sketch_Space vol. 3: on Word and Image

I wanted to share a few more thoughts about the sketch-space concept as I envisioned it in my last few postings. I still think the idea I illustrated would make a great, meta-medium for artists (and anyone else who develops multi-media "projects") to use as a site for their own art-research. But that said, I think it being built by myself may be somewhat out of the question.

I say that primarily because I think that the research, training, and man-hours that would be involved in creating a modifiable, web-hosted, 3-D environment would take me completely away from the art-research I ought to be doing. I have no doubt that the experience would be a fantastic learning experience for me, but I know myself all too well to think that my interests wouldn't circle back around to the image faster than I could type http://eledrew.blogspot.com. That fact remains that no matter how many different media I dabble in, it always, always comes back to film. Cinema or, in more artworld-friendly words, the "moving image", is where my heart is. Always has been, always will be. I didn't write short stories at age nine because I wanted to be a writer, I wrote short stories because I wanted to make movies only I didn't have the means. Even all those teenage years I spent wanting to be a novelist--it was because I thought that's how I'd get into movies. Same goes for film criticism. I didn't want to be a film critic indefinitely, I just thought it was a means to an end--like Godard or Truffaut.

Essentially, I'm saying that while I still very much like the idea, I don't think I'm the one to build it. And I say that not because I wouldn't enjoy it, but because it would take me away from working on art and push me towards creating a product.

Bottom line: I'm not a web-guru, I'm a filmmaker.

Which brings me back to the blog: although it's easy to see the blog as a cop-out, since it lacks so many bells and whistles and it's presentation is really quite uncreative, it is also so effective for that very reason. As you've read, my relationship with the word has always paralleled my relationship with the image, and so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I would be drawn to both of those as my primary means of expression. The word is fast, cheap, and out of control, so it beats the image for pure, stream-of-consciousness thought-processing (hence the preceeding and following). And since I'm interested in "storytelling through the moving image"--a really, really, really ashamedly pretentious way of saying "movies"--it makes sense that the de facto form of communication would figure predominantly in my ideation-creation, art-research process.