Why would anyone volunteer for technosexuality? Or even want to be a technosexual? Why indeed? For me the answer is easy, but first I need to make a disclaimer: it is 9:20 in the morning. I haven't been to bed yet; I have spent the night drawing on the computer. The work was successful and I am feeling elated (as artwork that goes well always makes one feel) and I am having a couple of gins before bed (and as celebration)
There is a small reproduction of the drawing I have been doing. It is the sort of thing I like to do just now, marrying my classical skills with the computer. Not making a drawing in chalks and conté on paper, but doing it all with a Wacom tablet on the computer. It is something I started when the model was here on Tuesday night. I often draw like this just on paper, but this one sorted out some ideas I was wanting to translate to digital media, and printed - it looks great. It is something I want to do for my up coming exhibition. That exhibition will be the fruition of what I have been doing digitally. This small triumph this week is actually an important step along the way for me.
Another success with technology in the last few days lay in transfering this diary blog to a new domain. For ever more it will be known as www.diaryofanartist.com but it started life with a URL typical of a blog: www.kingscross.blogs.com/diary, a difficult to remember web address. To create its own domain was a ticklish matter which I had not attempted before, so while there are web experts out there who think nothing of playing with DNS records, for me this was a big deal. And fortunately I was able to figure it out without a hitch by doing sufficient research first and finding the answers I needed.
Technology has always interested me, but analog technology was always so frustrating in how little it gave back for vast investments in money and time. Now the digital world offers so much more. Yet for every successful step there is at least one other that frustrates. This week it took the form of some software for my phone. A dictionary - something one would assume is relatively straightforward. It would be if the software company's decided to make things easy. For my Merriam-Webster dictionary the software company is one of those that doesn't understand the need to be clear and straight forward. So after some back and forward e-mails i still don't have a working copy on my phone. It will get straightened out eventually, but they unnecessarily make one jump through hoops to get there.
Many people cannot understand the success of the iPod - they think it is just marketing. What they do n ot understand is that when Apple came along MP3 players had lots of features but none of them worked very well. The iPod just works. So all those who complain that it does not have enough features don't realise the importance of things working well. The same thing is likely to happen with the iPhone. Lots of phones have lots of features, like my one, but lets face it, the software is often flaky. Lots of features, but they don't all work well. All Apple has to do is have a product that does what it does well and they will have a hit.
Technology when it works well is a delight. It can also value add to productivity. It has transformed me as an artist and opened the world to me. It has laid a new creative universe at my feet. I love it, but hate the unnecessary frustrations. Lets face it, so much of the stuff that is frustrating is just company's that don't know how to make things work right, or are so greedy they couldn't care about the users experience so long as they make money.
Conclusion: technology is wonderful, what i can do with it is wonderful, but the people who sell it - are mostly not so wonderful. Lets hope we can all survive them.
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