A Story Only A Cyber Artist Could Love

Taking your images all the way to the outer limits

by Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.

He taps commands with his fingers and files
change to other types, arranged in a new
composite, tuned to different contrasts and
tones and given new formats. His mind is full
of visions; describing a new kind of
artistic work, he’s in this cybernetic age.

Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor
based in Seattle. He taught college (UW) and after promotion
to full professor of printmaking and media arts, he resigned
at 43. He then launched several teaching, research and
practice companies. In 1992 he discovered Emeralda, a
fantasy region accessible only by computer. He invented
the rules-of-play and created an operating system for online
interactivity for himself. 

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, which you can see listed on the ten
"islands" on the Web. An example is
www.seanet.com/~ritchie/apzine.html, on the island of ArtsPort in
the Emeralda Region.

For further information via e-mail:
ritchie@seanet.com, or visit www.seanet.com/~ritchie and his first
portal for Emeralda is www.artsport.com. The company name is
Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha, Seattle, WA 98109.

I’m searching for a certain stamp in the files. It should be a counterfeit of the actual art of the professor that he made in 1963, if the information given is correct.

 Would this search interest anyone but a cyber artist like me? I doubt it. You might, however, if you had a compelling reason, as I have. For example, if knowing ahead how this search ends would make you a winner, that might be motivating. And what does it mean to be a winner in art today?

Nothing less, I guess, than high scorer in a tournament or, as they say in the art world, winner of the big prize. Trouble is, people who know their cyber art, and think art has morphed to digital media, no longer think the big prizes in the old art world are big enough.

Not if--as seems to be happening--real cyber art gets you audiences in the millions or even billions of eyeballs. Take a look, as I am, at how many people are playing massively multiplayer on-line games now--even while I’m typing out my thoughts this Friday, the 13th of June, in the year 2003.

Take one game for example, such as Ragnarok. Go to their Web site and read the news items about this and other hit games. They’ll give you an idea how many on-line players there are linked up now. The numbers are climbing, too. Computer games in general, however, are not all massively multiplayer; most people don’t play that way. Considering how many are playing this kind is just a fraction of all players, can you imagine the number?

There are so many people interested in games that they opened a channel on Cable that’s devoted to nothing by games and the game industry—sort of a CNN of the computer gaming world. Sounds fascinating to me. It’s enough to tempt me to get cable again. And the market for this channel is bigger than they expected. Since its launch the number of viewers has climbed to over six million viewers, according to today’s news article.

Back in the art world, I used to think it was a big deal when I won a prize of a thousand dollars for an artwork in a summer art festival. Thousands of people strolled by that artwork, note the blue ribbon or red star on the label. They'd saunter off to the next display, and the next. Compare this to the numbers of people actively playing a cyber artist’s game, 24/7.

The way things are going for me, I will be one of the members of a team that creates one of those massively multiplayer games that's like the big deal it was for me 40 years ago when I won those "big" prizes.

This is on my mind as I search for a digital file. I am the number one player of my own game, a game I invented for myself. Orville and Wilbur Wright were number one players of the early manned flight game; they were challenged to win the big prize to be able to go the distance in an handmade aircraft.

I think the same kind of genius that it took those brothers to team up to make a plane in a bicycle shop is the same that it takes to make up an innovative game in the back of an art studio. It's like looking for a certain file, part of my game; looking for the right material for a wing must have been like that, or the right curve of a wing template to create air lift.

My digital files are for graphic images, and they follow industry standards that are used around the world and also on the Internet. They comprise an open system for sending and receiving, storing and encrypting pictures.

 Some are also moving pictures, and pictures that have the illusion of three dimensions. They take large bandwidth, or the number of bytes to store or send them may be small. They move fast or slow, accordingly, from point to point in a digital computer or over the Web. They take up large or small parts of storage media, such as a hard drive or a compact disc.

As I’m entertaining myself with this writing, I’m also deciding to use a tagged image file format, or TIFF, for this morning’s exercise. (I imbedded the files here, shown on this page on the Web as a Graphic Interface Format, as GIF files).

As I am a champion at my own game! I edit the files, pasting six images of stamps from my early years into one file. My mind is roaming around the cyber landscape as my fingers do the work—select, move, tune, shrink, rotate—and I’m dreaming I’m in a time and place when these moves must be fast and they must be right. This is spacey stuff!

That’s just the entry part. There's the output, too. If all the files are correctly managed, and they’re not too large to fit the storage medium, then I have a chance to go to the next stage. Is this a kind of a game? Would I know? Am I having fun? Would another person have fun doing the same thing? Or would they have a way to do it that’s more fun?

(I can only think of one other person who always seemed to be one jump ahead of me, and he’s not here. He shall remain unidentified for now—but you may have guessed his name when I began my story with artists’ stamps. In fact, I credit him with the idea for Stamps 'N Stories).

What, you may ask, is the point of this? I can think of several, but they must all lead to the Big Prize, the Gates Prize, named for Elmer Gates, the brain researcher and dreamer who thought about World Teachers, and H. G. Wells, who forecast the Web with his book, World Brain.

The object of the game is to entertain, and in between moves, learn how to make a better art than I could before. In the days when I began--the '60s--it was enough to make an image that was more interesting than other peoples'. Making the original image is just the beginning and, if fact, easier to do than it once was, thanks to new technologies of image making.

Now an artist must not only make an interesting image, he or she must also learn how to move it into the cyber world, the domain of digital reproduction. It used to be that there were only one or two kinds of reproduction; now there are many. Millions of ways, in fact, as the spectrum of digital media continues to grow. Management is the key now. That, and transferring files.

One of these millions of ways includes the story behind the image, and this is where the massively multiplayer game comes into its own. For the six stamps in my TIF file, there are six stories, too.

Now I’m at the end of my story. It’s time to move on to the next stage—move the new TIF file to another storage medium, and to another platform, into another software program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The composite collection of six of the author's stamps  (which are shown below), in a grayed out tone. These are selections from the first six years of his art career, 1963-1968.