPad. Can not wait to see what you come up with when lion is well in to its life span. Touch screen macs and SA x.vx wow!
Laurence
I'm actually kind of curious about your comments on enjoying painting with your fingers on the iPad.
I was initially very excited about that aspect of the iPad, but after putting together a test app for finger painting i rapidly appreciated what i love about the Wacom pen (pressure, tilt, tilt orientation, the ability to use the pen modulation to control active processes while hovering the pen over the canvas, etc). It really made me appreciate why pens are so great, and if you look at the history of art techniques, it's really all about working with a pen or brush tool as opposed to finger painting, and i think there's a real reason why that's the case. Most painters don't use their fingers, now why is that? the degree of fine control over painting with a pen or brush is very powerful. So working with an iPad actually made me come to re-appreciate all the fine control that painting with a pen tool offers. If they offered pressure modulation i might appreciate it more, but i don't expect that to happen.
We're working with implementing touch screen support for Studio Artist for the future, but the lack or pressure sensitivity, let alone all of the other features pens offer (tilt, tilt orientation, control of position via hovering without click behavior, finer control over positioning, better ergonomics, etc) really make me question it's usefulness for real painting. To be honest i'm much more excited about low cost pen based tablet pcs for running Studio Artist, which are based on actual wacom pen technology.
We also looked at using an iPad to control studio artist on another computer, but again after working with it i just came to appreciate how great a wacom tablet is as an extremely expressive control device for drawing and painting.
We're definitely going to do something interesting for the iPad at some point (and that's all i'm going to say about it at this time), but i was not impressed in the least with finger painting when compared to what you can do with a digital pen as far as expressiveness of paint presets.
So i'm very interested in what you find compelling about it.
john,
first, for me, the iPad lets me paint, if you will. I have been taking photographs now for years here in the southwest when all I wanted was to paint with my computer. As for brushes there are styluses for the iPad. and since this is iPad2 it will only get better. The drawing app Asketch is quite a bit of fun in a exploratory way. I use artrage with my drawings, photos and scanned images to create work. As to finger painting. I get to pretend I am hans hoffman or diebenkorn for a bit since all my work at the moment is quite sloppy and loose. I am thinking of trying to be clifford still or motherwell next.
so at this point, and since this is my first ios device. I am just happy to let something come forth from me that is not a photo. I do not know what is in store for ios v5 but if pressure sensitivity comes with it. cool.
If I could I would print or project my SA 4.x images and I would paint them on large canvases. That really is all I want to do.
laurence
Well, if you are enjoying your experiences using it then that's the most important thing.
As such a long time user of Wacom pens, i immediately focused on all of the interactive control that was missing from the painting experience on the device. That's just really hard for me personally to give up, being so used to having it available, and having lived with that kind of interactive expressive control for painting in Studio Artist for so many years.
But feedback from users like yourself is very useful information for me, so i appreciate your comments, and have fun.
Have you seen the vWave lite app for iPad yet?
Laurence
Musicians making more from T-Shirt sales than downloads?
College Graduates unemployed due to cheaper Global skills resourcing?
Try telling a kid from a poor family in a G10 country that these are exciting times for digital art - that this art will change their lives. How are these kids expected to pimp their asses for free to get their break without economic support?
Globalization of ideas is tedious . Potency in music and art always comes from isolation of ideas - those indefinable special circumstances.
The thing that interests me the most right now is the concept of creative theft - download theft, idea theft, software theft. When it becomes the bridge head for Corporations to lobby Governments on ISP control and license fee access to the matrix- then what? Who shares out the cut?
Ever tried researching software and found countless sites where you can download/ steal the stuff for free before you can find legitimate pages? It strikes me that Google with their fancy filters seem in on it - the next move seems close. Then what?
They are exciting times for creativity , but not exciting times for many artists/creatives /lecturers /educators making a professional living, enjoying a lifetime of work. Sure there's always money to be made out of chaos , out of trends, out of micro industries , out of selling today's fad , out of selling some bullshit mirage, out of selling the picks and shovels to the wild eyed gold panner .
The story so far is that computers have deskilled and stolen income from a vast amount of artist/ creatives starting with typographers.
I'm not really interested in whether some kid can make a movie from his/her bedroom thanks to the economic support of Mommy and Daddy, or that every animation student or tv commercial seems to be rehashing something they've clearly stolen from another artist, or that artists blogs what they've had for breakfast or that musicians can't seem to write a decent album save the two tracks that are good for a day because it kinda sorta half reminds you of the summer of "77, or "66 or such like.
Are these exciting times? Yes they are :-)
That's why i posted this discussion, because there are 2 very distinct sides to the argument.
I'm obviously interested in digital art. So in terms of the tools and computer power available for the individual artist, these are very exciting times, and the digital revolution has helped artist and art. The level of quality that can be generated via a digital print, via ink jet or digital printed photo paper, or just via presentation on a screen via the web these days is stunning. The range of digital effects and techniques available to a digital artist is stunning in it's range and potential for creative expression.
So there's 2 different sides to the whole coin. You just discussed one way of looking at it. Here's another point of view.
As a working musician when i was much younger, i spent ridiculous amounts of time schlepping heavy gear around every night up and down stairs to go to and from rehearsal and my above ground apartment, and in and out of clubs for gigs. being a keyboard player at that time, i also had to spend vast sums of money to acquire the instruments i needed for my trade. So i needed to work other jobs during the days so that i could afford the very expensive instruments to play nights.
The sheer amount of physical gear needed to create a finished album or layer cd was also substantial, and very expensive. My first real recording project was done using an expensive Otari 8 track analog recorder. We needed to purchase a very expensive physical mixer to work with it. Something as basic as a compressor cost hundreds of dollars, even the cables required to hook up all of this stuff was expensive, and immediately started rusting and breaking down. All of the gear we needed to put together an album made us work like slaves during the days to be able to do this stuff on nights and weekends. And the technology was not all that great, for all of the current nostalgia over the 'magic' of analog recording, i recall watching magnetic particles drop off from the tape we were using to record our music every time we ran the recorder. So the longer you took to build your song mix playing the tape, the duller the finished sound got in some ways.
As an electronic musician in the 90's i needed racks of expensive gear to build electronic compositions via midi sequencing. My wife had a serious touring band for a long time, the amount of gear they needed to physically move around to recreate their sound live required ridiculous air freight bills, large trucks, several human guerillas to move around on and off stage. It was always breaking down.
The whole reason i originally built the first multi-track recording system for audio (and mid) on the mac in the very early 90's was because the expense of physical recording was just ridiculous for a musician. And as a musician trying to do all this stuff i wanted a better way for myself and others. The work the we (and others at the time) did really revolutionized what musicians were capable of achieving at home on their own, without needing ridiculously expensive equipment. At the time the physical computer and hard disk equipment was still quite expensive for the average person, just way less so than a traditional analog multi-track studio. but today the cost of digital recording has dropped so extremely it constantly amazes me. Everything i needed racks of physical equipment to achieve in the 90s can all be done in a single software program today. That's both amazing, and extremely powerful and enabling for a creative musician.
We were also actually one of the first companies to release digital audio samples on a cd that musicians could use as an alternative to live recording drums or other instruments. Again, that technology can be cried about as ruining music today, but it is an amazing creative enabler for musicians when used properly. So i guess i'm personally responsible for the ruination of all modern music based on your arguments, ha,ha.
Now days, all of that physical gear i needed, both to just be able to compose electronic music, let along to record and make a physical cd can be achieved on a single portable computer. That's an amazing revolution to me. My band the WMF in Honolulu were able to record and release a series of live recordings over a period of years at a very low physical cost, both in terms of what we needed to use to play the music, how we recorded it, how we then edited and mixed the final finished recordings, and how we were able to release the music to people interested in listening to it. This magic we were able to achieve was all because of the digital revolution.
So has the digital revolution hurt art, no i don't think so when looked through this lens. the digital revolution has made art blossom, at least for me personally. And i think for many others as well.
The same discussion can be made about the origins of Studio Artist. I had a somewhat traditional art background in college for while. I also spent some time working with very traditional film animation techniques, boy talk about tedious and expensive. When first developing Studio Artist, i was trying to work with the capabilities of modern digital computer technology to revolutionize what could be done in the realm of digital art (both static photos and video animation), like i did with digital music recording before that. With the notion of making all of that power available to the individual creative artist.
Look at the physical expense required for traditional art. One needed an actual physical studio because of all of the stuff required to do it (not a cheap option by any means, especially if you live in a large city where space is at a severe premium). Expensive and smelly chemicals were often involved in many of the traditional techniques (stuff that can actually make you sick and kill you). Even the expense of physical traditional paint and whatever you are going to paint on is not cheap in reality. Also again, if you do a lot of traditional physical artwork, you require a large physical studio to store it all in. Because of all of the physical space it takes up. Modern on-demand digital printing services really revolutionizes that for an artist.
Or look at the severe expense of being a traditional analog photographer. the professional equipment was very expensive, you needed a physical darkroom, the cost of film was astronomical. All of that has changed. You can do high quality work with very cheap equipment these days, and the darkroom is a piece of software you can cart around with you to a coffee house or work with on the kitchen table if you wish.
So there's some arguments laid out above to think about, presenting the other side of this modern dilemma. I understand the points you are making. But i think there's a lot more too this discussion than what you pointed out, so i tried to lay out some of those other points.
One could certainly take the tack that the age of digital art died when EFX magazine stopped being printed years ago. They said so as much in their final issue, because they felt that the magic era of new graphics software innovations they had been covering didn't seem to be blossoming forth like it had in the past. And the interest wasn't there anymore to cover the physical costs of creating the magazine. And indeed the digital revolution is killing off both physical magazines and physical books, but that's another discussion. EFX was just an early causality of that trend.
Or you could argue that the current developing expectation that software is only supposed to cost $1.99 is going to kill off anything interesting as far as the development of real creative tool apps are concerned in the future (a big concern of mine). I recall an article about an iPad developer who was crying because he spent 6 weeks building his iapp and didn't make a fortune off of it. Studio Artist has been actively developed for over 10 years, and it would take at least that long to write it from scratch. Six weeks work of work to finish something of substance is a joke to developers like me that slave away for years on very sophisticated applications to be used by creative professionals.
In some sense art used to be some exclusive realm. Most people doing it didn't make a lot of money off of it (so you either had to be rich or a patron of the rich or resigned to a poor but creative life), a few fortunate or very talented ones (the talent might have been artistic or a talent in self marketing) became famous and wealthy. It was all hidden away in museums or rich people's houses. It was exclusive and kind of snooty or highbrow in some sense
The digital revolution has totally stripped that exclusivity away. Anyone with the desire and inclination and access to a computer can be an artist these days. I think that's amazing. And empowering to the individual. So yes, i do feel these are exciting times. At the same time i understand the points you made.
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