February 26, 2004
The Green One
I was surfing my news, and through my reliable portal, InstaPundit, I found a website, TripReport that was discussing camera shots... (check it out)
Here are two views of my storybook landscape picture. This first image is what came out of the scanner while the second has been color-corrected. The first image falls down from a realism piont of view but I like the effect because it reminds me of my old children's books. The second is more natural and retains some of the storybook feeling. I may be the only soul on the planet who likes the green version so I'm planning to work on the color-correction some more.
I felt compelled to comment:
Here's a vote for the green one. It seems to belong to the imagination, where all experience goes anyway... and doesn't photography exist in that place, a beat after the moment? The fleeting NOW is for something else entirely, like science... where veracity is measured on a moment to moment basis.
It's interesting to consider science and art... memory and veracity... art as "science"... science as "art"... alla prima painting and NOW versus memory and imagination...
If what is beautiful is what appeals to the imagination, the green one is good to go. (Check out the site if you haven't done so already.) And what is art but an enlarged imagination? Ah... but Dennis, some people go crazy from an enlarged imagination. And my painting is all about NOW... as the paint dries, it changes and people can only see the trail of where I've been. The author of Trip Report is dealing with PhotoShop and where should she steer her adjusted image. These new choices that emerging technology gives us sure stirs up the sediment of ideas.
Posted by Dennis at February 26, 2004 6:39 PM
Ah yes the imagination...I have been pondering this same question in light of all we can do with computers these days. As digital design becomes standard operating procedure in the realm of architecture and 3d programs suck you deeper and deeper into a virtual environment one contemplateds not only the imagination but the virtual. I have found these investigations both liberating (both by the constraints of physical boundries such as gravity, and the posibilities of permutations at the click of a mouse)and imprisoning (by remaining in the limitlessness of the virtual). Could it be I have a virtual angst. The point is as the tools become more sofisticated, as do the audience, can we create unique cultural interfaces with technology or are we victims to the defaults of the software.
Hey Ray:
I guess we're living in a time when the world between imagination and reality converge. It makes me think of the Art and Life equation, where a PostModern ambition is either fulfilled or short circuited when "and" is replaced by an equal sign.
(And for me, it recalls my poor Dad who spun out when his wall between Imagination and reality dissolved, a story too sad to recall here in detail but too stark to ignore.)
Or to think of reality and the claim science has to it. This, against the claim I've made in the past to audiences that art is an enlargement of the imagination. Or how scientists use imagination to model reality, and how they test thier models afterward. Or how imagination lives at a remove from the present and that if the future will bring a dissolve between imagination and reality, how we might live a beat or two back from the NOW in a computer enhanced, information enriched realm... a nation of images that might be difficult to depart from.
And here I am, the one who wants a computer implant.