Technology and Art

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Comment by Wayne Harjula on April 4, 2012 at 12:09pm

thankyou Jeff, all positive commentary helps!

Comment by Jeff Lindeman on April 3, 2012 at 10:36pm

Nicely done little video Wayne! Particularly because one SHOULD be bored to tears with three minutes of one-camera, even considering the time-lapse aspect, yet the soundtrack brings the whole thing together acting as the carrot on a stick! I couldn't have stopped it even had I wanted to; I simply had to see/hear what was around the next corner. I don't stop by too often, but I received the notice of your post and thought I'd drop by. Worth it. Very creative. Thanks for sharing! Carry on... Cheers, Jeff

Comment by Wayne Harjula on April 3, 2012 at 3:54pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5KwrUhq_jw&context=C42af9b8ADvj...

stop animation video of schools visit to my studio using mostly ipad2 apps

Comment by Ishita Biswas on May 21, 2011 at 3:47am

Digital Art is a new rage these days and is a very imaginative form. 3D art has rapidly taken over the world of technological art. I myself is studying Multimedia Animation & Visual Effects. However I'm not too much of a tech-savvy person. While working on 3D softwares many a times I feel too uncreative and dry. I find it difficult to get over it & this affects my creative growth.

I wish if anybody out here could give some suggestions regarding this.

 

Thanks! :-)

 

Comment by Jeff Lindeman on January 27, 2011 at 6:41am

Technology and Art. United in bliss? An unholy union?  An inseparable marriage of mind and spirit (for better or worse; in sickness and in health...) or a hedonistic romp of casual convenience (we're 'just' living together; you know, **ck buddies)? As a longtime commercial photographer (go back to analog? are you kidding?) and touch-up artist, 20 year Photoshop veteran (since v1), Mac user since the black and white (not grayscale) MacPlus (1986?)("Who would need a megabyte of RAM" - Bill Gates, Mr Bloatware himself) and additionally (for about 3 years now) fine art photographer (second-class citizen of the art world), my opinion on the subject is pretty plain to see. And in my dealings with the commercial world of "always hungry for the next cool (digital) thing" and the more traditionally oriented fine art world of analog creation with tactile tools (some unchanged for centuries) used in time-honored techniques, I've observed just about every opinion possible from the "pure" to the "irreverent." Being more of a Relativist myself, my stance is a more ambiguous "eh, whatever works FOR YOU." It's a tool, like any other. A means to an end if you like.

 

Addressing Cindy's comment below, I believe it's true that each of us "seem" to display certain traits and, for want of a better word, aptitudes that are physiologically labeled as left and/or right brained. A long standing debate I have with my wife, she being a grade school teacher, is whether that "observable ability" is innate, genetic hardwired from birth or whether is learned, nurtured wired from experience - the 'ol 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration argument. I say the latter, she the former. The truth, as with most things (remember I'm a Relativist), is probably somewhere in the middle. As an example, she bases her opinion on the observation of two siblings, very close in age, both raised in the same environment, where one has the ability to draw beautifully while the other can't make a stick figure.  I still believe that their apparent "hardwiring" was not that at all, but simply a "self wiring" based on their unique experiences long before they came under her eye. though they were raised in the same house, the variables of their exposure to concepts and ideas  are endless. My point is this. How easily something comes or doesn't for any individual has nothing to do with left/right brain or whether, as you put it, they are good at technology or creation. It has more to do with exposure and self-wiring. it also has much to do with Will. How bad do you want it? To what lengths will you go to get it? Will you stay up all night practicing or reading? Will you forsake other more pleasant things (in the short term) to reach difficult goals that may be painful in someways to attain? I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I think that once you feel the deep satisfaction that comes from fighting the good fight to get somewhere, whether that be a concept or a skill or a job or whatever that holy grail may be, it becomes an addiction, and one goal leads to another. If we only do what comes naturally and "easy" there's really no growth in that.

 

For me, I don't see it as Technology and Art, I see it as Art period. Because Art has always been and always will be about the available technology to create it. From brush and palette knife to airbrush to pressure-sensitive tablet. From pinhole to multi-element lens, film to CCD to CMOS, emulsion to pixels, enlarger and wet lab to computer and inkjet (did you know that the pretentious little fine art term "Giclee" (Gee-clay) means "little squirt" in French). I don't see myself as left or right brained either. I see a whole brain as two soul mates that push and pull and move each other by their different ways of viewing the same problem (because life itself is hard; life is a series of problems to solve; once you accept that, life is easy! - now substitute "art" for "life" in all those phrases). And those "purists" that deride "technology" in the creation of art - be they the artist's themselves or simply admirers and buyers - only show their conceptual ignorance of of whatever genre they are trying to keep "pure." In photography, the one I here so often is, "well, Ansel Adams didn't have Photoshop." The truth is, if you look at his entire collection of work, he wasn't very prolific, and within that body only about ten percent represent the pieces he is so well known for, and (no hate mail please) the rest just aren't very good. the ones that made him famous represent hours and hours dodging and burning minute details to bring out the depth. that was the state-of-the-art- of the technology of his time. If you don't think he would of been all over Photoshop given the opportunity, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you... cheap! If you don't think Bach or Beethoven or Mozart wouldn't of sold their souls to the devil for a couple of samplers and a modern computer loaded with a MIDI sequencer, you're a fool. "Pure" only exists in the minds of the slow, the luddite, the fearful , the lazy and the misled. And that's my point about Art and Technology being one. Why bother with the extra syllables? It's simply Art.

 

And lastly, I'm the perfect example of the power of exposure, will and self-wiring. I loved to draw when I was a kid and my parents were very encouraging of any artistic pursuit. They were very musical so I started music lessons on the saxophone in 3rd grade. I excelled at it - my teacher told my mother that I was a natural and that a music teacher is gifted with only a few his entire career and I was one. I learned my theory, became good at sight-reading and improvisation. I wrote arrangements for my hi-skool jazz band and won awards at competitions. I didn't care about anything else and cut classes when I could get away with it. I was in the dummy math class and couldn't figure out what x,y and z had to do with it anyway. I dropped out in my senior year and hit the road with a rock band (1973). A couple years later I'm doing a pick-up gig off the union board playing in a theater pit band for some play (exercising those sight-reading chops), and talking to the piano player about algebra during intermission and he says, " Hey man, you know your theory right?" Sure," I say. "Well, music is just math man. You know, Cycle of Fourths, Cycle of Fifths, the twelve tone Western scale. It's just "Base 12" instead of decimal "Base 10." Buddabing! Epiphany! It rang in my head for weeks. On the road again. Nothing to do between gigs, except share the driving and hang at the hotel pool all day. I bought some books in a college town (I think it was Fayetteville, AR - same place I saw Frank Zappa's "200 Motels" movie at a college screening). to make a long story shorter,  a few months later I came back t my hometown of Seattle and went back to school, Seattle Central Comm College and then the UofW. Self-wired for math now, I was a physics major with an art minor. The only other class I hadn't skipped in hi-skool was photography. It was a habit I'd kept and practiced on the road just to remember the places I had been. With no prospects of employment out of college, I turned to the only other thing I knew how to do. I knew some guys that had gone pro out of hi-skool and they gave me some work, assisting at first with lighting set-ups (those newly acquired math skills), then shooting product shots. Eventually I struck out on my own to freelance. Always curious, always like a dog with a junkyard bone when it came to digging up work. Jobs were for schlubs and I would die in the gutter first! "Would you like a Slurpy with that hot dog?" was not an option. Things got better and better. I bought the MacPlus on a lark in'86(?), then the SE30, IIci something in between, Powerbook 3400, and the first G3. I was drum scanning analog slides and editing in Photoshop - No Color Profiles 'til v5 so you had to take your monitor down to the service bureau and talk things over, so you stayed with them because they knew what to do. I started buying digital cameras to fool with on the side and stayed analog for work - the quality wasn't there yet. Finally in '96 I went digital and never looked back.

I only started the fine art supplement to my income in 2008 when the recession hit me like a ton of bricks. Long time clients went out of biz, others downsized and pulled production in-house, It looked like the days of two assistants and catered lunches with the models were over. I went from a 53 year old man with a mortgage, wife and two daughters that required my handed-down computers every two years and cell phones with unlimited texting of course LOL, three car payments and gear payments up to my teeth AND perfect credit, to 54 and all the above with credit in the toilet. But still the junkyard dog with a bone.

So I've hung on. The fine art has moved slowly, but I was always an obsessive shooter and so as I've mined my 60,000+ catalog of images I've struck a few gold mine sellers and I took on three - gasp - weddings this last summer (gotta feed my family - no job though -sorry you'll all drive POS and go textless before I'll be a beast of burden) and found I love the run and gun photojournalistic aspect, so I'm hiring younger guys to shoot the boring formals etc. and having a gas playing sniper and interacting with all the people. And the commercial biz is picking up, the cell is ringing again. Still a little slow, the residuals are a little tighter and the catered lunches are in brown bags, but life is good and still on MY terms. Exposure, Self-Wiring and Will.

Sorry to talk your ears off, but I never really wrote it out like that before. I'll keep a copy to look at in another twenty years. I wonder what will be happening then, and how many tunes will I have in my 120 terabyte iPod (my 120Gb Classic is only half full - and I can play for 13 days and some odd hours without repeating a tune. And no there are no pictures or video, just music

Comment by Wayne Harjula on January 13, 2011 at 12:59am

Hi John, your idea does ring true, in fact my most intense programming ability was being the co-pilot while a professional performed routine projects next to me, I learned more in two days than I have in the last four years for free. Unfortunately its just the 'alone' part brings up so many pitfalls and bugs and saps my effort and hours while the 'money burns in the barn'. I need to restructure and I am open to concepts that continue to allow people to find me online, yet I am wholly intrigued by open source programming in this rapidly changing landscape, the end result as in all my art will be my starting point, mmm, children need to get to bed, I'm right at the turning point, thank you. Wayne

Comment by John Rouse on January 12, 2011 at 8:30pm

Great Video Wayne! Looks like we need to do an experiment. If we left artists alone with a computer for two months would they be able to teach themselves to build a great website?

Comment by John Rouse on January 12, 2011 at 8:11pm

Wayne, did you decide to hold off on making the change to Wordpress? What do you use to analyze your statistics right now - google analytics?

Comment by Wayne Harjula on January 12, 2011 at 2:45pm

Hi Cindy, I wouldn't try and match or differentiate the two subjects, each creative mind will interpret practicalities/obstacles, and probably not define its category, the institution should provide the tools and guidance. A small link to this Ted talk opens some simple concepts which could provide a new format on the way we perceive educational progress and shows the strength of group involvement. Ultimately the result will be from how we inspire others to the positive benefits, yet become part of the contemporary culture ourselves to understand where we have been. Please post your thoughts and experiences, I look forward to see your challenges/ideas...Wayne

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.ht...  

Comment by Cindy Wang on January 12, 2011 at 12:23pm

This is a question I'm working on! In fact multimedia is a new form of expression.

I'm wondering how they teach in art school. some cam be good at technology and some at creation! How to match the 2?

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