Empathy and Fullness
My Paper iPhone 
As someone who makes images for a living, I find that the process of making images gets harder with age. One would think it should be easier with time. Something about losing the ability to concentrate; or maybe perhaps a resistance to shut everything else around me. I was good at that when I was younger. Shutting out everything and everyone else around me. It made everything much simpler really.
Writing a simple computer program can easily lead you to complex imagery. It turns out however, that the real world around us is perfectly complex. So I wonder nowadays … why bother to try to compete with Mother Nature? Of course I know the answer — because we can [attempt to do so].
Around fifteen years ago I observed the cover of a Japanese magazine with a polygonal figure as the main subject. My immediate reaction was that it was done by computer. It turned out it was simply a wooden figure carved with few smooth surfaces. This sort of “hurt” my brain. At the time I was fixated with deriving a distinct category of computer generated imagery, only to discover that there could be no such thing.
Today computer imagery has very few such polygonal artifacts, thus making it close to impossible to distinguish real from the non-real. Does it matter anymore? Probably not. And thus I find the same satisfaction when snapping a photograph that I do in finding the right computer algorithm to express myself. The latter takes much longer to develop as an actual hands-on process of mathematics and computer codes; the former indeed takes less time as the press of a shutter button, but years in order to get to the moment when nature presents itself. Ready to be captured.
3 Responses to “Computer Graphic-ishness”
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I do agree that it is of no importance if an image or product has been made or taken out of nature. I think that the process of “selection” or “discovery” and “creation” are actually the same thing.
The most thrilling about nature is that it is always moving, changing, adapting, so the chances of New selections, discoverys, shots, is always increasing. Like the fable of Achilles and the Turtle. Nature is slower, but we’ll never catch it.
Thank you for your comment on slowness Martin. It serves as an important reminder for the purpose of an effective weekend break from work. Best wishes, John
martin’s right. and you bring up an interesting point regarding the immediacy of image-making [and the challenges we (or i) face in the doing as we age]. but i think the question, for me, boils down to two things: process and result.
the process allows us to ask, “what if?” as well as to exorcise whatever demons that process might.
the results vary, and as martin points out, might not be very important if it doesn’t exist. but again with what-if, as artists and designers we can only hope to touch someone, to allow them to share our experience or to confirm their not-aloneness.