Kyle Clements – Page 12 – An artist's thoughts on issues of creativity in the digital era.

My Nuit Blanche Adventure: The Storm before the Storm

In the days leading up to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2010, and during the day of the event itself, I was making random notes to capture my thoughts and experiences during the lead up to, the actual event, and the aftermath of Nuit Blanche. Although these entries are are going to be typed up and posted after the event took place, they are based on notes made in the heat of the moment.

My Nuit Blanche Adventure: Part 2: The Storm Before the Storm.

I had been asleep for about 20 minutes when the phone rang. It looks like I’m going to be a little late getting to the venue for the final touches of our set up. It’s a good thing I did most of my packing the night before. Breakfast consists of an apple that is starting to go soft from sitting too long, and a cup of what I call a ‘triple instant’. A triple instant is 3 cups of instant coffee in one cup. It’s far from tasty, but very much needed this morning.

The brisk walk isn’t enough to jump start my body, but I do manage to arrive in a reasonable amount of time, 5 minutes faster than expected. We get to work. The wires are being cut to size, and I have Brad replace every single one of them with speaker wire. it is a needless cosmetic change, but I think it’s one of those subtle extras that will make a difference. Brad doesn’t put up much of an argument, and in the end, he agrees with me. Usually, I’m the one saying “it’s good enough” while Brad is demanding more unnecessary cosmetic changes. I guess he realized that if I’m the one saying it needs to be changed to look good, then it must really need to be changed to look good. So, Brad starts doing his thing, and it’s time for me to start doing mine…only my exhausted mind never thought to pack my tools last night. All those tools are still at home, on the table by the door. So, less than an hour after walking to the venue, I have to walk the 2.4km back to my house, pick up my tools, then walk another 2.4km back to the venue, and get to work.
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My Nuit Blanche Adventure: The Calm Before the Storm

Part One: The Calm Before The Storm

3:41am
October 2nd, 2010

(Yea, I know that is a clichÃ©d expression, but I’m a painter, not a poet, and that phrase captures the mood I’m in, so it stays.)

The lead up to this day has been intense. Weeks of steady 14-hour workdays have given way to a roller coaster oscillating between periods of insane last-minute busyness, followed by hours of empty free time.
In the mad rush to get everything done, there was little time for anxiety, for nervousness, anticipation, or for excitement. My attention was so focused on the work in front of me that I didn’t have room to worry about anything else. The small windows of free time that have opened up during these past few days have allowed all those previously ignored emotions to flood my senses. Throughly unhelpful worries and worst-case-scenario situations have overtaken my mind.
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Take a Picture: Promo

Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2010 is coming up in less than a week now, and it’s getting harder for me to contain my excitement.

If you haven’t been to the Take a Picture video page, you might have missed the two promo videos Brad and I have released for the Take a Picture project. Not to worry, I’m not going to send you on an internet scavenger hunt. I have included both of the videos with this post!
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Perfect vs. Good Enough

After watching a series of recorded talks and presentations, I have become a fan of Seth Godin. Like his talks, his blog is an explosion of ideas, and each idea is worth spending some time with and giving some serious thought. They are the type of ideas that even if they all turn out to be wrong, a person is still better off for having thought about them. The ideas are fresh. One idea that is stressed more than once is the importance of abandoning the idea of perfection, and shipping a product that is good enough.

At first, this didn’t sit very well with me. “Good enough” is a phrase I use very often. I am by no means a perfectionist with every detail in my life. The only area where I do strive for perfection is my art, because the arts are one area where I strongly believe that “good enough” is never good enough. Only the very best that I am capable of producing is ever good enough. This must be an area where business advice does not apply to the art world.

But this might be too literal of an interpretation on my part.
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How Much Practice Does it Take to Make Perfect?

How many times have you heard the phrase, “practice makes perfect”?
      Does it really?
      What about talent and genius?
      Is practice really all it takes?

When I was five, my family moved to a new neighbourhood. Unfortunately, a bully lived next door. I couldn’t go outside without having someone twice my size beat me up. To ensure that my teeth stayed in my mouth, I stayed in the house. I stayed in my room and I drew. I drew a lot. I would lock myself in there for hours at a time, where I would draw until one of the parents came up and got me; then they would make me stop for a bit and eat dinner. Afterwards, I would go back upstairs and draw some more. I did this until I was 15. That was when I discovered ‘QBASIC’ on the old IBM PS/2 386, and computer programming started to dominate my attention and free time for the next 3 years.

For 10 years, from the age of 5 to 15, I drew nearly everyday for about five hours.

300 days X 5 hours X 10 years = 15,000 hours of practice.

Fifteen thousand hours of drawing.
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Do You Sell Originals, or Reproductions?

In the last entry in the “Photographing Art” series, Don’t Bother With Image Protection, I covered some reasons why I think that allowing images of art work to be freely shared isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some people want to photograph art, or download images of art, and for artists dealing with one-of-a-kind images, like painters, the benefits of this infringement can outweigh the risks.

The last entry was rather one-sided, however. Freely allowing copies isn’t going to be beneficial in all situations. If you are in the selling reproductions business, file sharing has the potential to eat away at sales. I can sympathize with this. I have made money licensing images for prints myself. As a struggling artist, I know that every source of income, no matter how small it might seem, is very significant.

How many image makers are in the business of selling reproductions? Photographers certainly are, but I believe that it is important for artists to decide on the main focus of their practice: are they about selling originals, or selling reproductions.
If you are in the business of selling reproductions, this series is probably not for you. If you are more interested in selling originals, please come with me as I take you through the weird world of infinite goods.
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Professional Photography: Accident of History?

Lately, I’ve been hearing a growing number of complaints from professional photographers about the introduction of pro-sumer grade digital SLR cameras. Pro-sumer is that fuzzy patch between consumer-grade toy and professional-grade tool. These days, professional level photography tools are accessible to a non-professional audience. I don’t have to take out a loan to purchase professional-level equipment these days. I don’t have to spend years learning all the technical processes involved in making my expensive tools work. It’s all within my reach.

When accessible high-quality tools meet up with the awesome power of online aggregates and search, the micro-stock photo industry almost seems inevitable. This also means that the idea of professional photography as a profitable career is put into jeopardy. There may no longer be a need for as many photographers as there once were.

Here is one idea that although not a pleasant one, is one that I believe must be considered: maybe photography as a profession is just an accident of history. The window between photography being possible and photography being easy allowed the profession to exist, and that window is now coming to a close.
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Expanding on ‘Take a Picture’

In the last entry, I introduced you to the reason for my recent focus on taking pictures of art: My next art project is about this very topic. These are the ideas that have been dominating my thoughts lately. It’s what I’ve been thinking about; it’s what I’ve been talking about; therefore, it’s what I’ve been writing about.

When I’m working on something, I like to completely immerse myself in ideas surrounding the topic I’m dealing with in the artwork. I usually start with a very clear and focused thought that I want to develop. I work out the basics, and create a rough sketch or guide to work with. That rough plan must be very flexible, because I find that the ideas I develop throughout production are far more interesting than the initial thought that started the whole thing. I’ve got to anticipate some unexpected turns on my journey to completion. Countless little choices pop up during the process of actually making a finished piece, and I believe that having the right ideas floating around in my head can inform the decisions that I make, and the result is a much stronger finished product.
Well, that’s the idea at least.

The final paragraph of the last entry listed some of the points I wish to raise with “Take a Picture”, but I didn’t actually talk about how I was approaching those issues.

In this entry, I will break down that final paragraph, and expand on each of those points.
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Take a Picture

From reading my entries so far, it may seem that I have a one-track mind: my only interest is photographing art. There is a reason for this singular focus up to this point. Over the past several months, I have been working on a project that is specifically about photographing art. The issues of art, photography, copyright, digital technologies, and social media have been dominating my thoughts and conversations for a very long time now. It seems only natural that those ideas would spill into this blog as well.

This project has grown out of my interest in free culture. This interest began with an angry museum guard yelling at me for taking some pictures. It grew as I began teaching myself some basic computer programming, where I quickly discovered how wonderful it is to have access to a body of free knowledge, ideas, and materials. Working with electronics, and having a constant need for datasheets and schematics only strengthened this opinion. But, it was Windows Vista that finally provided me with that final push to fully embrace the world of open source. What I found was a world where just about any small tool was freely available with just a few keystrokes (provided I could get the damn wireless connection to work) As a user, the benefits of this mindset, this ecosystem of permissive sharing is very appealing. But I’m not just a content consumer, I’m also an artist; I am a content creator. It’s only fair that as a producer, I should try to pass on the same benefits that I enjoy as a consumer.

The art world that I learned about back in art school was one that prides itself on being part of the cultural avant garde. My experience in the art business leaves me thinking that the culture surrounding free software is several decades ahead of the culture surrounding the arts.

The prohibition of museum photography is something that I believe turns art from a shared cultural artifact into a private commodity. This restriction turns a painting into an object where permission must be sought to do what comes naturally to myself and many of my peers: taking pictures of the cool things we see, and sharing the details online. Realizing that these private commodities live in publicly-funded museums only adds insult to injury. I can’t photograph what I paid for? The objects that are said to represent culture are locked out of the shared attitudes and practices that actually characterize our culture.

I am interested in culture, not commodities. Preventing images from being shared removes them from our shared cultural experience. To quote Cory Doctorow, “It’s not culture if you’re not allowed to talk about it.” Sending pictures back and forth and posting them online is how my generation talks about things.
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