I’d like to describe a collaborative experiment that started from recent attempts to use simple image manipulation to aid in discussing visual art, such as painting (see comment 6 here) or fiber art (comment 12 here). Quite a few artists these days work partly or wholly digitally, and I wondered whether some of the advantages (like Undo!) could be carried over to an otherwise non-digital workflow.
In one of the posts mentioned above, June Underwood described her huge, inspirational, and ongoing project at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. I proposed to cast myself as her assistant:
“The idea would be to take any work you are interested in looking at variations of, whether in progress, part of an ongoing project like John Day (so that there might be future works on the same subject), or part of a completed project, as an exercise in learning and appreciation through an interactive engagement with the work. I’m imagining that ideas for variations to look at and discuss could come from either of us, though I give priority to envisioning changes that you, as artist, are actually considering making or that could affect your handling of a future piece.”
June, to my delight, agreed to the trial, and realized she had a candidate to work on, an older dyed and painted silk piece called “Mountains of the Mind,” which she wanted to revise. The name comes from a difficult, bleak, and compelling poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I thought June’s piece was gorgeous, but the bit of blue sky seemed overpowered by the dominant warm tones. And despite the wonderful, chaotic churning in the lower part, which I associated with geological mountain building processes, I thought it seemed slightly static on a larger scale, with a squared-off look except for the strong diagonal in the upper left quadrant. Finally, perhaps because of the preponderance of warm and bright tones, the piece had more a positive than a negative emotional connotation for me. For what they’re worth, those were my initial reactions, and I was curious to see whether they could be altered with simple modifications of the artwork. Whether they actually made artistic or practical sense was a matter for June the Decider.
I wanted an easy way to compare versions and share them. This could be done many ways, but to simplify the process for June I built a frame-based page in HTML that can be used with any web browser and a set of images in the same folder (the file names have to be copied into the HTML). The one I used with June is here; feel free to copy the code. We also communicated using June’s test blog (subject to change) and a collaborative writing tool call a writeboard, the content of which (not the protected writeboard itself) is here.
To make a long story short, we went through several iterations over about a week, and perhaps we’re done with the experiment, at least for now. I think June has some good ideas and is anxious to proceed with the reworking as soon as she has time.
Steve’s perspective:
I had a great time getting to know the artwork much better than I would have just looking at it. I think the visualization helped convey ideas, but the written communication was also important. I think that just the effort of articulating can be productive of new ideas. If June ends up more satisfied with the work when it’s done, I’ll be thrilled to have played a small role, especially if she occasionally adopts our methods for herself in future work.
June’s perspective:
Steve’s query about collaborating with him pleased me. The particular piece, Mountains of the Mind, has been annoying me because it’s flawed, but I had reached an impasse about useful changes. I had played around with a few small emendations, but they didn’t begin to tackle the problem.
Collaborations, I think, can work really well, particularly when a fresh eye is applied to a problematic work. Steve was seeing Mountains of the Mind as it was, not as I had, through its many stages of progression and preconceptions. Moreover, he didn’t have to worry about the technical problems, which sometimes sidetrack me and can be unhelpful. And finally his HTML tool is a marvel: side-by-side comparisons is sometimes the only way to make decisions about changes. I do them clumsily in Photoshop; he did them elegantly with his coding.
Along the way, Karl and Birgit entered the conversation and provided further validation of Steve’s insights. I found the collaboration invaluable. Steve’s careful and serious work with the original and my intentions were the base which allowed me to accept and proceed with the revisions. I’m not sure I can succeed with the changes, but even if they don’t succeed, I have learned some important things. Working with Steve was a bit like working with a skilled teacher, one whose whole aim is to make your art better.
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What do you think of this experiment? Can you see ways to do something similar (or different) in your own art or teaching? Do you have any other ideas for June?
Wow, this is cool. I didn’t read your entire dialogue, but I found the option to compare your changes side by side really helpful when discussing your suggestions. I always have a hard time visualizing people’s suggestions and this takes away a lot of barriers in that regard. I know from experience that just having an outside eye that I can trust can be super helpful in making changes. there are “obvious” changes soemtimes that only become obvious when someone else points them out or even demonstrates them.
I am wondering if i can use this tool in the classroom? Especially when I teach color theory… the possibilities are endless.
I think the computer is a great tool for previsualizing changes before you make them. I haven’t had time to follow the links, but from what I can see here your experiment was very successful!
I must say, though, that I don’t really see this as a collaboration, in the sense that the work is still very much June’s, even though she benefitted from Steve’s excellent feedback. It would be interesting to see actual collaborations using this type of approach, where the artists pass their iterations back and forth, each making contributions, and the final work (probably in digital form, or some sort of output) is by both artists. I’ve talked about doing this with a couple of my friends, though we haven’t had the time to actually do a project together yet.
The computer is a wonderful connector. It’s a way for artists who are geographically or temporally (different schedules) far apart to work together. And of course by versioning up, you never destroy earlier stages of the work, so you can always go back to them (or have many completions). Musicians are doing this more and more, and I think we are just seeing the beginnings of it in visual art. It’s very exciting.
I am wondering if i can use this tool in the classroom? Especially when I teach color theory… the possibilities are endless.
Leslie, this would be a great tool for teaching color theory. I remember one demonstration my teacher (who was a student of Albers) did with two slide projectors, showing the way the color of a circle changed by changing the lightness of darkness of the backbround around it. Something like this would be much easier, and more versatile, with a computer. You could show the effects colors have on each other either side by side, or by sequentially making changes and seeing them dynamically.
David, you’re right, only the experiment is a collaboration. The artwork is all June’s.
Leslie and David,
I think I’d do a lot with something like this teaching color theory or art appreciation. Why did Goya make those pants green instead of yellow? Well, what happens if they are green? I suspect it would make it easier to learn how to apply ideas from color theory in real works, not just geometric shapes.
David,
Yes, I do use the computer to do that kind of thing in color theory – it is quite helpful in showing color’s relativity. I am convinced color goys like Albers and Itten would have had a field day with programs like illustrator and photoshop! I can’t do the same scrolling down comparision thing, but power point allows for a a lot of side by side comparison when you cut and paste a lot.
What I am wondering about is if there is a way to use Steve’s method of digitally making changes to show students how their work would look different with this change versus that change. Students are often so unwilling to risk changing a piece. If we could predict how a change will affect a piece, it may help them open up to more possibilities. The challenge I see is time. It would involve photographing the works in progress (getting the color quality right seems challenging to me, an amateur photographer) then making changes (I don’t know HTML yet so that part would involve a learning curve on my part) to show to the students. I would be more than willing to learn what I need to know, but part of me is skeptical about how worthwhile it would be versus how long much actual class time it would take. Steve, you wanna fly out to Missouri as a consultant :)
Students are often so unwilling to risk changing a piece. If we could predict how a change will affect a piece, it may help them open up to more possibilities. The challenge I see is time. It would involve photographing the works in progress…
Leslie, I know this is true for paintings, but for color theory maybe they could just work digitally.
David,
I would love to teach the class part digital at least, but not all. FOr one I think physically mixing the paint is useful in understanding color concepts. For another, the whole printing nightmare and calibrating the screen would probably be challenging. But the reality is that my college does not have enough computers in the classroom to do it all digitally right now anyway.
I should clarify – not enough computers in the studio classroom where I teach colro theory. they have state of the art elsewhere – there lies part of the problem!
I think physically mixing the paint is useful in understanding color concepts.
I agree up to a point, but color mixing and color interaction are two very different things. The time spent mixing can really get in the way of exploring visual interaction. We did our color studies using packs of ColorAid paper.
As far as what I did, I didn’t think about calibration or other technical issues at all. The nice thing about using side-by-side comparisons, rather than just single images, is that the effects of differences can be very clear, even if both images are rather “off” in terms of absolute color correctness.
What this means for the technology is that almost any digital camera and almost any image processing program suffice. Easiest would be an attached camera like some people’s web-cams. I think these are $50-100 for any computer.
Steve and June,
I enjoy this work you did together. It is refreshing to see people escaping the trap of the cliché that artists must be mad loners expressing a personal vision that no one else could understand and contribute to. Collaboration has been central to art throughout history. Your collaboration reminds me of experiences in my days in science. Scientists with different areas of expertise often collaborate to bring their work further than they could alone.
I also like the way you experimented with different presentation methods for both the art and the discussion. The frame display method that Steve developed is something we could incorporate into a blog system as well, with some programming. This would allow for comparison of images to images, and of images to text (comments, for example). We could also use it for side-by-side comparison of different posts, or the same post. Write board seems like a basic Wiki system. I’m not familiar with it, but it would be interesting to see how we could put this functionality into a blog as well. For example, imagine a document as a blog, and versions as posts. If there are several members of the blog, they can edit, post, comment, and repost, improving the document as they go along. With a system like WordPress MU (which June’s test blog is based on), it is fairly trivial to start a new blog for a new project like a document, or a new painting, or a discussion of a painting. This is a nice test of the limits of the blogging software we have available.
I can’t help having the feeling, however, that the ability to look at so many versions gives too many options to choose from. I realize it must be different for you being directly involved in the project. I feel a bit perplexed at all the variations. To be honest, I like them all. I could not begin to choose which I would want as the “real” version.
Steve and June, I think what you have really done his is to add another dimension to this work. It is as though you have turned a painting into a polychrome sculpture. Each variation is a different viewpoint on the same work. Thinking of it this way, I don’t have to select one image as the “real” version. I think a slide show which shows the images in sequence,would be one nice way to incorporate a different dimension (time) into the work. An alternative is to use stereo to see the work in “3 dimensions”. I do this by putting two images together on the two column frame display and then crossing my eyes to fuse the images into one (a prism apparatus could be used as well). The effect of this is quite neat, worth trying. Some combinations give remarkable sense of depth, and the colors and patterns can become vivid through “binocular rivalry”. Viewing the images in this way also allows for instant recognition of the areas that vary between the images. If you made very small changes, you could always catch them with this technique. If you move elements slightly to the left or right in one image, you can intentionally create depth effects.
If you produced a stereo slide show, then you would have a four-dimensional artwork…
David,
I have mixed feelings about color aid paper versus painting. Too expensive to do both(and expect students to buy supplies) and I am just a big fan of learning by mixing :) I guess color mixing and color interaction are both really important in my book…
Steve,
Yes. Good point about the color not having to be correct. Of course the color on the screen is different from the real live color, but obviously June still finds this exercise useful.
June, any thoughts on the experience of the screen version versus the live verison of your piece?
Karl,
The many variations now on the viewer were developed over time, and are shown in chronological order. Any one iteration between us was based on two or three potential variations. The divisions could be made clearer in the captions, we just didn’t put much effort into polishing anything.
An alternative viewing method that pops out changes is to have the image change when you mouse over it. That’s better for some purposes, but I set up the viewer to show two images at the same time.
Karl
I had not trouble picking out which version of the perhaps 10 or more of Mountains that I liked best. It was immediately obvious to me, perhaps because I had some very specific intentions as well as specific criticisms of the piece. And Steve picked up other areas where I was uneasy but hadn’t articulated my unease even to myself. As soon as I saw what he was doing, I knew it was going in the right direction.
The idea of incorporating this into the blog system is an exciting one. Go for it, Karl. (I’m still struggling to get the basic test blog up to speed). Steve gave me the code to make the page that allows the scrolling on both sides, but I haven’t ventured to try it yet.
And, the crossing of the eyes to give a sculptural version is definitely something I would like to try. I’ll have to wait, though, to do it in the privacy of my own, ahem, room.
Let us celebrate this new form of A&P interaction!
June’s textile art is gorgeous.
Leslie,
re: screen version versus live version: interesting conundrum. As someone (Steve?) mentioned, the screen versions are all relative to one another — that is, we started with the original jpg and cloned or sprayed or cropped using it. So no radical changes among the screen version occurred.
However, I’ve been re-working the live version using the screen as both a printing tool and a model, and I’ve run across some different challenges.
Painting from hard copies of the screen changes, I can deepen/darken/blue the internal sections without much difficulty because I can adjust according to the (live) surrounds. It’s mostly a matter of instinct and experience (and an ability to go with the flow of the paint). Those changes have a lot of flexibility and instinct attached to what will make them work best and that fits my “live” work.
However, printing on linen with a pigment based printer, I haven’t yet gotten a good reproduction of the side panels, or at least a good enough version that I can use use it at the top. This is the larger test of accuracy — there’s simply less flexibility in the outcome needed.
The outcome problem consists of too many variables, having to do with the original tiff image, the monitor settings, the calibration between monitor and printer, and the textile on which the printing is taking place.
This problem isn’t insurmountable (I’m good at fudging and there’s some flex in techniques and I haven’t tried everything I know how to do with the printer). But it could be that a certain amount of “temperamental” flexibility would be important — that is, students would have to know that what they see on the screen could be inaccurate; comparing a particular blue against a particular orange, for example, could vary depending on monitor differences. And could vary when set up against live pantotone samples, if you were running the Itten processes, for example.
By the way, I photograph my work in progress all the time.Partly this just gives me the kind of view that looking at a piece in a mirror or from a distance would give me. But also I can play around with changes I might be thinking of making. The digital camera gives me instant access to the image and I can get some sense, if only crudely, about possible options. It makes me wonder if putting this auditioning process into a workshop or short course might not be very helpful to students.
All that said, I have to reiterate — I think this process will save a (fairly important)piece that I wanted to save but was feeling hopeless about. The computer-generated frames that allowed moving the piece around on the monitor was important. but equally important were the live eyes that Steve (and Karl and Birgit) brought to bear on the piece. If it wasn’t true collaborative work (and David, I think you are right about that), it certainly was a valuable way to get a peer-to-peer critique that allowed for the “what if….” questions to be checked out.
June,
Fusing side by side images takes a bit of practice. In visual perception research, it comes in handy almost daily when reading journal articles with examples of stereo images. It’s also a handy ability to have when you see one of those puzzles where you have to say, what is the difference between these two pictures? If they are presented side by side, you can fuse them and answer the question effortlessly.
I still stand by my words: I like all the variations that you and Steve displayed.
I’ll offer a variation on Steve’s coding of the side-by-side display of images on Monday when I discuss what’s up with the new art blogs we are experimenting with.
June, another way to break up the symmetry on top could be to introduce a very bright light (brilliant whitish) on the left side only