Bad Things about Computers in Art & Design

   Trying to be for computing but against the hype

This text is developed from lecture notes.  I have tried to keep pretty much to the original format hence the abundance of three dot pauses mimicking aposeopesis (think that's the word = pause for effect)

As I’m going to say some bad things about computers, to defend myself . . .

First I should say I am no Luddite, I've worked with computers since the late seventies

Second I am no purist of Art and Design . . . I can live with plurality of intention and purpose

Third I am not a sentimental old duffer reflecting on the alchemies of type, paint or rotring pen  

  . . . but  

Neither do I feel it necessary to take some apologetic or respectful stance in relation to a winning technology.  Computer graphics, CAD, whatever, has been around for decades now.  The days when you had to defend it against those who thought it had nothing to offer or those who thought it would be ruinous are long since gone.  The winning mantra had to be strong, it went . . .

Computers are flexible, fast, efficient, productive.  You can simulate all types of things.  It's as good as the software of course . . . but that is always getting better.  It's as good as the hardware of course . . . but that is always getting better.  You can streamline and integrate all your production.  You can save money.  You can make money.  It's the future . . . and on . . . and on

In fact, the chant has been so strong, it is now the creed . . . the old evangelists have now converted the luddites and brainwash the novices.  Try standing up and saying that computers are in various respects inadequate or in various respects perhaps perversely influential . . . half your audience will declare you an idiot or a fool or stuck in the past.  (Try it!)

What I would like to do here is develop a thesis about computers which is entirely figured by my own subjectivity as a practitioner . . . a set of statements which are not some argument ready to publish but instead which are a set of statements which reflect an intuition and constitute its expression.  A set of statements which assert the right to fundamentally question the worth or the quality of computers.  A set of statements that reserve a sane right . . . the right to be critical,  the right to say that there are some bad things about computers in art and design.

Where does this intuition begin . . .

The intuition begins as a doubt, an unease about art and design in general perhaps . . . but one which grows stronger as I look at the use of computers in these disciplines

but first . . .

that intuition is swiftly joined by a common-sensical thought . . . that most things have a good and bad side . . . this is quite easy to understand and accept . . . and to accept in relation to technology e.g. the car, nuclear power, genetic engineering

and it might be worth noting that the good and bad manifest themselves in different arenas . . . with the car . . . personal transport is good but collectively, our use of the car makes the air bad, the street hazardous and the city a parking lot. With nuclear power the argument was cheap clean power versus the possibility of environmental disaster and so on.

There is nothing new in these observations, they are trite.  More often than not we are happy to live with these opposing qualities . . . based on all this . . . it would seem logical to assume that the generic good of computers in art and design is matched by the generic bad. Whatever commentary there has been on this generic bad has tended to be either about the performance of technology . . . or its social impact . . . or a trashing of the unbelievers . . .

What there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of . . . is the thought that there might be an ever present bad, a flip-side, a trap or hindrance to the unwary creative.  A ‘something’, which rather like the car is fine close up but doubtful from further away.

. . . and so . . .

back to that first intuition, that unease.  What am I responding to and what might be its cause? ( This is where things get really subjective because my idea of the bad is in many ways prefigured by my idea of the good ).  When I look at work produced using computers this is what I think I usually ‘see’ now and attribute to the computer and its influence. . .

1.    A Design of Incorporation

2.    A Design of Seamlessness

3.    A Design of Perfection  

What do I mean by each of these?  What is their nature and their effect.?  Finally how and why do I judge them to be bad?
 
A Design of Incorporation  
There is an increasingly dominant style of visual assemblage simply because it is possible to put a lot of things together. This style leads to a kind of graphic ‘flatworld’ where many competing design entities are forced to conform to a ‘virtual surface’.
 
A Design of Seamlessness
In that flatworld of many entities the problem of joining them into an homogenous whole becomes paramount. This results in pushing the visual flatness, a professional language of smoothing, blending and harmony develops until the ‘edge’, the confrontation, discord is seen as anathaema to creative solutions.
 
A Design of Perfection
The role and effect of the technology in areas such as productivity and efficiency leads to a design repertoire of ready mades. The traditional roles of plasticity in the production process.. .the handle of materials, the fight with materials and so on . . . are seen to be an impediment. The result is a process of arranging and editing what is given or appropriated. The parts are perfect prior to the whole.

 

The consequences of these three 'atmospheres' are to be seen across virtually all the arts, wherever computers are applied, from breakfast cereal packet design . . .  to pictorial encyclopedias . . . to Hollywood movies . . . to multimedia installations . . . to your average webpage design.  Sometimes it's fine but often you get the idea the artist or designer isn't even aware they are there and sometimes, well, the result is rubbish.  I think  therefore that these three types of computer influence bring with them as much bad as they can good.

Computing as a basis of medium, as all media do, has spawned a variety of genres but computing as a basis of a repertoire of tools, processes and surfaces, as all tools, processes and surfaces do, leaves a signature . . .

This signature is in turn dominated by a system of production values and the signature of computing in A&D is one dominated by a central paradigm . . . that of editing . . . editing as a source of origination as well as construction.

When its influence becomes too strong we are left with a visual and design culture of desk top fiddling.