It is wonderful that I can, on impulse, sit down
at my PC and scan through 40 years of my artworks, select one image from
1964 and create an artists stamp.
Wonderful, too, that the image is of a sculpture
that still sits on the campus where I started my own life saga as an
artist and teacher – the campus at what was then known as Central
Washington State College, or CWSC, a little over one-hundred miles from
where I’m writing.
The sculpture is titled “Flight”, an
abstraction of three birds alighting on a rock cairn. The birds and rocks
I carved from wood, the former out of white oak and the latter out of
cedar. I did it for my sculpture class during my senior year in college
almost exactly 39 years ago.
Now it's an image in my collection of 40 artists
stamps, commemoratives of my 40-years in art.
Not only is this a collection of paper stamps,
but it’s also an electronic stamp, which is a “hot spot” on a DVD
which – like the other hybrid artworks I’ve been making for the past
thirty years – has a life in both the real world and the cybernetic
world.
What cybernetics has done to real artworks is
create a continuous field of presence for me. The sculpture is in
an administration building in Ellensburg a hundred miles away, but it is
also on my desktop. Plus, in a few hours, it will be a sheet of give-away
stamps at my temporary studio gallery on Seattle’s Capitol Hill - the experiment called Seattle Independents Mall, or SIM.
This “continuous field of presence” can
fundamentally alter patterns of resource availability, use of space, and
my sense of time.
By resource, I think of the need I have
to see images from the art of my younger self. By use of space, I
think how that sculpture takes up a square yard of floor space in a
building miles away. By time I think of how my past is telescoped
up into the present. With a few keystrokes and some additions of text, I
give an “old” artwork an extension of life (in the form of an
inch-square stamp).
Isn’t this comparable to the decentralization
that Professor Mitchell, at MIT, is writing about? He gives example many
people are familiar with, such as decentralized banking through ATMs and
online stores such as amazon.com. He also mentions sex workers and drug
dealers, too, who have found the Web and e-mail to be a better way to do
their business.
I wish more artists and poets would use these
systems, instead of only the art gallery’s walls and bookstore readings
areas – sites that serve only a tiny segment of our population.
Teachers, too, could take advantage of decentralized, mobile
communication.
I aspired to teach art at the same time I
practiced being an artist at the moment I left college. I am taking steps
to resume that goal and, if I succeed, it will be because information
technology (IT) has – as professor Mitchell says it has – transformed
public space.
Like the traditional art school, artists who
teach on the Web can supply what students and co-workers need in order to
make their contributions to society. Artists and art teachers are a scarce
resource, and some of them are already making use of desktop computers and
networks to magnify that part of their offerings that can be communicated
digitally.
Cellular communications and wireless networks
will open the envelope, I believe, by making a coffee shop or park bench
into a site for both a sending and receiving station for creativity.
Art’s long association with the values of social and entertaining
experiences will augment and make more vivid the meeting points of common,
constructive goals people have in their minds and hearts.
I hope my work with my art and my education will
have the effect of replacing what we, as artists and teachers, were
limited to in the past century, and that art education will come into its
own, supplying the creative ingredient needed to solve the problems that
we face as human beings in a world that’s tired of our old ways of using
resources and space. |
"Flight" is the title of the sculpture represented
on this artist's stamp, Made of wood, the work is on loan to the college
where the author went to school forty years ago.
Bill H. Ritchie is an Itinerate
Professor of Art now based in Seattle. He taught 19 years at the UW where
he’d been a full professor of art, teaching traditional printmaking and
media arts. Resigning at 43 to start his own learning, research and
production company, he discovered Emeralda in 1992, a fantasy region
accessible only by computer. He invented the rules-of-play and created an
operating system for an online interactive game, indulging himself in a
virtual promised land in the age of digital reproduction.
He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a thousand or more saved. And he has a blog on the island of RIISMA in the Emeralda Region. See Services.
For further
information via e-mail: Ritchie@seanet.com,
and see the professional Web site at www.seanet.com/~ritchie.
The company’s name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha #105, Seattle, WA 98109.
Professor Mitchell's article is
described in Issue 3 of Topic Magazine by an excerpt in The Chronicle of
Higher Education:
"How
technology has transformed the use of physical space"
William
J. Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses "what cyberspace
does to real space."
Wireless
technology has created "continuous fields of presence," he
argues, which, for better or worse, "can fundamentally alter patterns
of resource availability and space use." As examples, he points to
the decentralization of banking through automatic teller machines and
online transactions, and the rise of online retailers such as Amazon.com.
Because
cyberspace allows for mobile, covert communication, sex workers,
pornographers, and drug dealers have also begun to rely this technology,
according to Mr. Mitchell, making the job of law enforcers more difficult.
Information
technology has also transformed public space, says Mr. Mitchell. "In
the early Internet era," he writes, "networked computer clusters
emerged as new foci of public spaces -- much like the traditional village
well, but supplying a different type of scarce resource." However, he
continues, as domestic space became wired and computers cheaper, these
sites began to give way to cellular communication and wireless networks.
Nomadic societies used campfires
as "mobile focal points for social life," he writes, while urban
societies have offered fixed social attractions such as village wells,
domestic hearths, and computer network drops. Wireless technology,
however, has brought about a third alternative, he says: "We can use
our portable communication devices to construct meeting points on the fly
-- places that may only be known within particular, electronically linked
groups, and which may only play such roles for fleeting moments."
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