Results tagged “art”

Last week's issue of The New Yorker attracted a lot of attention for its cover art, which was created on an iPhone by artist Jorge Colombo.

From the New York Times to gadget blogs to design sites, the work certainly got a lot of attention. But while a few stories did a decent job of talking to the artist behind the work in addition to covering the technology involved, most seemed like they were fixated on the tools instead of the end result. That'd be understandable if all of these venues were filled with people who'd never seen an iPhone before, but even the tech-savvy got pulled into the "gee whiz, a small computer can make pictures!" aspect of it.

The truth is, Colombo has been creating art for The New Yorker (albeit not covers) for a decade and a half — he didn't suddenly become a recognized artist by using an iPhone. It's not surprising that the magazine would encourage an established talent to use new media to express himself. But that odd fixation on tools over talent perhaps reached its apotheosis in the New York Times's story on Brushes, Steve Sprang's clever little app that Colombo used for his artwork. The piece offers a link for buying the application, but doesn't explain how to buy any of Colombo's work. While I'm glad to see the application's creator recognized, it seemed odd that in all this coverage, very few people talked about how to support the artist who made the cover itself.

Fortunately, we have the means to support Jorge Colombo's work within our community as well. Colombo has been featured on 20×200 a number of times, and in fact his iPhone editions made their debut back in April on the site, as Jen Bekman gleefully notes here.

So, go ahead and buy Brushes. That's cool — Steve Sprang deserves to be rewarded for his creativity. But I think we should be recognizing Jorge Colombo as the artist who uses these tools as well. A work like this beautiful sketch of an interior at Grand Central Terminal starts at just $20. Our technologies are succeeding best when they become invisible or irrelevant compared to the ideas they're being used to express.

One of my recurring fascinations is people creating works of art using common productivity software. Office Tools of Expression as a review of this medium that I wrote last year, and Excel Pile offered an overview back in 2004.

Today, the idea of using office software as a means of expression is popping up more and more frequently. Danielle Aubert released 16 Months Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel about two years ago, as a fifty-dollar coffee table book offering exactly what the title suggests. Writer Response Theory presented a terrific overview of the work at the time, as well as an interview with Aubert:

I started making Excel drawings, never spending more than 30-40 minutes on each one, and I tried not to get hung up on whether I was making non-representational versus representational versus abstract versus systems versus typographic drawings. I just made drawings about anything that I thought might be pleasing in some general way. After a while I started to copy one day’s drawing into a spreadsheet for the next day’s drawing because I found that that way the drawings could build on themselves and maybe become a bit more complex. But really my main objective when I began making them was to experiment with making ’small art’ - or the equivalent of my friend’s small poems - in Excel.

And then, for the holidays this year, the Google Docs team has gotten into the game. They've released "Collaborative Spreadsheet Art", a winter-themed piece created by four artists working simultaneously in the web-based spreadsheet app. The introductory movie is only a minute long.

The Google Docs holiday site offers more insights into the creation of the work, including a look behind the scenes. Now I'm just waiting for the various web-based art programs to make performance videos of people using their tools to do calculations and analyze data.

If you're really taken with this stuff, my earlier post gathers up a list of interesting links about office app art.

One of my favorite posts that I've ever written was Excel Pile, about people's propensity for using Office tools like Microsoft Excel to track mundane parts of their lives, or even as tools of artistic expression. From that post three years ago:

[A]lmost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss's mood. There's no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one's personal life.

The team behind Microsoft Office for the Mac has built a site called Art of Office around exactly this concept. I had intended, with that original Excel Pile post, to make a site (called Office Pile, actually) which would let people share and collaborate around these kinds of expressive documents, and it's exciting to see that someone has done exactly that. At Microsoft, no less! They describe the site well:

Art of Office is for Mac users pushing the boundaries of what can be done in Mac Office. Explore. Contribute. Reuse. Remix. Add your best work. Take what you like (giving credit where it's due) and make it yours.

Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo created some postcards in MacWord, Phil Torrone made a 361-slide PowerPoint deck of illegal primes, and Pixelfreak made (what else?) pixel art in Excel. I dig it.

Blog readers who liked this post also enjoyed:

• Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, David Byrne's PowerPoint-as-art effort, released as a book that comes with a CD of the presentation. I had a chance to see the man himself present some of the slides at the book's launch,and quite enjoyed it. See also the official EEII site and a 2003 Wired story on the piece.
• Excel Pile: 130 different comments about how people use office apps in their personal lives.
• Office 2007 is the bravest upgrade ever, where I wrote about how ambitious I think the most recent version of Microsoft Office is, and inspired endless flames.
• Two posts about a press story on the recreational use of office software.
• And one to miss Leslie with: Click To Add Title, Leslie Harpold and Michael Sippey's seminal PowerPoint competition.

End of slide show, click to exit.

Armin Wagner's created a brilliant collection entitled Crates and Barrels, cataloguing the ubiquity of these containers in video game culture. Though they're obviously favorites in 3D games for their simplicity (hey, that's a cube, and that's a cylinder!), there's something kind of pleasing about the way they cross so many genres and generations of games.

You can even get separate lists of the most recently uploaded crates and barrels.