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Reception
I left work early yesterday, at around 4:30, in order to attend a reception downtown for the winners of the Art Walk competition.
These sorts of things make me nervous. How different I am from most people becomes so clearly apparent in such situations that I feel alienated from the gabbing mob and go on the defensive, waiting for someone to spot the weirdo and challenge me to a duel of cool. A squint. A stare. A full up-down scan of my engineer geek-chic.
This was supposed to be a gathering of artists, and I was concerned about not looking like one. This weekend, I was imagining myself donning a fake goatee or soul patch, giving my blond hair that fashionably messy look, and Method acting my way through two hours of conversation, wine, and hors-d’oeuvres. The night before, I had a dream wherein someone pulled off my faux facial hair and the entire room gasped as someone shouted: "Oh my God, he's not an artist - he's an engineer!"
Instead, I came to the event directly from HP wearing a pair of jeans and a dark red linen shirt that had been ironed that morning, but by now more closely resembled a ruffled pirate's shirt. My hair was a dirty blond mop. No gel, no brushing. And, I didn't have the energy to act like anyone except myself.
I arrived early, so I parked in front of the exhibit space and - partly to calm my nerves and partly to actually accomplish something - went for a walk to the Art Shop, located one block over and three blocks down. Man, I miss walking in urban areas. There's so much to look at - buildings, people, construction - and, despite the so-called undesirable human elements, it just feels safe. I need to move back downtown. But, I digress.
I wanted to visit the Art Shop because I needed to examine various mounting materials for presenting my photographs in the exhibit. As strange as it may seem, I've spent more time figuring out how to use the negatives I took last August than the photo shoot itself required. Way more time - perhaps 10 times as much.
I'm beginning to realize that in art, just as in manufacturing, more effort goes into figuring out how to execute a design than in actually drawing one up. They never really teach you that in engineering school: that a lot of the genius in making something lies in fabricating it, not just in how elegant the CAD drawing or photo negative looks. You can calculate ink wetability on a silicon architecture channel or determine the proper exposure of a piece of film using some arcane complex differential equation. But, in the end, you have to build the ink channels up in a FAB somewhere and process your little piece of negative film somehow. These are things that are so complex and open for errors as to make them theoretically intractable problems. Throw out the Navier-Stokes. Empiricism is the only way that works. That's why I think trade secrets are just as important as patents, if not more so in some cases.
A good case study is the Lego brand of building blocks. It's a simple enough concept. The 3D CAD drawing couldn't be simpler, actually. Still, it took the company years to figure out how to manufacture the little bricks so that they would fit together so well. It's harder than it looks and is not a patented process. By the time Lego had a hit on their hands, no competitor could come to market fast enough to prevent Lego from attaining a virtual monopoly of the market. Have you seen the price of Legos? We're not talking commodity prices. Yet, the damn things are nothing more than molded plastic bricks. How much more commodity could you seemingly get?
Anyway, back to my specific task at hand. The quality and availability of various photo presentation materials will influence which of three display options I choose. The first and easiest is to scale up the resolution of the existing Flash movie and project it in a dark room with an LCD projector run off a laptop. Second, is to blow up 6-8 of the choice stills into a 3 by 5 foot format, mount them on foam core, and hang them in what is really the best space in the building - the front lobby. Third, is to frame the 8-by-10 silver halide hand prints in the traditional way and array them on the same wall, gallery-style.
As of this weekend, I had only tested the large-format option. I rather like the result. There's a visceral impact by virtue of its sheer largeness and concomitant ability to draw you into the scene, but the image lacks the depth and detail of true silver halide prints. The 8-by-10 silver halide prints are absolutely gorgeous and, when framed, would appear more arty and professional - but lack that engulfing quality. The Flash essay would totally immerse the viewer in the underground world of mass transit, both visually and aurally, but would not be in as visible a space as the print media (back room versus front lobby).
What to do? I figure I can use a projector at work to tweak the Flash movie this weekend. But, I don't really know much about framing. Ergo, my walk to the Art Shop.
Once there, I found something I liked, bought it, and put it in my car. I went to the reception, which was a painless and quick tour of the exhibit space including a presentation about how to prepare pieces for display with the rail-and-wire suspension system. Everyone else was dressed like me and seemed just as antisocial. I never felt like I belonged in a crowd so much before. On the drive back home, I got to thinking that maybe I do look like an artist because I'm, well, making art. A real artist is someone who defines himself or herself by what they do and not how they merely appear. I mean, I'm not a DKNY-clad SoHo pretender living in a 2-million-dollar Manhattan loft - and maybe that's a good, not bad, thing.
Once home, I played with framing. A gallery photo presentation frame is a nice thing, with a super-white, acid free mat and foam core mounting board held inside a jet black aluminum frame. At about 25 bucks, it's also an expensive thing. But, I'm sure custom framing would be much worse.
I was shocked at how much better a photo looks when properly framed. A gallery display focuses the viewer's attention by surrounding the art with nothingness and placing a boundary around the object, isolating it from the distracting clutter of its greater environs. And the bright white mat and dark black frame serve to calibrate the eye to the full dynamic range of black-and-white photographic intensities. Instead of serving as a wall decoration, each work feels like a little reality capsule, capable of transporting you to another place.
When you calculate the sum total of the developing, printing, and framing time/cost, I have easily exceeded the up-front investment required to get the images down on film in the first place. And, these post-photography steps add just as much value to the final product as the so-called act of artistic creation. Just to verify this, I took a poor photograph and put it in the snazzy frame. Sure enough, it was transformed into an object de art. Similarly, the mounted 3 by 5 photo blowup went from looking like a drab computer printout to functioning as a teleportation window floating on my living room wall.
So what I'm learning is that things post-design matter. There's just as much intellectual property in execution as in design. You can copyright a photo or patent an invention, but that's just where the creative game starts, not where it ends.
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