rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn) (02/19/88)
People will explore the aesthetic potentials of ordinary objects to the extent that technology and costs allow. If you look at the history of industrial design there is no object so simple that it escapes aesthetic contributions. The only bounds are set by the costs. This has been true for millenia. It is only now apparent in computers because it is only in the last few years that affordable technology was sufficiently capable. When the affordable printers were used formed letters and fixed print spacing, there was little room for visual aesthetic contributions. (I remember the 1403. Bleah) Minor formatting improvements could be made, but the real expressive contributions had to be in the words and not the form. With laser printers there is enough flexibility that form itself can be explored as a medium. Since it can be explored, it is explored. This change may be more dramatic in the computer field because for a long time it has been dominated by the left-brained and non-visually oriented people. I recall a recent lunch with an artist and some mathematicians. She could not understand how people could be so excited by the beauty of a new technique for solving linear programming problems. They could not understand how she could be so concerned with the precise placement of a few little squiggles. The evolution from today's initial explorations into established aesthetics, styles, and fashions should be interesting to watch. It may be more disorganized and erratic in the computer field than elsewhere because of this gap between the old style computer users and the professional artists. Too many of today's efforts are being made by people who are completely ignorant of artistic methods. They have seen forms that they liked and they are trying to emulate them. My general reaction to these efforts is that they are poor cartoons. They are like photo snapshots as contrasted to Ansel Adams prints. I expect that as real artists explore this medium we will see the same kind of differentiation emerge as has occurred in the photographic field. This exploration may wait for display and printing technologies to improve further. I have worked with artists attempting to get prints of basic black and white artwork. Even the best offset printing cannot reproduce the fine details that are very important to their art. They really need edge positions equivalent to 5000 dpi, and lines as thin as 1000 dpi. Laser printers are nowhere near this good. Even with offset printing the artist must make significant modifications to style so that the printed work has the desired visual effect. I predict that the real blossoming of computer typography and presentation art will not arrive until the turn of the century. The real work will emerge on devices that support colors and fine line detail. Today only the direct-to-film computer art reaches this quality. (I know they don't have 5000 dpi. They use de-aliasing and grey-scale techniques to achieve their effects.) Rob Horn