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Point of View
by Giancarlo Biagi
THE HUMAN FINGERPRINT
DIGITAL OR NOT
Forms, texture, color stimulate our visual sense. Games of light and shadow that sculpture plays are capable of exciting our intellect. Digitally we can retrieve something that we like: for example, using the 0’s and 1’s that the computer generates of a scanned Ghiberti’s relief. However, the information needs to be decoded in human terms.
In this issue we are looking at technological innovations that help us speed up our process of creating sculpture in this fast-moving world where most values are measured by time, and thus money. But like a good wine that ages to its perfection, art can never be imitated by the amalgamation of elements of physics and chemistry.
During the Renaissance, the science of perspective was of great interest. Although Aristotle was the first to describe how an image is formed on the eye by making an analogy to the pinhole camera, Filippo Brunelleschi is known as one of the definers of one-point perspective construction. According to the verbal accounts of his contemporaries, Manetti and Vasari, somewhere between 1405 and 1425 he publicly demonstrated his theories using a box with a pinhole—camera obscura. The use of this kind of new technology in the service of art lent a hand in giving the “rebirth” of the classics its own life.
Looking back at Giotto’s time, however, we are excited by the seemingly random yet charismatic elements of architecture mixed with human emotion. Human error vanishes and the excitement of the composition supersedes the inaccuracy. Sometimes perfection goes unnoticed and imperfection catches our attention—some form of strabismus in a woman was and is considered attractive.
Unless a mechanical, inert creation is our intention in order to distance us from that romantic hue, we should prevail over machinery and bestow our imprint in creating works of art. The human feel, the human touch, the fingerprint will always be the forces to which we respond, digital or not. Each time it is our own expression that overrides any means of labor, technology, or media, in my point of view.
Giancarlo Biagi
Sculpture Review Magazine
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Tel (212) - 529 - 1763
Fax (212) - 260 - 1732
E - mail GP@SculptureReview.com
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