BOOK+MOVIE HYBRIDS Integrating print with sound & motion pictures

books   home   artwork   purchase moor     movies   about   gallery

PAINPANG.COM: ART VS. PHOTOSHOP®

Art loves Imitation Art hates Imitation

ART VS. CRAFT

ART VS. CAMERA

ART VS. COMPUTER

ART VS. HARDWARE

ART VS. SOFTWARE

ART VS. BUSINESS

ART VS. AUTOMATION

ART VS. TECHNOLOGY

ART VS. ENGINEERING

ART VS. SCIENCE

MIMESIS NEMESIS

BEAUTY LOVES IMITATION

BEAUTY HATES IMITATION

IMITATION LOVES BEAUTY

IMITATION HATES BEAUTY

Photoshop® Masking & Compositing

by Katrin Eismann

© 2005

When I returned to college to study photography, I was a thirty-year-old freshman with a deep passion for imagemaking that kept me in the darkroom and studio late into the night. In those first years at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I realized I couldn't adequately express my perceptions within the mechanical blink of a camera shutter, and I began to combine and composite images with scissors, tape, glue, and multiple exposures in the darkroom.

One night as I was leaving the darkroom, I passed by a small computer lab, where a few students worked in the weak glimmer of 13-inch Apple monitors on images similar to the ones I had struggled to create in the darkroom. The images were crude, yet exciting, and the energy in the room was contagious. At that very moment, I turned away from traditional photographic materials and processes and toward the future discoveries and potential that the digital realm offered. (Katrin Eismann)

MIMESIS NEMESIS # 1:

"The images were crude, yet exciting, and the energy in the room was contagious."

Painpang.com believes It is always far better to be exciting in art —to be excited about art— than to be unenergetically sophisticated and disillusioned with art. Sophistication demands renewal. And it is a renewal that new images alone often fail to bring about. It is a renewal that demands more than new images of sex, violence, and the sensational. It is a renewal that demands to cut its teeth on authentic emotional power.

Art is renewal. Art is a renewal demanding actual emotions. And sophistication in art is not the enemy of these emotions, of this renewal. Sophistication in art is a renewal that demands artless beauty. And artless beauty abounds in the depths of so-called simplehearted pain and passion. There is never anything simple about real pain and passion. Their reality is forever mysterious. The more real and revealing emotions are the more mysterious they become. This is their paradox.

The more real emotions are the more powerful their reality is. Thus real emotions are a powerful antidote for the weak impact of uninfluential art and its lack of creativity and creative force. Sophistication is a renewal of intellect that demands to be illuminated and reenergized by the deceptively simple insights of profound emotions. It needs this bottomless well of insightful energy that is as mysterious as it is naive. Passion is the impenetrable primal light of unknown origin that can only reveal... reveal that its source has more... and more... to reveal.

The so-called... single-hearted drive of... simpleminded, single-minded, energies is anything but simple. The primal energy of every passion is an infinite singularity that cannot be reduced to any single sense of finality. And sophistication is a renewal that demands to be reenergized by this single-hearted drive of simple-minded, single-minded, energies. For these energies are often the most clearheaded and powerful. And in turn, these clearheaded and powerful energies can challenge and make any form of sophistication more clearheaded and powerful.

If sophistication comes at the price of energy and vitality, then a return to primitive energies through the crudest techniques and the sincerest passions is in order. Cynicism... jaded sensibilities... masquerading as sophistication drain the life out of passion and interest. It sucks the energy out of art... out of life. It kills all interest. It kills all sense of importance. A primal return to pain, to passion... is a return to our sense of urgency... our sense of emergency. A primal return to passion is a return to our primary sense of being and our most powerful sense of energy, interest and importance. It is a return to power — the power of awareness. (Painpang.com)

Photoshop® for Right-Brainers:

The Art of Photo Manipulation

by Al Ward

© 2004

"Going Beyond Canned Filters"

Filters are one of the first features that a new Photoshop user typically starts with. They draw people into the software, providing instant gratification with just a few clicks.

The drawback to using filters is that no matter how cool an image may look after a particular filter is applied, other Photoshop users will notice it in an instant. Many is the time I've been asked to critique someone's "masterpiece," only to see that they applied one or two filters and sent it out to the digital world to stun the masses. The masses, especially those who use Photoshop, are usually left unstunned. (Al Ward)

MIMESIS NEMESIS # 2:

"SEEN IT, BEEN THERE, DONE THAT."

A. I know what you did — I know how you did it — and I can do it too!

B. Yes. And since you know how I did that, you know how easy it is to do. But make sure you don't dismiss the easy way of doing things just because you can't take the credit you want for doing something uniquely important and valuable. It is always better to do something the easy way than to do something the hard way if the hard way does not produce better results. Just because something is technically difficult to do does not necessarily make the result better than the least (technically) sophisticated thing done or make it worth doing. This is especially true in art. After all, "WHAT IS ART?" If people cannot agree on what art is, how can they agree on what the resulting work of art should be? And if they cannot agree on what art is or should be, how can anyone expect to agree on HOW an artist ought to create art? (Painpang.com)

Peek... inside the creative process

MIMESIS NEMESIS # 3:

"KNOWING HOW HE DID IT VS. NOT KNOWING HOW HE DID IT." This is the game played around the world. And power, love and money make that game, that world go around.

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS. Want to be loved and admired in the art world? Want to be feared and respected? Want to make a lot of money? What you need to know:

1. Secret recipes, secret formulas, secret processes, secret techniques, secret technologies, secret systems, secret ingredients, secret supplies, secret suppliers and secret sources are trade secrets. Trade secrets are secret knowledge: the secret to making money. (Since all secrets are important and valuable enough to someone... for someone to want to keep it a secret, then all secret knowledge are trade secrets that give people the power to trade in whatever they consider important and valuable.) But after the original creation or discovery of some piece of knowledge that they kept secret, these creators and discoverers exhibit only one real talent: the ability to keep a secret. Their whole value here depends upon others not knowing how they are done, where they come from and how & where one acquires them. This secret knowledge prevents others from duplicating them and duplicating their successes. Imitators can try to imitate them, but it will be much harder to do and their imitations will most likely never be perfect copies of the original without the secret... recipe... source.

2. Never believe anyone who says they have no trade secrets. For that is tantamount to saying that he or she has no secrets of any kind whatsoever. Never believe anyone who says the only secret to their success is hard work. Never believe anyone who says they cannot share with you how they do what they do because they do not know how they do what they do — for it is some mysterious God given talent that you unfortunately were not given, do not have and cannot get.

3. Like secret recipes and other trade secrets, proprietary software's only real evidence of talent after its original creation lies in the owners' ability to keep its source code —how it was made— a secret. Likewise, artists who are heavily dependent on some kind of technology or technique for the production of their artwork often try to keep their secret stew of technologies and techniques a secret from others, because they do not want others to devalue their work by successfully and EASILY reproducing them; possibly even exposing just how unexceptional, common and lacking (in uniqueness) their supposed talent is. Given the time and desire to do it, anyone can follow the step-by-step instructions of a secret recipe of techniques & technologies to duplicate what another has done. And if the instructions only involve pressing or clicking an easy button or two, then any child can do it. But is it talent? Is it art? Painpang.com says "Who cares?!" It's an ugly, hostile world where Everyman must use every trick in the book to carve out just a small piece of self-respect and importance before the world takes it away from him. Even the gifted must fight for whatever the world has not already given them. They must also fight to hang on to what they have been given. The gifted must fight an ugly world that unfairly deprives and dispossess the luckless and ungifted. They must fight an ugly world that not only envies their gifts but will fight to take them away. Finally, despite all romantic illusions to the contrary, the art world is just as ugly. The art world is often uglier because there is so little money, respect and importance here to go around. And its sense of beauty is only paradoxically redeemed by those artists who fearlessly know and expose their own ugliness and the world's.

4. "KNOWING HOW I DID IT VS. NOT KNOWING HOW I DID IT." We at Painpang.com play this game too. But it is a game we play with ourselves in an attempt to get deeper into the mysteries of the creative process. The only trade secret Painpang.com trys to keep is the identity of its participants. And the artists who participate at Pinpang.com withold their names only because they enjoy their independence and do not want their identities to be too closely linked to any name or organization other than their own. (Never relinquish control over your identity to others, not even to trusted others.) But beyond their own individual names, no one here is interested in keeping trade secrets from the public. And we most certainly are not interested in keeping secrets from ourselves. Instead, we are committed to getting to that point of understanding about our own creative process where we can clearly observe that moment... we enter into the mystery of action-that-successfully-creates-a-sense-of-importance: a sense of wonder. It is a mysterious moment. It is often a moment when no one here knows exactly what is happening. "Just what is going on... what is being done... what are we doing?!" And yet, something important unexplainably appears. Nevertheless, we want to recognize how we got to that point so that we can return to this stimulating mystery, re-create it, and explore it again and again. And we want to return here because we want to return to the mysterious origin of that mysterious action: the birth of Something Important. We want to return here to not only witness something important but to completely renew our sense of importance. We return here to experience this total sense of renewal baptized by the birth of Something Important. Nothing compares to being immersed in Something Important. Even if it turns out to be something that is only important to us, it is still important enough to return. If not, we won't.

So much seems to ride on this mystery — this mysterious Birth of Something Important. All talent worships at this alter. All talent drinks from this well, feeds at this trough and warms itself at this fire. Real talent is undefinable... Not only because it is irreproducible by technical means or learned techniques alone. But because all talent is only a shadow of the mysterious Birth of Something Important. ... The fiery Birth of Something Important is beyond the greatest talent's power to fully capture, control or define. (Painpang.com)

MIMESIS NEMESIS

TRUTH LOVES IMITATION

TRUTH HATES IMITATION

IMITATION LOVES TRUTH

IMITATION HATES TRUTH

© 2004 by Painpang.com | privacy policy | jobs | contact us | order forms