A Huge Post

"Digital media in a digital age." Intriguing and inspiring words, yes indeed! If you guys haven't read Schmidt's last blog post, stop looking at this and go do so, because this post is in response to hers. In it, she endorsed the benefits of creating art digitally, which saves time, labor, and the hassle of scanning a picture if one wants to put art up on the web or make multiple copies. Also, digital art can be totally fun to make, and people have done some pretty incredible things with it.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. My dad gave me a program years ago called Painter, which uses one of those Wacom tablets Schmidt mentioned, and which I can't use anymore because the only computer that could run the program has taken ill. But back when I could use it, I had tons of fun, especially because of all the awesome effects I could create while doing virtually no work. It was a magnificent tool for trial and error: I might draw a ship on my tablet, see it appear on screen, then click on the "Effects" dropdown to see what the "Smear" tool did. And if it made the ship look soggy, I could go "ctrl-Z!" and poof, there was my ship as it was before. If the computer hadn't started misbehaving, God knows how far I could have gone with Painter!

This is the perfect contrast to my typical hands-on painting experience. For example, when I was about 12 and obsessed with astrology, I decided to draw my own birth chart surrounded by all the Roman gods, and then paint it. It took FOREVER. I spent hours sketching the damn thing and getting out materials, and when I finally started painting the background, my attempt to layer two colors resulted in a sickening kind of brown. "Shit!" I thought, having no button to push to erase my mistake. Reluctantly, I dabbed at the background with a sponge. Rather than taking the brown away, the sponge gave it a weird texture, which seemed to ruin the background completely. But when I stepped back and looked at it, I realized that not only did it look cool; I had achieved the exact effect I wanted but in an unexpected way. After the zodiac painting, I was never able to replicate that effect. I could not program it into a "Sponge" button; because the sponge effect had been a happy accident, a human error.

But who's to say that every time you break out the art supplies, and risk making an irremovable mistake by putting colors on the paper, you will be pleasantly surprised? Who's to say that every piece you create will turn out how you anticipated? Nobody. Not a single picture I've painted looks just how I thought it would look, and that can be a good or bad thing.

There's a risk of producing imperfection in all art forms, and in this computers have proved their worth. I think the last time I wrote a story by hand was in second grade, and I finished none of those handwritten stories, because I'd get two pages in and realize that they were shit. They weren't worth cramping my hand for. These days I have a keyboard on which to write, so I can type up long stories at a pretty good pace, without cramping my hand. (It's only after the stories are finished that I read them, and realize they are shit.)

In music, also, computers have opened new realms of exploration. I know of a band that up till recently had but three members, so they would bring an Apple computer onstage at concerts to play the pre-recorded bass parts. On KEXP, a musician was recently interviewed who made his new record entirely with computer applications like GarageBand. And computers are becoming seemingly indispensable in the film industry. You get movies like The Lord of the Rings, whose stunning visuals wouldn't have been possible without the aid of digital effects; on the more extreme end of the spectrum, you have movies like 300 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, in which the settings are almost entirely computer-generated.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that computer-made art is bad. Schmidt linked us to some amazing visuals. There are great novels that have been typed up on computers. The no-instruments guy on KEXP may have put out a brilliant record. And I actually adore Sky Captain, partially for how cool the computer-generated set looks. Ultimately, machines do not create art. Humans create art, and any media (digital or not) can be used as a vehicle for genius.

But as the computer becomes a more popular tool, facilitating art production, more artists seem to be taking advantage of it. Computers are unprecedented in how much they reduce effort. As a result, my local video store's "New Releases" section is constantly stocked with movies whose only appeal is the special effects. A lot less work (for me, at least) is put into typing up a book than into writing one by hand, and publishers are capable of cranking out more books these days; the consequence seems to be the infestation in bookstores of truly brainless literature. And it could just be me, but when I listen to the radio at night, so many of the computerized songs sound indistinguishable from one another. The by-product of artists adapting to the digital age, I think, is that some start to depend on the computer instead of using it as an asset. It's true that the computer is quicker and less labor-intensive. But the upside to labor--to "dirtying your hands" as Schmidt would say--is that you want every second and every joule spent to be worth it. So oftentimes the final product is better.

I confess that I've long been conservative regarding the advance of technology, and reading Kurt Vonnegut isn't helping. But for art, I think getting one's hands dirty is absolutely essential. I would guess that creating great art is like having great sex. You don't get it over with quickly and painlessly. You make a couple goofs, and hopefully turn them into eclectic and successful techniques. And as Schmidt says, if we're talking oils, it means opening up some turpentine. A lot of the best art is stuff that you can see or listen to and think, "That must have been some amazing foreplay."

And I'm a purist in that I love the physical aspect of it. I like holding a new album in my hands more than seeing a new song appear in my iTunes. I like standing inches away from an original masterpiece, and I don't think I could stand in front of a monitor with a piece of art in it and get the same feeling. But lest you think my tastes old-fashioned, remember the satisfaction some of you described that comes with baking, slicing, and eating your own homemade bread. Imagine a special printer that would allow you to design your ideal, customized loaf, and would, at the touch of a few buttons, in minutes' time, bake and slice the bread for you. Now here's the question: would you rather print bread?