The primary example used, other than photography, is that of music. Music has “three diverse but complementary perspectives” (Negroponte 1), which relate to the scientific via a digital signal, the interpretive via discerning how music makes us feel or react, and the creative via the idea that music can be used as a tool for artistic expression. Negroponte’s point here is that computers are now able to provide points of access to all three of the elements of music listed above. With such a high level of versatility computers are quickly becoming capable of allowing many points of access for other types of media as well. Music was simply the beginning for MIT’s Media Lab. This program, founded primarily by Negroponte, has continued to do various research involving bits and atoms, digital life, and research programs such as Scratch, which is a “programming toolkit” made specifically for children to use in order to create interactive stories, games and art through the use of graphics, image, and sound manipulation.
The conglomeration of using graphics, image, and sound to create new styles of art is the basic thrust of all multimedia projects. With people like Negroponte working to create newer and easier ways to access these mediums it is just a matter of time before there is at least one person in every home who uses digital technology to express themselves, be they age 5 or 50. Negroponte states, “The means and messages of multimedia will become a blend of technical and artistic achievement” (1). This blending of imperatives, as Negroponte calls them, is the core idea behind New Media. Computers and all their various programs are becoming geared towards artistic expression as well as technological advancement. New Media is all about using computers to create and express ourselves with the new technologies becoming available to us. The fact that we can now combine various medias with traditional types of artistic expression is amazing. We are able to take many art forms and enhance or augment them with the technology multimedia provides. One such art form is that of digital photography enhanced by photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. There are now even websites devoted to this particular type of photography such as, Digital Photography School, which has links to tips on taking better digital photos. The website, Digital Blasphemy, actually focuses on creating entirely digital images without the aid of a camera. The images on this particular site are actually 3-D rendered images created with Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Poser 6, and so on. The creator of the site, Ryan Bliss, is self-taught which demonstrates the idea that computers will and are enabling people to express themselves more thoroughly through much more technical avenues.
In class we’ve been discussing Negroponte’s book, Being Digital. This book has an example in it that Negroponte also uses in this article; that of the mid 19th century teacher being fully capable of substituting for a teacher today. The purpose of this example is to illustrate how slowly education has changed and to point out how it is beginning to pick up a bit of speed. “We are moving away from a hard-line mode of teaching that caters primarily to compulsive, serialist children, toward one that is more porous and draws no lines between art and science or right brain and left brain “ (Negroponte 2). Comparing this statement with Negroponte’s statement about multimedia blending technical and artistic achievement shows how we are becoming more comfortable with the idea of being ambidextrous in the way we think, work, and create. There has generally been the assumption that you are either a math person or an English person, a technical person or an artistic person. Rarely do we find someone who claims to be good at Math and English. However, we are being pushed towards that end by enabling greater levels of creativity, but requiring some technical/mathematical aptitude to accomplish it with the computer as our primary tool. Vice versa, Negroponte points out how computer hackers write programs that have deeper meaning and aesthetic values that reflect their makers. Writing computer code is a highly technical and mathematical pursuit, but apparently the artistic and creative flair can be seen within them as easily as the technical can be seen in a digital film.
Works Cited:
Negroponte, Nicholas. “Digital Expression” Wired Dec 1994. 31 Jan 2007.
1 comment:
1994? Has this guy written anything recently? We need a Being Digital 2, or something.
Is "mediums" a word?
Generally good, Casey, but I'd prefer you use articles out of scholarly journals.
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