Maeda&Media

Art is primarly a question of form, not content.

Paul Rand

Thousand cycles or just a few, the computer never complains. It always complies

Once encoded as a programmatic form, the computer becomes a literal design machine, capable of rendering endless variations on basic theme. The foremost challenge in operating such a powerful tool is the same as with the simple tool: there must always be a clear initial concept that can guide the process to a relevant outcome

- Our hands are the primary obtacle to advance in the digital graphic arts

- Their physical limitations prevent us from exploring what we cannot construct

- Tap the power of the design machine, its metamechanical hands do not tire

- Design the lens through which it translates raw information into your own visible languaje

- Escape the monotony of demostration, engage in a pure discourse of style

- Manipulate perfect abstractions of form, unhindered by tactile reality

- With the design machine

Generating copmlexity for complexity’s sake is similar to shouting complete nonsense at the top of your voice. Both are embarrassments that are best avoided, but when you are young it is the best way to attract attention.

Because the traditions of art and design presuppose a material with a single fixed state, our critical instinct is to reduce anything with variability to a single instance. A solution is always chosen because a piece of paper, plastic, or stone cannot simultaneously assume multiple forms. A static material enforces a thought process with only one conclusion. Thus it is difficult to appreciate and, more importantly, evaluate an artistic statement of change. A natural reaction is to command for to be frozen-for it to assume a single instance. But another instinct supports our willingness to let it go-when we realize it is alive.

Reactive

The purpose of reactive graphics has always been to engage the human sensory system at the instinctual level, rather than the communicative level, as in interactive graphics.

Perhaps the best example of an everyday dynamic reaction is the cursor graphic that magically moves around the screen only by the power of your will

To break free form any implicit visual restraint requires the maturity to recognize, together with the training to neutralize, predisposition to synthetic conventions.

We usually think of a stroke of digital ink as nothing more than a mark left in space. When itrs true identity is revealed as a path not only through space but also through time, its sculptural, space time qualities can be revealed, as visualized in this project to paint time.

The average computer has four sensory inputs: keyboard, mouse, mike, and camera. Humans have five: touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. In both cases a set of human experiences and motivations guide the interpretation and processing of an ouput

The common thread to all reactive graphic systems is the condition of time. Time can be perceived in one of two ways: as a natural precondition for reality or as a state measurable with respect to some specific reference.

The most important areas of visual exploration are therefore not in the mimicry of screen space and the printed page, but in the deconstruction of our spatial senses to simulate the higher dimensions of expression made possible by the computer

The freedom to experiment responsible envolpe of expression is by no means easy.

But when the world’s greatest problem-solver runs out of other people’s problems to solve, she realizes that her own problems are not only the most difficult to solve, but the most difficult to articulate.

Paper

Its unfortunate that the display technology of the computer we use has been designed around the flat, rectangular methaphor of machine-cut paper, instead of the unflat, unrectangular, and infinitely multidimensional space of pure computation.

Four colors

But the truly creative mind will prefer to wander rather than repeat her greatest hits over and over again. Torealize such a future, morea artist must be unafraid to peer deep inside the machine and directly affect a deconstruction of the software system that imprision all digital expressions.

Online

The reinterpretation of a static piece as a dynamic form is usally a bad idea unless the original static form has either been developed with some degree of variability or is an unfinished work. An unfinished work represents a non-terminating point, which is precisely the rationale for any pure motivated dynamic form.

Because of their impliciti use of mathematical structures, geometrically derived forms are perfect candidates for kinetic reinterpretation in the computational domain.

Once printed, a print piece is finished. A web piece is never finished, even after is officially delivered and launched.

Noise

Noise should neither be seen as noble nor as a necessary improvisational aid; it is a numerical color that can be quickly overused.

Now

*** Sound as an effect, versus a necessity, is a difficult distinction to make. We expect most of our actions to resut in reactions that are not only visual but aural. Without sound, one is distanced in reality from the reaction, making it ore abstract. Onde a sound is made, however, your body recives confirmation that the event is not imagined, but real.

Perhaps the most powerful impetus for self-improvement is to be flatly told that your work stinks.

Space

Perfection is an exciting goal, but the imperfect nature of the mechanical production process suggest that you seek more realistic thrills than perfection.

Look deeply into a set of tools and materials and coerce them to reveal their hidden potential. Discover their core abstract properties by ignoring the constraints dictated by uncreative conventions.

Computer

The task of rendering quality static illustrations, no matter how complex, is best done by hand, when time permits. Creating a program to create a static drawing is in many senses overkill because it is like drawing a million siilar illustrations just to achieve one.

A good mentor is someone who leves a legacy of possibilities that do not constrain youngere people’s lives, but instead gives them the tools by which they can surpass their mentor.

When now more than ever we need people who can lead huanity toward techonologies than improve society rather than techonologies that simply show improvement over technolohy itself.

The responsibility to make the computer a better space for visual thinkers is currently in the hands of large software companies with limited imaginations. As a result there a re few real choices in operating systems and their related software. In contrast, if you had to select a cup or other object of daily use, there would be undreds, perhaps even thousands, of diverse items from which to choose. Some of the artifacts would be unsuitable, of course, some would be acceptable, and if you were lucky there might be something truly exquisite. Through quantity emerges quality, and for quality to emerge there must be more visual thinkers who seize control of the computer’s future by contributing their personal visions. Not as mere written words or editorial complains but as working artifacts and architectures that can inspire the development of computing spaces painted through and through in the joyus colors of humanism.