Task 13 – Redesigning and re-instrumentalising activities

The thirteenth task – Describe your activity and explain how would you redesign it, re-instrumentalise it and re-organised it to be more efficient, enjoyable, etc.

Thinking over several possibilities I decided to discuss the opportunities and ways of redesigning and instrumentalising arts. To be more specific and be able to base on my experience painting, visual effects and reworking existing (master)pieces will be covered. First I will describe some academic, non-digital methods and go to re-instrumentalising afterwards.

I started following some academic drawing lessons in the middle of 90′s. The basics of drawing is given by drawing and modelling simple geometric shapes – cube, silinder, cone, sphere. A shape must be depicted constructing various surfaces from stripes, no bordering lines should be seen. The technique is demanding and takes a lot of time to succeed but will be the base of all more complex objects later on. I followed the course throughout four years, 3,5 h weekly.

The same goes for painting. Given the technique used – aquarelles, oil paint etc. – one must work hard to reach the desired result. Or some other methods used for schooling. For example producing some nets of systemised stripes following some rules, you never know how it will look like in the end. To give a better description, it looks like for example Jared Tarbell has generated using ActionScript.

Another method used for academic learning at art school was taking a reproduction of a painting, deviding the surface into equal squares and then producing a new work consisting of the same squares that are now mono-colored according to the value they seem to have as average. What could be called in the computer technology? I would say “pixelation”.

All the above-mentioned techniques have their versions in technological world. Lev Manovich described in his “The Language of New Media,” his thoughts seeing a computer display 3D models of sphere, cylinder or a cube in perspective just in seconds (in 1985). He had learned to draw those in detail as described above years ago. Today we all know what the software is capable of doing and generating. When I started to discover all that, I felt some warm recognition of the techniques thinking “I know how to acieve that manually!”

I have tried out painting, sketching, 3D modeling, pixelating using the software targeted at those activities and I have enjoyed the process. It is a personal preference not to go totally over to digital methods of the activities I love – it is so true that once you get used to oil colours and the smell of white spirit, you can not exchange it to clean and shiny computer but you can definitely use it as a part of the process.

That is what I have found as a good compromise of using both technology (saving time) and traditional techniques of activity. I prepare my thougths and ideas in computer, use photo manipulation, editing sketches etc. then take place in front of the easel and canvas and work the idea out with real paint, brushes and enjoy the fragrance of the scene.