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Artist or Scientist?

That is a question that we are each increasingly facing in the digital age. Graphic designers, programmers, audio/video artists, and the rest of us, have to rely on artistic and scientific reasoning every time we turn on our computers or even use our home electronics and games. Balancing the needs of the Artist and Scientist in each of us can help overcome the obstacles that evolving technologies present.

History

When we're searching our own human memories, an application's Help file, or instructions in a manual, we're following a long path of human history that requires mastery over abstract concepts and tools in order to express what is human. The written word, the bowed instrument, and the sculpted stone, have each required advancements in science and technology in order to be rendered. At the extreme, even the spoken word required mastery over oral technology (the throat and voicebox) to a degree that no other species is known to have achieved. Primitive man, as an artist, was inspired to speak, while his scientific reasoning empowered him to master the process of speaking through repeated experimentation.

As technologies evolve, artists need to become familiar with the new methods of expressing themselves. Consider the impact that the movable valve stem had on music at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Prior to this point, horns were shaped in such a manner that only a single note and its overtone series could be generated by a particular instrument. These had names such as the "F Horn." With the advent of the trumpet, trombone, and tuba, a new way to create notes was made available to the musician. In turn, the musician needed to become familiar with fingering, in addition to blowing into the horn in such a way as to intone a specific note.

What about scientists? To have a hypothesis is to be an artist. Inventions, by definition, are works of art. Before experimentation and implementation comes inspiration. This is as true for the physicist as for the composer.

Definitions

What does Webster have to say about the matter? According to the largest dictionary I could find, here is what the experts say:

Artist: One who professes and practices an art in which conception and execution are governed by imagination and taste.
Science: Knowledge possessed as a result of study or observation.
Scientific: Yielding knowledge deductively; derived by logical process.

Depending on your perspective, this could be seen as good news or bad news. For the rapidly-typing programmer, or computer scientist, she or he can feel inspired by the idea of being an artist. Acknowledgement of this simple reality can make the soul feel good.

The artist, however, may suddenly be confronted by the reality that much in Art is scientifically applied. This awareness may simplify certain tasks or otherwise inspire the artist to become familiar with different software programs.

On the other hand, there are many who are technology-averse, who would prefer to work with traditional materials and the scientific methods of a different age. Even if digital media and the manner of their creation and editing is not embraced, the artist will still need to have command over the techonology that is being used to express their art.

Which Hat Do I Wear?

The majority of digital artists find themselves somewhere between these two pure types. If you did not have to consider the process by which your artistic imagination became a rendered reality (e.g., the many Photoshop shortcuts and methods, the implementing of an object model, or the photographic development), then your work might be considered to be purely artistic.

Conversely, if your work requires you to repetitively open a file of a specific type, change an aspect of it in a predefined way, and save it following a preagreed naming convention, you would be following a scientific method of achieving a task. This is akin to a chemistry student mixing two ingredients that are predicted to have a certain outcome based on thousands of similar, previously conducted experiments.

Sometimes it's difficult coming to terms with the reality that much of our work is redundant, and merely implementing tasks that we know through research and repetition. Many artists, however, will seek to become even more familiar with technology so that they can refocus on their art.

In many applications, there are ways to automate the way that you work-copying and pasting is only the beginning. This is especially true if a number of things need to be done in a predictable way. Applying filters or resizing an image in Photoshop can be recorded as an action, for instance. Batch processing takes this to the next level: actions can be applied to a number of files within a directory structure.

The tradeoff between and the fight for the attention of both Art and Science take place every day that we sit down in front of the terminal. As we become increasingly digital, or scientific, we enter a world that is first foreign, then intuitive and familiar, which we embrace in varying degrees.

Shortcuts, Menus, Buttons, and Mice

Many of the most familiar tasks in software applications are accessible through a number of methods. For various reasons, we each use one or more of them at different moments to achieve different ends. We may open a document by clicking on an icon, selecting a menu item, or by using a combination of keys. If you regularly work with image editors that let you use single character keys to select a tool item, it can pay off to learn these shortcuts. The time that it may take, for example, to select the marquee tool, to trace a rectangle, then use a menu to select its inverse, is probably longer than it would take you to press a letter, select an item, then press a key combination to select its inverse.

These productivity nuances and opportunities exist in many, if not most, of today's leading software programs. What this means to the artist is as relevant now as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century. Instead of learning new fingering, we now have to learn new shortcuts, software, and production processes to keep pace with technology.

As the Artist, Man, works harmoniously with his Scientific progeny and counterpart, the Tool, previously unrealizable works become achievable. From Jurassic Park to the Mail Merge resume that you sent out last week; from Van Gogh's oils to the Gaussian blur, Science and Art are as intimately entwined now as they ever have been. Whether we like it or not, we're firmly positioned as both Scientist and Artist for the time ahead. More than ever, our artistic minds are being challenged by the new demands that our scientific minds are required to learn. The quicker and more able we are to embrace these demands, the sooner that we will be able to focus on whichever Art we choose.