Scholarship is serious business. But sometimes, a slightly different approach is called for. Fernando Orellana knows this and says he opens his digital arts course “by forcing my students to play. This is playtime with a purpose-a lot of adults forget how to play.
“I think it's important to start this class as an art class,” he says, of his new Introduction to Digital Arts course. He has the students choose two crayons and a sheet of
8 1/2 X 11-inch paper, and gives them 25 minutes to use the entire paper, drawing whatever they like. Some
students hesitate, having done nothing like this since kindergarten. Posting their artwork on the wall and offering one another good-natured critiques helps break the ice. And then they can bring this sense of play into making art on the new computers in the lab.
The Digital Arts program, an interdisciplinary endeavor between the Visual Arts and Computer Science departments, was launched this year at Union College. Along with the addition of Orellana to the faculty last summer and the offering of new courses, a computer lab was created to house the latest computer graphics hardware and software-thanks to a gift from Trustee John Kelly '76.
It's only in the past twenty or thirty years that artists have been using the computer as a tool in their work. “And it is only a tool,” Orellana points out. “But the possibilities are endless, beginning with the millions of colors available in PhotoShop.”
Orellana, who arrived at Union last summer to start a new media curriculum, has done extensive research in art and technology. He predicts that the field of digital arts will explode. This seems to be happening already, including at Union. After offering a section of Introduction to Digital Arts in the fall, he finds himself teaching two sections this term, both of them full. He plans to offer the course every term for a while, with more courses to come: In the fall, he will introduce The Processed Pixel, which will explore how the basic principles of computer programming can be applied to art. And next spring, he will teach Real and Recorded Time, covering four-dimensional content (time art), including sound composition, video and installation art.
His introductory course focuses on the fundamentals of creating two-dimensional art using the computer.
Topics include essentials of digital graphics/imaging and Internet art. Class lectures and hands-on studio incorporate demonstrations, discussions, technical exploration, aesthetic inquiry, and historical information relevant to computer multimedia, hypermedia, and telecommunications. He encourages students to experiment with new ways to connect digital technology to their own artmaking practice.
“I recommend that students have taken at least one traditional art course beforehand, but what's important in the digital arts is to be able to relearn how to see the world visually, not necessarily to draw.”
They use PhotoShop and DreamWeaver, but it always comes back to the art. “Making good art always takes longer than you think,” he cautions. He requires critiques too, “to enter into the artist's process with them, perhaps asking questions that they might not have thought of.” He asks the students to carry
a sketchbook at all times.
He calls the course “a doorway into digital art. It's computer-aided artwork, with the emphasis on the art-this is not a vocational class, though students do use PhotoShop, Illustrator, and DreamWeaver. It's essentially a painting class with pixels.”
The students in his course include art majors, but also one each from English, biology, computer engineering and mechanical engineering.
In his own art, Orellana splits time between painting and new media. (New media includes interactivity, robotics, gaming, web design, virtual reality, video, installation, “and more, to be discovered,” he says.) He brings an artist's playfulness to the possibilities of technology.
Orellana has devised whimsical drawing machines -robots that can make art. He enjoys playing with the idea of artificial life/intelligence as metaphor for an alternative point of view-“creating systems that seem to be alive.”
He is planning a project
he calls the living-room, “in which all objects have the potential to be sentient.” This comes under the heading of robotic art or interactive art, in which you imagine a premise like this and work through it artistically and technologically. “In some
distant future, perhaps technology will accelerate to the point where it can ubiquitously take on the form of anything,” he points out. “In this future, how would these things relate to each other- for example, what would the language of furniture be? And what would the pieces say to each other? It will be possible someday to grow a chair out of wood-why not give it a personality too? That's the role of the artist-to comment on and imagine these plausible worlds.”
Orellana began drawing and painting at a young age. “My father was a painter and my mother studied architecture. By luck, the college I went to-the School of the Art Institute at Chicago-had one of the only art and technology departments in the country. So I focused on art and technology, specifically on 3D modeling and animation. After a while I realized that computer animation wasn't the kind of storytelling that drew me; I was more interested in exploring how time, movement, and interactivity could be used in the fine art realm.” The main reason Union hired him, however, is because he had all these computer skills; he is one of the first generation who are both computer- and art-savvy to get out into the teaching world.
He believes that the fine arts curriculum is important across the board. “Engineers and scientists have to be able to deal with visual information in logical and also aesthetic ways. There's a change going on: Companies realize that they have to embrace art in order to recruit employees who think outside the box. Although in the U.S., people still look at you funny when you say you're an artist, I think the 21st century will
see a major shift. We're surrounded by art-it's hard not to notice that everything around you has been designed by some artist.”
For more, visit the digital arts website, at http://cs.union.edu/digitalarts/