A view of the intersection of art and technology - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

In 1988 as the greatest in quantity junior faculty member of my department who happened to be teaching "printmaking" or "graphics," I was asked to investigate computer "graphics." Fortunately, my forays into this novel field were not only fortunate but also gratifying - it was as if I had finally lay the foundation of my metier! At that time, SuperPaint single worked in a black-and-white method and Adobe Photoshop was barely cutting its teeth in a beta version form. The options available to artists who began to explore the world of digital imagery at this time were limited to real pixilated and bitmapped files, actual few tools with which to manipulate them, and little ability to transmute a given file to another software application, permit alone output it. So, what drew our attention to the digital world and then held our interest? I remember learning somewhere along the way of my many years in art place of education that if it didn't take a certain amount of time to create a work, then that work was somehow or other less valuable or meaningful or important than single that did. But how many times did we make work that, two-thirds of the way end we knew wasn't "right" and started over? The computer appear to beed to provide speed and ease, and frankly, it was a relief finally to work with a medium that could hold fast up with me in real rather than glacial time.

I think the insidious thing about computer is their intrinsic ability to emulate metaphors. Ironic? Not really. clan often use metaphor and analogy, when speaking of or about the computer (For example, "The information didn't have enough time to come by to the hard drive" was in what way my friend Bev described her sister-in-law Sandy's lack of any memory of her hang-gliding accident in which she relentless 900 feet with no parachute after I'd been foolish enough to ask if she remembered anything.) We smooth name them. All the computer in the art lab at Scripps are named after goddesse the two ancient and contemporary; we have Sappho, R Sonya, Vidietta, Medusa (she makes you want to pluck your hair out), Techne (this one's mine; she's the goddes of art and science or craft and technology), Chimera, Hekuba, Electronica, and Madonna.

Do we think like the computer or does the computer think like us? I am writing these notes upon an airplane to New York, and the man sitting behind me is explaining to the woman nearest to him that someone told him that our brains are just like the computer Hello, isn't this backward? Who's the stock here? Isn't the computer more like our offspring, designed to mirror the way our brains operate, and not the reverse? I one time made a list of boundarys that are now part of our everyday usage - window, thumbnail, database, bitmap, download, point and click, icon, efface on-line, noise, morph, snail mail, e-mail, dialogue case plug-ins, wysiwyg (what you diocese is what you get). Technical bounds have pervaded, invaded our everyday language upon a scale equal only to their vicinity in our lives on an everyday basis.

And it isn't just the bounds that are here to stay. The images - digitized, "videoized," animated - appear upon book covers, billboards, buses, and signs we rencounter in our daily movement; in innovative films - usually action or animation; and before our organ of sights in split-second hits as commercials upon television. But with all this imagery, are we actually any smarter as a tillage in interpreting the "meaning" or the symbolism inherent within many of these images? This is where education must play a vital character Visual knowledge, visual competency, and visual information all draw upon different skills.

Teaching computer art, I have observ in what manner the learning curve for this technology delineates itself. First, developing hand-eye coordination (much les necessary now than five years ago, when you had to start scholars off with mouse training), then moving into desktops, menu bars, and sub-menus. one time the x and y of these are learned and memorized, we can begin to establish relationships between the way choice and the adjustment to colors in Photoshop or the file size and resolution to image size and storage. Finally, the scholar realizes how all these parts relate to the whole, from the artwork in proces upon the screen to the means for output Today we have choices between World Wide Web (WWW) or CD-ROM or interactive video or cibachrome photograph or inkjet printer, which is a giant leap from where we started. Previously, we had to photograph the image directly from the guard using a funnel-shaped device to blockade out the light with the camera at individual end and the screen at the other.

The computer mirrors our ability to assimilate paradigm shifts by means of categorizing, synthesizing, and hybridizing. Multitasking l to hyperlinking on the contrary they both represent what began to happen when we were about eight years old: the cognitive ability to comprehend that an reality was red and round, and not r or circular or what I refer to as both/and thinking rather than either/or thinking. This is the logic necessary to comprehend multiplication, a dynamic proces resulting from the coordinates at the intersection of x and y rather than the static linear progression of x+ x+ x y+ y+ y or x+ y+ x+ y In liberal arts education, we call it the breadth and deepness experience. The culmination of the intersection of x and y is many times the senior thesis or senior project