Impulse

I loved clay­ma­tion when I was a kid. I’d scour the TV guide for ani­ma­tion shows and watch them reli­giously. Finally, in junior high, I had to make one myself. I bor­rowed an 8mm cam­era from the school, sculpted a few crea­tures from plas­ticine, and started film­ing. I toiled for hours care­fully plac­ing the crea­tures for the open­ing scene, then proudly clicked the shut­ter for the first frame of my ani­ma­tion career. A half an hour of metic­u­lous repo­si­tion­ing later, I clicked the shut­ter for the next 1/16th of a sec­ond of my mas­ter­piece. More minus­cule shifts of clay, more clicks of the shut­ter. After three hours of labor, I had nearly com­pleted the first — and only — full sec­ond of clay­ma­tion. I screamed and stormed out of the room, frus­trated. Decades later, the 8mm stop-motion movie cam­era remains, for me, a sym­bol of infi­nite pos­si­bil­ity and infi­nite frus­tra­tion. All I wanted to do was make a funny lit­tle movie. But that was then, this is now.

Today, the dig­i­tal moth­er­ship has landed. Increased com­put­ing power and eas­ier ren­der­ing engines have made it fea­si­ble to cre­ate my lit­tle film entirely on the com­puter. But wait, there’s more! Macromedia/Adobe Flash removes the tedium of car­toon ani­ma­tion. Digital cam­eras and photo soft­ware allow end­less manip­u­la­tion of images and the abil­ity to print at home — the art of pho­tog­ra­phy has never been more approach­able or more flex­i­ble. Video cam­eras are com­mon­place as is decent video edit­ing soft­ware, mak­ing film­ing a short films fea­si­ble and full fea­tures approach­able. Music and sound edit­ing soft­ware have already cre­ated an explo­sion of new music. More than all that, the inter­net has cre­ated numer­ous forums for peo­ple to share their cre­ations, learn­ing tech­niques from each other as well as devel­op­ing a sense of what peo­ple react to.
And kids are grow­ing up in this envi­ron­ment. (Imagine!) Much has been made of the net­gen demo­graphic — kids brought up with an inter­net con­nec­tion, for whom instant mes­sag­ing a friend in Europe is as rou­tine as teenagers tele­phon­ing next door was decades ago. It’s not entirely about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, though: think of the pos­si­bil­i­ties for cre­ative expres­sion with the tools we have in abun­dance today. In the world these kids are grow­ing up in, you can cre­ate just about any­thing you want — cool pic­tures, movies, songs, ani­ma­tions — eas­ily any­time you want. You can share your work with friends and see what they’ve done. In their world, you’ve always been able to do this.
The oppor­tu­nity for cre­ative expres­sion for kids nowa­days is mas­sive — more than any time in his­tory. Are we there­fore rais­ing a gen­er­a­tion of full of artists — pos­si­bly cre­at­ing another artis­tic renaissance?

Don’t believe me? Take a look at Duality. This Star Wars fan film looks as good as any­thing com­ing out of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic. It was made by two high school kids on a sin­gle mac — five years ago. Now watch Ryan vs Dorkman, another Star Wars flick. Again, made by high school kids back in ’03. Look through ieve’s pho­tos on Flickr and real­ize she’s only been tak­ing pho­tos for 1 year.
Now, look through DeviantArt, a trea­sure chest of cre­ative work. DeviantArt is a forum for shar­ing art­work of all kinds — pho­tog­ra­phy, illus­tra­tion, crafts, poetry, fic­tion, non-fiction, ani­ma­tion, just to name a few. Though it’s open to all, it’s pri­mar­ily pop­u­lated by the 13 – 20 crowd. They have forums and blogs that allow mem­bers to cheer each other on, offer sug­ges­tions, learn from and chal­lenge each other. It’s a huge, vir­tual art col­lec­tive. And it’s work­ing. Just spend some time perus­ing the site and you’ll see the lit­tle com­mu­ni­ties that have come up, their dis­cus­sions, and the art­work that inspires and is gen­er­ated by them.

Now, you can make the argu­ment that mak­ing it eas­ier to make art means it’s eas­ier to cre­ate medi­oc­rity. Absolutely true, and I think, irrel­e­vant. Firstly, think about 20 years from now when these kids are adults — hav­ing grown up with artis­tic tools at their dis­posal, the aver­age per­son will be much more trained, and prac­ticed, than the aver­age per­son today. I think the qual­ity of medi­oc­rity in 20 years will be much bet­ter than medi­oc­rity today.
Secondly, good work always finds a way to bub­ble to the top. People have been mak­ing crap for mil­len­nia, but on the whole, we’ve for­got­ten it. All we remem­ber is Mozart, van Gogh, and Chaplin. People actively seek out good work and rec­om­mend it to their friends.
The inter­net is excel­lent at accel­er­at­ing this. The very core of google’s rank­ing algo­rithm is essen­tially a pop­u­lar­ity index based on how often sites are rec­om­mended by oth­ers. Flickr is research­ing the con­cept of “inter­est­ing­ness”. Just about every web site has rank­ing infor­ma­tion. “Today’s Favorites” is right there on DeviantArt’s home page. More and more online forums are using rep­u­ta­tion sys­tems where you can quickly find the mem­bers who have the most highly rated works or cri­tiques.
Blogs, too help peo­ple find the good stuff. It’s the most com­mon use for blogs: they are essen­tially qual­ity fil­ters, authors rec­om­mend­ing inter­est­ing sites or works to their read­ers — find one blog you like, and you’ll find a lot of oth­ers. Boingboing.net, one of the most active blogs on the net (see their stats) is exactly this: a cool­ness fil­ter for a par­tic­u­lar aes­thetic.
Add this all up and you’ve got plenty of ways for a few good works to float to the top of an ocean of unin­ter­est­ing stuff.

So you’ll have a gen­er­a­tion raised in a cre­ative world — where cre­ative cus­tomiza­tion and expres­sion are habit — with plenty of tools to eas­ily cre­ate any­thing they want, many forums for shar­ing and learn­ing from each other (and again, a gen­er­a­tion that’s as used to online dis­cus­sion as they are talk­ing on a phone), and plenty of ways to find the best of the best. Sounds like a bunch of old wood, sit­ting on saw­dust, drenched in gaso­line, on a hot dry day. I’m excited to see what hap­pens.
What do you think?