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Handhelds Hardware

Palm Used in Contemporary Art 105

Posted by Hemos from the cool-ooking-stuff dept.
Malkthulhu writes "Artist Tom Kemp has created a huge new work of art with a Palm Vx. It is a staggering 4 feet by 17 feet and consists of one thousand tiny paintings all made using the TealPaint application. As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm."
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Palm Used in Contemporary Art More

Palm Used in Contemporary Art

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  • Hey, it's better than Tetris for those long meetings!
  • I guess the next Palm artist revolutionary will use TealPaint [tealpoint.com] with a color Visor Prism or Palm IIIc. What would be cool is if you could make large color images on your Palm-compatible (you can view them with FireViewer [firepad.com] already). I wish they had a better picture of the squigglies.
    ------
    James Hromadka

  • Patent it! (Score:4)

    by geophile ( 16995 ) <(jao) (at) (geophile.com)> on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:24AM (#676021) Homepage
    Yes, someone has done this, (e.g. Chuck Close is a recent example). But this guy did it on a computer, so now he can patent it.
  • The big deal is this: he thought of it first. Step back for a sec and consider the modern art movement. Everybody from Mondrian to Jack the Dripper to Cristo has been famous for finding some unique "hook" in their artwork. It's different, and therefore, cool.

    -Omar@my.2.cents.worth

  • I'm glad to see most everyone sees through this piece. I'm sure the idea was to woo "techies" by running the same old crap through a new vehicle. And to get some gallery owner in London who (conspicuously) uses a Palm to champion the guy.

    "As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm." Call me old-fashioned, but don't paintings usually require paint? If it were truly produced on a Palm, it wouldn't be a painting, if it were truly painted it would just be designed on a Palm. Either way, I'd call it more of a mosaic or montage or hanging bunch of doodles or something.

    Now if someone were to do the same thing with a few hundred screen shots of Asteroids...wait, no, that's my idea(TM)...

  • I agree...how lame can you get? "Hey, look at my artwork. Yea, I know it's just waste paper from the recycle bin, but it's art when you line it all up nicely on a piece of canvas!"
  • asdf jkl;

    There. ART! I'm using the characters and motions of my fingers commonly used in many western dialects. Someone pay attention to me and marvel over my creativity and artistic vision.

  • "...and yet he has produced one of the most cutting edge of contemporary paintings"


    Here's my cutting edge "painting".

    X

    I have simply titled it: "X"
    Now where's my grant money?
  • Can you rephrase your last paragraph. Your double negative parses to "I think art can be simply beautify, etc. without needing to make a point." But given the apparent typo: Should "It does appear to inspire feeling" be "It does *not* appear to inspire feeling", I wanted to make sure I didn't misunderstand your first sentace about beauty and meaning.

    In defense of the art, I did like the fact that it was: somewhat original, trying to capture the art of writing without using writing, and wasn't trying to make some tedious social commentary.

    Of course, I'd rather spend a few hours looking at portraits by artists of old.
    -----
    D. Fischer

  • As many have said before me, highsight is 20/20. We praise artists much as we do Comp Sci people, or ECE, or for that matter many other fields. Not for the ability to do something no one else can but for their vision to do it at all.

    Most of us could write ebay in perl fairly quickly but the reason we like ebay is that they figured it out first and did it. An artist of decent skill could duplicate many of the great works out there today...but they didn't have the vision.

    Feel free not to like the piece but don't put it down because you think it is too "easy" or "simple". After all, why didn't you do ebay first?

  • this guy did it on a computer, so now he can patent it.

    Would that mean that anyone (in the US, blah!) trying to decode any "meaning" in the artwork would be violating the DMCA?

  • Time series art. (Score:3)

    by DHartung ( 13689 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @10:17AM (#676030) Homepage
    This is actually interesting for two reasons. One, naturally, is the /. nerd quotient that it was made on a Palm. The other interesting thing is that it's a time-series art project. Most people seem to have missed this.

    Each of the drawings was done sequentially. While individually they are merely doodles, what's interesting is to look at the square-by-square progression of each doodle to the next.

    No, it's no Mona Lisa, but art isn't merely about making pretty pictures. A work like this makes you think about the production process, the mindset of the artist as he proceeds through all N iterations of the project. It makes you think about what can be accomplished with just a few pixels. It's not representational art, and approaching it that way is a mistake.

    It's the 21st century. Hasn't anyone had an art class since 1891?
    ----

  • More palm art (Score:4)

    by Zoyd ( 13778 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:45AM (#676031)
    These guys do some [endeffect.com]art on palms [endeffect.com]. Pretty good.

    (Yes, these are the fellows who do many of those amazing backgrounds that you see on screenshots at themes.org)
  • far be it from me to criticize someone else's art, but I too was expecting more a mural type thing--something more like those nifty pictures that when you view it from far away, its a cow or something, and when you go up close, its made up of lots and lots of little pictures of cows...

    In a somewhat related subpost--i do quite a bit of artwork on my windowsCE device... using the equivelant of MSpaint... Its not nearly as good as say--photoshop--mostly because i am limited to 4 colors, but its still pretty cool. Maybe i should convert some of the bitmaps to jpg and put them on the web--THEN I CAN GET A SLASHDOT STORY TOO!?!?! :P


    mov ax, 13h
    int 10h
  • ...I would love to see Chuck Close do something with this idea. Several years ago at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, I got to see a self-portrait Chuck Close did with THUMBPRINTS. It was about 4' by 3' and I was floored. The amount of time and work it must have taken is amazing to think about.

    If you have never seen any of his self portraits, you are missing a great work. Many of his self-portrait head shots are 10-12 feet high, by about 8 feet wide. He subdivides the entire canvas into small 1-4 inch squares. Then he paints abstract designs into each square. But when you stand about 5 feet from the canvas you see it is actually an awesome self-portrait. Think pontillism writ-large. So maybe Chuck could do a self-portrait in the same way Tom Kemp did this work.

  • Wrong idea. Ever taken a modern art class?
    Typing out "asdfjkl;" by itself isn't creating art. Being the one to do it *first*, perhaps as a reaction to another art movement, might be.

  • "If I make a mistake then I have to throw the painting away and start again." Damn ... there's 4 seconds he'll never get back...

  • Re:Dumb art (Score:4)

    by drivers ( 45076 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @10:26AM (#676036)
    "This work does not inspire feeling"

    Speak for yourself. I thought it was a cool hack. That in itself is inspiration to me.
  • asdf jkl;
    There. ART! I'm using the characters and motions of my fingers commonly used in many western dialects. Someone pay attention to me and marvel over my creativity and artistic vision.
    I see the truth of it.


  • Also the fact that the "art" he made was nothing any 2 year old couldn't best. I saw the examples on that website, and unless he has something better that they didn't take pictures of, he just scribbled onto a lot of files, saved them, then printed them. There's nothing artistic about it, nothing clever, and no talent involved. I have better tealpaint images than that, such as the one I drew of an evil tux, but we'll not talk about that.
  • If anyone wants to see some similar, but more photographic, sorts of things I recommend the gallery at CamBorg [camborg.com]. I've just had some of my Gameboy camera photos posted there, but otherwise it's images taken with the Casio Wrist Camera. At the moment the subjects and composition are a little immature, my own included, but I'm sure the artform will develop. The idea of peicing together a large peice like the one in this story is very appealling -- I think I might get myself a Gameboy printer.

  • The posts in response to this story give me the same feeling most /.ers get at M$-funded FUD papers about Linux. A good reminder that being clueful in one area usually doesn't stop people from spouting off on stuff they know nothing about.

    Most of the discussion (and satire) is centered around an idea of art (it "communicates" "meaning" based on the artists "intention") which hasn't been taken seriously in the art world for decades. The statement on the guy's site is pretty lame, but you'll note he doesn't talk about it meaning anything.

    The whole point of being a visual artist is exploring what stuff looks like. How it relates to the world of meaning and context is an important issue, but generally there are other media which do a better job of transmitting meaning (like writing). This guy is messing around with the process of classical abstract painting in a novel way. That in itself justifies it's existence.

    Whether you like looking at it or "find something" in it is something that you can work out for yourself. It doesn't really do it for me, even though I think the idea is interesting. But whether it's important in the larger scheme of contemporary art practice is something for the network of art critics, dealers, artists, and artgoers to work out.

    So offer an opinion by all means, but unless you have a serious investment in the arts community it doesn't count for much more than my opinion on your object handling in C++ (which I know nothing about).

    Danny

  • Like most art, it will be under appreciated until the artist dies ... or he drops his Palm Vx on the floor and it dies (the spiderweb effect on the screen of my Palm Pro after I dropped it had a magical, almost artistic effect, that moved me emotionally too).

  • As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm.

    Can someone define "serious"?

    Kemp lives and paints in the middle of the ancient city of Oxford, England and yet he has produced one of the most cutting edge of contemporary paintings.

    Give me a break. Cutting edge scribbles from some knucklehead with way way too much time on his hands.

    Each of the small paintings was made with the movements we are all familiar with in our everyday writing. However, none of them contain any known characters or letters.

    Right... and some people say masturbation isn't sex.

  • Build structural art with the Palms? In so much as that's about the only good use for them, I can imagine the 'fun' "art" that will be created... Of course, I'm sure Gulliani wouldn't allow it to be displayed, since the Palms so closely resemble crap, but can you imagine the leaning tower of Palm-za?
  • "As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm."

    You're really going out on a limb with that one.

  • I belive this is a dumb post for the opening page on slashdot?

    Anyone with me?

  • Re:Whats the big deal? (Score:5)

    by interiot ( 50685 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:26AM (#676047) Homepage
    I think he read too many "Wouldn't it be cool if we had a Beowulf cluster of those?!?" posts on slashdot.
    --
  • PPl are continuously saying that this is not "art"..
    First of all the old question: "what is 'art'? "
    Everything is art, maybe not to you but to at least one human. So everything has the "potential"; of being art.
    Art is not a subset of "things", but "things" are a subset or Art. Because there is way more to art then the tangible object if front of us. It's the idea behind it that count. Now that the idea is out, of course it's obvious.


  • This would have been more impressive if each image were done on an individual Palm and hung on the wall. Like the mural someone once made out of etch-a-sketches.
  • it's nice to see technology and art convergence covered on slashdot but honestly the work produced is really uremarkable. Just using new tools to make what is a rather uniteresting large doodle. This is less interesting than someone doing the same thing with macpaint. for a better example of tech(specifically the web) and art combo look at adaweb [walkerart.org]
  • No offense, dude, but...

    What?

  • Here's the first series piece of art on SlashDot

    .

    .

    Serious

    * Art*

    pay

    me

    .

    lots of $

  • Re: clipboards
    That's a nifty idea. It might be easier to sandwhich the mobo between two, thin, clear plexiglass sheets. That would give strength, and you wouldn't have to work as hard to smooth solder joints and fill in empty holes.
    -----
    D. Fischer
  • Absolutely a typo. This work does not inspire feeling, especially not as a scan on the internet. To be fair to it, I would still be interested to see it in a gallery setting since it is large. I always remember thinking that Rothko couldn't paint either, until I stood in front of one of his pieces.

  • Calling all lamers... (Score:5)

    by isaac ( 2852 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:50AM (#676055)
    Predictably, a lot of people are crawling out of their holes to shout "that's not special! I could do that"

    Well, this guy DID do it. The Mona Lisa it ain't, but at least this guy unassed himself to create something new. Good for him!

    Those of you offended at this guy's "bad art", go out and create something better, and show this guy up. Otherwise, you're all talk.

    Reminds me of the people who talk shit about rap requiring no talent "because it's just talking fast". It was always fun to put them on the spot and start beat-boxing, waiting for them to rap along "'cuz anyone can do that!"

    -Isaac

  • Way to quote a Nazi, dumbass. Goering would turn ANYTHING into a reason to reach for his gun. Dumb.
  • Yeah I looked. A bunch of squiggly pictures arrayed in such a manner to create a new picture. Kind of like Surat's stuff. My idea still holds.
  • Those of you offended at this guy's "bad art", go out and create something better, and show this guy up. Otherwise, you're all talk.

    Err, "creation" and "evaluation" are two completely separate skills. There's no drawing test to get into a museum, movies are watched by people other than actors, and so forth.

    If, in order to express my negative opinion about a piece of art, I must be capable of creating something better, then I will happily admit that that work of art is the greatest ever created, and thus none of us are worthy to judge it. Therefore, it should be safely locked away in an underground vault, away from our plebeian senses.

    Similarly, I will have to excuse myself from voting in this upcoming election, as I'm not nearly as polished a public speaker as any of the candidates, even when you factor in Bush's occasional stutter.

    And as an aside, if someone wishes to supply me with a Palm Vx, I'll be more than happy to try to make a better piece of art.

  • Re:Should be titled: "Man Bored In Meeting" (Score:4)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:52AM (#676059)
    Yes, but that's the entire appeal of the piece. Through a subtle juxtaposition of form and style, it manages to create a holistic embodiment of the tedium of modern existence, as expressed through our neo-techno-centric culture.

    Furthermore, it manages to utilize shading and light, in order to express a sort of fuzzy gray, that is neither black nor white. This shows the artist's intention of trying to break from the traditional, clear-cut boundries of society, instead opting for a nebulous ambiguity.

    Also, the work speaks to the viewer's logical side, for it implicitly poses the conundrum, "If this is not art, then it must be pornography. Yet I feel no sexual thrill from the work. Therefore, it must be art."

    Finally, the doodlish nature embodies man's inner-child. Are we not all children at heart, especially when we get a new, expensive, electronic toy?

    (I'm generally reluctant to post humerous material on serious stories. But I can't see how anyone in their right mind can take this work seriously.)

  • This kinda thing would fit better on The Onion [theonion.com].
  • You suck.

    Look at the snapshots of the work, clearly the artist is exploring common forms and motions used in calligraphy and penmanship. The piece shows the common motions used in calligraphy from a variety of sources, I can see stuff in there that is reminiscent of Arabic, Eastern calligraphy, and pictographic stuff.

    As a piece of art, I personally find it interesting, a good attempt at abstracting some of the features common to writing from many cultures and styles.

  • That's the single most hilarious thing I've read about this piece of "art" on the entire forum. I applaud you sir. The sad thing is, I've been known to absolutely adore crappy art before, but this, this is just sad.

  • >It's just a bunch of palm scribbles assembled on a piece of paper.

    I might add that Degas' charcoal sketches of ballerinas are little more than "just scribbles on a piece of paper."

    People used to say that Impressionism wasn't art because it didn't represent the world in a natural way. Amazing how many people today think Impressionism is not only art, but high art worthy of great analysis. Same applies to a lot of unusual (for the time) artistic practices of the early 20th century: Pick your art-ism... Impressionism, Cubism, Dadism, etc. If you don't know who Degas is without doing a Google search, you probably shouldn't expect to have your opinions of what is and isn't art carry much weight, by the way.

  • I actually thought it was kinda cool. Admittedly the patterns created were fairly simple, but they were an awfully good start for a completely new concept. Think of what Sol LeWitt could have done with this - and what this guy might be able to come up with after getting (constructive!) criticism of this piece.

    So quit yer bellyaching, all of you who didn't think it was the next Sistine Chapel. So what? It's a good idea nonetheless.

  • This has got to be the most disappointing discussion I've ever seen on Slashdot. The amount of pure ignorance about art is astounding. There are about 2 posts that genuinely critique the piece. The rest of you slugs couldn't rise above the "This is ART?, my 3 year old could do that, look-I-took-a-dump-let's-call-it-art" comments that I hear from my hick relatives in West Virginia. Truly pathetic.


    --------
  • ... whether this is the most miserable piece of "modern art" I've seen yet, or just the most insipid use of a Palm.

    "Because I can" is a reason to climb a mountain, not choose an artistic medium.

  • ...Writing on a 21st century Palm Pilot has similarities to writing Hieroglyphs 4000 years ago.

    I can't stand to see trash like this, but even worse is a bunch of people screaming that a work isn't ART. If you don't think that its Art, then keep walking, you only fuel the fire by mouthing off! I do think the article is interesting because someone is MARKETING this as 'Serious Art' though.

  • According to the majority of the posters on this topic, if it's not representational, then it's not art. How sad. It's as if the twentieth century never happened for its proponents. It reminds me of Kandinsky's notion that if music were held to the same incredibly rigid strictures of the visual art of his (and, sadly, this) time period, people would be insisting on having "real" sounds like breaking dishes and barking dogs and whatnot in musical compositions. Otherwise, the musician would be "limiting" the audience to the noises that say, a guitar makes.

    Why not make drawings that focus on form and mark making? Or sculptures that describe flowing shapes? Or paintings about the love of painting materials?

    Hasn't anyone here ever marveled at the delicate, weightless shape of a cloud? Or enjoyed the texture of a rock?

  • So, go ahead, express your negative opinion of art - I'm not grousing about people who do that. I just won't take you seriously if you say "Anyone/I can do that" without backing it up.

    In that case, I feel I definitely over-reacted to your post. However, I still feel that there's some merit to my arguments. While the odds are certainly against me literally producing a similar artwork, and while I due appreciate that the artist was expanding on a traditional art style, I still feel that I haven't gained anything significant from having viewed that art. The way I see it, the phrase "I could've done that", while not necessarily literally true, accurately sums up the poster's intent: Namely that creating one thousand "doodles" that (to most people) appear to be half-assed isn't a major accomplishment.

    So I suppose that there is a degree of vindication by calling the average Slashdot reader over the issue of the ease of producing something better. However, that still doesn't convince us that it's any better than, say, a modern artist who paints the top half of the canvas one color and the bottom half another color, and gets the result displayed in a museum. It seems that geeks, of all people, are much more willing to call "Bullshit!" when the situation dictates it.

  • About time somebody used a palm for something other than better CPU for a lego mindstorm
  • He didn't "throw a bunch of Palm Pilots together"; he just used his Palm Vx as the medium for making the sketches, which he printed out and arranged in a grid afterwards.

    You wouldn't compare Casablanca and Battlefield Earth without first watching them, right?

    Sheesh.

    Vovida, OS VoIP
    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • Well to create a similar effect you can just take any old image and run it through aview. Aview is a program that comes with the debian distribution which has the ability to render an image out of the observable ascii character set. It works quite well and will do almost the same thing.

    All you have to do it get it to run on the palm and it will work.
  • Art doesn't have to be "about" something. A work of art doesn't have to be a representation of something else. It can just be a cool-looking or emotionally provocative artifact of its own.

    I know, there's a bug knee-jerk reaction against this idea because most modern art is ugly. People tend to fight you over the idea until they are presented with an example that they actually like, like the Celtic abstract designs popular in tattoos, or the Eiffel Tower, or [insert your favorite piece of instrumental music].

    If you don't like these works, that's fine, but don't try to justify your personal preference by bashing abstract expressionism.

    By the way, these scribbles do mean something to the artist. As it says in the article, they're part of his "fascination" with the process of writing. So maybe they are really "about" a deep reverence for the human form, its manner of moving, and the way those movements can be captured on paper. Or maybe the artist was stoned and got into a groove on writing. I don't know. The point is, it's not devoid of meaning.

    Vovida, OS VoIP
    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • Yay! (Score:1)

    by Wiggin ( 97119 )
    more art for me not to apreciate!
  • I mean, imagine if he had made something that you could transmit to other Palms and it would modify itself (or the "user/viewer" could modify it). It's interactive, it's distributed--THAT would be new and interesting.

    You're right: That would be really cool. I have been teaching myself Palm OS programming (using the O'Reilly book [oreilly.com] :) ), and I just might take this and run with it as a fun exercise. I will credit you in the source and the About screen if I do so. Thanks!

    Vovida, OS VoIP
    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • The article doesn't mention it, but that Greek form of writing was used interchangeably with left-to-right script writing like the kind we do in English. Sometimes you find steles or tablets that switch into or out of boustrophedon in the middle. I'm not sure if there are instances where the writer switches several times in the course of a document, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were.

    Obviously the ancient Greeks had a different way of thinking about writing. Why this is the case is anyone's guess. It wasn't unfamiliarity with writing; almost all the free population of Periklean Athens, male and female, learned to read and write in public schools.

    Does anyone know of other languages where this phenomenon occurs?

    Vovida, OS VoIP
    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • Man I don't want to rain on the dude's parade, but this is the dumbest piece of artwork I have seen in a long time. It's just scribbles, bunches of them. A thousand scribbles. Boring. I'm looking for art that is difficult to make, not that is easy to make!
  • and it's art, makes me think of the old program on the C64 called Doodle..
    ..and the time was in some fancy art class just because I had to(long story). So I smeared a canvas with some paint and the teacher could see a lot of cool things in it. He must have inhaled... Like the guy that made that palm art thingy.
    --------
  • Cuz that's about what it's worth.

    Misfit
  • "The TealPaint application is a surprisingly powerful painting program. It has twelve different brush shapes."
    Wheee, I guess he doesn't see too many computers.
    --------
  • Too bad...
    I would have love seeing a full view of the painting.
    Maybe then I would be able to feel the size.


  • A non-issue--but for a different reason (Score:4)

    by OlympicSponsor ( 236309 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:30AM (#676082)
    I see a lot of responses here about "so he doodles on a Palm Pilot and suddenly he's an 'artist', so what". That's a pretty specious argument which is easily torn apart by a counter-argument: "so he slaps a bunch of colored liquid on a piece of paper and suddenly he's an 'artist', so what".

    It's not the "he's not an artist" aspect that makes this story uninteresting. It's the fact that this story is no more and no less interesting than if he had used babylonic cuneiform on clay tablets. THAT'S what makes this story boring--it's just like all the others. He hasn't created a new art form or used the Palm in a novel way--he's just done regular old drawing and combined them in a mosaic. His message isn't exploiting his medium, I guess I want to say.

    I mean, imagine if he had made something that you could transmit to other Palms and it would modify itself (or the "user/viewer" could modify it). It's interactive, it's distributed--THAT would be new and interesting.
    --
    An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
  • ... is that that Palm has other uses than what it was designed for. We usually see people doing techie stuff with them, but this guy went and made some serious art with it.

    If you don't think it's serious art, *YOU* try drawing a 4' x 17' piece in little segments. At least give the guy props for putting lots of work into it. Also, if you read the entire page, you'll see that he was modeling his piece after an ancient Greek style of writing. The piece itself is pretty neat, with an almost Escher-like style of one part blending into the next part to eventually transform into something else completely different.

  • Doesn't work on an etch a sketch... (Score:4)

    by quamper ( 229753 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:33AM (#676084) Homepage
    I tried doing that on an etch a sketch once, but when I took it into kinkos the just looked at me wierd when I asked them to print it for me.
    And I got all upset and started jumping up and down and my masterpiece was gone :(

    My next attempt was a light bright.. but that ended even worse...
    ---

  • I jammed mine into a door hinge to keep the door open. It wasn't designed for that (note the cracked display) AND it did a damn good job but that hardly makes it serious art.

    For what this guy will probably get for this "art," I would gladly draw a 4'x 17', hell a 20'x 20', mass of doodles. I don't think people deserve props for wasting everyone's time, even if they waste a lot of their own in the process.

  • More about art (Score:3)

    by cube farmer ( 240151 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:58AM (#676086) Homepage

    As others have pointed out, this work by itself [demon.co.uk] doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking. However, when considered as part of a series of works [demon.co.uk] by the artist, it does have more meaning.

    What Kemp has been doing over a longer period is exploring the medium of writing... How writing feels, how it looks, what it means.

    Almost be definition, Palm has established a new writing paradigm: handheld, portable, editable electronic writing. Yes, Apple's Newton and other devices have done this before, but the Palm popularized the medium.

    Kemp has taken this new paradigm and expressed it in meatspace, and quite well. If part of the meaning of art is to cause a discussion of issues, then not only has Kemp succeeded in creating a piece of surprising aesthetics, but also in fomenting a discussion of its merits.

  • Ya know, for a bunch of nerds, we sure have a lot of art critics on /. Especially some that have taken "art classes" or have sold art. They all say this is lame or that it's not art at all. First of all, art is the vision of the creator. Whether or not YOU like it is a completely different story. Personally, I've seen many pieces of art. I've been to the Museum of Modern art in several different cities (NY, SF, DC etc), and I've also seen the priceless works of Michelanglo, Da Vinci etc when I went to Italy. The conclusion that I've come to is, 80% of modern art would be considered as crap to most of you with your standards. Honestly, I don't like modern art either, but this is sadly enough, modern art. For example, the most tragic pieces of Modern Art I saw in these Museums (mind you this are priced at hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars) were either pictures of a red square and a blue circle on a white piece of 8.5 X 11 paper or a bunch of candy wrappers arranged on the ground. That is modern art, disgustingly enough it's considered priceless. Stuff like that doesn't compare to paintings during the renaissance era, or the "Romantics" as some call it. This just goes to show you what TV and other things have done to people. The idea of Creativity has changed, and unfortunatly, so has the perception of "art".
  • You're an idiot.... look at the picture first then comment. jackass
  • My first reading of the article lead me to believe someone had glued a thousand Palm Pilots to a canvas.

    Imagine my disapointment.
  • You know that feeling when it is late on Saturday night and you suddenly realise you are not quite sure whether that commercial is real or just a SNL parody?

    I got that feeling a little bit from reading his story. Okay, the the effort put into it seems pretty cool. The idea seems pretty cool. The finished product is also pretty cool.

    BUT
    "Because each small painting is printed life-size we can see the individual pixels. These contrast marvellously with the obvious swiftness and complexity of the movements the artist used when wielding the tiny electronic brushes."

    Now, that seems really overdone.

  • I thought the same thing when I saw the title of the article and even while reading it, however; when I go down to the part where they show some of the actual screens that make up the painting I thought "how kewl". From far away you see this slightly awkward square in the sense of the fact that it's missing a piece, when you get closer you see it's sort of a mosaic, a little closer and you see what each piece of the mosaic is made up of (individual squiggles), then you take a close look at the squiggles and you see that they have a flow to them (each a piece of each other in a way), then you look closer and those squiggles are made up of tiny squares that flow together to make those squiggles. Everything on the painting ties together into itself in a much deeper way then just paint forming a picture. From far away or close up they all work together to give you this feeling of completion in chaos. Digital and Analog working together. Like man in society working with his technology. Don't you see you uneducated uncultured tech weenies! It's art damnit!

    and if you buy that...great...I have other b.s. ideas to sell you on. Basically though it's art it's subjective and you're right they shouldn't have needed to add the fact that it was done on a palm. It would have been the same as if he doodled in a sketch book. Not really news but good enough to tell people who don't really get technology to think it is.

  • Movies are a good counter example. I probably couldn't write a good script, or shoot a good movie, and I may not have a PhD in "feelm", but I know what I _don't_ like, and I can most certainly compare "battlefield earth" unfavorably to "casablanca". And I know that throwing a bunch of palm pilots together to create "art" is just a means of taking advantage of the technologically unsophisticated for publicity purposes. :)

    -Dean
  • If I had moderator points, I would have mod'd you up.

    On a side note, is there a complex contraction for "I would have?" I mean, when speaking, I say: " I'd've " or phonetically "eye-dove". I don't think I'd've is a proper way to write it though.
  • There's a fine line between what's considered "art" and what actually turns out to be a self-indulgent piece of masterbatory crap on the part of the artist.

    A good insight into this culture is David Sedaris's recent book "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" in which he talks about his experience with the North Carolina performance-art crowd.

    -Dean
  • This may seem slightly offtopic...

    A lot of people are arguing, "How is this art? How is this original? All he did was doodle a bunch of times and put it on a poster." This is a valid practical argument, but I think these posters are missing the point. A guy slapping together 1000 pixelated drawings may not be good art to a lot of people, but the original application of technology in an expressive form is as much art as anything else. It's all in how you define human expression.

    Why do I think it's original? Simply because I don't think anyone has done anything like this before. Jim Dine, for example, usually uses hearts, skulls, robes and tools in his artwork, and while he manages to approach these subjects in a colorful and interesting way, the most original thing of his I've seen was a heart shape made of straw [enquirer.com] that measured about 5' by 3' by 1'. The heart shape itself is not original; making a large one out of straw and placing it on its side is - in my opinion, which is what it all really boils down to.

    Some Jim Dine links, fyi:

  • I wholeheartedly agree. And remember, folks: There is no art! [saunalahti.fi] Never fall into trap of comdemning what you don't even try to understand. I read the article and thought this idea was interesting...

    -W4, a random artist and art lover =)

  • The first thing I think when I saw the article was that 1000 Palms, That's like at least 200 grand! Talk about expensive canvas.
  • Looking at Kemp's other work does nothing to persuade me that the "palm" mural is "great" art. However, his other art, specifically the stuff he did with his hand [demon.co.uk] and other objects [demon.co.uk] on scanner beds is quite interesting to look at. His other artworks remind me largely of chinese or japanese design, where the writing itself is considered an artform. I don't get as much from that as i do the scanner bed stuff. That's a good use of technology for atristic purposes. interestingly enough, the scanner bed stuff is something that we all (concieveably) could do. heck, i've played with moving objects on the scanner bed before, never considered it art, but it looks pretty cool.
  • Whatever dude...you must be on the pot. To each his own I guess. - SG
  • One thing's for sure, you guys (mostly) don't know art. All your blathering about how Kemp's piece "aint art", or is "dumb" shows that you know jack about art. Art no longer needs to be representational. We got over that, oh, when was it, the thirties maybe? If any of you have taken any art appreciation courses as part of your required courses in college, you may remember that there was a movement called abstract?

    Yeah, really, it can be considered art if it doesn't have kittens with big eyes, or dogs playing poker. Amazing, aint it? It can be art if the artist is exploring the physical gestures employed in writing language. Wow, pretty high concept, huh?

    And Ichimunki, how can you even bother to have an opinion, if you haven't seen the complete work, much less in person? You label it NULL, after having only seen small details. Pfeh! You lack integrity.

    Frankly, I expected better from the /. crowd. But this goes to show that the technical crowd are sometimes sadly narrow in their range of knowledge. Yes, you can reprogram the traffic light system to give you green lights from your house to work at a given time, but can't tell the difference between anime and fine art.

    The "If I can't understand it, it must be crap" mindset seems like the exact opposite of what you'd expect to find here at /.
  • I may be showing some of my "lack of culture" but what is the big accomplishment here? I am sure that hundreds of people have made doodles on their Palms before, and this guy goes to Kinkos and prints them out in a large manor and he is an originator? This would have been a far greater accomplishment (or perhaps an accomplishment at all really) if he had created some coherent picture by only drawing one screen at a time, and then placing them all together in the end. I am sure that before the advent of the Palm Pilot some artist somewhere has thrown together a bunch of small pictures on a single canvus, and I am willing to bet that most of the people who read /. would upon looking at it said 'So what?' but because its on a Palm Pilot its revolutionary. What I'd really be interested to know is how many people would really be interested in something simply because its done on a digital medium. I don't see why its such a big deal, as every day the digital world is becoming more analogue and lifelike. Eventually I hope this digital lust ends and people start to appreciate art not because of how it was made, but what it says.
  • and this sure as fuck is not art. try www.pocketpig.org for real palm art.
  • I thought they meant someone had taken the palm of someones hand, cut it open (as they do in all modern art) then put it on display.

    Couldn't think what all the fuss was about....

    ---
    It was pity stayed his hand.
    "Pity I don't have any more bullets," thought Frito.
    -- _Bored_of_the_Rings_, a Harvard Lampoon parody of Tolkein
  • Yeah, I was kinda disappointed when I saw it, too. I was expecting a huge mural with each palm contributing an integral element. Not a bunch of individual crappy scribbles that join together to make... nothing.
  • Come on, I could pick the mayo out of my garbage can, throw it on a piece of paper, scan it, and call it art? I was making scribbles in Teal on my original Palm Pro. way before he even picked up a stylus... it's pathetic where "art" is heading. What's wrong with these people?

  • Re:Dumb art (Score:3)

    by ichimunki ( 194887 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:37AM (#676106)
    As a person with a degree in fine art, who has actually managed to sell artwork, and is a regular attendee at galleries and museums, I have to agree with this sentiment, if not the exact wording.

    The piece taken as a whole is incoherent at best. There are 1000 of these screen shots, but they are not arranged in any way that is actually pleasing. Nothing in the work speaks to the electronic scribble origination of the screen shots-- unless you want to state that the presentation is so incredibly sterile as to be unmistakably machine made. Some of the individual scribbles appear to be incredibly graceful, which makes the whole thing that much more tragic in it's complete lack of coherence. I find it appalling that any real meaning assigned to this piece will have to be scraped together post hoc, and that if the artist had any intentions in the creative process that they are largely unexpressed.

    Finally, as I somewhat stated already, the part of this piece that comes from having been executed in part on a Palm is irrelevant. This same effect could have been achieved by painting a grid on a canvas and then scribbling in each of the spaces. I'd be a lot more impressed if the Palm had been used as a tool rather than as a kind artistic buzzword to obtain legitimacy for what is otherwise an empty art object. For instance, why not use Tealpaint to capture quick sketches of places/things/etc that wouldn't be practical to take a traditional analog drawing/painting tool too. Because the Palm is symbiotic with a PC, this could lead to a remote reworking of the sketches. But this work completely overlooks the Palm's dependence on a second system.

    Finally, I don't think art can't simply be beautiful, elegant, or even ugly without making a point of some sort, but this is utterly NULL. It says nothing. It does appear to inspire feeling. It won't even match the carpet in a corporate lobby.

  • It's not bad (Score:5)

    by CharmQuark ( 200261 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @09:38AM (#676107)
    This, as I am sure many people will say, is not a revolutionary concept. People have been string pictures together in various ways for a very long time. Another collage or storyboard does not in itself make art.

    What is interesting is the use of a palm to talk about writing. Writing or drawing on a piece of glass is a very different experience than writing on paper or parchment or plywood or whatever. The potentially artful part of this may be the progression of the pictures, as the artist grows comfortable with this new medium and the restrictive size. Even in the few squares we can see, there is much experimentation. For example we see the contrasts of various levels of white space, or various amounts of entropy. If nothing else, the palm allows the artist to express an emotion or thought immediately.

    Of course, it looks simple and we all say we could do it; but how many of us do. We have to give the guy credit for trying.

    • Cure For Cancer Demonstrated (rejected)
    • PS2s May Catch Fire? (rejected)
    • Linus Hit By Bus (rejected)
    • Dopey Palm Art Shown (accepted)

    Slashdot has never had a shortage of fluff content and re-runs, that's for certain.

  • *FART* Hey look, I made some art! Quick, someone buy it before it's gone!
  • How does palm store it's drawings/writings? Can it store in a vector form so that it can be printed out in high quality or is it stored in a bitmap form?
  • If, in order to express my negative opinion about a piece of art, I must be capable of creating something better, then I will happily admit that that work of art is the greatest ever created, and thus none of us are worthy to judge it. Therefore, it should be safely locked away in an underground vault, away from our plebeian senses.

    Did you read the first line of my post? The one that said

    Predictably, a lot of people are coming out fo their holes to shout "that's not special! I could do that"?

    It's to those people that I say "put up or shut up."

    Evaluation and creation are two separate skills, but an adept in either skill will have some familiarity with the other. An artist incapable of evaluating his/her own work is an artist incapable of change. Likewise, an art critic who has no notion of technique or a broad knowledge of works won't be able to render an informed critique of a work, merely a personal opinion which I, uninformed as I am, am perfectly capable of generating myself.

    So, go ahead, express your negative opinion of art - I'm not grousing about people who do that. I just won't take you seriously if you say "Anyone/I can do that" without backing it up.

    -Isaac

  • I actually found this rather interesting. It shows an evolution of work in time (of time?). The first time I saw something like this was in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and he would take a long strip of paper and start doodling across it. He didn't have many samples, but he did have other doodles for the chapter headers that changed as he did.

    So what fascinates me about this Palm art is not that it was done with a Palm, but rather how it seems to be a two dimensional projection of a length of time.

  • For all you non-art appreciators out there. There's quite a ggod many artists out there who can code Assembler that would blow the hot grits out of your pants. Feel free to check out Interaccess in Toronto [interaccess.com] and Deadtech in Chicago (yes... my space. plug plug.) Check out [deadtech.net]seemen [seemen.org] for some massive fire and pneumatic art. and of course the granddaddys survival research laboritories [srl.org] web controlled art. pitching 2x4's through steel plates and fire out the ass.

    This is _true_ art and technology. robotic art. internet art. telepresence. cell phone art. emebedded electonics. shaft encoders. et al. not photoshop wank on a flatscreen. enjoy!!!

  • I'm encouraged to see the high percentage of people here who recognize this 'art' as the obvious trash that it is. Thanks, everyone, for showing evidence of having a brain.

  • You know what they say about modern art... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Creativity without skill leads to modern art."
  • Screwed the interaccess link. should be interaccess.org [interaccess.org] not .com Sorry about that.

  • http://members.rotfl.com/vadim/rcx/ http://www.advancenet.net/~kory/pilot/ http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/
  • ...any time a geek uses his palm for something other than personal gratification is a cause for celebration.

    ;-)

    --

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