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Palm Used in Contemporary Art
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Oct 25, 2000 02:05 PM
from the cool-ooking-stuff dept.
from the cool-ooking-stuff dept.
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."
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Palm Used in Contemporary Art
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Patent it! (Score:4)
Time series art. (Score:3)
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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More palm art (Score:4)
(Yes, these are the fellows who do many of those amazing backgrounds that you see on screenshots at themes.org)
Re:Dumb art (Score:4)
Speak for yourself. I thought it was a cool hack. That in itself is inspiration to me.
Re:Whats the big deal? (Score:5)
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Calling all lamers... (Score:5)
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
Re:Should be titled: "Man Bored In Meeting" (Score:4)
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.)
A non-issue--but for a different reason (Score:4)
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.
Doesn't work on an etch a sketch... (Score:4)
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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More about art (Score:3)
As others have pointed out, this work by itself [demon.co.uk] doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking. However, when considered as part of a series of works [demon.co.uk] 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.
Re:Dumb art (Score:3)
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.
It's not bad (Score:5)
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.