Those of us who worked to create a new
art form(s) with computers have been gratified by some of the
progress in the creation of computer generated art. But we must also
acknowledge that the process of exploration has been uneven, with
some areas going from triumph to triumph, and others lying neglected
and underappreciated. Sure, it is easy to be enthusiastic about
vast expense paid to create impossibly stupid movies with computers
which are sequels to impossibly stupid movies that make a half a
billion dollars. Indeed, how could we not celebrate them as clearly
they are the very highest form of art that our society could aspire
to. And this is shown in the most sincere way we prove these
things: by success at generating commerce. Without commerce, some
would say, there is no real art.
It is easy to celebrate a film and a
director who publically dismisses as irrelevant the technologists and
artists who made his lead character of his film, in this case a
tiger. A director who laughs at them in their misery and
impoverishment. It is the fate of these so-called digital artists to
suffer as they are worthless scum and anyone can be hired off the
street and be trained to do their job. In fact governments spend
hundreds of millions of dollars to impoverish and destroy their
places of employment so that they may have the glamour of computer
animation facilities in their own country. That is only natural and
correct. (1)
Since we must acknowledge that doing
computer animation as it was traditionally performed is a failure in this
country, with a few exceptions, it is time I think to reexamine our
roots and look at other forms of expression with computers. For
example, a friend of mine, Tom Brigham, sent me an interesting
youtube video of an unknown artist (unknown to me) doing an art
experiment by applying the power of a neon sign transformer to a
former LCD television. Thus the artist experiments with the
interface between the analog represented by the voltage
from the transformer, with the digital, as represented by the cracked LCD display,
in unexpected and creative ways.
All potential practitioners of this process are reminded to be very careful with those high voltage logic probes.
Although the final work is not a
success, the process demonstrated by the artist clearly has potential
and I hope that many will also experiment with creating new art in
this way. Of course, I hope they are very careful with the power
transformers, and avoid death by electrocution, which would be unpleasant.
LCD TV vs Neon Sign Transformer
Ed Systems on Youtube
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1. Examples of such countries include
Canada, the UK, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China and New
Zealand.
modified 12/5/2013
