Tuesday, April 25, 2006

TECHNOLOGY ????

It’s amazing how much technology has crept into our lives. It’s almost like a necessary evil. We cannot think about a life without a mobile phone or working without a computer these days. If we do not have the latest processor in our computer we feel as if we are living in the Stone Age. It amazes me more so because in a country like India, a mobile phone or a computer was very much a luxury less than a decade ago.

What got me thinking was this television show I watched on Europe’s richest people. They showcased this Indian gentleman called Ratan Chaddha who created the empire of Mexx clothing. In the show they were discussing how this man splurges his millions, and one of his splurges like all very rich people was art. Now art per say does not really interest me since I don’t understand most of it and do not quite understand the arty lot. But in this show, they showcased an art form, which I was completely unaware of. It was called interactive art. Whenever I think of art and art mainly in the form of painting, I can conjure up images of an old man with a dirty palate smeared all over with all possible colours, with clothes painted in all those colours as if he himself were a piece of art than the canvas on which he was trying to bring to life something that he had in his head. I could never ever in my wildest of imagination think of an image of a computer geek sitting in front of a computer screen and using his brains to come up with programs in order to make an image do certain things when touched.

I am not an IT geek like many of my friends but I do use substantial amount of technology in my daily life. I am also not scared of technology like many people I know at work but I always thought that no matter what, there would always be some streams of life wherein one will rely on the creativity of his hands to create something. Art being one of them.

Some smarty might come up with you do use your mind and hands when on a computer. I agree that on a computer you are using your hands on the keyboard but there are a fix set of keys that one uses. One cannot move ones fingers in whichever directions one wants because one will end up with a lot of gibberish then. But then I see things like interactive art and I am compelled to think: whatever happened to good old humans and their creativity? Today we call editing an image on adobe photoshop creativity. We call mixing music on high-end softwares creativity.

Whatever happened to the sounds of beautiful instruments played by hundreds of musicians? I wonder what happened to the joy of getting together the best instrumentalist in his own instrument and putting them all together to form one beautiful piece. I sincerely hope that we do not reach a point wherein such instances become extinct.

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