Here's a question that will become relevant now I'm at art college : am I a visual artist?
Looking at my
monster stickers I realize that they're visually fairly slapdash. Sizes, shapes, colours are random. I didn't spend much time worrying about exactly how they would look.
Frankly, I don't care.
Jesson Yip suggests that I try to use restricted palettes rather than the current garish cacophony of colours. And, although, in a sense, I like the childish hues of the designer toy world, I'm sure his muted tones would look great too.
And if someone wants to hack the program to produce grey-scale, gothic monsters, ready for Halloween, then I'd be equally happy with that.
But ultimately, I don't feel particularly energized to spend much time fiddling with the look.
And here's the real issue. I don't really care because, to me, the idea of the
interactivity is what matters. The fact that you run the program, print the stickers, go and stick them somewhere.
This is the art work.
However, now I wonder. This making a distinction between the
process (eg. encoded in the software, the activity of the audience) and the final
product is natural for the computer geek. It's what we do every day : distinguish our program (with which we can be well satisfied) from the customer's data.
But it is completely alien to the artist, for who the finished product is the end to which everything else is mere means. Does my attitude betray, in fact, that I'm too much the computer geek and not enough the artist?
We often laugh (or weep) at the graphic designer or customer who seems more obsessed by the colour or font used in the user-interface than our grand feats of architecture that actually made the system work at all. But is the designer or artist
naive as we would normally assume? Or simply someone for who this distinction between process and the final result is
invalid?
?????
Hmmm .... :-/
Doh! Stupid art college!
