I had hoped to end the old year and begin the new with some art and peaceful introspection. The Flint Institute of Arts did not disappoint.
Now I'll cop to it, looking at the main art museums in the Mid-Michigan corridor (Grand Rapids/East Lansing/Flint/Detroit), I vastly favor the Detroit Institute of Arts. But the smaller art museums here in Michigan have their charms. The Frederik Meijer Gardens has their yearly butterfly and orchid events as well as a wonderful outdoor Japanese garden. I haven't yet been to the Grand Rapids Art Museum, though I do hope to change that oversight later this year. The Broad Art Museum is a quick five minute drive from my home with a basement area housing older works of art and a video installation--and it's a quick walk from the MSU Library, good for research. Detroit has the DIA as well as the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village--all three had been invaluable resources when I was writing my animation history class.
But the Flint Institute of Arts has some really appealing qualities, not the least of which is a 45 minute drive from my home (as opposed to the hour/hour-and-a-half to the DIA, depending on traffic). They've also got a well-stocked library with comfortable chairs and a sofa for reading.
 |
"The Sheltered Path", 1873
Claude Monet |
The decision of where I would spend my day was resolved almost immediately when I checked the FIA's website and discovered that they had a painting on display by my favorite artist: Claude Monet. Turns out, "The Sheltered Path" was on their visiting artwork list and would be on display until February.
As I stared at Monet's painting, I was struck by the impermanence of digital. There I sat, looking at a painting from 1873. The colors may not be as vibrant as when it was first painted, but still a beautiful work of art that, if properly handled, would still be there long after I am but a memory.
Over the past thirty years, I've witnessed countless works of art brought to life through computer software. I've been there during software releases and upgrades, and yes, witnessed software once touted as the 'latest and greatest' denoted as reaching their 'end-of-life' before being relegated to the dustbin of digital history.
3d CGI, polygonal modelling, NURBS, metaballs, texture mapping, bump mapping, non-linear video editing, Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Painter, Kai's Power Tools, Director, After Effects, Future Splash/Flash, Moho, Bernoulli drives, iOmega Zip Drives. I was there for much it. Oftentimes on the sidelines, sometimes in the trenches.
The march of technology is relentless. It's partially why I maintain a number of old computers with obsolete operating systems that are still capable of running some of this older software--so I can still access old copies of animations and imagery that I produced during my college and grad school days.
The computer has brought us works of art that were hitherto undreamt of. I doubt that even the old masters could have conceived of what is being produced by contemporary digital artists. I have to wonder, how constrained were their imaginations by the technology of their time? Thought for another day.
Back when I was in grad school at R.I.T., I had been playing with a freeware 3d rendering and animation software package called
POV-Ray. It was a text based system where you'd plot everything out on graph paper using the Mark I pencil, then create a text file containing all the objects, their coordinates, and their properties for your scene. I was big on stone textures back then, so spent a fair amount of time making marbles using the various texture settings. This would serve me well when I needed objects to animate in my basic animation classes--like learning the squash and stretch principle by animating bouncing balls using Macromedia Director.
 |
| Squash and Stretch assignment |
Since then, I have tinkered with lots of 3d modelling and animation packages like Alias Wavefront/Maya, Ray Dream Studio/Carrara, and Blender. But while useful and entertaining, none of those programs produce anything of permanence. I do still like to walk through museums and look at sculptures--mostly those of stone and glass--and think about how I would recreate them using 3d CGI software. It's a fun thought exercise and it adds an extra dimension to museum visits that makes them more enjoyable for me.
 |
"Hadros", 2006
Petr Hora
|
Sculpture, paintings, celluloid film, animation cels, photographs from the early 1900's, even the hand-drawn paper cels from my MFA thesis, they will all outlive me. My thesis film is digital. Unless I do a transfer to celluloid film stock, one day, it will likely be gone with only the hand drawn cels and a couple printed images in my thesis paper as evidence that it ever existed. If care has been taken to preserve them, one hundred years later, we can still watch films from the 1920's. One-hundred and fifty-two years later, I can still spend an afternoon looking at one of Claude Monet's paintings hanging there on the wall. Over five hundred years later, we can still travel to Florence and appreciate Michelangelo's marble sculpture "David".
 |
"Still Life with Fruit", 1855
Severin Roesen |
I have to wonder, five-hundred years from now, will people even know about all the art we created in the late 20th/early 21st Century? Or will there be this huge cultural gap where art was being produced in physical format up until the 1980's and then it largely ceased. What will the museums of 2525 say about us? Will they even remember that we existed or will we just be a footnote in history, this big black hole of nothing called 'the digital age' where very few items of cultural significance survived to be appreciated by future generations?
* * *
