4/28/07
Any worker can tell you how hard it is to look busy when there's no real work to do. For those of us in the self-employment realm, the problem is mitigated in that, even though your boss is an idiot, he's unlikely to fire you. Still, the usual clean-your-desk, update-your-resumé activities are less than satisfactory when the only wolf at the door is the shadow of your own empty appointment book or inbox, a situation likely the fault of your idiot employee.

Even so, those among us fortunate (?) enough to depend on the jolly jolly internet for our daily breadcrumbs do have one recourse in the face of yawning slow biz no biz, namely rebuilding the ol' website. Yep-rock, ain't nothing so good for the soul and bad for the schedule as cranking up the text editor and having at the HTML and all its li'l acronymous buddies. And wouldn't you know it, between standards and web 2.0 and the endless arms-race of eyeball chasing, there's always some tedious tendentious detail of design or compliance to jimmy, not to mention the odd bloody-edged technology that you can turn to your advantage. It's sorta like what the traffic cop said: no matter where you are or what you're doing, you can be detained.

I myself am a total tool of programming, a veritable code junky, if only in a small mean way. I can get lost in the tweeze and the tweak, detailing architectures and chasing bugs until the wee small hours of the morn, delighting in the implementation of some blindingly obscure protocol or the extinguishing of some stupid malfunction that wouldn't take a real junky, uh programmer, ten minutes. It is well that I cannot make a living at IT, lest I become too fond of it.

The looming performing season and the benign disarray of Amber Tide's website (wot, no CSS?) was a lilly-white all-day pass to make meaningful virtual whoopee. A somewhat slicker face on our online press-kit might sway a selection committee or two in our favor. Wasn't like anything else was going on.

But I had another motivation as well. I came out of the winter doldrums (boomlay boom) with a brand new waste of time, for me at least: Flash. In the course of performing the digital equivalent of what I do to shore up distressed houses in my other (other, other, other) life as a handyman for some weepingly complex (good though) Flash templates, I'd become just familiar enough with that uber-popular waste of bandwidth to be a real hit at parties and possibly even design my way out of a paper bag. If I expected anyone else to give me a chance to mess up their site, I needed a demo.

Besides, what I really want to do is direct.

In the end, I spent more time rearranging the deck chairs on this particular Titanic than I did putting together the Flash presentation. Given an overall design and materials already at hand, the process of activating the necessary whistle and bell modules was relatively trivial. The heavy lifting of conversion and compatibility is already done for you by gleaming brows of untarnished genius behind the golden doors of Macromedia, said doors languishing in the sweating palms of Adobe over yonder by the Fremont Bridge. With a bit (okay, a lot) of dragging and dropping, I could sling together a 30 second History of Amber Tide montage, sorta Ken Burns meets Spike Jones at Monty Python's mystic lagoon for a spot of croquet and tea, in less time than it takes to replace the transmission on an '86 Plymouth Voyager. Don't even ask how I know that.

When art first came into existence, it was all folk art by default. There weren't any pros, there weren't any critics or criterions, there was no prestige or fame or fortune in art. It crawled out of people's minds and into their work-roughened hands and nobody thought twice. Hardly anybody even thought once. Art was no more and no less respectable than cooking or weaving or any other craft.

Gradually, though, what with philosophy and kings and free time and stuff, things got progressively more complicated. Art became stratified, nuanced, theoretical, junk like that. Fairly recently, an esthetic of progress, of attempting to anticipate the future of art, became trendy. Art 2.0, as it were. Tomorrow's Art Today was all the rage, the latest thing.

Perhaps the height of this school was reached around the end of Two Dubya Two with the appearance of the computer. Artificial thought, mechanical intelligence. You want recursion? We gots recursion! Avant garde artists, those that could make heads or tails (or ones or zeros) of the giant moronic things, fairly pole vaulted at the opportunity to hack their way into lushly verdant unexplored Art Thing territory. And hack they most certainly did.

But as they did, something funny happened. Techniques born eggheaded and experimental were perfected, smoothed, given assistance by the very tools the tinkerers were using to create them. The computer's swiss-army versatility proved capable of breaking the path both for the feckless explorers and for the grubby settlers who came swarming behind them. What started out painfully expensive and gnomically obscure (with the accompanying patina of profundity that those qualities imply in the fine art world) all too soon degenerated into granny-craft mediocrity as the tools and techniques grew exponentially cheaper and easier to use.

Nowadays, the desktop revolution in design has led us to circus poster typography and staircase bitmapped graphics, the electronic music inventions of Cage and Varèse and Stockhausen are given over to hiphop producers and bedroom remixers, and the shining city of the World Wide Web swarms with cat macros and MySpace infestations. Not to mention cheap Flash.

It's clear: computer art is now folk art. The circle has closed. The future has become the past. We now live in an age more golden than gold, an age beyond the dreams of the finest of fine artists of the past, where not only great art but any art can be constructed, not even at will, but at whim. An age when literally anyone can be artist, and in true Buddy Pine fashion, perhaps all too soon no one will be.

In the meantime, check out my kyewl new website! It's got Flash! LOLZ!!11!!