МедиаАртЛаб + Библиотека

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Библиотека

Райво Келомеес
Медиа-художник и эскперт в области мультимедиа (2000)
Тематика: Медиа-сообщества
Язык оригинала: английский

This text was presented at Pro&Contra conference in May this year:
http://www.procontra.danet.ru/

Main question relies in terms of how qualified as an expert should the
artist be in technical questions of multimedia, in using software,
computers, to work as an artist and author of media art? My experience
is that for young person with normal IQ and authorґs ambitions it is
enough about 1 year to develop oneself as a media artist.

Examining words “specialist in multimedia”, there are two options, to
describe it as nonsens or to undestand it in narrower sense, without
attributing to person competence in every subfield of multimedia
(graphical image, video, sound, content, programming etc.)

Artists shouldn’t be specialists in every subfield. In the ideal case
such persons are supposed to be multi-specialists, whome alike are hard
to find. As here lies the field of “multi”, whereto belong elements as
sound, video, graphics, hypertext, programming, HTML-coding and if
added to oneґs cultural competency and economical understanding, then we
can say - these are attributes for an artist of the 3rd Millenium. I
doubt if there is possible to find plenty of such kind of intellectual
super-humans, but it doesn’t mean that there are no people who are
dealing with something in every of those sub-fields.

Typical everything and something-doers in the field of multimedia are
artists. Somebody is good in smth. and somebody is less professional.
Reason, why they still do that (even if they know that there are people
who do it 10 times better) is their will to express themselves and
distribute their message. This is forceing to put all strenght into it.
And that is an important engine, which is pushing them to learn and
move. For some reasons it is underestimated. I would like to say that
this person, who has an “engine”, will to express thimself, “authorґs
blood”, can learn much faster and more as talented person, who is
intelligent in technological and mathematical questions.

It is possible to find artists with symbiotical mind, with artistic and
technological competency, but from my point of view we can follow
movement, that “authors” are learning technology, are achieving
professionality in that field and representing technological art, but
technological people quite rarely are working as artists. Their focus
seems to be in magnification of their incomes.

This point of view is focused on multimedia from art education
perspective. Art education doesn’t mean learning skills and training of
sight, but it means also to know in which extend to use skills in
culture and artworld and when it is better to use less skills. Does
those socalled professional skills fit in that world, are they useful?
And what do mean “artworld” and “culture”?

Main property of those is change. Traditional skills like polysher of
crystal or knitting of carpets are relatively useless from point of
contemporary artworld. New fields like videoediting, 3D-animation,
interactive design are not passed through filter of institutionalization
and hardly exists thanks to some entusiasts. Those fields doesn’ t
belong to official art education system in Estonia.

Works of artists, techno-artists and designers are often based on
feeling of context and catching the trends. In that sense for artists
there is not much to do with brilliance of useless skills, if artist
doesn’t feel where and why he/she is using those skills. Estonian artist
Eduard Wiiralt once described Marc Chagall as person with poor drawing
skills. Chagall is much more wellknown as Wiiralt, who was overskilled
graphical artist, almost national hero in Estonia but not much known
internationally. Notion and influence of art is not measured by
technological brilliance and amount of work presented in artwork. Here
is possible to recall another famous sentence: less is more.

Question of less and more is question of multimedia professional. Artist
is not doing his product into vacuum, but into cultural evironment.
Influence and notion of his work is not measured by amount of hours
spend by him or virtuosity of skills presented in work.

Оригинал текста: Media artist and expert in multimedia