The unending vastness of imagination

When you really sit back and think about the changes being wrought in the art world by digital technology it starts to feel very science fiction. Being able to do things never before possible, mixing media in realistic ways using pixels instead of paint, ink, silver halide, pencil, pastel, rock, mud, paper, crayon, water, or anything else you can think of. It's fascinating, amazing, frustrating, and frightening all at the same time.

For the folks that like to get their hands dirty, who truly create with their body and mind working together, the artificiality of bits and bytes and the lack of manual skill and dexterity required to write code or push a button or slide a mouse or pen across a tablet, the complete separation from the medium of art, to not make something from start to finish with your own hands by your own skill, is blasphemy.

For the folks who have never shot a roll of film in their life (there are more than you know), who were brought up with computers, who live in the digital age, there is no question, only wonder and experimentation, testing what the new technology can do, pushing it to its limits, driving new artforms, creating new paradigms. There is no looking back.

For those of us in the middle, mired in the crevass between worlds, taunted by technology, lured by its song, but firmly rooted in manual labor, it's a tortuous path. We can see both sides. We are not so entrenched in our ways that we cannot learn, but rebel, rage even, against the machine because we remember what it's like to get our hands dirty.