OS/2 Shareware BBS: 25 Icons/25-Icons.zip/iconde.zip/bs.txt

Text File | 1994-06-08 | 6KB | 120 lines

BS.TXT:

Yes, this icon collection comes with a free essay, powerfully suggesting the
command-line entry of DEL BS.TXT, or a quick trip to the shredder.
Nevertheless:

I am commonly asked two questions.  The first of these is some variant of, "Why
do you make icons that are not useful?"  Why, in other words, do I make icons
that do not represent a printer, or CD-ROM device, or some popular application
or another?  Well, there are several answers, one of which is that there already
exist many icons by other artists that serve these purposes quite well.  Another
is that attractive icons seem to me to be worthy in their own right, even if
they do not immediately suggest some utilitarian function.  When I find an
appealing icon by somebody else, I commonly leave it lying about the desktop for
a while, just for the pleasure I get out of looking at it.

Yet another answer is, "You never know."  Although an icon showing a rhinoceros
under a quarter moon does not immediately suggest a function to most viewers,
there are a few to whom the rhino may be just exactly right for one of their
applications or folders.  For example, I recently acquired a solitaire program
that employs a drawing of a lighthouse as part of its graphic layout.  My own
LITEHOUS.ICO, which I had drawn several weeks before, was an ideal object to
associate with the program.

The final answer is that drawing icons -- trying to milk "beauty" and artistic
validity out of a 32 x 32 pixel array with 18 colors -- is just plain fun.  It
used to be that when I needed a break from work, I played a computer game; now I
draw an icon: far more satisfying.  I distribute them because, well,
communication is part of art, and because people have asked me to.

The second question is perhaps more profound: "Why, as an artist, do you work in
a medium that is so obviously transient?"  In other words, why aren't I
sculpting objects out of deathless marble, or painting in oils (or even
acrylics), or doing something -- anything -- that might insure some degree of
immortality or at least relative permanence to my work?

Well, it's a good question.  For surely, other than performance art (which I
generally enjoy immensely), there are few artistic media more ephemeral than
OS/2 icons.  For example, in the next few months or year, the standard OS/2 icon
will probably become 40 x 40 pixels, or 64 x 64 or something, rendering my work
archaic and, on most systems, simply invisible.  Or IBM could decide to get out
of the PC software business altogether; let Bill Gates have it all.  Whatever.
In any case, it is a virtual certainty that archeologists 2000 years from now
will not be digging up my work and marveling at its beauty, as they conceivably
might with a marble statue or clay pot.

Consider an analogy.  I understand (perhaps from the writings of Jane Goodall; I
forget) that chimpanzees produce a form of art consisting of piles of sticks and
stones.  At least it's reasonable to assume that these are artistic endeavors,
although they certainly could be strictly utilitarian: chimp icons meaning "Here
there be leopards" or something.  But assuming they are art, they are remarkably
without human aesthetic value: they are just untidy piles of sticks and stones.
The beauty they offer their chimpanzee viewer is pretty much limited to that
species.  Indeed, if the chimpanzee species somehow advanced to human level, the subjective beauty of these objects would doubtless vanish.

I read a lot of science fiction.  Many such stories are set in the distant
future: 20,000 years from now, or even further.  Usually the technology is
incredible, indistinguishable from magic and all that.  But the really
remarkable thing about such tales is their depiction of humanity.  The human
characters, mentally and usually even physically, are pretty much, well, the
20th Century versions.  They have the same ambitions, jealousies, peeves,
ideals, motivations, responses, mental abilities, and just about every other
human trait that you or I might have, way back here in the terminal moments of
the 20th Century.

Well, this may be good fiction, because absolutely alien people would probably
make for incomprehensible and hence dull reading, but it is poor futurism.  It
entirely ignores, or soft-pedals, the probable developments in human biology
that can reasonably be expected.  Fact is, we have already begun tinkering with
the human genome.  Within the next couple of centuries, humanity will probably
undergo a dramatic artificial acceleration in evolution, with results that are
presently unimaginable.

Perhaps the result will be spindly, dome-headed zombies; perhaps vast brains
floating in jars; perhaps disembodied spirits inhabiting multiple dimensions;
who knows?  Whatever, the minds of these folk will almost surely be occupied
with matters that are not necessarily loftier but certainly different from what
we think about today.

Their aesthetic sense will be greatly different as well.  Perhaps they will
reach aesthetic ecstasy by listening to an endless monotone; perhaps their
artists will directly stimulate specific brain centers in fascinating sequences;
perhaps their visual senses will appreciate vast, swirling works done in
wavelengths far beyond our present and painfully limited visual spectrum.  I
dunno.

But it seems fairly likely that their artistic sensibilities will be so
different from ours today that, to them, all the works in the National Gallery
will resemble the products of chimpanzees: piles of sticks and stones, crude
productions and clumsy depictions that might be of some possible interest to
historians or anthropologists, but with no broader appeal.

Art as a vehicle of immortality is doomed.  Long live the ephemeral!  Let us
consider OS/2-icon art as a variant of performance art, cognate with the public
plucking of a chicken or the gift-wrapping of large buildings, and revel in it
while we may.


David Edwards