If somebody spoke 50 years ago about cross-ocean collaboration, touch screens, user generated content and other things we take for granted in 2011, they would consider him a mental patient. Today we live in this world. When one looks at the iPhone or innovations presented at tech conferences it is hard not to think about science fiction coming true, even though the most significant features of todays world (internet, laptops, mobile phones) were not actually foreshadowed by sci-fi writers. At least not to my knowing. It is kinda amazing, that most of sci-fi is concerned with big-time stuff, like space stations, flying cars or time traveling. There is some element of wishful thinking in that, I'm sure.
But that is not what I wanted to write about. What I am really happy about is being a part of is this global Internet community. Wherever people have access to personal computing device, they can log on and meet around the globe. In best cases they can collaborate, work together and share ideas. This offers a much better chance of meeting somebody of your own interests, tastes and creative wisdom. Clay Shirky writes about that in his book Here Comes Everybody.
In this regard I am proud to say that things are actually working very well in praxis, not just in theory. I bet many of Opera fans are familiar with Violetisha, a big Opera enthusiast who made a lot for this community and my.opera in general. This time she did something awesome for me too; she redesigned my blog. I always wanted something 'wider' (perhaps for high-res photos) or cleaner for reading. She made it true and just look how awesome it looks.
Slowly but steadily I am reading John Berger's book Ways of Seeing. It is a remarkable piece of thinking which has to be consumed as slowly as possible. The third chapter in which Berger finds a strong parallel between realistic (oil) painting and materialism is especially intriguing:
What are these paintings? Before they are anything else, they are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. Unique objects. A patron can not be surrounded by music or poems in the same way he can be surrounded by his pictures. It is as though a collector lives in a house built of paintings. What is their advantage over walls of stone or wood? THEY SHOW HIM SIGHTS: SIGHTS OF WHAT HE MAY POSSESS. - John Berger
Before the renaissance painters were no more than anonymous (yet skilled) craftsmen, very much like carpenters or plumbers today. But when Giotto first painted his Lamentation of Christ, he introduced not just a new way of painting, but also a new way of seeing things. Painting was no longer symbolic, now it offered a window into another reality, a replica of physical world. What follows is an never-ending pursuit of perfection; how to make painting as realistic as possible, that is to say, how to make an illusion of reality as perfect as possible. Because: what is painting if not just drops of color on flat canvas or a wall. Whatever 'realistic' we might see in a painting is just a trick of the brain.
From here it is just another logical step; if we could paint things in a realistic manner, we could show things. THINGS THAT MONEY CAN BUY. In other words; we can show off. Patrons were commissioning paintings of their castles, belongings, wifes, horses, exotic animals, even more exotic food (it is how still life was born), and so on... Painters were trapped in a position which was well payed, but a bit boring... Suddenly they were a slave of realism with little or no space for more sublime symbolic thought. Only rare exceptions (Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo...) were able to transcend this claws and create something that went into history. Myriads of others didn't. During the late baroque period techniques of realistic painting reached perfection.
Luckily for painters photography was invented just in time! Suddenly painters were free! They could finally venture back into symbolism where they belonged (imagine a poet trapped in a job of a news reporter). Now it was the photographer's job to recreate physical reality onto 2-dimensional plane.
I believe photographers are trapped in the same way painters were during the famous "realistic" periods (14th to 18th century). Better yet, photographers are today in the same position as painters during the late baroque. The techniques of reproduction are perfected to the level at which we are being bored by it. Wedding, portrait, still life, commercial and other types of photography are mere reproduction of physical reality (and how funny, most of them are dedicated to the 'things that money can buy'). Even photojournalism rarely goes beyond that. This is why photojournalists have their mouths full of 'stories' and 'humanitarianism' - they need a deeper reason to justify their menial craft.
The way in which I am pulled more and more by each passing day is symbolism. I am tired of being a slave to physical reality, I want to produce some of my own. I am not happy just by reporting anymore, I want to write my own (fictional?) stories or even poems instead. This is the main motive behind my new project: 52.
Last year it was all about capturing daily impressions with my mobile camera. This year I am doing something more profound, something more planned and contemplated. I am doing a project of one photo per week. I am trying to venture into the world of symbols, as deep as I could go. I want to explore the world of dreams, fears, emotions... To me the whole thing is very close to filming movies; I have to write a story, organize the filming (find locations, actors...) and at the end shoot the whole thing. It is very challenging and I hope to make it trough. So far I am doing it on Hasselblad camera (I really want that quality). You can follow me on flickr.
During the time in whch I neglected this blog, I did quite a lot of reading and educational watching. I watched the entire series of Justice class from Harvard, and I really liked this episode where they discuss the price that can be put on a human life.
What I realized more vividly than ever is that even intangible things must sometimes be tagged with a price in Euros. Which often sucks.
As a photographer I must attach a price tag to my photographs or my work in general. More often than not, I make critical errors in judgment, but not in my favor. I usually charge far too less. I tend to forget what I invested in my self and I also forget what I bring to the table. And I think I am not alone in this. It is a general thing among artists, not just photographers, but also painters, illustrators, writers, movie makers, musicians... etc.
It would be too easy to blame it on society, even though it plays its part too. The value that creative work has is often intangible and hard to defend financially, so people tend to diminish it in negotiations with the artist. They often do it on the basis of time ("You did it in one day..." "I don't earn so much in 3 hours..." etc) or material costs ("You only used this much of color"). You hear it everyday...
Yesterday a society of photographers in Slovenia called Enoooki (one-eyed) distrubuted an edition of our biggest daily newspaper Delo - but without photographs. It becomes very clear what the value of a photograph is, once you miss one.
Think of your wedding/graduation/family/whateveryoulike photograph(s). How much would you pay to get them back if someone stole it from you? That's the price!
There are many ways of how to define creativity and its finest results. It probably depends on how you look at it, but I like the idea that each creative output is a product of motivation, skill and taste. Motivation keeps you going, it makes you (wanna) do stuff and it is pretty clear that without the motivation any creativity is nonexistent. Then you must have skills. You must know your devices as well as you possibly can. Despite the obvious talent, it would be impossible for Elton John to compose a song without mastering the piano. Or Michelangelo to sculpt something like David without being really good with stone. This is why every art form calls for constant and fanatic practice.
A lot of people are motivated. They desperately want to do art or science. Some of them learn the skills. But very few have the taste to know in which direction aim their creativity. Taste can be understood as a set of values that guide you trough the process of creation. Even in most trivial of situations you can spot the lack of taste immediately. There are many people who clearly have enough clothes, but they combine them in the wrong way. It is not the lack of clothes that makes them look like clowns, it is the lack of taste. It is the lack of taste to blame that many technically good painters never go beyond what it is sold on the beaches or postcards. It is the same for photography. They are motivated, they have the technical skill, but they don't know what is really good so they aim too low.
So how to acquire a good taste? In my experience this happens with constant criticism. You must put your work under the scrutiny of yourself and others. You might get hurt, but that is a good thing. Bad feelings fade away, the lesson remains. You must also see and judge as many other works as you possibly can (this doesn't necessarily involve informing your peer about the opinion). If you are an architect you should devote at least some part of your every day to review other architects' work. When I was a freshman, a very dear very professor said: "A day without looking at an architectural magazine is a lost day." Today I know how right he was. By looking at magazines you develop a clear taste of what is good and what is not. You later apply that taste to your own work. Without the taste your motivation and skills are simply misguided into wrong directions. And this goes not just for design or arts, it is true for every activity. Because of that many good works of art are very simple and resourceful. You don't need a huge budget to create something original. You don't need many resources. But you need a good taste for it.
In every field of human creativity you usually have two separate domains of creation; professional and the amateur. In many cases the amateurs are inspired by the professionals but pro's don't care much about the amateurs. In many cases. But not in all cases.
Especially in music many professional composers and musicians study native and folk music for inspiration. In painting something similar happened in late 19th century with Paul Gauguin who studied "primitive art" and childish drawings in order to connect with the primal instincts of our painting skills.
But there better examples. In astronomy pro's and amateurs work hand in hand. Ever since the equipment (telescopes, ccd chips, etc) became ever-more available, amateurs take a huge part in collecting all sorts of data that is impossible for the professionals to handle. Amateurs may not have the largest telescopes at their hand (quite frankly, oftentimes you don't need large telescopes), but they have lots and lots of time, and more importantly, they are in great number, so their contribution sums up. For the last 20 years a lot of asteroids and other small bodies within our solar system were discovered by the amateurs. Simply put; you just have to continuously photograph small portions of the sky and search for "stars" that move in relation to the others. Whatever moved may be a candidate for an asteroid or a comet. Detection of such things takes a lot of time which is something that you just might not have if you work on a large professional telescope (there are "better" things to do there). This kind of research is ideal for the amateurs, and professional community benefits greatly from the work of committed hobbyists.
Until recently professional photography and filmography didn't bother much for the amateurs. And many of the old time pro's still look down upon the amateur creativity. But I think we should be more careful. Amateurs of today can have almost the same kind of equipment as professionals and in these terms there is almost no distinction left. Sometimes you will see a bunch of amateurs with Canon EOS 1DS mkIII . Dedicated amateurs are no longer different in that respect.
But they do different things. Since they don't have responsibility towards the client, they can try and do so much more. The digital revolution lowered the price of failure to almost zero, so people try really absurd things and many times the results are surprising. Just take a look at this:
Can you imagine somebody spending 500 EUR worth of film for this? You know, just to have some fun with a rotten apple? Of course not. We had "better" things to do with film. The price of failure was high and people didn't dare to try out these crazy ideas so nothing original was never produced. When the price of failure is high you stick to the old and well tested methods, of course you perfect them, but you don't innovate. If you see the collection of what we did on film, you may see a lot of perfection but not much innovation.
Things now changed and if one looks at Flickr, one may find the craziest things possible. People just experiment as they never did before. And I believe that professionals can learn from them. To often pro's don't have the time or energy to do this sorts of tests, but amateurs do. And pro's can learn from them a lot. There is no reason to look down upon them. We'd be all better of working hand in hand.
Two days ago I had a talk here in Ankaran about the Internet, Creativity, Copyrights and how it is all connected. The talk is very much inspired by Lawrence Lessig, in the terms of the content and also execution. Unfortunatelly I have had a little bit of a cold, so my voice is not what it should be... Hopefully you will understand my English
Many thank to Joe Nicolosi for letting me use his awesome video
When I photograph people, many of them find me annoying. Really. And I can't really blame them; I am not happy with just one or two photos. I must take them at least 50. But there are profound reasons why.
First of all; I wanna make sure that the person looks good on my photograph. In order to achieve that two things must happen; the person must be adopted on my shooting (for that I must be there a while) so that he or more often she is relaxed enough to look natural. And a larger amount of photos must be taken in order to statistically ensure a technically good photograph (in terms of eye blinking, expression, and also focus, sharpness, composition, etc).
But there is a deeper reason and it lies in the way I think about photography. Usually, when I'm in the zone, I'm not even thinking about the object of my shooting. I am literally making the photograph, not taking it. I am thinking in 2D. I am producing a 2-dimensional pattern of our visual communication. At least I try to. The people or objects are just grand means to achieve that. So even if I did 20 photos with you, I might have a new message to deliver or a new emotion to visualize. And that has nothing (or little at best) to do with documenting your physical appearance. For that, one or two photos would surely be enough. But for producing items of visual communication, I could work with a singe model for years... I try to find the next level of portraiture where models are actually actors (very much like in movies) who co-author my story. That story can be also be documentary, but not necessarily. And this is also why I started to systematically study other fields of art like painting, movie-making, sculpting... I am especially interested in works of Asian artists who are supposed to have a bit different way of thinking than us, Europeans. I read and heard a lot about that from many neurological sources, it is a bit too complex to go into it rihgt now, but there are great things there to discover!
This is my latest lecture from the conference in Rogaška Slatina, where we discussed the problems with the development of creativity in schools. My lecture was done in collaboration with dr. Mojca Juriševič. The deal was that I present some more practical problems and solutions and she backs them up with research data from the psychological department. This formula worked really well and I hope we'll do that again sometime
Unfortunately this is in Slovenian again... This lecture is shorter so I might find some time to translate it, but since it is licensed with CC license (by-nc), you can download it and add subtitles
I decided to hit the road and go on a tour around high-schools in western Slovenia to promote UMMI summer camps and in doing so speak about issues with creativity and giftedness. My main points are:
- giftedness is a property of mind which has to be carefully nurtured, otherwise skills will diminish to average at best, - creativity is not a property of mind, it is a way of thinking. It is seeing each thing afresh and approaching problems with playfulness, courage and bravery, - creative and gifted people are often misunderstood, hence they feel alone, - but they are not!
I am recording every lecture and I shall publish the best version ASAP. After each lecture I try to encourage debate about this issues to get some feedback. It is a great experience and there is still 5 places to go!
This should be our final version of animation made on Koper Primary School under the program of Multimedia Workshop. The movie tells the story of our jurney on the tower of the main curch in town. The technique used is simply drawing line by line with chalk on a standard blackboard in school. A lot of time was used in postproduction to normalize photos from different classrooms and light conditions.
Blackboard animation - Final version from Nikio on Vimeo.
Click below for translation of the captions.
Some time ago I wrote about what resolution in media might be. Only later I remembered a xkcd comic in which the charachter contemplates how wide our options are and how we yet choose to live only a few of "day-types" over and over again. Imagine how it would be like if you could live every day anew, with different tasks and different people.
Something like that is happening to me last 10-14 days and it will go on for an other 5. I have no steady routine, each day is really something special. That is not to say it is spontaneous and improvised, on contrary, my activities are well planed, but still days are very different in comparison to eachother. And they are packed with work work work... From 7AM to 10PM. I could say that right this moment I live a very high-resolution life A lot of data in short amount of time.
One might think this is cool, and it is. But it is also very fatiguing. I learned that repetition is what keeps us fresh for the new stuff (to some extent). It quite hard to live like this for a longer period of time. I can't wait to slip back into a warm old daily routine. At least for a while, to get some mental rest.
So, what was I up to? I can give you a few things, there is lot's more, but I don't want to bore you
One of the things was a new creativity conference, organized by UMMI. It was really really cool. I opened the conference with a Keynote lecture of my own (video will follow), and then I was blown away by lectures of dr. Zadel, dr. Juriševič, Korado Korlevič and many others. This is me during the lecture (photo by Mojca Kukanja Gabrijelčič):
G33Ks might notice a familiar face on my t-shirt Moar photos.
This year I also went on Kras marathon for which I designed the main poster and some postcards. The postcards were designed with photos from Flickr via Creative Commons licence. It is soo cool to have that kind of colaboration across the world. This is a postcart for 4 events that will happen this year. Photos are contributed by Cobalt_sun, ((brian)), Randy Son Of Robert and Samo Onič, who is not on Flickr. The poster: [/IMG]
That is me with my design. Again - sharp geeky eyes might recognize bent corners on my number tag. This weekend Battlestar Galactica hit its final run and such an important event must be celebrated with every possible detail. I dedicated my 8.4 km run to this series finale. Moar photos!
So, as mentioned - Battlestar Galactica Series Finale happens only once in a lifetime, therefore it deserves a special party, full of geeks, pizzas (we even ordered one with BSG caption on it), computers and elaborated debates about things that exist only in our imagination(s). But it was great. I'm not giving you any spoilers though...
It seems like years since my last valuable posting (if it had any value anyways...). It is not that I have any kind of writers block or anything, it's just that I don't have much time or that I'm uncertain about things that I want to write about. It's like I don't have all the details figured out yet.
But there is one thing that I've been thinking about lately and I find it very important within the media theory. And that is the question of resolution. I would define it as the amount of information per physical measure of it's medium. Huh... let me explain.
Basically what I mean is that if you have a high-resolution image would mean that every pixel is well used and that there are no parts of an image where information is lost. For example; if you resize 600x400 image to 6000x4000 pix, you actually loose resolution because now you have the same amount of information with a lot more pixels used. So a goal of every photographer would be to have as high resolution photos as possible (not in the terms of actual pixel count but in the terms of how efficiently are they used). This is why we need very sharp lenses. But this is not limited to technical terms. An image that contains parts that don't support the "whole story" of it is just as well a low resolutioin image. It wasted it's space on unnecessary elements and therefore the ratio between space that is used well and the whole space is very low. This is the kind of resolution I want to focus on.
This roule would apply to any kind of media. A high-resolution speech is a speech where every word counts. There is not bullshit in it - take one word out and everything colapses. A high-resolution storyline would produce a movie where every sceene servs the function of the general narrative, perhaps even on more levels (not just to support one aspect of the story, but many aspect or even sub-plots). A high-resolution chess game contains moves that serve more than one function at the time (attack, defense and perhaps material gain). I could go on with this, but I hope you see the point...
So why is that important you might ask? I think it is very important because every "piece of medium" is a limited resource. A newspaper can contain only this many of pages, so it is very important how we use them. And even a single page can cover only this much of space, again, let's use it wisely. The same goes for a photograph (only this many of pixels), music (only this many of bars), dance (only this many of moves)...
For the last couple of months I have been involved in a really cool project on Koper primary school. My job is to teach kids various types of media (drawing, photography, movie, digital media...) and finally to produce our own multi-media "thing". At the end we decided to make an animatoin about our trip around Koper (and climbing onto the bell tower of Koper's main church) on a regular chalk board. Yesterday we tried it for the first time and what was done now serves as a trailer for the real movie that we'll do in the next month or two
I have developed a habit to watch TED talks and then order books by those speakers. Quite recently I have found Scott McCloud, a prominent figure in the world of (American) comics and his book Understanding Comics which is soooo much more than just a comic book about comics.
I believe there is almost no child in western world that hasn't come in touch with comics sometime in his/hers childhood. For most of the youth in my country comics by Miki Muster provided an enchanted world of adventures by three amusing charachters: Trdonja the turtle, Zvitorepec the fox and Lakotnik the wolf. I remember that at age 10 or 11 there was nothing that could keep me away from those comics. This was my first 'serious' reading.
[/IMG]Now the book by Scott McCloud provides not only a very good insight into the realm of comics, but also a very good theory how visual communication and art-making work. The explanation is so straight-to-the-point that it could be valued even by people who never read comics and so simple (=elegant), that it could be only done by a genius. I will read this book again, for sure!
Have you ever ask yourself what are the aspects that make great performers really great? The question is a lot easier asked than answered, but there are certain things that can be explained and argued. I've noticed one thing that seems to be rather important and once you become aware of it, you can see it everywhere (which is usually the case when you are obsessed with something).
What is the most common thing we do when we acquire new knowledge or a skill? We show off. Children do that all the time and adults are no better. When a new skill is mastered we tend to overuse it in order to create a spectacle that will blow away anyone. Amateur orchestra's like to play out loud for most of the time to show what kind of strength they have, people who learn photoshop start producing over-saturated photos of sunsets which are "so amazing" to them, singers who learned new techniques like to sing loudly for everyone to hear the power of their new voice, and designers who come across some new astonishing fonts, like to put them everywhere they can.
Winter is the time of intensive reading, at least for me. Lousy weather and short days are ideal for staying at home with a couple of good books. During these holidays I read some of the Edward Tuftes opus. I was quite aware that Tufte is an extraordinary author, but reading Envisioning Information was still a huge positive shock.
In this book the author deals with the problematic subject of data visualisation. Well, that is the subject of all his books, but here he lays down the basics. He explains how the data should be aranged in tables, charts, computer screens (etc), and also what color scheme to pick, what kind of lines between the columns (etc) - but mostly - WHY it must be so! What are the underlying principles of our perception and cognitive functions that require such design tactics. In order to proove it, he shows a great number of magnificent charts, diagrams, tables and other forms of data visualisaton, that will take away your breath. An other way in which Tufte makes his arguments so strong is by showing his own (re)designs where it becomes clear what he's trying to tell.
Later on I also read Visual Explanations, but I find Envisioning much more fundamental and stunning. Perhaps it is because Envisioning was my first of his books and the shock was hence biger, but it is also true that it contains more basic explanations about the nature of his argument.
I think this is the book that every visual artist (designer, painter, photographer, movie maker...) should read!
My first book is out. Not that I wrote it - just made the design and all that. It is 120 pages of hard labour with very minimalistic aproach, and since it is a collection of poems and short stories of almost 30 different authors, I wanted it to be as neutral as possible. As usual, I am not 100% happy with the results, but it was fun ride. There is an other one going in print this week, and that one is going to be much much more interesting. I'll show you as soon as it gets out.
The thesis of my masters work at Faculty of Architecture was done in the field of architectural acoustics. I spent the last year of formal education going around different concert halls and testing their acoustical propreties. But just before the conclusion of my work I was able to get some very detailed information about our Grand Philharmonic Hall which gave me a deeper insight into this field of science and this concert hall in particular. Since then, I didn't have an oppourtunuty to listen music in that hall, but I did thought about it a lot. So you can imagine I was quite excited when Mr. Simon Perčič from UPOL orchestra called me to photograph their concert which was about to happen there.
Tonight I work! I will make a presentational video for my masters work at Faculty of architecture. I figured it could be really easy to animate 3d stills of my project into a fancy flashy video. So I set up a small video studio in my room. Here's what I have for the night:
[/IMG]
- one TV monitor for previews - one PC monitor for work (borrowed) - one video PC (borrowed) - one condensor mic for possible audio effects - one iMac for graphics and cool stuff - 750 GB of extra storage (that will not be used) - studio headphones - 0.5 L of fresh coffee (that will be very needed) - 0.5 L of fresh watter - a good chair - a lot of patience (not visible on the picture)
My Opera
