Last year I was going to do a guest artist workshop at a private school in NYC. We had these nice agreements over email about how the computer, in the art making process, should be “used as a tool”. I cooked up a couple projects that I thought would work well for students and fit that mind set. One was an imovie project where students would use their digital still cameras to make stop action animations. I was going to do homemade matrix style “frozen in time” animations. It was going to be really fun, and took full advantage of the hardware and software that they had on hand.
When I got to the school the teacher who I’d been writing with showed me the project that an artist did the year before that the teacher was very proud of. The artist had them making geometric colour compositions in appleworks. In essence, her project could be done with construction paper or paint just as easily (or easier) than using the computer. I realized that our ideas of “using the computer as a tool” were completely different. Opposite, in fact. The Teacher wanted to reduce it to a tool, I wanted to elevate it to a tool.
This year in Berkeley I took a few weeks of an experimental digital music class. One of the professors was very interested in simulation, and spent a great deal of time talking about the technical hardware and software problems involved in making a digital keyboard sound like a violin. The technical issues are complex and seductive, but in the end he’s playing his expensive keyboard through his expensive computer coming out of (really) expensive speakers and it sounds pretty good but nowhere near as good as a 200 dollar violin would sound in the same room. It was maddening.
I didn’t get the workshop gig and I dropped the class.
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When I got to the school the teacher who I’d been writing with showed me the project that an artist did the year before that the teacher was very proud of. The artist had them making geometric colour compositions in appleworks. In essence, her project could be done with construction paper or paint just as easily (or easier) than using the computer. I realized that our ideas of “using the computer as a tool” were completely different. Opposite, in fact. The Teacher wanted to reduce it to a tool, I wanted to elevate it to a tool.
This year in Berkeley I took a few weeks of an experimental digital music class. One of the professors was very interested in simulation, and spent a great deal of time talking about the technical hardware and software problems involved in making a digital keyboard sound like a violin. The technical issues are complex and seductive, but in the end he’s playing his expensive keyboard through his expensive computer coming out of (really) expensive speakers and it sounds pretty good but nowhere near as good as a 200 dollar violin would sound in the same room. It was maddening.
I didn’t get the workshop gig and I dropped the class.
- joester 4-01-2006 12:56 am