The Butt Ugly Weblog

Movie culture?

With my usual impeccable timing, I finally went to see the Future of Cinema-exhibition in Kiasma. Impeccable, because it's only open until tomorrow... Anyway, there were a couple of very nice pieces there (like the Alpha Wolf, where you can interact with beautifully animated wolves using sounds), but mostly I was put down by the lack of invention. You see, I used to dabble in 3D graphics, animation, synthetic characters, display systems, and multimedia while doing my thesis at the university, and frankly, I was amazed to see how ... ordinary the exhibits were.

Hey computer artists, you have these incredibly wonderful and powerful tools: learn to use them, will you? Make us laugh, weep, or ponder on deep things. Make us love you or hate you, I don't care. Just try to find some new ideas, ok? The movie and game industry are producing stuff that uses the media in far more inventive manners, and they are treating the computers as tools; they're constrained by budgets and schedules and are not really willing to do art for arts sake.

Or perhaps I've understood the whole thing wrong and the point of art is not exploration and expression? I'm just an engineer; I might well do just that, you know.