Blog

The Artist and the Scientist

June 28, 2011 - 2:35pm

Much of my art contains storytelling aspects. So naturally, in my final years of high school, I began to pursue animation. My illustrations often look like a frozen moment in a scene, because that is the way I think ― when I think, I think in full scenes. They play out in my mind like a movie. I have always made cartoons, but they never could express the action, the movement that I wanted my audience to experience. When I create my animations, I want my audience to be immersed in them; to see every action as I imagined it, to feel it through a combination of sounds and images. And so I began to animate.

Primarily, I work in Adobe Flash, as much as my art is digital. This brings me to the relationship between technology and art. As I work using programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Flash to create my artwork, I sometimes come upon roadblocks, the points where limitations of the technology are impeding my progress. I eventually get around them with a longer process than seems necessary. I’ll say, “I wish I could just do...this.” This is where the artist becomes the scientist. We find a new solution, one that was not originally built into a point-to-point program. We push technology to new levels, levels that could not have been conceived by a mathematical or scientific mind. It is necessary to have an artist’s mind in order to create a computer program, or other technology, that is free and open-ended enough for artists to use.

Though I am not entirely ready to create 3D animation yet, one just has to look at what it is today. Take movies like Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.,” James Cameron’s “Avatar” or any other animated movie of recent time. The increase in realism and spectacular images made in these films is amazing. Every individual hair on a creatures’ body can be seen, and it looks real ― one can see the texture, the different lighting, the movement. Science and art are intertwined, because they push each other. As technology becomes more advanced, the artist is able to do more within it, and as the artist finds more freedom and more use in that technology, they push it forward. They think of new ideas for it, new possibilities that will make it more efficient. So as they intertwine, science, technology and art continue to push each other to new territories and new heights.