In the “organic” world of physical objects and the human mind, sharp differences tend to smudge into soft transitions as materials or processes mix and interfere with each other. Sharp distinctions soften as edges are manipulated. The simplest image for this is a hill. One can cut a vertical face off of a pile of dirt with a shovel, but it quickly becomes a slope over time. One can push at materials and get a feel for how a variable situation responds in the moment, whether one is pushing ink around on a printing plate or overdriving an electric guitar. Properties of clay, wax, ink, and paint vary with the warmth of the day and the artist’s hands. With sensitive materials, it’s never the same tool as the one you remember from the day before, and that need for continual rediscovery leads to all kinds of promising surprises.

In digital media, all gradations are designed and programmed – a tawnier red is simply a different number in a system of colors, and all blending is done with algorithms. There is no “in between” in any situation, except one that is mapped by a programmer with a specific point of view of what, for instance, color, is. Programs like Corel Painter are astonishing in their simulation of color mixing, light reflection, fluid transparency, etc., but in some basic sense, they don’t even come close to the range of possibility of a cheap box of paints. One can try new combinations of options and in some programs one can design new logical procedures from existing components, but at some point, one comes up against a wall: one is limited to the tools and options that the programming team thought of. And the display resolution. And glassy flatness. (In practice, there’s often a sense of limitless possibility with digital tools, which is also real. But I’m following a thread here, ignoring my own obvious objections for the moment…)

Of course, I’m familiar with the other side of this paradox, and if I wasn’t astonished and seduced by the range of possibility that digital cinema, still image, and sound tools provide, I wouldn’t have spent the last several years working with them. There is still something missing for me, and it’s worth trying to articulate. In my experience, few of those who know how to use the tools even perceive a problem. On the other hand, few of the people I know who shun them for more physical media have enough working experience with digital media to be more than petulant or mutely resistant. They’re just not “that kind of person,” which is a lousy reason to choose a tool.

These days, digital “resolution” is astonishing, whether you look at cinema or use sound tools. One can perceive the issue better by looking not at the impressive level of focus and forests of options, but at the edges, at the margins where information becomes distorted as the tool fails to handle the information that’s arriving. In a nutshell, for reasons I alluded to before, physical, or analog distortion tends to be “soft,” while digital distortion is always hard (unless it’s modulated by one or another kind of “simulated” softness. The simulation can be convincing, but it’s not an oil painting or an acoustic guitar.

Why should it be? Well, it shouldn’t, and there’s nothing wrong with these tools. What strikes me as wrong is an emerging society that has no visceral concept or experience of a non-virtual world. I teach students who are puzzled by my suggestion that a good reproduction is not the same thing as an oil painting. A digital version certainly has more “features” (scaleability, portability, etc.), and if the digital print has the same hues in the same relationships, well, what’s the problem? Why would one want to see a piece of music played live? Why watch movies on film?

I’ve had a few cranky conversations with (name withheld) about experiences with students and institutions. He sent me this, a fast-moving condensation of a lot of ideas about education, institutions, creativity, ADHD,… and so on. I won’t try to sum it up, and there’s plenty to argue with, but I think it’s more thought-provoking than much of what comes my way, and it goes down easy. It comes from a talk by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA, and animation students (I think) have animated his ideas so that they appear in cartoon form as he speaks. Inability to pay attention is one issue he breezes through, and in some sense, this movie is perfect for an audience that otherwise doesn’t have the attention span to follow a 12 minute train of thought without a movie. In any case, I think it’s twelve minutes well spent.

I’m disturbed by where he ends up, after such a smart introduction to a lot of ideas. When the movie cuts off, he seems to be leading toward familiar ground. In my experience, lowering the bar is usually accompanied by language that reframes cut and paste as collaboration and enthuses about a post-literate society of visual thinkers. Institutions are remodeled to meet the needs of “digital natives,” and in practice, that tends to mean that reading and clear thinking are optional.

According to Sir Ken and a lot of others, we’re due to move beyond a model of education with its roots in the Industrial Revolution, in which students are sorted by “date of manufacture” (age) and forced to ingest irrelevant collections of facts. Often true, yes, and I’ve griped as much as anyone about the dehumanizing effects of educational institutions. (probably more than most, knowing me). His solution is one that’s familiar to me from time served in for-profit universities like Colorado Tech. In this new post-industrial model of education, assembling text entirely by cutting and pasting from the web is a liberation of creativity. Citing sources is a drag. Grammar is for bespectacled schoolmarms (or schooldards).

If we’re talking about art-making, or the juxtaposition of sources to create new meanings, I’m all for it. It’s easy to cite sources, and there’s broad protection for artists’ use of copyrighted material to make new work. That’s not the issue.

The issue lies in the fact that many “digital natives” are unfamiliar with the practice of generating text from scratch. A huge percentage of entering college students literally can not write a coherent sentence or paragraph, and remedial reading and writing programs have become central to university curricula. Plagiarism is routine, and it’s clear that it’s largely become acceptable. This is not liberation. This is crippling, and I’ve got too much experience with it to be convinced otherwise by shrewdly constructed studies.

My sense is that public school teachers have thrown up their hands in despair, and college instructors throw up theirs in turn. A professor can’t single-handedly reverse decades of indifference. The institution sets the standards and the tone.

Shedding academic standards feels great, and (paying) student customers love it. It ignores the fact that in the “knowledge economy” that they’re entering, few things are more important than intellectual property. When companies have borrowed and slightly rephrased other companies’ manuals and and website copy, lawsuit rewards have numbered in the hundreds of millions of dollars. One could say that a student who hires someone to write their papers, rather than stealing from the web, is acting well within the standards of the corporate knowledge economy. If the task is to deliver text of a certain quality, on a certain topic,  it may be that contracting it out is the most efficient use of their time, especially in courses that the student doesn’t see as essential to their field. Or so the logic goes.

It may be true that we’re leaving behind the factory model of education, and online learning and multisensory education have vast uncharted potential. In many ways, the model that’s replacing it in corporate worlds is the model of programming and network engineering. Business and scientific institutions are inconceivably complex, and while managers will continue to devour books on cultivating creativity and motivating employees to become motivated motivators, self-starting, sodden with self-esteem, (and so on), the working world becomes more and more constricted for the average worker. They may well be able to work from home, but more than ever, they’ll be working on a sub-task of a subtask, getting an overview from mindmaps and flowcharts created by people they’ve never met, under pressure, in brief meetings. For lower pay that they’d hoped, in competition with billions of laborers worldwide.

Sorry to say it, but very few of the college freshman that I teach can write a coherent paragraph. If the institution has determined that this group of people is ready for college, then their average ability has to at least be considered “passable.” Who would back me up if I failed 2/3 of a large classroom full of people? I don’t actually think it would be fair to fail most of them – by the standards of the “post-literate” schools they’ve been attending, they’re doing fine. Cut and paste is identical to critical thinking, yes? No? Incoming students are paying customers in a period when money is tight. Lowering standards is not a personal choice. Rather, it’s an uncomfortable professional obligation.

This country is changing rapidly.

Rian Kerrane‘s piece, Velvet Letters, covers two walls with an evolving tangle of letters/words that wrestles with red-flocked circles and leafy shapes. Visitors add their own significant words and phrases to a rolling list, and the new thoughts and sounds get composed and installed as the run of the show continues. Labor intensive interactive installation. If all of Letterkenny gets a word or two in, the wall will be a highly-figured near-black with the texture of text and its intersections. There’s still some space, so bring your words.

My short movie looks great on a framed monitor lent by the Letterkenny Arts Centre. (See this previous post for an even-more-abstracted variant of what’s being shown.)  The show is open to view right now. A wide range of people have come through and are amazed, puzzled, charmed, or caught off guard by Letterkenny’s most peculiar currently-showing movie. Everyone I run into seems to have something to say, which can’t be bad, and most seem to be productively befuddled, which is perhaps how the human mind evolves. It’s how mine does. I like this writhing flick. Hope you do. Stop by the opening and talk to us, and to the exhibition’s adventurous curator, Seamus Quinn (pictured).

In Odin/Odeon, Eric Waldemar takes a maximalist approach to a small installation space, assembling a piece of “visual chamber music” that combines an intricate arrangement of monoprints with tiny abstract video work. In ancient Greece, an Odeon was a type of small theater, designed for more intimate productions. The Norse god Odin, as the tale goes, hung upside down from the World Tree for nine days until vision and knowledge arose in his mind. In Waldemar’s studio, imagery is invited, awaited, then shaped as it emerges. In an art world that favors shrewd, spare concept and wry sampling, he persists in affirming the mysteries and depths of an open, exploratory work process that hangs between picture and nameless form.

A few more items for the RMCAD show in September. It’s been a busy few weeks – just back from California, off soon to Missoula, MT for an iron pour, with the end of the semester a little more than a week away. There’s also an exhibition coming up in Ireland in a few months, with a video piece from me and a lettery installation by Rian. ArtWorks in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, starting in late July. One recent surprise was an impromptu outing to see Jonsi with Carl at the Paramount. Keening, moaning, thundering Icelandic “post-rock” amidst a hyperintelligent, geeky, absolutely devoted crowd. Sheets of sound raining down like Ragnarok amidst grim, entrancing and/or silly animated projections. Teaching class the next day was a bit dreamy, with heavy eyelids, but I fooled ‘em, I think. My own music and sound projects are moving slowly along, but I’m mostly accumulating fragments. I know, I know – the desire to make something whole dates me, and it’s all about fragments in this metaposthistoricalprotoneodada environment, but I still plug along with my quaint 20th century notions in my post-solitary bailiwick. Working on a number of things. I just spent a few minutes helping set up Michelle Ellsworth’s show at MCA Denver and had another look at Bill Stockman’s drawings while I was there. More to say about that, I think. For now, though, back to work, with tomorrow’s class to prep for.

Over 1600 images on 111 sheets. This “block” is threaded through in a variety of ways to create three distinct pieces of animated visual music. This installation, which includes both video and still images, will appear as the centerpiece of “Time & Attention,” opening at Ironton on October 23rd. Esoteric secrets of abstract animation will be laid bare. Related drawings, prints, and cinema will also appear. Movie bits will appear on this site as the show approaches. Contact me to make sure you’re kept informed.