Diary Of An Artist In A New World

On Being A Digital Artist & The Lamborghini Miura

A lot of people seem to struggle with understanding what it means to be a digital artist. Sure they know that we work on the computer but apart from that they just don't understand. For people like that traditional media like paper and charcoal and oil paint and canvas are "real art" and everything else isn't quite the same. They are right you know - it isn't the same, and if anything, I look back at my time painting with paint as being a bit limited.

What Am I Reading? - A Biography Of Steve Jobs

iCon: The Greatest Second Act In The History Of Business

Earlier this year Steve Jobs had a liver transplant and the world is faced with the prospect that his life will eventually come to an end. When a man is as young as Jobs is questions of death are rarely raised but the seriousness of his illness and his unique role in the digital revolution that we are all experiencing brings attention to the details of his life into sharp focus.

I find Steve Jobs a fascinating character and because I love computers I regard him as an incredibly important man. He is a very flawed human being by all accounts and yet is role in computing is so essential that it could be argued that computers would not be the ubiquitous devices in everyones homes that they are today if not for Jobs. He is the person who changed their development from being the toy of engineers and turned it into the first real personal computer as we know it today. 

It might have been Steve Wozniak who was the engineering genius who designed the circuitry and programming for the first Apple computer but if that was all that happened it would be nothing special. There were many brilliant minds in Silicon Valley who had the desire and ability to make circuit boards for computers that anyone (not just universities and government departments) could buy. But none of then, Wozniak included, saw much beyond the circuits and geek talk. 

Alan Turing had done the math for the first computer algorithm back in 1936 making him the father of all electronic computers but they remained huge and inefficient machines until the transistor and the integrated circuit enabled miniaturization in the 1960's. The first personal computer was the Micral in 1972 and several others followed over the next few years. Problem was that all these computers required expert knowledge. The computer was just a collection of components and the user had to use a soldering iron and screwdrivers to assemble the machine. Then the software had to be installed into the machine every time it was turned on. No wonder people had to be very enthusiastic to use one. It probably helped to be a genius like Wozniak.

But then Steve Jobs came along. He didn't know much about circuits or software. He was a college dropout who had studied Zen and calligraphy. He had a vision which was that a computer had to be something different to what it had been up until then. It had to be able to be operated by ordinary people without a degree in computer programming. It needed to be fully assembled when bought - you should be able to just plug it in. It needed and operating system that stayed in the computer memory. It needed a television screen so graphics could be seen (previous microcomputers relied on flashing lights) and it needed a mouse to make it easier to control. Wozniak apparently didn't agree but Jobs was insistent and so he drove Wozniac to make computers the way Jobs wanted them to be made. The Micral may well be the first personal computer but it was the Apple was the first one that you and I would recognize as being one. The modern personal computer market was born. And it was Steve Jobs who envisioned it in a realistic way and made it happen. 

Review Of In The Shadow Of The Moon: Pure Brilliance

There are certain events that etch so deeply in the memory that years later we can remember every detail of our surroundings and thoughts as we heard the news. 9/11 is like that for me, as was the deaths of John Lennon and Elvis Presley. High on my list of memorable events, however is one that is not about death. It is the positive and inspirational moment of those first steps on the moon.

Other people saw it on television. Our school, being in a provincial town, had no TV and the radio broadcast was piped through the school PA system. No doubt by a secretary holding the mike up to a transistor radio. It sounded like it - screechy and indistinct, but in the middle of that chaos of squawky noise one of the greatest moments in the history of humankind was discernible. A man was stepping onto another world for the first time.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a newly released movie that brings that experience to life again by piecing together previously unseen footage from the NASA archives and digitally enhancing the original. Previously seen film from the control room, for example, was silent. The makers of In The Shadow Of The Moon spliced together audio tapes from the control room and using the same techniques musicians use to lip sync music, they put the voice back into the moving lips as the drama unfolds.

Likewise the footage shot by the astronauts in orbit and on the moon is brought to life by the addition of an audio track. In this case it is the astronauts themselves describing what was going on from their perspective as human beings looking back to events they can never forget.

Michael Collins the astronaut who stayed in the lunar orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon, and for a while became the most isolated human being in history, has revealing insights and  remarkable observations that turn something that could easily be the dry ramblings of a pilot into the exciting human story that this great adventure was. After all the millions of dollars spent, and the incredible machinery put to work (Apollo Five is still the most powerful rocket ever made), it is in the end a story of the courage and adventurous spirit of some visionary people that made the lunar landing possible.

It seems incredible some of the risks that were taken. It should not be forgotten that the effort to get to the moon was at the cost of precious human lives. The movie reveals in the astronauts own words their own fears surrounding certain exposed wiring in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the space capsule. These fears were proved real when the 3 astronauts of Apollo One were burned to death on the launchpad. It appears they were fearful of the wiring, but more fearful of complaining due to the risk of losing their place as astronauts on the project.

The production notes for the movie demonstrate the extraordinary steps the producers took to recreate these awesome events and the sensitivity they exercised as the project developed:

"Producer Duncan Copp and co-producer Chris Riley spent many weeks in the NASA film library examining cans of film - some of which had not been opened for over 30 years. This search uncovered many gems, including astonishing space shots which have been re-mastered from the original film rolls to reveal the Apollo program with a visual clarity and impact it has never had before. The mute 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control have been laboriously lip-synced with the 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers' voice loop to re-unite the pictures and sound of many historic moments for the first time, lending a striking immediacy to many dramatic scenes.

"The film has some stunning shots in space of the spacecraft separating and docking. This was engineering footage shot so that the engineers could investigate the cause of any problems – in effect a sort of visual "black box recorder". There were cameras built into the various stages of the Saturn V rocket which would automatically shoot key moments, usually at high frame rates on 16mm film. The cameras would then eject (you can see this happening on one particularly spectacular shot of the final stage firing) and re-enter the atmosphere, where they would be caught in mid-air by high-flying aircraft equipped with nets! It's an amazing story we plan to tell in one of the DVD featurettes. One of things we wanted to do was really allow the audience to luxuriate in this amazing footage – and so some shots we play in their entirety."

"Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me about this project is that this film had not already been made," said director David Sington. He then went on to describe the surviving astronauts who were able to participate in the film. "The best thing about it has been meeting and talking to ten of the most remarkable individuals I have ever met."

This movie has enough blasting rockets to please hardened technophiles, enough tales of courage to please the adventurous, and enough heart and soul to please the rest of us.

Ron Howard Presents In The Shadow Of The Moon
Blasting off September 2007
Website / Preview of In The Shadow Of The Moon

Two New Easels

Needing two new easels I settled on the universal type (vertical mode plus watercolor mode) and small enough for easy storage. Those easels always have design faults, however. The legs tend to spread while you work for a start, so I made some improvements - chain stays for the legs and a cross brace for extra watercolor stability.

After centuries of making easels you would think the manufacturers could get something as basic as an easel right, but it seems not. I remember a story of Vincent going to a blacksmith to make an improved painting tool, so it seems to be a long term problem. The only easels I have that work well without modification are the eight I made myself about four years ago and my Stanright aluminium easel. Every wooden easel made in Italy or France that I have purchased has needed improving. The chain stays should be standard. They make the easel more user friendly without preventing the easel from folding up. Stability is especially important if I am going to trust putting my laptop on it.

Beam Me Up Scottie (Well, Soon, Maybe)

Not to be outdone by a 22 room space hotel announced a few days ago (see my post "The First Artist In Space" August 12, 2007), Brigelow Aerospace has brought forward its plans to launch its own space station called Sundancer. Although not described specifically as a space hotel that would seem to be the most likely source of income for the venture.

Brigelow has already launched two inflatable test orbiting space ships called Genesis One and Two. Sundancer appears to be planned for launch before 2010. So it seems there is going to be ample opportunity to become the first artist in space. Now all I need is the four million dollars or so to get up there. Maybe I will just have to Hitchhike. Have thumb, will travel...

The First Artist In Space

From my earliest memories I dreamed of being the first artist in space. While Bill Gates dreamed of money, Murdoch of world domination, Steve Jobs of beautiful machines, and George W. of the mother of all oil wells, I was lost somewhere on the moon painting moonscapes or on a starship photographing the center of the galaxy.

Even today, when other people count sheep to get themselves to sleep, I take my seat in a spacecraft amongst the moons of Jupiter. I have to confess that I have only ever used two screen savers. One was a view from the space station of the earth, and the current one is a photograph of Jupiter taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1995.

There are few things possible to imagine of greater beauty than the cloud tops of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. I check the web sites for the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Mars rovers every few days to see the latest photos. Currently there is an image of one of Saturn's moons called Encaladus on the Cassini site. Encaladus looks like the most beautiful pearl in existence.

I dream of being in a little compartment on Cassini taking photographs and making drawings and paintings on my Wacom tablet and trusty Macintosh. I could paint the beauty of space, and then in pictures and poems try to explore the loneliness of being out there, in the middle of the inky blackness with a limited supply of resources. It would be worth it to know that I only had a few weeks of air left if I could just communicate some of that feeling I get from extraordinary beauty.

I remember the first time I saw Saturn. It was in a 4 inch reflecting telescope I had put together from old parts as a project with my young sons. It was in Cairns on a warm evening that we took the telescope outside and after looking at the moons of Jupiter we spotted Saturn low in the eastern sky. That year the rings were nearly side on to the Earth and the planet looked like a yellow ball with a long yellow nail through it. It was the strangest sight, and even now it remains my best ever view of this wonderful sight.

I would love to be the first artist in space. and have a bohemian studio amongst the stars.

If I end up with four million dollars it is still possible to be the first space bohemian. Today it was announced that the first Space Hotel is planned for launch starting in 2012. The rooms are 22 pods around a central hub. It is the strangest looking thing, like a sea creature and proof that reality is always stranger than fiction. When science fiction imagined space stations years ago they visualized wheels in space. Maybe that will happen one day, but so far the space station we have, and now this space hotel are nothing like the future world predicted not long ago.

I would love to be a guest on the Space Hotel in my Galactic Suite painting the marvelous view of the Earth below and its extraordinary beauty like a jewel in space.

The Floating City

Today the USS Kitty Hawk returned to Sydney Harbor. Naturally she tied up at the Garden Island navy base which is a 5 minute walk down the road. We are fortunate that Woolloomooloo Bay has such deep water that the biggest ships in the world can dock just a few steps from our public streets. I took these photographs from Embarkation Park. It is part of why I love Kings Cross so much - that so much that is different and exciting is just a few minutes walk away.

I think aircraft carriers are very beautiful pieces of engineering where the beauty grows out of the pure efficiency of function. Like large bridges or large aircraft the laws of physics take precedence over compromise and the result is by default beautiful.

There is also the kind of impression of beauty that grows out of the human ability to be awed by immense structures whether they be mountains or huge ships. I love being in a big jet when it is taking off just for the sensation of the power of those engines to  create speed and then the physics of pressure differentials on the wings lifts that great weight into the sky. I get that same feeling from a great ship like this, its immensity, the power of its engines, and the  city-like functioning of its crew, 5,000 souls working together like a purposeful machine. That is just as much beauty as the lines in a hull.

Docked at the wharf great doors open that expose the hangars in the bowels of the ship. I have been inside there on an open day when the ship was in port a few years ago. The feeling in that immense space is of something from another world.

It is good to see so many sailors in the Cross tonight. 4 more ships were in port - cruisers and assault ships. It is a lot of sailors. Kings Cross has been hosting visiting sailors for 150 years. It always has a good feeling when a ship is in. Judging from the smiles on happy sailors it seems the feeling is mutual.

Inventions Of Leonardo Da Vinci

A travelling exhibition of models of Leonardo's machines is in town at the moment over at Fox Studios (now re-named Entertainment Quarter). 60 of his inventions and devices are on display, many of which can be operated with handles and so on. It is possible to go inside his room of mirrors to see your own back and so on. The catalog is a useful addition to my library for my Leonardo web site still in progress. The whole exhibition is very timely for my writing. Here are some highlights.

Trees, Girders And Wires

There is something strangely beautiful about these utilitarian structures. In many ways engineering is one of the highest arts. I love freeways and railways and aircraft for the kind of unadorned shapes that display beauty in ruthless function. In many ways human form is the result of the same kind of design approach whereby all that is superfluous is discarded until only the functional remains and that is what we appreciate the most when we look at our own forms. These constructions are equally efficient in purpose and beautiful because of it. They are like abstract paintings against the sky.