Digital Abstraction

Arful Design Chapter 8

In Chapter 8 of Ge Wang's Artful Design, he describes artful design as a process of being aware of one's medium and allowing its affordances to shape the message (447). This resonated with how I think about creating and my tendency towards more abstract/minimalist designs. There is a push and pull within digital media, particularly VR and more experiential works: does the medium's strength lie in its ability to recreate the physical in an instant or to render surreal and impossible environments? The advent of photography created an existential crisis for painting, which had until then been used almost exclusively representationally. If a portrait can be taken more accurately and exponentially quicker with a camera, would painting become obsolete? Obviously, it did not, and instead was able to transcend its original purpose to become a more abstract medium for expressing the intangible.

My interest within music technology is to create tools and experiences accessible to non-musician audiences. This is an area where means-to-an-ends and ends-in-themselves are readily confounded. Highly representational design is not always a path to an accessible final creation, let alone the only path. I would rather have someone come away from my work thinking "I have no clue what it was, but it was sublime" than "there was a tree and a river and they responded to sound, but what is this for?" Most people listen to their favourite songs because they enjoy them in and of themselves, not for any higher purpose. The beautiful is able to speak for itself, and this is emphasized by abstraction, when there is no literal interpretation to fall back on, no real-world analogue to harken to. It either works on its own terms, or it fails as an end-in-itself. Art that comes across as strongly representative of reality can too easily market itself as neutral and mask its true moral leanings.

The digital has the power to represent the surreal better than any physical media. Thus far, technology has largely been used for concrete functions: calculate this value, send this email, view this article. These uses are clearly not art, though they must be designed for. The world of VR and interactive digital experiences more generally is far too powerful to be used only for worldly errands.

As I finished Artful Design, I was reminded of an Alan Watts quote. It is how I see myself and the things I create, as entropy spiralling out in time and space, a small manifestation of an infinite process:

It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall... In the middle, it's dense. And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns. So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it... Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are... You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. [source]