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Palm Used in Contemporary Art
Malkthulhu writes "Artist Tom Kemp has created a huge new work of art with a Palm Vx. It is a staggering 4 feet by 17 feet and consists of one thousand tiny paintings all made using the TealPaint application. As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm."
Yes, someone has done this, (e.g. Chuck Close is a recent example). But this guy did it on a computer, so now he can patent it.
-Omar@my.2.cents.worth
Can you rephrase your last paragraph. Your double negative parses to "I think art can be simply beautify, etc. without needing to make a point." But given the apparent typo: Should "It does appear to inspire feeling" be "It does *not* appear to inspire feeling", I wanted to make sure I didn't misunderstand your first sentace about beauty and meaning.
In defense of the art, I did like the fact that it was: somewhat original, trying to capture the art of writing without using writing, and wasn't trying to make some tedious social commentary.
Of course, I'd rather spend a few hours looking at portraits by artists of old.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
This is actually interesting for two reasons. One, naturally, is the /. nerd quotient that it was made on a Palm. The other interesting thing is that it's a time-series art project. Most people seem to have missed this.
Each of the drawings was done sequentially. While individually they are merely doodles, what's interesting is to look at the square-by-square progression of each doodle to the next.
No, it's no Mona Lisa, but art isn't merely about making pretty pictures. A work like this makes you think about the production process, the mindset of the artist as he proceeds through all N iterations of the project. It makes you think about what can be accomplished with just a few pixels. It's not representational art, and approaching it that way is a mistake.
It's the 21st century. Hasn't anyone had an art class since 1891?
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
These guys do some art on palms. Pretty good.
(Yes, these are the fellows who do many of those amazing backgrounds that you see on screenshots at themes.org)
"This work does not inspire feeling"
Speak for yourself. I thought it was a cool hack. That in itself is inspiration to me.
If anyone wants to see some similar, but more photographic, sorts of things I recommend the gallery at CamBorg. I've just had some of my Gameboy camera photos posted there, but otherwise it's images taken with the Casio Wrist Camera. At the moment the subjects and composition are a little immature, my own included, but I'm sure the artform will develop. The idea of peicing together a large peice like the one in this story is very appealling -- I think I might get myself a Gameboy printer.
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The posts in response to this story give me the same feeling most /.ers get at M$-funded FUD papers about Linux. A good reminder that being clueful in one area usually doesn't stop people from spouting off on stuff they know nothing about.
Most of the discussion (and satire) is centered around an idea of art (it "communicates" "meaning" based on the artists "intention") which hasn't been taken seriously in the art world for decades. The statement on the guy's site is pretty lame, but you'll note he doesn't talk about it meaning anything.
The whole point of being a visual artist is exploring what stuff looks like. How it relates to the world of meaning and context is an important issue, but generally there are other media which do a better job of transmitting meaning (like writing). This guy is messing around with the process of classical abstract painting in a novel way. That in itself justifies it's existence.
Whether you like looking at it or "find something" in it is something that you can work out for yourself. It doesn't really do it for me, even though I think the idea is interesting. But whether it's important in the larger scheme of contemporary art practice is something for the network of art critics, dealers, artists, and artgoers to work out.
So offer an opinion by all means, but unless you have a serious investment in the arts community it doesn't count for much more than my opinion on your object handling in C++ (which I know nothing about).
Danny
I think he read too many "Wouldn't it be cool if we had a Beowulf cluster of those?!?" posts on slashdot.
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Re: clipboards
That's a nifty idea. It might be easier to sandwhich the mobo between two, thin, clear plexiglass sheets. That would give strength, and you wouldn't have to work as hard to smooth solder joints and fill in empty holes.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Absolutely a typo. This work does not inspire feeling, especially not as a scan on the internet. To be fair to it, I would still be interested to see it in a gallery setting since it is large. I always remember thinking that Rothko couldn't paint either, until I stood in front of one of his pieces.
I do not have a signature
Well, this guy DID do it. The Mona Lisa it ain't, but at least this guy unassed himself to create something new. Good for him!
Those of you offended at this guy's "bad art", go out and create something better, and show this guy up. Otherwise, you're all talk.
Reminds me of the people who talk shit about rap requiring no talent "because it's just talking fast". It was always fun to put them on the spot and start beat-boxing, waiting for them to rap along "'cuz anyone can do that!"
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Furthermore, it manages to utilize shading and light, in order to express a sort of fuzzy gray, that is neither black nor white. This shows the artist's intention of trying to break from the traditional, clear-cut boundries of society, instead opting for a nebulous ambiguity.
Also, the work speaks to the viewer's logical side, for it implicitly poses the conundrum, "If this is not art, then it must be pornography. Yet I feel no sexual thrill from the work. Therefore, it must be art."
Finally, the doodlish nature embodies man's inner-child. Are we not all children at heart, especially when we get a new, expensive, electronic toy?
(I'm generally reluctant to post humerous material on serious stories. But I can't see how anyone in their right mind can take this work seriously.)
Look at the snapshots of the work, clearly the artist is exploring common forms and motions used in calligraphy and penmanship. The piece shows the common motions used in calligraphy from a variety of sources, I can see stuff in there that is reminiscent of Arabic, Eastern calligraphy, and pictographic stuff.
As a piece of art, I personally find it interesting, a good attempt at abstracting some of the features common to writing from many cultures and styles.
So quit yer bellyaching, all of you who didn't think it was the next Sistine Chapel. So what? It's a good idea nonetheless.
sulli
RTFJ.
This has got to be the most disappointing discussion I've ever seen on Slashdot. The amount of pure ignorance about art is astounding. There are about 2 posts that genuinely critique the piece. The rest of you slugs couldn't rise above the "This is ART?, my 3 year old could do that, look-I-took-a-dump-let's-call-it-art" comments that I hear from my hick relatives in West Virginia. Truly pathetic.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
You wouldn't compare Casablanca and Battlefield Earth without first watching them, right?
Sheesh.
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Well to create a similar effect you can just take any old image and run it through aview. Aview is a program that comes with the debian distribution which has the ability to render an image out of the observable ascii character set. It works quite well and will do almost the same thing.
All you have to do it get it to run on the palm and it will work.
Respond to s
I know, there's a bug knee-jerk reaction against this idea because most modern art is ugly. People tend to fight you over the idea until they are presented with an example that they actually like, like the Celtic abstract designs popular in tattoos, or the Eiffel Tower, or [insert your favorite piece of instrumental music].
If you don't like these works, that's fine, but don't try to justify your personal preference by bashing abstract expressionism.
By the way, these scribbles do mean something to the artist. As it says in the article, they're part of his "fascination" with the process of writing. So maybe they are really "about" a deep reverence for the human form, its manner of moving, and the way those movements can be captured on paper. Or maybe the artist was stoned and got into a groove on writing. I don't know. The point is, it's not devoid of meaning.
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
You're right: That would be really cool. I have been teaching myself Palm OS programming (using the O'Reilly book :) ), and I just
might take this and run with it as a fun exercise. I will credit you
in the source and the About screen if I do so. Thanks!
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Obviously the ancient Greeks had a different way of thinking about writing. Why this is the case is anyone's guess. It wasn't unfamiliarity with writing; almost all the free population of Periklean Athens, male and female, learned to read and write in public schools.
Does anyone know of other languages where this phenomenon occurs?
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Too bad...
I would have love seeing a full view of the painting.
Maybe then I would be able to feel the size.
--=.=-- www.cyber2000.qc.ca
I see a lot of responses here about "so he doodles on a Palm Pilot and suddenly he's an 'artist', so what". That's a pretty specious argument which is easily torn apart by a counter-argument: "so he slaps a bunch of colored liquid on a piece of paper and suddenly he's an 'artist', so what".
It's not the "he's not an artist" aspect that makes this story uninteresting. It's the fact that this story is no more and no less interesting than if he had used babylonic cuneiform on clay tablets. THAT'S what makes this story boring--it's just like all the others. He hasn't created a new art form or used the Palm in a novel way--he's just done regular old drawing and combined them in a mosaic. His message isn't exploiting his medium, I guess I want to say.
I mean, imagine if he had made something that you could transmit to other Palms and it would modify itself (or the "user/viewer" could modify it). It's interactive, it's distributed--THAT would be new and interesting.
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An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
... is that that Palm has other uses than what it was designed for. We usually see people doing techie stuff with them, but this guy went and made some serious art with it.
If you don't think it's serious art, *YOU* try drawing a 4' x 17' piece in little segments. At least give the guy props for putting lots of work into it. Also, if you read the entire page, you'll see that he was modeling his piece after an ancient Greek style of writing. The piece itself is pretty neat, with an almost Escher-like style of one part blending into the next part to eventually transform into something else completely different.
What came before the Big Bang? Hum, it must have outside of time...
And I got all upset and started jumping up and down and my masterpiece was gone
My next attempt was a light bright.. but that ended even worse...
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As others have pointed out, this work by itself doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking. However, when considered as part of a series of works by the artist, it does have more meaning.
What Kemp has been doing over a longer period is exploring the medium of writing... How writing feels, how it looks, what it means.
Almost be definition, Palm has established a new writing paradigm: handheld, portable, editable electronic writing. Yes, Apple's Newton and other devices have done this before, but the Palm popularized the medium.
Kemp has taken this new paradigm and expressed it in meatspace, and quite well. If part of the meaning of art is to cause a discussion of issues, then not only has Kemp succeeded in creating a piece of surprising aesthetics, but also in fomenting a discussion of its merits.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
and if you buy that...great...I have other b.s. ideas to sell you on. Basically though it's art it's subjective and you're right they shouldn't have needed to add the fact that it was done on a palm. It would have been the same as if he doodled in a sketch book. Not really news but good enough to tell people who don't really get technology to think it is.
A lot of people are arguing, "How is this art? How is this original? All he did was doodle a bunch of times and put it on a poster." This is a valid practical argument, but I think these posters are missing the point. A guy slapping together 1000 pixelated drawings may not be good art to a lot of people, but the original application of technology in an expressive form is as much art as anything else. It's all in how you define human expression.
Why do I think it's original? Simply because I don't think anyone has done anything like this before. Jim Dine, for example, usually uses hearts, skulls, robes and tools in his artwork, and while he manages to approach these subjects in a colorful and interesting way, the most original thing of his I've seen was a heart shape made of straw that measured about 5' by 3' by 1'. The heart shape itself is not original; making a large one out of straw and placing it on its side is - in my opinion, which is what it all really boils down to.
Some Jim Dine links, fyi:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
I may be showing some of my "lack of culture" but what is the big accomplishment here? I am sure that hundreds of people have made doodles on their Palms before, and this guy goes to Kinkos and prints them out in a large manor and he is an originator? This would have been a far greater accomplishment (or perhaps an accomplishment at all really) if he had created some coherent picture by only drawing one screen at a time, and then placing them all together in the end. I am sure that before the advent of the Palm Pilot some artist somewhere has thrown together a bunch of small pictures on a single canvus, and I am willing to bet that most of the people who read /. would upon looking at it said 'So what?' but because its on a Palm Pilot its revolutionary.
What I'd really be interested to know is how many people would really be interested in something simply because its done on a digital medium. I don't see why its such a big deal, as every day the digital world is becoming more analogue and lifelike. Eventually I hope this digital lust ends and people start to appreciate art not because of how it was made, but what it says.
Yeah, I was kinda disappointed when I saw it, too. I was expecting a huge mural with each palm contributing an integral element. Not a bunch of individual crappy scribbles that join together to make... nothing.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
As a person with a degree in fine art, who has actually managed to sell artwork, and is a regular attendee at galleries and museums, I have to agree with this sentiment, if not the exact wording.
The piece taken as a whole is incoherent at best. There are 1000 of these screen shots, but they are not arranged in any way that is actually pleasing. Nothing in the work speaks to the electronic scribble origination of the screen shots-- unless you want to state that the presentation is so incredibly sterile as to be unmistakably machine made. Some of the individual scribbles appear to be incredibly graceful, which makes the whole thing that much more tragic in it's complete lack of coherence. I find it appalling that any real meaning assigned to this piece will have to be scraped together post hoc, and that if the artist had any intentions in the creative process that they are largely unexpressed.
Finally, as I somewhat stated already, the part of this piece that comes from having been executed in part on a Palm is irrelevant. This same effect could have been achieved by painting a grid on a canvas and then scribbling in each of the spaces. I'd be a lot more impressed if the Palm had been used as a tool rather than as a kind artistic buzzword to obtain legitimacy for what is otherwise an empty art object. For instance, why not use Tealpaint to capture quick sketches of places/things/etc that wouldn't be practical to take a traditional analog drawing/painting tool too. Because the Palm is symbiotic with a PC, this could lead to a remote reworking of the sketches. But this work completely overlooks the Palm's dependence on a second system.
Finally, I don't think art can't simply be beautiful, elegant, or even ugly without making a point of some sort, but this is utterly NULL. It says nothing. It does appear to inspire feeling. It won't even match the carpet in a corporate lobby.
I do not have a signature
What is interesting is the use of a palm to talk about writing. Writing or drawing on a piece of glass is a very different experience than writing on paper or parchment or plywood or whatever. The potentially artful part of this may be the progression of the pictures, as the artist grows comfortable with this new medium and the restrictive size. Even in the few squares we can see, there is much experimentation. For example we see the contrasts of various levels of white space, or various amounts of entropy. If nothing else, the palm allows the artist to express an emotion or thought immediately.
Of course, it looks simple and we all say we could do it; but how many of us do. We have to give the guy credit for trying.
...any time a geek uses his palm for something other than personal gratification is a cause for celebration.
;-)
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The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.