So I was traveling home this evening and I had cause to look up into the sky, and I saw a rather fantastical view. The sky was not particularly dark, even though it was 10pm, there was a little bit of fog or low clouds, splotchy though, intermittent. The moon, which was low on the horizon, not too low, not so low as you'd see that extraordinary giant orange moon from time to time, somehow timed with a harvest - but it was indeed a similar orange, a nearly half-moon, and it was quite orange. I assumed this was due to wildfire smoke, but in any case, it was indeed a fantastic orange, sort of low in the sky.

 

And of course my mind turned toward my ongoing struggles with the digital revolution because I had the seemingly natural and ubiquitous inclination to take out my 'phone' to 'photograph' this astonishing scene. But then I remembered that this never adequately saves but a tiny fraction of the experience, if it preserves any of the depth of such a panorama at all, save just the memory that something extraordinary happened here, on this occasion - which then leaves it to your mind to recall the details mostly without map or notes.

 

I was looking at this, and I knew that I was alive and that I was looking, into the sky - I was looking at the moon, and the sky and the clouds, and the combination of things together, and I was looking... ...with my eyes. I was seeing something we call 'reality.' And I thought: "That is fantastical." and it reminded me of a famous Rene Magritte painting - you know, the one in which there is a daytime scene, in the sky, with his lovely puffy clouds and nursery sky-blue, but as your eyes descend to the tree-line, there is a transition, the trees darken and below the trees is a house, and the house is depicted at night, and the lights in the house and upon the lampposts are ablaze, as they would be at night. In other words, day and night live together, in his oil painting, meticulously constructed by brush and hand. It's all very fantastical, magical, done by oils, and by hand.

 

So there are couple of things there: There's the reality I was looking at, a half-moon, orange. And then a fantastic oil painting, depicting a fantastical scene of day and night simultaneous. These two things, separated by 6 or 7 decades, perhaps similar, but different, but both worthy of respect. And I thought: These days, if you made such an image, with the aid of a computer, I would find it mundane.

 

You see, reality can be amazing and fantastical, and can stubbornly refuse to be stolen and framed. But then one can have an idea, to stage something amazing and fantastical, and Magritte did this, and in a certain way, somehow worthy of my respect. But I suppose reality can be mundane... ...or at least the details of our lives can be tiresome; we fall easily into ego and desire, which barricades magic from our gaze. But I say: "Ah-ha - you must be receptive to magical views, I wager they are always there, should one not be numb."

 

But that aside: It's because I KNEW, that that's how the world actually looked, it was fantastic. If I knew that a scene I was looking at was created by a computer, I would have little interest and no respect for it. Because it's just a fabrication, showing saturated colors and fantastical scenarios or not. Even if the thoughts leading to a digitally fabricated image, the impetus for the fabrication was a pure idea like Magritte pursued: "What if I paint a daytime and a nighttime scene together and have a transition between the two be rather seamless and precise?" - an idea that a computer operator who may well call himself an artist could surely have.

 

An in this 'revolution' people want to defend by saying: "Well, it still requires skill to fabricate this image. You're just dismissing a modern skill set over an older skill set."

 

But I thought: There's something about that defense that just not quite right.

 

There's no reconciling or need to prove the that reality I absorbed was there, on that evening, the universe displayed that fantastical scene, and I know that it was there and that it wasn't a fabrication, I know that it was there, it was not created by man, it was there without me.

 

I don't think the fallible chemistry in my brain produced the image, a hallucination. We do not here breach the topic that thinking is not faulty or arbitrary. I don't believe my brain chemistry has a motive akin to that of a computer 'designer.'

 

As for Magritte and respect: This is in part the dynamic between the 'artist' and the 'conceptual artist.' Magritte was both, should he have used his hands in the execution of 'his' painting, rather than those of an apprentice. Did Michelangelo prove that he COULD paint the Sistine Chapel himself before hiring an army of painters to do the deed? And so the 'computer artist' wields the mouse as skillfully as Magritte and his horse-hair bristles, as the defenders might say. They study the .pdf tutorials rather than listen to the tough-love masters of old, bantering for years about the proper color mixing techniques of tradition. If it apples and oranges, then both can be thrown at the poor quality entertainer.