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Category: artists

Memling Portraits: The Anti-Digital

Published December 10, 2007 by cgerrish

Portrait by Hans Memling

I spent the last week on holiday in New York City. While I was walking around with an iPhone, and still somewhat connected to Twitter, my focus was on looking at the art and design that serves as the foundation for Western Civilization. The digerati, while filled with a certain type of creativity, they lack any real sense of history. That’s a big generalization, but in a general sense it’s true. There are a number of threads that were spawned by my trip. I hope to capture a few of them here before they return to the aether.

The Frick had a show of the portraits of Hans Memling a few years ago. It was a small show, the Frick doesn’t have a large exhibition space for shows, and there aren’t many Memling portraits still in existence. At the time, I spent more than an hour with those faces. On this trip, I had to seek out the portraits. Some are in the Frick’s permanent collection and their are a few at the Met. These portraits present humanity to us in a manner that seems to have been lost. Memling was born around 1435; the portraits deliver us the visages and the souls of people from that time.

In thinking about the wonderful creativity of our time, and the vast power of our digital tools, we have nothing to match what Memling accomplished. And these works must be seen directly in person. No form of reproduction can convey their power—in this sense they are the anti-digital.

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Web As Industrial Design: Painting with Code

Published December 1, 2007 by cgerrish

Juicer Prototype

 If you happen to be passing through Terminal 3 of the San Francisco Airport any time soon, check out: Prototype to Product: 33 Projects from the Bay Area Design Community. Rushing through the Terminal to my gate, I didn’t have enough time to spend with each of the pieces. The exhibit features preliminary sketches, detailed illustrations, models, prototypes and the finished product. Every time I see this kind of approach to design I think that Web design should be done in the same way.

Designers of Web sites need to take the materials, the DOM, the semantic HTML, the CSS, the javascript, the images and links into account when they design something for a person to use for a particular purpose. Industrial designers need to know and understand their materials. Will there be a new generation of Web artists and designers who can paint in code?


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Bring me the dreadlocks of Jaron Lanier

Published November 21, 2007 by cgerrish

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier writes in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that creative types need to get paid for “digital content.” Lanier used to be in the “information wants to be free” camp. Now that information has become content and it seems to adding some value when it grows via spontaneous generation in caves like Facebook or Delicious, Lanier is interested in a piece of the action.

Burma Shave Sign

Lanier thought that somewhere down the road the creative people making digital content would find a payday. But the network is what you make it. The network we inhabit isn’t built for collecting tolls, it’s built for billboards along the roadside. There are some closed loop systems like Second Life where payment for digital goods is normal. All that’s required is for the system owner to control the physics of the entire virtual experience. iTunes is an end-to-end experience as well, but it’s an extension of a familiar payment model. These are the kind of models that Lanier is well-known for pioneering.

The question about getting paid is an interesting one. Right now it’s advertising and targeting that pays the bills. Better targeting + big traffic flow = Google.But what if we want an alternative to advertising.

When the work of art is a physical thing or a performance there’s a clear ceremony around collecting payment. The introduction of mechanical reproduction changed the intrinsic value of the work of art, the price, but not the nature of the transaction was affected. Generally the cost of mechanically reproducing art or creative output was still relatively high and required a specialized set of skills. In the age of digital reproduction, the only skill required is “copy” and “paste.” The original and copy are only differentiated by a creation time stamp. The digital is also viral in the network and the packets can be anonymous as they travel through the long series of tubes. When you bought that digital content, which vintage of time stamp is yours? Can we put toll booths on every entry point on the network? Can we implant the toll booth in the user?

This is the point where it would be nice to reveal the magic method by which creators of digital content get paid on an open network. There’s not one answer. Some clues to help us along the road? Philip Greenspun’s book was free and digital before I bought the copy that sits on my bookshelf. The 37 Signals book, Getting Real, was sold first as a PDF download, but is also available to read for free online. Here’s another clue, we pay for the container, not the content. It’s the form of the hardback book, not the text it contains. Think about that in relation to the network. You can see the problem.

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Charting the shores of risk with Pina Bausch

Published November 16, 2007 by cgerrish

I read about Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal for years before I had the opportunity to see “Palermo Palermo” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There were moments, images, movements that stay with me to this day. She creates extraordinary stage pictures.

Pina Bausch, Julie Nelken

The key to great performance is risk. If you don’t risk failure, you will never achieve greatness. Pina Bausch is one of those artists that you must see at every opportunity. There’s always a chance of glimpsing greatness.

You might want to do a little background reading about Pina:

She’s bringing her group to Berkeley’s Cal Performances this week. I’ll be attending the Sunday performance of Ten Chi. It’s described as a choreographic travelogue exploring the sights, sounds, joys and paradoxes of modern Japanese culture.

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