Shonna Wells' AAD250 Page

In my opinion, “Computer Graphics: Effects of Origins’” by Beverly Jones was the hardest and dullest paper we have read yet for this class. It was a lot more difficult to assimilate where it was going and I found myself not being engaged with the writing at all. I had a hard time figuring out how this really had that much to do with art, especially when contrasted with the other papers we have read this term. I think that is largely because I was least interested in this segment.

That being said, I did wade through it and worked at pulling out the main thesis point. Jones writes, “I hope to establish the relation of specific image, object, event or environment to conceptual frames. These frames exist within art and technology and are present in other forms of symbolic material culture”. This really talks about immersing technology into art and that is very clearly seen when you watch any of the video games or any of the Pixar films.

People become more and more familiar with new mediums and as the familiarity increases, so does their ability to make art with it. I mean look at how simple the first cellphone games were. All I had on my first Nokia was Snake…a small snake that wrapped around, eating a piece of fruit and growing as you ate more and you had to avoid demise and couldn’t run back into your own body. Now cellphones have games that are over the top and span the imagination! Uniquely though, what we see in this art is affected by cultural patterns and the origins are often a very influential pattern throughout development of our art and entertainment.

Jones uses this example about our form now and how it’s influenced by the past, here, “…the stone columns of ancient Egyptian architecture were based on earlier bound papyrus columns.” The cool thing is that even if the original use of the technology is thought about in a different aspect, it can evolve and find a new use in modern day. “New forms of art and technology are frequently cast in the mode of old forms, just as other aspects of material and symbolic culture have been” (Jones).

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Jones, B. J. (1990). Computer Graphics: Effects of Origins. LEONARDO: Digital Image – Digital Cinema Supplemental Issue, pp. 21-30.

Although I know you can make art with a computer through programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, CAD, etc., I have never really stopped to think about the validity of the media in the art world. Does it make it less authentic if it is made with a computer instead of the hand renderings drawn by virtuoso architects like Frank Lloyd Wright? Isn’t it still the person tapping into their spirituality and their higher senses to create something?

What about if that art is used in a game? To me, I almost feel like that should make it more impactful since then the user is fully integrated into the medium. I know that when I have played video games, especially the more recent options out there, I am often blown away by the superior quality in the way the scenes are created. That being said, I will admit that Jane McGonigal did not have me convinced that playing these games could save the world and that we actually needed to play them more. However, by the end when she talked about what games they were developing and how they should be played, it began to make more sense. It was really an inventive strategy about how to bring awareness to things like oil shortages and famine and clearly had strong impacts on the user’s actions in real life which I find enormously commendable.