Thoughts on a few articles - OSU

I recently read three articles all detailing varying aspects of creativity.  The first article was actually apart of an interlude for a book, but it was titled "Ladies and Gentlemen, behold; The Enemy" written by Kidd.  This writing goes into detail about "The Enemy" and as I personally understood it to mean, the enemy being your public.  You have to constantly keep relative things in perspective - shape, size, emphasis on your design points coming across and design clarity in general.  They raised some very good points and ideas for things such as keeping your message simple and making sure you are conveying what you mean to convey with your message.  The article also goes into speak about not understating things either and finally, not to take for granted perspective and points of view.  The analogy they used referenced our looking down upon second dimension creatures and how limited their view was while we being in the third could be looked down upon by the fourth, them via the fifth and so on and so forth.

The second article I read was written by Dave Hickey and is titled "The Heresay of Zone Defense".  This basketball themed and oriented writing largely argued that the rules of anything be it in sports or life can be molded and changed but they also end up becoming our laws which restrict as well. He likened basketball's ever evolving into something beautiful and artistic where as art is devolving into something critical and confined.  I honestly felt this article was a bit too narrow minded in its scope as its underlying message was good, but the examples it was using could have been either phrased differently or removed all together.

Lastly, the Wired article "Why is this man smiling?"  written by Lawrence Weschler.  I found it interesting that the author was speaking about how unnatural trying to make artificial creatures look real is or feels to humans since Wired is a premier technologically backed magazine.  He goes in length on the varying obstacles we face with trying to cross the Uncanny Valley (A point where something artificially made reaches a point of looking 'too' real and the small differences prove disturbing to human beings visually) and other eye-appealing realisim-esque effects being applied.

All in all, I think these are very relative to someone in the digital art realm as you need a well rounded and fundamental understanding of the varying types of media at your disposal as well as surrounds you.

/TDC