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“Autumn Spiral
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by Karim Bouchnak
And Yet Another Take On “How To Be Creative”
1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big -- It just needs to change the world.
3. Put in the hours.
4. If your plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, then you’ll probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; Everyone is given a box of crayons on Kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Work for a company that doesn’t squelch creativity….
9. Everyone has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10.The more talented somebody is, the less they need props.
11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain it cannot hurt you.
13. Never compare your inside with someone else’s inside.
14. Dying young is overrated.
15. The most important thing a creative person can learn, professionally, is where to draw the red line that separates what you’re willing to do and what you’re not.
16. The world is changing.
17. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t.
18. Sing in your own voice.
19. The voice of the media is irrelevant.
20. Selling out is harder than it looks.
21. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
22. Worrying about commercial vs. artistic is a complete waste of time.
23. Don’t worry about finding inspiration, it comes eventually.
24. You have to find your own shtick.
25. CREATE FROM THE HEART.
Get Inside Their Heads!
Last week we touched upon the need for improved print technology in the digital fine arts. I did a little research and it seems that Kodak is leading the pack with regard to digital processing, papers, inks, and then some.
I highly encourage you to send an email to Kodak about your need for improved print technology.
Here's a link for your comments:
Email Kodak
Learn more about what KODAK Research is currently working on:
Kodak Research leverages scientific understanding to improve the technologies.
Current research focuses on improving:
Capture technologies - sensors, color filter arrays and adaptive acquisition technologies
Data organization - meta-tagging, search & retrieval, compression and storage
Digital workflow - assembling and preparing assets for digital printing
Output systems - still/video display, digital printing (electro-photography & inkjet)
In the days of film, there was a single technological pathway from capture to output. Today, there are numerous usage paths and new challenges associated with the existence of huge collections of digital assets in the commercial printing space. The fundamental scientific disciplines behind Kodak research are as follows:
Materials Science - inks, toners, coatings, paper and other media.
Nano-/Micro-Scale Devices - to sense or control light or fluids.
Computational Science - to label, organize, compress and interact with digital data.
Read More at: KODAK RESEARCH
Call to Artists
Open Up Workshop: Projects for the digital facade of Medialab-Prado
February 9 - 23, 2010 -- Venue: Medialab-Prado in Madrid (Spain)
Open Up has just started! About 70 artists, designers, architects, programmers and many other interested people from all over the world are already working in this exciting workshop to create contents for the first digital facade for artistic purposes of Madrid, a 150m2 and 27.000 LEDs (pixels) screen.
In this event 7 projects selected through an international open call will be collaboratively developed within this next 2 weeks.
The goal of this project production workshop is to explore the relationship with the urban space by opening production processes through different citizen participation strategies. Selected projects are being developed with the aid of tutors and technical assistants such as Jordi Claramonte, Chandler McWilliams, Casey Reas, Víctor Viña, Chris Sugrue and Massimo Avvisati.
More information: Open Up
Venue: Medialab-Prado - Madrid (Spain)
“Organica: Fractals - Organelle”
by Pam Blackstone
Random is as Random Does
When considering the "distinction" between randomness and mastery consider the possibility of being a "master of randomness." Indeed, during my video art days of the mid 70's, I became attracted to the work of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenburg. Their work both apart and together, created about a generation previous to me, embraced randomness and laid some of the ground work for Post-Modernism. Part of their intent in this work was to use chance operations to foster an environment in which unplanned but, often, beautiful moments could arise. So, if your intention is to foster unintentional beauty, then those results remain, at some level, intentional. Deciding to make no decision is a decision.
I decided to make a video composition using chance operations both as a personal experiment and homage to John Cage. In brief, I set about creating what we would call today an abstract video animation in which size, color, texture, direction, speed, duration and layering order of several fields of moving parallel lines would be organized by tossing dice. This video composition was accompanied by a random generated audio piece by John Cage created for harpsichord and electronics entitled "HPSCRD." The results were more instructive than beautiful, because at about the mid-point of the video, while the music continued to race ahead at a frantic, and cacophonous pace, my video at the bidding of the dice simply stopped moving. On all levels, it just died and sat there. I hated it.
So, I was faced with an aesthetic dilemma. Was I to succumb to my ego and manipulate the results or stick to the concept I had established for the work and let it be something that I, myself, could not appreciate aesthetically. In the end, I let it be, just in order to remind me that the paradigms you choose, even if they embrace freedom and surprise, can become dogmatic if you cling to them too tightly. And, on a more personal note, to confirm to myself once and for all that I am much too much of a sensualist to keep myself out of my own work. In short, if I am not personally involved with the artwork, how can I expect someone else to be?
Today, I work digitally. Everything appearing on a digital screen is preceded by an immense list of rigidly controlled and encoded instructions. So at that level, nothing
digital is ever truly "random." At the same time, since I did not directly write this code and can only manipulate it indirectly through the proxy of a cybernetic connection, I must say that some of the results I see in my work are total surprises to me. Sometimes I envy traditional painting methods in which pouring, splattering, or throwing paint at a canvas yields dramatic results. Whether or not these results can be called "random" has to do with one's own mastery and manipulation of viscosity, rates of absorption, gravity, and here again… intention.
I say "envy" because when I want the same looseness and spontaneity to appear in my digital work I have to work very hard to make pixels appear to drip and run. Without gravity or materiality to play off of I have to work very intensively to digitally create a look that, in traditional painting, happens in a split second. How often have you worked long hours with displace maps and layering effects to create a look in your digital painting that could have been done on a canvas in a few moments with sand paper and a palette knife? This is just one reason why I flinch at the idea that working digitally is so often criticized for being too easy. In comparison splattering paint is easy and far more outside my control than achieving the same visual results digitally.
Let's be clear. People do not find digital work lacking because it is random. They criticize it because they fear that the artist has turned control of making the art over to a machine. They sense that no human hand (or eye) has been involved with creating the composition before them. Ultimately, they think they smell a rat. Magazine art and films have told them often enough that what they thought was a real situation was "actually done on a computer." They fear being fooled again.
Certain types of digital art seem to support this "tricksy-factor" more than others. You and I know that fractal art and images generated by running filters and plug-ins require careful manipulation of controls, these things do not actually happen by themselves. Are we in control? …sometimes. Are we surprised by the results? …often. But, does surprise within the process of making art negate the role of the artist? Not in traditional art making. So, why does surprise, and turning some of the art making process over to random results receive criticism in digital art making?
I suspect that this has a lot to do with our culture's love/hate relationship with technology. Also, in a world that has become increasingly willing to accept, even expect, to see the textural evidence of the materials used to make art that the super-flat and technologically clean surface of a digital print or electronic screen seems somewhat unworldly. How ironic that the aspirations of historical French academic painting, those ideals of creating a painted surface which revealed no hint of a brushstroke; the same ideals that Modernists fought so hard against, are now reviled and unappreciated at a time when we have the technical means to achieve those ideals to an unprecedented degree.
Fractal Art is patently beautiful. We are attracted to those patterns because in them we sense the underlying mathematics of nature itself. We glimpse the order and perhaps even the intelligence beneath it all. But, just as Modern Art has deemed that it is often not enough for art to simply copy nature, similarly it is probably not enough to simply present a visual representation of the math behind it. Without the materials or the hand of the artist readily evident in art made digitally, we are left only with the proof of our eye and the strength of our ideas to convey the warmth of our hearts.
In the end, the only thing I can see that can be done is to take to heart the lesson I learned many years ago. I must keep in mind that no matter what set of tools I use, or how much of the process I turn over to the machine, I must remain an active, feeling, critical part of the art I make and present to people. If I do not feel present in the work… I cannot expect anyone else to be. Just as beauty does not often say much for the worth of a person, beauty, in and of itself, does not make for the strongest art. Somewhere along the line the beauty must speak. The "mastery" in digital art is exactly where it is in any traditional art. The thing to master is your self.
My acknowledged "masters of randomness" took themselves out of the composition by adopting chance operations to organize the work. That was their intention, from which they never wavered. But, it was the power and humanness and skill with which they applied their human selves to this intention that kept them in the game. Once their audience understood their intention what they experienced was not randomness, but rather the work of human beings, being human. This is what is essential in art, no matter how it is made.
Source: JD Jarvis 2/2010
Webster’s Dictionary defines "Random" as:
“Fractal Art"
by Domenico Nadile
In persuasive or argumentative writing and conversation, we try to convince others to agree with our facts, share our values, accept our argument and conclusions and adopt our way of thinking. To do so we must consider the following --
Elements toward building a good persuasive argument include:
Establishing facts to support your position
Clarifying relevant values for your audience (perspective)
Prioritizing, editing, and/or sequencing the facts and values in importance to build the argument
"Persuading" your audience that your conclusions are based upon the agreed-upon facts and shared values
Having the confidence to communicate your convictions
To build a persuasive argument:
Think of the questions that critics may pose and write them down in your own words.
what prejudices lie in the statement or values that color the facts or the issue
the facts and use actual data to support your position
List out facts; consider their importance: prioritize, edit, sequence, discard, etc.
Ask yourself "What's missing?"
What are the "hot buttons" of the issue?
Recognize and list possible emotions/emotional reactions so that you can anticipate them and react accordingly. Which is always calmly and supportively, while maintaining your ground.
How to respond to criticism:
Consider criticism as a test of developing your powers of persuasion. It is important to not take it personally. If your facts are criticized, double check them, and then cite your sources. If your values are criticized, sometimes we need agree "to disagree". Remember: your success in persuading others assumes that the other person is open to being persuaded!
You can’t begin to persuade another until you have successful evaluated and understood their perspective and position. Use the convictions they share to render a supportive and fact based reply offering mutual respect to where you both are in the disagreement.
Source: Educator, S. Ryder
Guess what's new to the art market?!
John Balestrieri is teaching his computer how to paint. He is doing it by developing software that automates the artist’s decision-making process.
Read more at: Automated-Painting
Also -- A new digital art picture frame from Casio emulates art for you. Built in filters and effects create instant art from photographs. Read more at: Casio Frame
In-BOX
"Dear Mary,
There are the speeches and then there is reality! It is very simple, MOCA is an example of the difficulties which one meets to distribute our artwork. I will explain: to make your exposure of the ‘Donnie 2010 Contest’ you asked us for our work as a photographic traditional support [for example .jpgs]! Which is perfectly understandable because to join together a hundred screens is not desirable and it is very expensive. So, I return to what I have already said, we are in the midst of a transitional period!! It takes centuries to be presented on physical supports, and suddenly thanks to the evolution of the digital medium, one can project on screen and file our work for eternity if one wants while following the evolution of the safeguards. Of course, these are the support needs of the future. Today it is still a question of money and no matter what one says the money is still of issue. That is to say, without money practically nothing is possible. We all are confronted with this problem on different levels.
All of those who work in the universities, or other associations use the tools which they have on the spot, it is normal. [They have resources at their disposal.] The regular artist, the private individual, has a different problem [the money/ the resources are often lacking.]
I see on the Web this array of artists from all countries which have astounding talent, it is splendid to see this evolution on this creative level. I share that I am always 100% pro-digital.
Good courage to all -- our hour will arrive!!"
Dear Peter,
I, too, believe "our hour will arrive!"
This page posted 15 February 2010
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