JANE VEEDER
So artists, the model of the fine artist as the studio artist is, you know, just not really very practical anymore
9
(excerpts)The Entertainment Economy, cont.
As I mentioned before, the two big areas for financing and supporting big spurts in technology innovation are the consumer entertainment market or the work market, how we support workers. These are big horizontal markets that pay for the big leaps, and such as video games in the 70s.
You know, supporting the personal computer initiative. There is the complexity factor, which is really getting daunting at this point. At one time, like in the middle ages, there was hardly any information. So the aristocratic intellectuals could be experts in four or five different fields.
At one time, some one person could know everything that was going on in computer graphics, and know how to do it. That's no longer the case.
So you have to kind of choose. You want to try to be a jack of all trades, which means you go slowly. Or do you want to adopt the producer director model? A couple of weeks ago, about a month ago, I saw Woody Vasulka and Steina give a talk about their show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Woody talked about his being one of these guys who interfaces with the technology in a very low level way. And he was talking about his dilemma, that that's really kind of the slow boat. The other alternative is to use standard tools.
He said,
if you're using standard tools the features are coming at you so quickly that you don't have time to de-trivialize them, (which I thought was a wonderful thing to say.)
He said,
You have to find your personal image.
And you know, all these standard tools, if you look at the face of them, they're trivial. And it does take time to detrivialize them. So this is, I think a big issue. There's the spectacle factor. Individual vision and budgets. How do these even interface? 1993 was the first year in about a decade when the video game industry grossed more than movies. And a whole lot of people suddenly woke up one morning and decided they were video game designers. And I've just met oodles of people since then that have an idea for a video game.
top