notes from underground

For anybody who’s interested, I now have a more formal portfolio website available at kadamwhite.com. Yeah, a little narcissistic, but it seems like everybody’s got personal pages in their own name these days and far be it from me to deny an overwhelming trend in my target industry!

There is also now a navigation bar link to the site

Dubbed “the new Katamari” by my housemates for its insane visual style, slightly psychotic gameplay and all-consuming soundtrack, Patapon is the main reason I won’t give my friend’s PSP back to him. Penny Arcade made a very good set of arguments against the game, and I agree with all of the points made in their newspost, but as Tycho blogged later on, “I had to play Patapon for quite awhile before I figured out why I didn’t like it, and then I had to be quite sure I didn’t, and then I had to play it some more for some reason I don’t entirely understand.” It’s that kind of game.

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Character names:
Waltham Madak: Young, Debonair, Adventurous
Prosigonia Priety: Proper, Prudish, Scandalized

The most important people at any social event are the tailors and dressmakers. Discuss.

I’m going to keep notes and musings here regarding my Digital Painting independent study, with the hopes of condensing them into a longer piece at the end of the course. First up: Definition of Painting.

Courtesy of the OED:

1. a. Painted matter; that which is painted. … a representation on a surface executed in paint or colours; a painted picture or likeness.
b. The representing of a subject on a surface by the application of paint or colours; the art of making such representations; (in extended use) the practice of applying paint to a canvas, etc., for any artistic purpose.
c. Computing. The creation of graphics or images in electronic form in a manner analogous to painting (sense 1b), as by the use of a paint program.
2. a. The action of applying a coat of paint to a surface; the action of colouring or staining something; (occas.) an instance of this. Also fig.
c. Computing. The filling of (part of) a display screen with a particular colour.
3. The result of applying paint; the fact or quality of being painted; colouring; pictorial decoration. Also: the relative condition of something as regards paint (freq. with modifying adjective).

Obviously the usage cited in definition 1.b does not discount painting on wood or other surfaces, but both of the computing definitions are disappointingly complicated. At first we have digital painting defined as a process analogous to (and by extension not the same as) “real” painting. This is acceptable inasmuch as there exist many painters who were not regarded as doing “real” paintings by their contemporaries, for example the initial disdain for impressionism. To be viewed as parallel to but separate from the mainstream, important part of the art world is a natural side effect of being a nascent medium. Of course it was generally accepted that the impressionists were at least [mis]using paint, which is less widely acknowledged in regard to digital work.

This issue is represented in the worrisome divide between the concept of Digital Painting represented in 2.c, which uses painting in its most basic programming context, juxtaposed against the tactile application of physical paint cited by 2.a and 3. Paint is something invoked by a computer, versus something applied by a painter. It is a subtle difference in agency, but it’s a problem for anybody who wants to argue digital painting as comparable in its own way to oil on canvas. No matter how complex the drawing instrument you use, many galleries view digital work as nothing more than a side effect of software rather than a human creation.

All of these definitions of the noun painting are naturally targeted at defining a physical end result. In my mind it is the process of painting that defines the work, not any particular end product, and I believe art history will corroborate. I have often heard painters and sculptors talk as if their target image or form was already present in the canvas or marble and their job was to find it, using forms of color to bring out the painting from the canvas. This artistic process translates perfectly to a digital context: computer monitors already “contain” every color they are capable of producing, and the job of the digital painter is to pull out the right ones.

In closing:
A pastel teacher of mine, irritated at the dual view of pastel work as both drawing and painting depending on the caprice of gallery owners, once defined painting as the definition of form with mass and drawing as the definition of form with line. Images may incorprate both techniques, of course, and drawings with mass or paintings with line exist in droves, but at its most basic level the definition struck a chord with me. Digital painters rejoice! None of the difficulties of the OED definition are present here. Nothing is to say that form cannot be articulated on a screen.

…And some mathematical formula I forget for determining the maximum number of distinct possibilities were you to flip them all.
To explain, I have six courses I wish to take this semester, and it is almost uncanny how precisely they represent the dual sides of my main areas of interest. On the one hand I have a course on Japanese Cinema, emphasizing cultural and film theory, and on the other I have Advanced Animation, emphasizing production. Another set: History of the English Language, with its stress on linguistics and the evolution of language, and Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy, with its focus on the evolution of a literary genre. Finally there is a great course on Dada and Surrealism, taught by a man best described as a whitebeard sage, juxtaposed against an independent project in Digital Art with my energetic art professor from last semester.

Each of these pairs represents a distinct interest from two different angles, and none of them are easy pairs to give up. Animation & Film is what I hope to do with my life, so I’m somewhat committed to it; Art is the impetus for that decision, always the most important of my passions even when it was undernourished by my coursework; finally, Language and Literature are what I came to Brown assuming I was going to do, and to forsake them now would be to deny some of my notions of what college is for. Add to this that I am more or less committed to one course of each pair–Russom’s “History of the English Language,” Barb’s Advanced Animation course, and my ISP with Jay on Digital Art–and I find myself forced to choose which of these directions I should go in my last regular course credit at Brown.

There is so little time left, and it is intensely frustrating.

“That would be an interesting paper topic.” Over, and over, and over again.

Yay being the token humanities guy in a CS house!

(art too…)

I’ll leave motionographer.com to deal with most recent motion graphics awesomeness, but I really think that Of Montreal’s Wraith Pinned to the Mist video by Kangaroo Alliance ought to be seen. This was the first animated video Kangaroo Alliance has done, it was featured at ResFest. It’s cute, vaguely hallucinogenic, bizarre through and through, and really cool for all its simplicity. I approve! Also, Of Montreal are worth noting on their own, if it is even possible to have missed them by now.

While there is still some hope that it will return, we are leaving (indeed, have already left) the age of the wristwatch. It’s a pity, really, and it has broader implications: no longer do we check our wrist to ascertain our own remote, mechanically determined personal time (a subtle movement, intensely familiar and understood to mean many things depending on context). These days, we check our cellphones, our blackberries, to see a digital readout linked in to a worldwide communication infrastructure through a device designed purely to link you to other people. The movement is more invasive–try looking at your wrist, and then for comparison drawing a cellphone our of your pocket or purse, and you’ll see that I’m right– and the social nature of the device is more dramatically limiting: you can’t turn off your network without turning off time itself.

Overly dramatic, but there you have it.

I just returned from drawing class and Tealuxe, where I had one of the most fulfilling conversations of my entire time here at Brown. More on that later, still turning the ideas over in my head, but a related thought:

The statement that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it seems misleading. I do not in any way mean to demean the study of history, but rather that history should be one of the most celebratory fields in the world: The study of humanity’s past actions doesn’t just teach us what lead to Nazism, but also contains the memories and stories of the combined sum of humanity’s success thus far in history. Perhaps a more justifiable way to phrase the point would be that those who study history are blessed with the greatest treasury of past success, and have the strongest foundation ever for the structuring of future endeavors.

To justify the title of this post, Anachromancy is my own term to indicate to myself the notion of predicting and structuring future action from the vantage point of a comprehensive view of the past. Obviously the future is created through a continual dialectic between the existing structure and new ideas, but far too often the new is overemphasized.

Therefore, history should be a required course. Next time on Nova, nodal points and the coming cultural event horizon!

It’s about time I put something resembling an animation reel up here, so here’s a short reel I’ve cut together:

Animation Reel, Fall 2007

This has no sound, but since I originally updated it I have replaced the out-dated source footage for the knight segments with final renders, cleaned up timing, added captions and put it on youtube!

I’d rather have done a better job, but something’s better than nothing, in this case! Character segments modeled and rendered in Autodesk Maya (Alias, back then), all else done in Maxon’s Cinema 4D. I love Maya’s character tools, and want to learn to leverage that program’s scripting and particle capabilities, but Cinema is so much easier to model in! Hehe. Total personal bias, I also like the flexibility of their NPR Renderer.