How does technology mediate the artist experience?
The technology that was available to me to synthesize my project both helped and hindered the different parts of the process. One thing I noticed while doing the situational tour is that there are different steps to take and create good photographs than for creating good paintings. The processes differ because there is only so much you can do with the equipment and object or setting that you are photographing.
In our painting class, we can take artistic license while we are setting up the design of the painting. With photography, you take many pictures, and work with what you have. I ran into this problem because it was a dark night at the vigil and my camera was not sharp enough to capture the scene very accurately. This was both a problem and an opportunity.
The advantage to taking digital photography is the fact that you can edit the pictures after you take them, something that you really can not do with painting. Since my pictures generally came out fuzzy, I applied a digital wash that helped sharpen the pictures. Also, the advantage to taking pictures is that I got to document an entire event from start to finish, not just one moment in time. These pictures together say much more than one painting can say, and since you apply the same artistic principles you would in painting, just in a different way, the artists meaning can still show through.
The disadvantages that I thought were present was there is a steeper learning curve. I have taken digital pictures before, but I had usually avoided nighttime. That is part of the reason I choose the location for the tour that I did. I thought it would be interesting to try new forms of photograph. However learning the shutter length and exposure time and such to formulate good base images took awhile. I walked away from the event not knowing whether or not my images would formulate into a good series, but with editing it all worked.
Editing was probably my favorite part, because this is where I feel I am truly being an artist. I was able to choose how I wanted the picture to look, and not just rely on the luck I had with some of my pictures, This stage was hard also, because it takes a lot of time to decide what you want the final pictures to look like, but also how you want them to function as a whole.
I feel that producing mass media art can be just as personal as creating a painting. It can even take just as much time when you add in the traveling time for pictures, editing, posting and such. However, even though it may take the same time, it can convey a more real time, "it seems like I was there" feeling that you may want to convey. Technology has improved enough for me to be able to fix some of my pictures to convey the scene in the way I saw it, even if my pictures did not come out the way I saw it completely due to a lesser quality camera. However, some pictures that came out different then I saw, I decided to keep that way because the disconnect interested me. The technology we used was simple once you got over the learning curve and produced a great series of pictures from everyone in the class.
