| 1. | Introduction | ||||||
| 2. | Classroom Activities | ||||||
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| 3. | Reflections |
Creative Discovery in Digital Art Forms: A First-Year Seminar
Jennifer
Burg , Wake Forest University
Yue-Ling Wong, Wake Forest University
Abstract
Digital
art, broadly defined, includes photography, drawings, paintings, music,
and literature created or presented by means of a computer. In a first-year
seminar, we explore with our students the potential of digital art and
the avenues of creative expression made possible by computers. Students
learn photographic processing, sound editing, drawing, painting, and multimedia
programming on their computers; they create multimedia interpretations
of poems, and they write a term paper exploring the legitimacy of digital
art as "real art."
1. Introduction
All freshmen
at Wake Forest University are required to take a first-year seminar -
a course in which they engage in "critical thinking and writing"
on a special topic chosen by their professor. First-year seminars are
taught in all disciplines, on subjects ranging from "Chaos Theory"
to "The Analytical Methods of Sherlock Holmes."
The purpose of our seminar, entitled "Creative Discovery in Digital Art Forms," was to examine historical understandings of the word art, discuss the legitimacy of art created with the help of a machine, introduce digital art in a variety of genres, give students hands-on experience with digital media, and explore with them their own creative potential when the computer becomes their artistic tool and medium of communication.
The maximum class
size for first-year seminars is 16 students, which was the size of our
class. All students on campus have identical laptop computers equipped
with a standard load of software. In addition to their standard software,
we put key-served versions of Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Freehand,
Flash, and Director on the students' laptops. The students also were able
to use our digital media lab with Cool Edit and Acid Pro sound editing
programs, Cakewalk PC Music Creator, and a MIDI keyboard.
2. Classroom Activities
2.1 Discussions
The seminar began with an overview of the history of art. We considered
prehistoric works like the paintings at Lascaux and the Venus of Willendorf
-- works that, in retrospect, we consider "art" while not knowing
their actual inspiration. We noted that in ancient Greece, art was based
on classical rules of form, and a distinction was made between the crafts
of painting and sculpture and the inspired activities of poetry and music.
We observed that through the Middle Ages, the "liberal arts"
came to be defined, and art increasingly was associated not only with
knowledge of form and classic technique, but also with inspiration. We
discussed the Renaissance and post-Renaissance notions of grazia, the
je ne sais quoi or indefinable element that characterizes timeless art.
And we noted the emergence in the 17th century of the beaux arts or "fine
arts," including poetry, music, architecture, painting, sculpture,
and mechanics -- bringing together form and structure, aesthetics, inspiration,
and the craftsman's skill.
The second topic of discussion was the seminar's central question: What is art? Quotations from artists through the ages gave us the starting point for our discussion. Gustave Flaubert emphasized the importance of form. "One must not always think that feeling is everything," he said. "Art is nothing without form." The sound must seem an echo to the sense." Oscar Wilde claimed that "Art is quite useless," not implying that we should not bother with it, but acknowledging that what compels us to artistic activity is "the human impulse to create." Goethe asserted that "Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art." Others have focused on the relationship between art and nature. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, art was the "reconciler of nature and man," with " the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation." Other artists aligned art with truth and beauty -- considered one and the same thing by John Keats in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all\ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!") George Sand valued art "for the sake of the good and the beautiful." Leo Tolstoy viewed art primarily as a means for communicating one's feelings and experiences to another. Similarly, Marcel Proust rejoiced that art can give us "another's view of the universe."
We had a similar discussion about the nature of poetry. We considered Frost's definition -- "a momentary stay against confusion" -- as well as Wordsworth's -- "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," which emerges as "emotions recollected in tranquility." We considered Archibald Macleish's injunction that "a poem should not mean, but be," and we looked at other poems that attempt to define poetry, including works by Pablo Neruda and Marianne Moore.
In the next part of the course, we considered how art might be compromised by the intervention of mechanical tools. Photography, in its beginnings, gave us an historical example of how new art forms can be called into question when it appears that clever technological tools play too large a role in their creation, perhaps at the expense of the human element.
One of the two major assignments in the course was a term paper exploring the issues raised in our discussions: What is art? Can digitally-created art justifiably be called "real" art? Is the computer taking over too much of the creative process? What human element must be present for a work to be truly artistic? Does the computer open channels of communication not possible in earlier art forms? What is the effect of combining media in a digital production, including pictures, sound, motion, text, and interactivity? What is the effect of interactivity in art? What is the effect of non-linearity? What is the effect of changing a work dynamically, altering it for different viewings or viewers? Is good work being created in digital art? Can it be found on the Web? What are some of the best examples of digital art and digital literature to be found on the Web? And so forth.
2.2 Hands-On
the Computers and Digital Media Tools
Our classroom discussions set the stage for the students' hands-on work
in digital media and their preparation of a term project. The assignment
for the term project was to choose a poem or write an original one and
to create a multimedia interpretation of it by adding pictures, sound,
and interactivity. Requirements for the project were these elements: (1)
the text of the poem, either static on the screen, appearing line by line,
or rolling across the screen; (2) two sound clips -- one voice (reading
the entire poem or at least the title) and one music; (3) at least one
original photograph or drawing, digitally produced, expressing some aspect
of the poem; and (4) interactivity, e.g., the ability to click on a word
and open a new picture, show some new text, change the sound, or alter
some other aspect of the poem. We required that all photographs and sound
either be original or not be protected by copyright.
The middle portion of the semester was spent introducing the students to photographic processing, sound processing, digital drawing, digital painting, and multimedia programming. The classroom demonstrations were designed to give students -- who had no significant experience with these tools -- the essential knowledge they needed to create their multimedia presentations. Working with the computer tools also gave them direct experience with digital art and generated ideas for their term papers.
2.3 A Closer
Look at Digital Art
The last part of the course was spent reflecting on what we and others
have done in the realm of digital art. We examined Web museums such as
the San Francisco Museum for Modern Art's 010101.ART.IN.Technological.TIMES
exhibit, where we found interesting site-streaming presentations of artists
discussing their work (in audio) at the same time that the work is dynamically
displayed online. The most interesting Web site we found for digital literature
was Born Magazine, with a large and varied collection of digital and interactive
poetry.
In the last week of class, students shared their own digital poems. Three students did original poems, one did a poem written by a friend, and the rest did "classic" poems. Some students wrote and performed original music, recording either on their guitars (through microphone or connected directly to the computer) or on the MIDI keyboard. Others used uncopyrighted sound clips made available with Acid Pro.
A sampling of the best work from the class is described below. Their poems and papers reflecting on their experience are published as companion works to this article.
