The Digital Age

Technology has changed our world and fine arts education is not immune. Computer-based editing is reality in the music and film industry. Computer-based lighting, set and costume design is reality for the theatrical world. Digitized images manipulated in computers, printed by ink-jets, are the subject matter on exhibit in the George Eastman House in Rochester and on the Internet globally.

To prepare our students for that world, indeed, to initially recruit students, our curriculum must include computers as tools for their creative expression. And increasingly, our curriculum will be available on computer.

Dean Tom Dodson sees the need to focus the college's efforts in technology. "Individual faculty use technology in their creative work and in teaching. Clearly, there is a need to support that activity and to coordinate that development," says Dodson, who created a new position to provide that leadership.

Taking on the mantle of College of Fine Arts Associate Dean for Technology is Dennis Farber, also a professor of painting and drawing. Farber heads the college's Ad Hoc Committee on Technology which will explore opportunities and lend direction on the topic.

One of the college's major opportunities is additional space at the old UNM bookstore. Renovations planned in collaboration with the Biology Department add a third floor to the building to house a Shared Technology Center. The Department of Media Arts will occupy a majority of that floor with its offices, seminar rooms, video editing rooms and production studios.

"This collaboration with the Biology Department brings an exciting potential to explore content and disciplines in creative ways," says Dodson.

Technology upgrades are also being made in computer labs in the Theatre and Dance Department, the Music Department and the Art and Art History Department. The integration of this newly available technology is reflected in new course offerings and revised curriculum.

"We haven't solved all our problems," says Dodson. "We have continued need for funding to keep up with technology."

Though in some ways, the College of Fine Arts is playing technological "catch-up," there are many exciting projects underway as demonstrated in this newsletter. "The future holds great potential," states Dodson, "and we are currently creating a long-range plan to guide our emerging programs in arts technology."

TAMARIND USES COMPUTERS FOR COLOR PROOFING EXPERIMENTATION

The use of Photoshop software customized with simulated lithographic materials, "allows artists to go wild, to explore avenues of expression they might not otherwise try," explains Marjorie Devon, Tamarind director. "It helps them understand color composition and allows them to be more adventuresome because they can make dramatic changes with just the flick of a button. Artists can narrow their choices to make the hand-proofing session more efficient."

Artists can use computer proofing two ways: by scanning their initial sketch for a conceived lithograph or by scanning a finished lithographic proof into Photoshop. The program then allows separate color layers to be manipulated with a multitude of variables. The customized software was created by Tamarind Education Director Jeffrey Sippel and intern printers Paul Croft and David Afsha-Mohallatee, working with the UNM Media Technology Services to scan in color ink samples and several variations on lithographic wash and crayon textures.

Sippel, who teaches Tamarind's professional printer program, is also developing CD-ROM instructional software for computer proofing in partnership with Media Technology's New Media Center Program. UNM is one of the 21 founding New Media Centers established in 1994 to improve higher education through the use of innovative new media tools and technologies. Partnerships with hardware, software and publishing companies such as Apple Computer, Adobe, Macromedia and Korg, allow New Media Centers on campus to introduce faculty to the tools and techniques of digital media.

TECHNOTOPIA

THE 1997 GALE MEMORIAL LECTURE SERIES

The Department of Art & Art History celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Gale Memorial Lecture Series with "Technotopia." This fall, visiting artists and faculty presented a spectrum of views on cyberculture in the annual lecture series at UNM Center for the Arts. Topics ranged from art history to the exploration of computer technology in artworks.

The Technotopia Series was coordinated by Steve Barry, sculpture professor; Geoffrey Batchen, art history professor; and Michael Cook, painting and drawing professor.

The 1997 Gale Memorial Lecture Series is named in honor of Dr. David Gale and his wife, Sylvia, who bequeathed their home to the College of Fine Arts. A permanent endowment established from its sale supports the annual series.

MEDIA ARTS' NEW HOME

Ira Jaffe Head of Media Arts

Also, video screens in the corridors will exhibit scenes or attractions from recently acquired works from around the world that are being incorporated into Media Arts classes.

Perhaps most important is that Media Arts will have a home! For the first time since the program was established in the College of Fine arts in 1989, Media Arts will have key resources together in one place, rather than dispersed over separate stories and buildings.

"These resources will include the mini-theatre, small editing rooms, equipment storage and checkout, film and video archive, a multi-media seminar room, a conference room, a student lounge, and offices for staff, faculty, and graduate assistants--in short, critical mass for richer conversations," says Ira Jaffe, Department of Media Arts head.

"In keeping with plans for the expansion of Media Arts' technical resources, and of our dialogue and responsibilities, the program will hire by the end of the current academic year a film and video artist conversant with new technology to fill a tenure-track faculty position in production," states Jaffe. Working with a number of excellent part-time faculty, this individual will be Media Arts' first full-time faculty member for production since the program became an official academic unit offering a Bachelor of Arts in Media Arts degree in 1996.

KIDS, MUSIC AND THE INTERNET

Nancy Uscher Professor, Viola

<"Global Perspectives in Music through the Internet" was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project taught music by involving students in distance learning.

The 18-month project is now completed, but Uscher believes the impact continues. "Hawthorne has expanded their computing agenda a great deal since our pilot project," says Uscher.

UNM students also learned a good deal from the pilot project. Education, art and computer science students explored issues which evolved from the Hawthorne Elementary project in a "Problems" class supervised by Uscher.

ARTIST DATABASE IMPROVES ACCESS AT BUNTING SLIDE LIBRARY

Researchers will soon be able to cross-reference one of the nation's largest and most comprehensive academic collections of images of Native American art. The Bainbridge Bunting Memorial Slide Library, a division of the College of Fine Arts, is creating a searchable database of the Native American artists represented in its collections.

"Phase one is an in-house database," explains Sheila Hannah, library director. "We are working with a local company to develop the software application. Phase two will be migration to the Internet, but we are still looking for funding."

Previously, artists were referenced by name in an alphabetical card file. With the new software, each artist will have multiple cross-references in addition to name: nationality, tribal affiliation, life span, variant names, and location of images of their art in the Bunting collections. For example, images of Allan Houser's art are located in the library's sculpture, painting and graphic design collections.

Faculty of the College of Fine Arts as well as the School of Architecture and Planning use Bunting Library's images in class presentations. The visual resources library has more than 300,000 documented slides, photographs and digital images illustrating world art and architecture from pre-historic times to the present. In time and with funding, it is hoped that the entire collection will be searchable by a cross-referenced database--available on the internet.

THE WET LINE DARKROOM IN THE AGE OF THE DIGITAL, ITS EFFECT ON TRADITIONAL MEDIUMS: TRADITION OR ANACHRONISM?

by Michael Cook, Art faculty

(excerpted from a panel presentation on "Traditional and Lost Art Techniques at the End of the Millennium" at the Mid America College Art Association annual meeting held October 1997 in Richmond, Virginia)

In recent years traditional "wet line" darkroom techniques and its variants have been confronting momentous changes in image making technology, specifically the impact of the computer or digital imaging. For many artists this development is a seamless and logical evolutionary progression, for others a serious threat to tradition or what is thought of as the aesthetic of "the hand in the work" and perhaps for the vast majority of artists an issue of little consequence.

The impact of the digital world crosses all media and is not specifically identified with photography. Traditional disciplines such as painting/drawing and sculpture are equally effected although perhaps in not so obvious and direct ways as photography or printmaking, the mediums in which the impact would be thought to be the most apparent.

Site specific and time based art works are also in many instances effected by digital technology. This development raises many interesting questions for artists, but perhaps more perplexing questions for institutions engaged in fine arts education.

The UNM Department of Art and Art History is a top-rated program with strengths in the areas of painting and drawing, sculpture, photography and printmaking. Its history has been one in which the applied arts (industrial design, graphic design, advertising design, etc.) have been absent since the beginning of the department, the focus being on fine arts. This focus is based upon the classical notion of the university as an institution whose mission is education and research. Because of this focus on tradition, in which the presence of the "artist's hand" in the work is pre-eminent and the intention investigative and non-commercial, the impact of digital technologies on the various disciplines within the school has been "delayed." This is not necessarily a bad thing, considering the nature of advancement in digital technology, which at this moment in time has hardware and software upgrades in approximately six month cycles.

Machines are significantly better than several years ago, especially when you consider speed, so fundamental to image processing and non-linear digital video editing. It is only within the last several years that the Art and Art History Department has started to build a digital imaging capability. In the process of building this capability, many questions arise that are a result of not only aesthetics and traditions, but also of the practical: the world of budgets, equipment and facilities. UNM, like most institutions, has struggled to maintain existing programs, let alone expand and create new ones; there have not been enough resources. Naturally when it comes to constructing a whole new lab out of finite resources, certain discussions will be generated. At UNM, the discussion has traveled a broad range: from engaging theoretical and aesthetic questions about the role of traditional wet line darkrooms in the future of image making to practical considerations about the continued environmental impact of chemicals used in darkroom processes and the cost of both processes to students.

When one looks at the "landscape" of contemporary art, it is exceedingly apparent that the use of images that are reproducible across all media. Much of it is contained in digital files, much of it on film or paper, whether literally the work of art or the conceptual basis or reference point for the work.

Technically speaking it is safe to say that the wet line darkroom is now entering the period in which it is becoming an antique or traditional process. Commercial printers and newspapers, for example, have all but eliminated most of their traditional wet darkrooms, replacing them with digital equipment.

For artists, this is of little consequence. The majority of artists tend to accept or reject a wide range of tools and there is always an interest in the new as well as the old as it applies to one's work. Artists also possess an amazing ability to get their hands on equipment and materials. From the beginning artists have adapted commercial processes. It is possible to reproduce or reinvent many techniques in the studio. Photography in its brief history is now entering a phase in which images shaped by an earlier technology are being thought of as traditional, while images shaped by the logarithms of software are being greeted by some with the same suspicion reserved for the photographic image in previous times or...more paradoxically embraced with little forethought. This is perhaps part of a larger tendency within a technological western society that is increasingly distanced from the source of its own culture/s and means of material production.

Digital images and artwork that exist solely within cyberspace and are displayed on a cathode ray tube or liquid crystal display may be the true inheritors of the image-makers legacy--a physical support for the work, in the traditional sense, becoming totally irrelevant. This space, this culture, is a cyberculture and is defined by cultural critic Mark Dery as "a far flung, loosely knit complex of sub legitimate, alternative and oppositional subcultures (whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities, often framed by a radical body politics)...(Cyberculture) is divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, fringe science, avant garde art and pop culture." (Dery, Flame Wars, The Discourse of Cyberculture, Duke University Press)

Sound familiar? This definition seems to bring us full circle to the traditions of what many conceive to be the role of a contemporary artist, these characteristics are restated here but first acted out in late 19th-century Paris and are still profoundly relevant at the end of the 20th century. It reveals how strong a force those traditions continue to be for most of us.

If, in this period of assimilation and transition to new tools, we as artist/educators, the faculty and their administrators, are not articulate enough, educated enough, to understand that the digital is in fact just another tool and proceed to eliminate those traditional darkroom facilities and techniques in the belief that the digital capabilities of new technologies can produce those qualities inherent to the traditional darkroom, we will have made a profound mistake.