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The personal computer as an interactive technology for the artist (simulation vs. abstraction)
Comput. & Graphics Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 315-319, 1987
0097-8493/87 $3.00 + .00 © 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain.
Graphics Art THE PERSONAL COMPUTER AS AN INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR THE ARTIST (SIMULATION VS. ABSTRACTION) HAROLD J. MCWHINNIE The University of Maryland, College Park Campus, Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742 Abstract--This article will explore one artist's experiences with the microcomputer. It will explain how a new IBM authoring language called HANDY was employed to create a wide variety of images that later were used as a basis for drawings and prints. The article is an attempt to show how one artist incorporated a new technology into an ongoing body of work and how the interface with that new technologyin the form of a computer came to alter the content of his images and change the essential direction of his work. INTRODUCrlON
Like many artists and designers, I too had, for a long time, resisted the attraction as well as the lure of the personal computer. I had conceived of the microcomputer as being too impersonal, too remote, noncreative, and certainly less than "user-friendly." Recently through an IBM project, my own attitudes as well as point of view took a dramatic change. I became "hooked" upon this new technology. I became a "Hacker." With the image of little Rufus Jones of Bloom County in my mind, I faced the "green screen" with a new openness and a spirit of adventure. The IBM program was called HANDY and it involved the use of a new authoring language for the development of interactive teaching lessons. I began to create a series of lessons exploring various aspects of color and motion in relation to general principles of basic design. As my work with this new language began to evolve, I saw the almost unlimited possibilities for the artist and designer. The computer became my electronic sketchbook. It became an essential artistic vehicle in which | could state an idea; vary that idea; try out all of the possible combinations for color, texture, and movement; and finally produce an almost endless series of variations upon the basic theme or motif. The output assumed many forms. A series of slides was used as the basis for drawings; and a sequence of images, when combined with text, served the basis for book and story illustration. How ironic! To go back to the lithographic stone with images from the new technology. Yet, in recent months, this has become for me one of the more important thematic considerations, the joining together of the old and the very new. Has the machine taken away my personal and creative vision? Has the "life of the studio" with the smell of the paint, the taste of the clay and plaster dust come to be replaced by the blinks, beeps, and shakes of my electronic images? Am I a slave of the machine? I think not! For me at least, the personal computer has become yet another tool for the creative artist and designer. It, like the camera in the 19th century, can extend the perceptual limits of the artistic imagination. It has within it the essential power to help the creative artist function at yet another level of reality and awareness. In the fall of 1985, I began working in the computer
lab with the IBM HANDY software. I have now completed 3 projects.
1. Adventures in Color This is a sequence of four interactive lessons on color. These units introduced the general world of color and what can be done with the limited range of colors in my program. HANDY uses 16 colors which can be combined in foreground as well as in background sequences. I have learned that even those 16 colors can provide an almost endless set of color variations when textures are employed.
2. Totem Figure Dance This sequence of lessons explores movement in design and how an almost unlimited set of variations on figure and ground relationships might be created. These totem images were an adaptation from my work in Ceramic Sculpture. If one compares the nature of the image done in Fig. 1 with the actual sculpture (Fig. 2) that served as the model for the computer image, then one can see how deeply the use of the computer has come to transform my basic image making.
3. The Garden of the Golden Section A series of 10 sequences in which both color and motion are used. These sequences include poetry and music and construct a series of stories about the adventures of color in the Garden. The metaphor of the Garden of the Golden Section refers to other historical research which I have done in the past 3 years on the work of Jay Hambidge and the principles of dynamic symmetry as a design language. The basic transformation can be seen in the next 2 illustrations. Figure 3 shows one of the computer images that has been taken out of the Garden of the Golden Section sequence. Figure 4 shows a recent colored pencil drawing that was made from the slide shown in Fig. 3. THE GOLDEN SECTION AND THE WORK OF HAL McWHINNIE
For the past few years I have employed a system of design known as dynamic symmetry in a great deal of
316
H.J. MCWHINNIE
Fig. 1. H. J. McWhinnie--"Totem Dance," 1985--Computer Image (Collection of Artist).
Fig. 2. H. J. McWhinnie--"Totem," 1983--Ceramic Clay-15" high (Collection of Artist).
Computer technology for the artist
Fig. 3. H. J. McWhinnie--"Garden of Golden Section," 1986--Computer Image (Collection of Artist).
Fig. 4. H. J. McWhinnie--"Garden of Golden Section,"1986---Computer Image (Collection of Artist).
317
318
H. J. MCWHINNIE
my own work. For me this is a quest that unites the art of today with that of the past. It also unites art with science and enables the artist to function and be a part of a new technological landscape. The HANDY program provided another valuable tool in this general exploration. The Golden Section, of course, immediately brings to mind works of classical art. It was a method of proportions in art and design which derived its basic idea from the books of Euclid. Dynamic symmetry was a method of designing pioneered by the early 20th century American artist, Mr. Jay Hambidge. Hambidge devised a system for dividing lines and shapes into certain proportional areas which confirm the nature of Greek design and developed proportional systems which are natural and humanistic. I have used these systems for some time in my own work as a printmaker and designer. The dynamic symmetry system, since it involves the measurement and division of shapes by area and not by arithmetical measurements, can be employed as a means of design enlargement. A small drawing using the same proportions may be done by using this system and then become enlarged perfectly to any size or scale. It is a geometric approach to measurement in design. My work done with this system looks very much up-to-date and resembles some of the design done today; although the method itself was developed in the 1920s. One can use it as a means to achieve purely abstract forms of visual compositions with images and subject matter that can range from the realistic to the abstract. The high tech or postmodern design style of the past 20 years has emphasized the rectangle, the horizontal, and the diagonal as the basic design or compositional motif. These new art styles focus upon the dynamic qualities that can be obtained in the design when the diagonal is used as the basic compositional motif. THE SIMULATION OF ABSTRACTION
I will continue with my work on computer generated design and prepare a complete set of text and illustrations for T. S. Elliot's "Wasteland." The final product will be a set of colored pencil drawings that are based on the computer images. This project would seem to be a logical development of my own professional career and it would further develop the integration of science and art which is the central theme of my own professional life. While my own career has been very diverse to date, the central theme seems to be one of the individual's psychological reaction to the visual world. The use of the computer in design work as a means of "Image Processing" seems to me to be a logical extension of much that I have done to date. The technical advantages of the computer allows me to extend these concerns more directly into my own work as an artist. This new abstract painting does not so much work within serious abstraction as it does to comment upon it. These computer images are an appropriation ofab-
straction which questions its original or subline aspirations. As with the so-called new abstractions [ 1], I do not so much appropriate abstraction as I simulate it with the computer based images. The basis of such simulations are both a problem as well as a challenge. The essential process of abstraction now seems to become quite a different process. A series of possible realities is presented, and the artist can now make selections based upon how they may fit into a more personal vision. The new quasi-abstract painters either simulate abstraction, recycle it, or reduce it to a set of conventions. This attitude seems to comply with our current design theories of the economy of signs and simulations. What is the connection between simulated works (those done in video or upon the computer) and abstraction? These issues seem to be very much at the heart of those aesthetic questions that are addressed in the translation in my own recent work from the computer image to a colored pencil drawing. This new work seems to comment upon this process of abstraction more than to function within a more clearly abstract context. The copy is an image endowed with a resemblence where as the simulacrum is an image without such a resemblence. The copy produces the model as original, the simulation calls into question the very ideas of the copy, of the model, and finally of abstraction itself. Some artists have insinuated into the paternal order of modern abstraction their frauds or false claims, and these are in a position to disrupt its institutional canons and confuse its historical logic. (See Brice Marden's work, Art in America, June 1986.) Is the simulacrum good enough, is it deceptive enough to be insinuated into the logical order of abstraction [2]? Some may see that this abstraction is neither an appropriation nor a simulation of abstract art, is it simply a swing of the pendulum, a stylistic rendition to neoexpressionism as dedicated by the art market/art history system? However, stylistic oscillation alone is not enough; new forms must be expropriated, usually from the popular or mass media (and from the computer) and obsolete modes of expression as well as media usage become retoted. Can this new work seriously engage interests and issues ofa technoscientific, postindustrial society in a medium like painting or drawings that are based on preindustrial concepts? This is the basic issue which seems to be involved in the transposition of computer images into a drawing [3]. As with the work of Jack Goldstein (Cover, Art in America, June 1986), in my own work the opposition between the biological individual and technological society is all but moot, so intensive have become my forms and images that are based on the computer images. My motifs are not abstracted from the world of all possible images, but are generated as abstractions themselves by the computer. Whether a snowflake under a microscope or a constellation through a telescope, these objects or events (when conceptualized into abstractions) do not exist
Computer technology for the artist "out there" in the world in a way that can be represented perspectically, nor are they produced "in here" in the subject in a way that can be evolved abstractly; rather they are effects of technical processes which do not transform them utterly. My drawings, in short, have more to do with new modes of visual information than with either classical representation or modern abstraction. My colored drawings are simulacra rather than copies and as such they function in a rather different way; as a set of images without resemblance, they are at least in one sense an ironic positioning of modern abstraction. As such, they seem to relate to another mode of abstraction, the abstraction of technological modes of control of nature in a postindustrial society. Though it may undercut representation, simulation is hardly liberative. In fact simulated images are today a crucial means of social deterrence. Abstraction may only approximate representational effects but they do not follow representational marks of logic; that is, they are not derived from referents in the world. The major aesthetic problem which I have to set for myself in The W a s t e l a n d Series is to move from simulation to abstraction. I use the prints and drawings to explore important relationships in my own work
319
between simulation and abstraction on the one hand, and between abstraction and representation on the other. In one way or another, I have sought to picture abstract tendencies in late postmodern society, in science, technology, telecommunications, and image production. My work seems to be concerned with a system of information but I continue to produce a work of art (a hard copy) in a very traditional medium. Though it may undercut representation, simulation is hardly literative. The work seems neither modern abstract painting nor post-conceptual appropriation art. What is it? The work creates an ambiguous relationships to both representation as well as to abstraction. It suspends a critique of the art object. The work partakes of both, but does not combine them as opposites. Abstraction sublates representation; simulation may subvert it. REFERENCES 1. Hal Foster, Signs taken for wonders. Art in America pp. 80-91, June (1986). 2. Jeanne Siegal, Geometry desurfacing. Arts pp. 28, March (1986). 3. Bauchillard, The precession ofsimularcum. Art and Test Hp. 8, Sept. (1983).
0097-8493/87 $3.00 + .00 © 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain.
Graphics Art THE PERSONAL COMPUTER AS AN INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR THE ARTIST (SIMULATION VS. ABSTRACTION) HAROLD J. MCWHINNIE The University of Maryland, College Park Campus, Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742 Abstract--This article will explore one artist's experiences with the microcomputer. It will explain how a new IBM authoring language called HANDY was employed to create a wide variety of images that later were used as a basis for drawings and prints. The article is an attempt to show how one artist incorporated a new technology into an ongoing body of work and how the interface with that new technologyin the form of a computer came to alter the content of his images and change the essential direction of his work. INTRODUCrlON
Like many artists and designers, I too had, for a long time, resisted the attraction as well as the lure of the personal computer. I had conceived of the microcomputer as being too impersonal, too remote, noncreative, and certainly less than "user-friendly." Recently through an IBM project, my own attitudes as well as point of view took a dramatic change. I became "hooked" upon this new technology. I became a "Hacker." With the image of little Rufus Jones of Bloom County in my mind, I faced the "green screen" with a new openness and a spirit of adventure. The IBM program was called HANDY and it involved the use of a new authoring language for the development of interactive teaching lessons. I began to create a series of lessons exploring various aspects of color and motion in relation to general principles of basic design. As my work with this new language began to evolve, I saw the almost unlimited possibilities for the artist and designer. The computer became my electronic sketchbook. It became an essential artistic vehicle in which | could state an idea; vary that idea; try out all of the possible combinations for color, texture, and movement; and finally produce an almost endless series of variations upon the basic theme or motif. The output assumed many forms. A series of slides was used as the basis for drawings; and a sequence of images, when combined with text, served the basis for book and story illustration. How ironic! To go back to the lithographic stone with images from the new technology. Yet, in recent months, this has become for me one of the more important thematic considerations, the joining together of the old and the very new. Has the machine taken away my personal and creative vision? Has the "life of the studio" with the smell of the paint, the taste of the clay and plaster dust come to be replaced by the blinks, beeps, and shakes of my electronic images? Am I a slave of the machine? I think not! For me at least, the personal computer has become yet another tool for the creative artist and designer. It, like the camera in the 19th century, can extend the perceptual limits of the artistic imagination. It has within it the essential power to help the creative artist function at yet another level of reality and awareness. In the fall of 1985, I began working in the computer
lab with the IBM HANDY software. I have now completed 3 projects.
1. Adventures in Color This is a sequence of four interactive lessons on color. These units introduced the general world of color and what can be done with the limited range of colors in my program. HANDY uses 16 colors which can be combined in foreground as well as in background sequences. I have learned that even those 16 colors can provide an almost endless set of color variations when textures are employed.
2. Totem Figure Dance This sequence of lessons explores movement in design and how an almost unlimited set of variations on figure and ground relationships might be created. These totem images were an adaptation from my work in Ceramic Sculpture. If one compares the nature of the image done in Fig. 1 with the actual sculpture (Fig. 2) that served as the model for the computer image, then one can see how deeply the use of the computer has come to transform my basic image making.
3. The Garden of the Golden Section A series of 10 sequences in which both color and motion are used. These sequences include poetry and music and construct a series of stories about the adventures of color in the Garden. The metaphor of the Garden of the Golden Section refers to other historical research which I have done in the past 3 years on the work of Jay Hambidge and the principles of dynamic symmetry as a design language. The basic transformation can be seen in the next 2 illustrations. Figure 3 shows one of the computer images that has been taken out of the Garden of the Golden Section sequence. Figure 4 shows a recent colored pencil drawing that was made from the slide shown in Fig. 3. THE GOLDEN SECTION AND THE WORK OF HAL McWHINNIE
For the past few years I have employed a system of design known as dynamic symmetry in a great deal of
316
H.J. MCWHINNIE
Fig. 1. H. J. McWhinnie--"Totem Dance," 1985--Computer Image (Collection of Artist).
Fig. 2. H. J. McWhinnie--"Totem," 1983--Ceramic Clay-15" high (Collection of Artist).
Computer technology for the artist
Fig. 3. H. J. McWhinnie--"Garden of Golden Section," 1986--Computer Image (Collection of Artist).
Fig. 4. H. J. McWhinnie--"Garden of Golden Section,"1986---Computer Image (Collection of Artist).
317
318
H. J. MCWHINNIE
my own work. For me this is a quest that unites the art of today with that of the past. It also unites art with science and enables the artist to function and be a part of a new technological landscape. The HANDY program provided another valuable tool in this general exploration. The Golden Section, of course, immediately brings to mind works of classical art. It was a method of proportions in art and design which derived its basic idea from the books of Euclid. Dynamic symmetry was a method of designing pioneered by the early 20th century American artist, Mr. Jay Hambidge. Hambidge devised a system for dividing lines and shapes into certain proportional areas which confirm the nature of Greek design and developed proportional systems which are natural and humanistic. I have used these systems for some time in my own work as a printmaker and designer. The dynamic symmetry system, since it involves the measurement and division of shapes by area and not by arithmetical measurements, can be employed as a means of design enlargement. A small drawing using the same proportions may be done by using this system and then become enlarged perfectly to any size or scale. It is a geometric approach to measurement in design. My work done with this system looks very much up-to-date and resembles some of the design done today; although the method itself was developed in the 1920s. One can use it as a means to achieve purely abstract forms of visual compositions with images and subject matter that can range from the realistic to the abstract. The high tech or postmodern design style of the past 20 years has emphasized the rectangle, the horizontal, and the diagonal as the basic design or compositional motif. These new art styles focus upon the dynamic qualities that can be obtained in the design when the diagonal is used as the basic compositional motif. THE SIMULATION OF ABSTRACTION
I will continue with my work on computer generated design and prepare a complete set of text and illustrations for T. S. Elliot's "Wasteland." The final product will be a set of colored pencil drawings that are based on the computer images. This project would seem to be a logical development of my own professional career and it would further develop the integration of science and art which is the central theme of my own professional life. While my own career has been very diverse to date, the central theme seems to be one of the individual's psychological reaction to the visual world. The use of the computer in design work as a means of "Image Processing" seems to me to be a logical extension of much that I have done to date. The technical advantages of the computer allows me to extend these concerns more directly into my own work as an artist. This new abstract painting does not so much work within serious abstraction as it does to comment upon it. These computer images are an appropriation ofab-
straction which questions its original or subline aspirations. As with the so-called new abstractions [ 1], I do not so much appropriate abstraction as I simulate it with the computer based images. The basis of such simulations are both a problem as well as a challenge. The essential process of abstraction now seems to become quite a different process. A series of possible realities is presented, and the artist can now make selections based upon how they may fit into a more personal vision. The new quasi-abstract painters either simulate abstraction, recycle it, or reduce it to a set of conventions. This attitude seems to comply with our current design theories of the economy of signs and simulations. What is the connection between simulated works (those done in video or upon the computer) and abstraction? These issues seem to be very much at the heart of those aesthetic questions that are addressed in the translation in my own recent work from the computer image to a colored pencil drawing. This new work seems to comment upon this process of abstraction more than to function within a more clearly abstract context. The copy is an image endowed with a resemblence where as the simulacrum is an image without such a resemblence. The copy produces the model as original, the simulation calls into question the very ideas of the copy, of the model, and finally of abstraction itself. Some artists have insinuated into the paternal order of modern abstraction their frauds or false claims, and these are in a position to disrupt its institutional canons and confuse its historical logic. (See Brice Marden's work, Art in America, June 1986.) Is the simulacrum good enough, is it deceptive enough to be insinuated into the logical order of abstraction [2]? Some may see that this abstraction is neither an appropriation nor a simulation of abstract art, is it simply a swing of the pendulum, a stylistic rendition to neoexpressionism as dedicated by the art market/art history system? However, stylistic oscillation alone is not enough; new forms must be expropriated, usually from the popular or mass media (and from the computer) and obsolete modes of expression as well as media usage become retoted. Can this new work seriously engage interests and issues ofa technoscientific, postindustrial society in a medium like painting or drawings that are based on preindustrial concepts? This is the basic issue which seems to be involved in the transposition of computer images into a drawing [3]. As with the work of Jack Goldstein (Cover, Art in America, June 1986), in my own work the opposition between the biological individual and technological society is all but moot, so intensive have become my forms and images that are based on the computer images. My motifs are not abstracted from the world of all possible images, but are generated as abstractions themselves by the computer. Whether a snowflake under a microscope or a constellation through a telescope, these objects or events (when conceptualized into abstractions) do not exist
Computer technology for the artist "out there" in the world in a way that can be represented perspectically, nor are they produced "in here" in the subject in a way that can be evolved abstractly; rather they are effects of technical processes which do not transform them utterly. My drawings, in short, have more to do with new modes of visual information than with either classical representation or modern abstraction. My colored drawings are simulacra rather than copies and as such they function in a rather different way; as a set of images without resemblance, they are at least in one sense an ironic positioning of modern abstraction. As such, they seem to relate to another mode of abstraction, the abstraction of technological modes of control of nature in a postindustrial society. Though it may undercut representation, simulation is hardly liberative. In fact simulated images are today a crucial means of social deterrence. Abstraction may only approximate representational effects but they do not follow representational marks of logic; that is, they are not derived from referents in the world. The major aesthetic problem which I have to set for myself in The W a s t e l a n d Series is to move from simulation to abstraction. I use the prints and drawings to explore important relationships in my own work
319
between simulation and abstraction on the one hand, and between abstraction and representation on the other. In one way or another, I have sought to picture abstract tendencies in late postmodern society, in science, technology, telecommunications, and image production. My work seems to be concerned with a system of information but I continue to produce a work of art (a hard copy) in a very traditional medium. Though it may undercut representation, simulation is hardly literative. The work seems neither modern abstract painting nor post-conceptual appropriation art. What is it? The work creates an ambiguous relationships to both representation as well as to abstraction. It suspends a critique of the art object. The work partakes of both, but does not combine them as opposites. Abstraction sublates representation; simulation may subvert it. REFERENCES 1. Hal Foster, Signs taken for wonders. Art in America pp. 80-91, June (1986). 2. Jeanne Siegal, Geometry desurfacing. Arts pp. 28, March (1986). 3. Bauchillard, The precession ofsimularcum. Art and Test Hp. 8, Sept. (1983).