The User Interface

Ok, yes, Alan Kay has read a lot and is well aware of human learning patterns. Additional he is obviously uber proud of his accomplishments in GUI development, got it, thanks Alan for explaining why you’re important.

Anyway, to relevance other than Alan Kay’s accomplishments, the GUI is of obvious importance to he who has technical need but not nearly the time to spend learning or dealing in code. That said, we interact with some form of GUI every time we interact with a computer – computer, cell phone, ipod, even calculator. Special. In relvance to art, the question was posed in our discussion “are you making the art or is photoshop (rather a byproduct of the GUI) making the art?” This is completely valid in response to the current situation of digital arts where far to many products of its creation look more like photoshop filters than they do original pieces of art. Yeah so a computer program can make a photo look like a watercolor. It begs the question of value, when all you did was click a button to apply a filter and then expect it to be compared to the work of a true blue watercolorist. Who really made it? Did you or did the person who programmed the filter?

For reasons standing behind photography, you did. You went out and took the picture. You brought it into photoshop. You decided upon the application of the filter. Photoshop being ultimately designed as an advertising tool since they’re the highest paying customer, maybe they didn’t realize the possibility of certain filters being used for such uses. That still doesn’t make you talented in the same sense as the talent used to create the filter though. Of course there is the concern that without artist desires the programmer/coder wouldn’t know what to do with there knowledge and couldn’t make truly applicable uses, but the fact is that big companies have utilized this concept and made applicable concepts. Again, special. I can pay $800 or however much money and purchase some program and they’ll make whatever it is I want into a certain form. Anyone beginning to think of big time/super star artists who start up factories to create certain pieces of art? Really though, no one knows if they actually know how to create what is being made but they’ve paid enough money to have someone make something, and because it has their name on it, it will sell. Sad state we’re living in when true art is made through production and the actual artist can’t actually make the product themselves (obviously that doesn’t apply to certain large scale sculptors, who without help couldn’t even fathom their constructions). So what does that say for photoshop? Especially when you go to a gallery opening and seeing ‘photographic’ images manipulated in photoshop that hark back to the days when photoshop first became available, and no matter how shitty the rendering was it was still impressive because they used photoshop…

The point being in all of this is that photoshop is no longer a good tool if whatever you are creating looks, well, obviously photoshopped. In relation to the GUI, it has obvious need for the consumer to be easy, accessible, and accomplish tasks that would otherwise be tedious and troublesome. In relevance to the art though, these terms do not apply, and little value should be placed on something poorly masked behind the tools… The artist should strive to create new forms and find alternative ways to create than what the populace finds immediately available for creation of now cliched (photoshopped) images. Power to the GUI for its ease of use, but less power to the artist to create new forms. It is the development of programs such as MIT’s Processing, Quartz, and programming in general, that will allow for the artist of the digital age to find new forms outside of what the public recognizes as possible. This should be strived for, but is far to often lost. People say digital art, and the first thought in most peoples minds are overly photoshopped images or maya animations. All those thoughts say is “well, I could create that too if I could afford those programs.” In contrast to similar thoughts regarding much contemporary art, in the digital arts that thought is true if all we produce are images cast through the various filters of photoshop and similar programs. Contemporary digital art may rely on the GUI but should not be limited to its programmers, and it should embrace the possibility behind creation of original program construction such as the capabilities reliant behind Processing, where the artist must actually create the environment rather than accept one programmed by someone else.