Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510100108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In Roanoke, the New River Valley and the world, an ever-swelling chorus of computer-assisted artists says, "Of course."
It would be hard to argue. Computers or their products are found throughout our culture these days - in the marketplace, the workplace, the schoolroom, the playroom. On land, air and sea.
Art is no different.
Although the direct use of computers in some of the highest art forms - the symphony orchestra, for example - may forever be unacceptable to most audiences, computers already are indispensable to many artists.
For example, they are of critical importance - or are rapidly becoming so - in the fields of graphic design and photography.
Composers and writers now routinely use computers to do their writing. Musicians such as Radford University's Bruce Mahin have even staged concerts using computers as performers.
Many college level art programs reflect the change.
"Just about all of our disciplines in the fine arts are very much into computers and digital technology," said Joseph Scartelli, dean of Radford's College of Visual and Performing Arts.
"Technology and the computer is really sort of the current art, if you will," said Bob Fields, who teaches computer art and design at Virginia Tech. "I feel if Leonardo was alive, he'd be into computers, definitely."
"It's a buzz word right now, the computer," said Elizabeth Heil, who uses computers to manipulate photographs or drawings for various artistic ends. "The artists are feeling overwhelmed, because it's an industry that's moving so fast it's difficult to stay on top of."
Heil uses the e-mail-like moniker Eliz. S.-K. Heil. on her creations - which she eventually turns into hard copies via a high-tech printer. She teaches her art students at
Roanoke College the latest computer techniques.
"It's almost impossible to enter any kind of art program without exploring the making of art via the computer," she said.
There is a lot to learn these days. Painters, to choose only one example, can "draw" with electronic brushes on graphics tablets that translate their actions to the computer screen. They can select from a near infinite palette of colors.
They can alter images on a computer that originally came from a camera, or were drawn on a canvas - or, conversely, use the computer to produce images that are then touched up with traditional paints.
And they can do more and more, it seems, each day.
Even those artists most rooted in traditional mediums have recently begun using computers, Heil said - often at the invitation of people who have designed a new software package for artists. "If Picasso were alive today, someone would have contacted him," she said.
Consequently, how the artist produces a work of art is no longer seen as very important, Heil said.
"It's not the medium anymore, it's the message."
|n n| For nearly as long as there have been computers, there have been attempts to use them to make art.
A mathematician and artist named Ben Laposky was creating graphics on an analogue computer in 1950. In 1962, an M.I.T. doctoral candidate named Ivan Sutherland designed a system whereby the user could use a light beam to draw directly on a computer screen.
In the late '60s, the alliance of art and technology got strong support from American artist Robert Rauschenberg - who said, "If you don't accept technology you better go to another place because no place here is safe. ...Nobody wants to paint rotten oranges anymore."
Since then, the development of digital technology - which uses binary digits to process data, as opposed to the older analogue technology, which used electronic waves - and the microcomputer has opened up a new world to many artists.
None of the arts is completely unaffected. Even students of classical music, still performed mostly by highly skilled (human) musicians using acoustic instruments - may learn music theory at a computerized keyboard, or seek informatIon for term papers through computerized information systems.
But according to Radford's Scartelli, the computer's primary value to most artists is as a labor saver.
Those who fear human artists will soon be altogether replaced by computers have little to worry about, Scartelli believes. Human beings stIll design the software and make the decisions.
Heil, too, calls the computer "just another tool" for the artist.
"Someday 20, 30 or 100 years from now, maybe there will be a computer that's another Hal - that can make those levels of decisions," said Scartelli, referring to the psychotic computer of the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
"For now," Scartelli said. "I think the general public is giving the computer way too much credit."
by CNB