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Blaming One’s Tools
The Digital Arts are in their awkward adolescence, a period defined, mainly, by groping:
Businesses grope with how to use the new medium to make money. Hobbyists grope with how to use the new medium to have fun. Artists grope with how to use the new medium to say something about the world.
….
We speak a new and powerful language, capable of saying things no other language can say, but few have realized this, and even fewer have found what to say.
This was part of Jonathan Harris’s closing words to Flash On The Beach 2008, a conference I attended last week. His message caused a bit of a stir, with a lot of people offended by either the words, his tone in delivering them, the shoes he wore while delivering them, the hair nature had blessed him with … to be honest I’ve no idea why they were so offended, but they were. It has been much discussed on other blogs, so I won’t go into it here. Except to say – Harris was right.
Everyone I know who is involved in the Digital medium are very focused upon their tools. When a new tool is released, or an old one gets an upgrade, there is much excitement, and a rush of experimentation to see what can be done with the new toy. This is what the conference was about – what’s new in the world of Flash. But, despite how cool it is to be able to do new things with pixels, if you step back from it a little you can see how primitive this current set of tools are, how difficult they are to use, and how much they impede our creativity.
Just as a culture is defined by its language (a concept for which we don’t have words simply cannot survive in a culture, but one that has many words thrives), an artform is defined by its tools. Our tools are PhotoShop, Flash, Java, After Effects, Illustrator, C++, HTML, CSS, Processing, etc, which all do incredibly cool things. But when we compare them to the tools of other media – paintbrushes, pencils, pens, chisels, scalpels – we see how far removed they are from natural and instinctual ways of expressing ourselves.
Getting a Hold of One’s Tool
The purpose of tools is not only to extend our capabilities; they are also to enhance the flow of our creativity. The digital tools, like the ones I listed above, fail to do this. All of them have a steep learning curve, and require dedication and constant use to master. A child cannot quickly pick up Illustrator. Even an adult with a certain degree of techno-savvy cannot come fresh to a program like PhotoShop and find a way to express themselves within a few minutes. Whereas with a pencil, or a paintbrush, they could.
These tools are also, with the exception of the Open Source tools, expensive – which adds another barrier to their use. And they all seem to come with ways of using them which have already become rather tired and over-familiar. They are hindering our creativity at the same time as they are extending it.
This is not to say that our digital tools are bad, they are just the best we have got to date. But, as Harris was correct in pointing out, because the medium is only in its infancy there is still a long way to go before we have the tools to make Digital Masterpieces. The tools will evolve, and through their evolution they will become simpler. Programming languages and design packages are today the preserve of the geeks, but this will not always be the case. 10 years ago, if you wanted to build a website you needed a web designer. This was the cause of the first dot.com bubble. These days you have WordPress and you can do it yourself. The same will happen to everything else in the Digital world.
Already great strides are being made in visual programming languages, where logic can be defined by shapes rather than syntax. And the web buzzword of the last few years has been usability – not worrying about making things pretty or powerful anymore, but making them easy to use. These are our steps towards adulthood.
To quote Harris once more:
TweetTools exist to serve you. Not the other way around. There is a long-standing unspoken pact between tools and their owners, which says that tools should disappear the moment you stop needing them. This is the way that pencils, hammers, and leaf-blowers behave. But many of our technological devices – iPods, cellphones, laptops, Blackberries – have violated this pact and overstepped their boundary, asserting themselves onto the lives of their owners, becoming constant distractions. Don’t let your tools trap you. Tools are not the idea. Tools are tools.
November 30th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Fortunately I’ve been blessed with a bit of creativity. Ideas is not something I come short of. It’s been like that since I can remember myself. I used to believe that the computer is this magic device that turns your ideas into something anyone can see…and it is in a way.The weird thing is that my ideas seem to change when I turn to the computer. They’re so specific to specific. I know what I want to accomplish…figure out wether its going to be an animation, short video, interactive applet, etc. This limiting in a way, because there is a whole world, literally , out there and the ideas I get when I’m away from the computer or that don’t involve technolohgy are better than the ‘geeky ones’ – they seem to have a soul. The ‘geeky ones’ seem to be practical: tools creating tools.
I attended Jonathan Harris’ speech at FOTB as well. It was an eye opener and a bit of a spoiler, because I’ve put a lot of my time in flash to get good at it and see that partly it was wasted. If I want to be mean, I could say he put nice interfaces to databases. He did what he was taught to do, not what he started out doing. In the slides his drawings and paintings came to an abrupt end, and in his works there were carefully coloured and placed words, sounds and short videos, but less of his own art. On the other hand, in my opinion, the whole point of the talk was the idea. The idea is the most important element of a piece.
An idea that is strong enough will find its way to show itself, regardless of the technologies out there, techniques, materials, etc.
Ideas are double edged swords though, or that’s how used to see them when I was little. Ideas were a great cause of frustration, because I had plenty of them and no way to express them, not the way I saw them. There was always a difference between how I’ve seen them and how they came out on paper. This can either make you stronger, or weeker. If there is one thing I can say about ideas is: DON’T FEAR THEM!
It’s weird how in a sparkle they’re just there, ready to come reality, out of nothing, a raw expression of our thoughts, emotions, experiences, etc.