phantom of the opera

Listen to the sweet sound of birds chirping in the trees. If you listen to gulls sing, well they might call it song but squawk is more fitting. Still compared to penguins, and I am willing to bet they squawk also, there could be a harmony of sorts. The secret of this working together is sharing. VirtualBox allows sharing folders between the Linux host and the XP guest operating systems. So the work I do in Sketch Up in XP can be seen by the Linux system.

Speaking of birds of a feather, digital artist are the rare flock of dubious reputation in the field of art. Most of the blame is put on the device called a printer. It is the output of this device that has the art world in a tizzy. It messes up the engineering world also, why? Because once a digital file in a computer gets printed out there is no differentiation between the first print and the last. This is accounting for the usual glitches, hic-ups and imperfections of printing the same thing over and over. Then there is the thing about the quality of the printer and the quality of the paper and the quality of the ink. You could very well have a cheap print being the same or better than a higher quality print. I think that is more improbable but sometimes a gritty, grungy outcome fits the bill for the art at hand. A printer is a tool of the digital artist.

So what constitutes the artist's original in digital art. The original in digital art is the indecipherable file that the artist worked on, regardless of if it needs a video display or printer output to see. What art sellers can't accept is that digital art defies the value of rarity. You could print one piece and destroy the file that made it. That is like shooting your dog for the artist. Many recommend printing a limited number then destroying the original file. I really can't answer this dilemma for you. Disney will store them away and reissue them for the next generation. That is cool also.

Now digital displays are not immune. Various manufacturing materials and specs produce displays with grades of visibility. Trying to match a display with possible printer output is a science by it self. Quite a number of the digital artist do work that is typically viewed on the video screen.

What about......photography? Today many are doing digital photography which involves both digital cameras and picture processing. Even film photographers use digital processing of film negatives unless chem processing is the art.

Saying all the above, I want to explore the digital arts in the gallery setting. I want to give digital art a good consideration as we are so immersed in media. Still art as display art is different and more varied than TV and movie art. Perhaps this is what we need to see added to the display of traditional arts, the arts of our present age.