Laura Nalesnik - MouseWhiskers Studio

About a year ago, I had a hard drive crash. I was able to retrieve most everything. But it got me thinking.

1. Buy a backup hard drive. Now. Use it.
2. If all I have left of a painting I created in Photoshop is a nice print, have I lost the important part of that work?

The last one really kept me up at night.

If an artist creates a work in paint, clay, pencil, whatever, that itself is the work of art, the finished piece.
You can make copies of it, print it, photograph it, but the work itself is the real deal.
Something is real when you can hold it in your hands, look at it in the round, sniff it, touch it. Right?

Even though my drive had crashed, and the work was gone, I still had the print. If I had created it in an analog fashion, that’s all I would have had anyway. Why was I freaking out? It sure felt like I had lost the work.

For a digital artist, what is “real”?
When does “real’ occur?

Is it real in your imagination before you ever put it down to draw it?
Is it the file in the computer, always alive and ready to be updated?
Is it real when you print it out?
Is it real when the file is finally viewed, online, or as a print? Does it take interaction for any work to be truly real?

It feels that while the piece is still in the machine, that it is incubating, always gestating. When it’s printed, it’s just a moment, but not all of them.

But it also feels like “in the computer” is kind of like ‘in a dream” . It’s an external repository for the imagination. But to quote The Matrix, “there is no spoon”.

But now, I back it up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.