I agree with Milie that, yes, I often feel a bit scared when working
with new software, particularly when I dimly recall something that's
undocumented. But at the same time, when I'm doing that most solid,
un-digital thing — cabinetry in my workshop — I have much the same
anxiety when I try any new technique or tool: one can mess up an
expensive and possibly irreplaceable bit of rare wood, or one can
destroy something on which one's spent hours designing and building,
and some tools, hand or power, are simply dangerous. I remember once
when I was turning a bowl on a lathe at the Rhode Island School of
Design furniture workshop when my cutting tool hit a fault in the wood
and the bowl exploded driving a pointed wood shard deep into my
hand. Afterwards, I wore heavy leather gloves, and although the
excitement in turning a bowl is largely aesthetic there's also always a
recognized element of danger. I suspect we always feel that mixture of
pleasure and anxiety with any complex software, though there's no
physical threat involved.
g
On Jul 16, 2005, at 2:03 PM, Millie Niss wrote:
> To return to the subject of digital art, do others here ever face the
> fear
> that they will be unable to master the technical tricks needed to
> complete a
> piece? I struggle for example, with Flash MX 2004 Pro because many of
> its
> features are either undocumented or documented incorrectly... In a
> similar
> vein, I was making a portal for a list I'm on using the open source
> content
> management program ez-publish (based on PHP), and it didn't have the
> necessary documentation to allow me to set up user accounts on the
> site,
> even though most sites that use ez publish have this feature... I
> don't
> think the documentation problem features in other art forms in the same
> way...
>
> Millie Niss
>
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George P. Landow
Professor of English and the History of Art
Brown University
www.landow.com
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