a meeting… of opinions!

So we had our meeting with Joasia again today… for some reason I thought I was in at 10 and not 11, and so turned-up a little bit ealry, but it was ok, as the other half of the year had their meeting then, so I joined in there… the groups aren’t that formal, I don’t think anyway. We had to pitch our ideas for the big essay coming-up. I’ve decided to do digital photography; regarding its roots, current artistic processes and how its regarded in both fields that it spans – digital art, and photography. It was at this point that Joasia and I hit a sticking point! As it turns out, it was a good thing that I turned-up early as we had a bit of a long discussion about our opinions! I am of the belief that it covers both aspects of the artistic mediums, however Joasia pointed out the fact that the computers were being used as tools to output a photograph, and that the digital element was not infact the medium. She reffered me to a book called Digital Art by Christaine Paul which I promptly went out and bought. Although I didn’t have time to read the book properly, I asked to see Joasia later on to further discuss the topic, and its validity concerning the essay. I decided to stick to my guns and tried to explain that digital photography is not physically possible without a computer, and to compound this fact, it’s not simply the fact that an actual photograph has been scanned and stored, then printed using a computer, but that the digital camera itself (on fully automatic mode) defines how it should best capture an image, then it is tranferred digitally to the computer, which then again decides how to display it on the screen using various algorithms. We still didn’t reach a mutual understanding, but came to an amacable agreement!

 It can be argued that digital photography only exists because of the detailed, and varied systems in place that the mdeium uses. The fact that an analogous image, of what we believe we see in real life, appears on the screen is what makes many people believe that digital photography is simply the same as photography. I’ve studied both. They’re not. Let me introduce these definitions of photography:

An image, especially a positive print, recorded by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface.

a representation of a person or scene in the form of a print or transparent slide; recorded by a camera on light-sensitive material.

A digital photograph by its very definition is screen based. When an image is printed, it is no longer a digital photograph, but a print. I know that I can pick-up a proccessed negative strip, hold it up to the light, and see a photograph. I can hold the raw data in my hand and see the picture. I don’t know if I’m going blind, but can you see the picture here…

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I can’t. Mind you that’s only a small section… maybe I’d have to have a really big monitor to see the whole thing, then it might be apparent… but I doubt it. That’s part of a small jpeg that was opened in Word. I rather foolishly opened a RAW format picture from my EOS 350D in word… it was over 3,000 pages long! My point being that software and hardware are as much as a fundamental core of digital phototography, as much as the captured analogous image is. The fact that digital ‘photography’ is named as it is, is because it’s the closest parrallel to an understandable notion of data manipulation that we can understand.

I may explain this further in another meeting, but at the moment Joasia and I have come to an agreement that I shall read the book, and some other potentially useful referances, and whilst doing so, I shall concentrate on notions of authorship, curation and reliance upon the internet. Right, I’m off to read a little more of the book! 

ps. as a note to myself, I must remember to exaplify the fact that digital artists, work in an rgb environment, and graphic designers who intend to output their work to print work in a cmyk colour envirnment. I’ll leave that for another day though.

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Now I do have to admit, Joasia did mention that there was material in the video that she was going to show us, that may cause offense… I kinda think that was meant towards the naked people doing weird (fun) stuff to each other… but that didn’t really bother me here nor there. What did offend me was some arrogant pleb, who by building a (bad) wire frame person ‘playing’ a (worse) wireframe keyboard, and playing some sleep inducing music (noise), and dressing-up in a frock, assumed that everyone else’s opinion and take on digital art was defunct. The notion that in order to comprehend art in the digital realm, you have to be a transvestite is absurd! I think he was basically some run of the mill antagonist, who had a silver spoon in his mouth to be honest. I think underneath the delusions of grandure, there may have been some distant point of a genderless evolution through cyber-space, but this was completely misunderstood and conveyed by him. SURELY if it was a genderless, eunoch that was to emerge from the cyber realm, then the notion of not just being of one sex, but TWO utterly contradicts this? I really don’t understand what the point was that he was trying to make. If you’re going to be a transvestite, then fine… Don’t somehow expect me to susbsribe to your notion that you, and your cohorts are the only ones to give an authorative view of digital art. There are hundreds of sub-cultures existing in both the real and cyber world. Geez, you don’t see the goths saying ‘ah well you can’t understand digital art til you’ve worn black eye-liner, and dressed head to toe in black! The notion would be equally absurd! I think though the worst biting point for me was not his mis-understanding of the structure of sub-cultures within society as a whole, but his rant at the Berlin peace festival (well I think it was there, I’d kinda switched off to half the nonsense dribbling from his mouth). There was something about the slogan being ‘one world, one love’ or something along those lines. He then decided to argue that. pleb. Once again missing the point of the peace festival, he proceeded to rant about the fact that there were lots of different kinds of love. oh really now… Geez, I thought the love I felt for a nice pint after work was the same as I felt for my family… If anything it’s about the fact that we all love someone, and regardless of who we are and what we do, that love is equal to anyone else’s and rather than dispute that, let’s celebrate that. The moment you believe you ar better than anyone else, is the moment that you start off a notion of class. Surely in this utopian cyber life, it’s not only gender class that you’re disgarding, but all notion of class and segregation?!?

Bah! I’m off to turn the gas down now… I think I’ve been left to simmer for too long now.