NAT THINKS: IPHONE ART, FACT OR FAD?
In 1998 I bought a new Dell PC. It had an Intel Pentium II processor, with 64 mb of RAM, maybe 500mb of hard disk space, and in internal 56K modem. It is the computer that I learned most of my digital art making. Photoshop, Illustrator, web design, even my first video and 3d animation.
A second point of reference. I started a web design business in 1996. Back when we were all still “dialing” up, when 56k was considered “blazing”, and when a 32k jpg for an image was considered way too big to put on a web page – every idea we talked about such as watching videos or listening to music on the web was always preceded by “assuming that someday you can get the bandwidth”. Now watching You Tube has become watching THE tube.
What a decade it has been. Computers reached new heights of performance and the web finally matured, delivering on its promise to revolutionize networking, communication, and access to information. It is only fitting then that the iPhone debuted at the end of this decade (June 29, 2007), because its impact is what we will be talking about at the end of the next decade.
Case in point. I worked on a piece of art while driving my car today.
There is an app on my iPhone called iTimelapse which allows you to create stop motion animations by taking a series of still pictures. As I sat a red light on my way home, a thought occurred to me. “What if i created a video or stop motion animation where i took a picture of the red light every time i stopped at a read light?” So for the next 1/2 hour I drove around not only looking for every traffic light I could find, but every RED light I could find. I found myself actually slowing down as I approached green lights hoping they would turn red.
The impact of the iPhone for the next decade can be summed up with the fact that I have an art studio in my pocket.
If the current decade could be symbolized by Google and the paradigm of “the search engine”, the next decade will be about the pursuit of “there’s an app for that”. If this decade was preoccupied with how we search for information, the next decade will be about what we can do with it. It will be about how we can do things in all places at all times. Like make art while driving a car, sitting at a doctors office, or yes even on the toilet.
The iPhone brings together the three biggest trends in technology over the last three decades: personal computing, the internet, and mobile devices. Blackberry, Palm Pilot, or regular cell phone users who dismiss the iPhone with such comments as, “yeah the iPhone can do everything but make a phone call”, miss the point that the iPhone is not about the phone. It is a personal, completely mobile computer that simply happens to make phone calls. In fact the iPhone is not really a communications device at all. It is a device to DO things with. It is a creative device and that is it’s significance.
As an artist I have started to explore the use of the iPhone in my artmaking practice. The many apps I have downloaded such as Sketchbook, iTimelapse, Juxtaposer, Typedrawing, Flipbook, iSequencer, and a host of others are in fact crude or “lite” versions of software I have on my computer. The art I have produced thus far has been equally crude.
But that is the beauty. It is going back to the basics and learning old skills in new contexts. It is struggling with the limitations and then figuring out creative ways to transcend them. There is something very comical, yet strangely liberating about doing dinkly little sketches and collages or creating low-res choppy video animations when I possess top of the line equipment and software to do the same things.
Sure the images are low-res, the camera isn’t a great camera, the apps can only do certain things – but you know what? I’m doing this all on my fucking phone!
Of course there is an element of novelty to all of this, just as there is an element of novelty to the idea of iPhone art or an iPhone art exhbition, but there is something substanive and deeper there and that is the questions that iPhone art poses.
And for me it goes back to what does it mean to have an art studio in my pocket?
…that also happens to be able to make phone calls.