Naked Singularity
bereft of an event horizon
Like a lot of my artwork, this was finished several months before it was scanned. Basically all I did before I scanned it in was add a few tiny details (the cobwebby things on the lower left) and run my pen over a few lines in the clouds of the background. One of the difficulties I often encounter when I’m inking is that after a while the pen I’m using will run out of ink, or give me a different line weight, and thus (usually for lack of other, better pens) I’ll need to work to compensate for that. So some lines aren’t as smooth as they could be; others tell eloquently (I use this instead of the alternative “complain”) of the interaction between ink and paper. It’s not a perfect relationship.
But while I was looking at it more carefully — and then examining the scan to look at whether I was in for any extensive cleaning up — I realized that I actually liked the rough edges of some parts, the way yet others seemed to sink into a morass of anonymous lines. This is, I think, what gives something done in traditional media character: the imperfections of it, the way you can almost see the twist and the hesitation in the movements that go into it. I like playing around with my art tablet, but I love the idiosyncrasies of ink and paper’s arguments more.
I have a midterm tomorrow; I took a break from study to ink a few things and upload this scan. It’s a little strange, I know, that when I’m busiest with academics, that’s also when my hands itch most for a pen and a ridiculously complicated drawing to torture my eyes and my fingers. One would think I’d look for something more calming, but oddly enough this is what calms me. I think the heart of art is struggle, of course,; I fight against inertia by putting my pen to paper. But it’s also reconciliation. These strokes, imperfect as they are, remain testaments to what it means to have something that is worth doing no matter how thankless it can be. It’s here that I find both solace and consolation.
…I learned in Ragnarok Online.
Well, okay, not everything. It’s funny, though: the more I play games the more connections I see that tie them to the things I’m studying. Am I just naturally obsessed with economics or do I just need something to think about while I’m trying to autoblitz Luciola Vespas to death? Not so much the former as the latter, maybe.
But I remember when I was still a wee idealistic undergrad looking to shift majors and trying to persuade myself that I’d do well in econ. “Well,” I told myself, “there’s math, right?” (Little did I know that the math in econ is very different from how math suffuses and grounds and comprises physics.) “Besides,” I said, starting to get worked up about it, “you enjoy the economy in RO!” (This was actually true: I made a lot of money simply by observing the current trends in the market, ridiculous though they may have seemed at the time. My special forte was getting to rare, desirable items before people figured out they even existed, so most of the time I acquired them before the very sharp spikes in price so common to my server’s economy.)
Granted, virtual economies, especially those on MMO servers, are drastically different from real-world economies. They’re much smaller, for one thing; information is simpler and thus easier to process, and resources take different forms, values, roles. However, consideration of how avidly I watched the market in my RO server — and how well I gamed it, if my performance as a merchant was to be judged — helped boost my confidence along the transition from a physics to an econ major. Oh, there’s a part of me that’s amused by the irony of it all: as an undergrad, I wouldn’t get to do the kind of analysis I thought I would be doing. No complexities of agent interactions within systems for me. The tools that would help me analyze my server’s economy were apparently outside the scope of my undergrad subjects. But the important thing is, the interest was there, even if merely in the form of a tiny spark. And my experience on my RO server helped facilitate that, making me consider: if I found this fragile system of precariously counterbalanced extremes so fascinating, what more real-world economic and social systems?
This contributive experience, laughable as it might be to those who scoff at games as useless wastes of time, has actually heavily influenced my outlook on economics. For one thing, RO taught me the beginnings of observing a system; I learned not to discount outliers or black swans, but not to put too much faith in them either. I learned to consider isolated incidents seriously without necessarily treating them as game-changing. Most importantly, I learned to look at agents, interactions, systems. The sometimes irrational and sometimes incredibly petty motivations underlying people’s decisions. It was something of a revelation of a whole mindset that was utterly foreign to who I was at the time. The particles I studied weren’t half so complex or maddeningly unpredictable.
And in a certain sense, having begun at a place where I had already accepted that analyzing the systems in a game afforded me additional insights into the real world, I was more open to a game theoretic approach to microeconomics: seeing these decisions in terms of rationalizations and payoffs, agent choices. It’s not so much “game -> game theory LOL”, but something like a more visceral understanding of what makes a game. Players. Strategies and actions. Penalties and rewards.
So I can’t and won’t divorce my experiences as a gamer from my thought processes as an academic, the same way I consciously allow my training (or lack of training) as an artist to heavily influence my writing. While in certain things I can maintain very strict boundaries between categories, in learning and doing I’ve found that my strength is my capacity to synthesize all these strangely related things and somehow use them to inform and contribute to a larger whole.
Besides, it’s more fun that way.
Like this time when, on a private server I played on, another player was complaining about how he’d killed over a hundred of a particular monster but hadn’t gotten its card yet (drop rate: 1%). I was halfway to writing this long-winded explanation about how that’s not how probability works, complete with summations and diagrams and all, before I snapped out of it, laughed, and went back to killing Luciola Vespas.
As it turns out, writing that guest post on Nick Simmons and the Bleach plagiarism issue, and then the follow-up that tackled the Nick Simmons statement didn’t quite get all the words out of my system. Not that I’d expected it would, but it might have been nice; one likes to think there would be better uses of one’s time than babbling uncertainly about the nature of creative inspiration. But there you have it. I enjoyed writing those posts for Rotch, but in the course of writing them and sifting through the links I also confronted certain questions that aren’t really suited to report-type articles.
The statement Simmons released on the whole issue was something I had a difficult time not taking as a personal affront. My first reaction to his statement was simply shock at this person’s gall: how dare he steal and call it an homage? And, perhaps more painful: how dare he cower behind the sham of what he calls inspiration, the faulty structures of “fundamental creative imagery”? He isn’t the first plagiarist I’ve encountered, certainly not even the worst; but it’s the bland, artificial mockery of an apology that frustrates me most.
As an artist — ah, this is where I segue into how it took me years and years to identify as an artist, connotations of the word and the excess baggage it’s supposed to imply and all — as an artist, one grapples with the double-edged swords of creativity and inspiration practically every day. Art arises out of this struggle, the result of defeating or being defeated by the need to find a singular expression of a potentially limitless vision through a medium that is itself limited. Being an artist isn’t about just being able to draw lines, figures, backgrounds. It’s also about the choice of which figures and backgrounds and lines to draw. It isn’t about how accurately you can render the same motifs that we’ve been seeing in art through centuries; beyond that, the authenticity of art is the authenticity of the individual. It’s about being so wholly yourself that even though you may be expressing the same ideas, telling the same stories, that others before you have done, the way in which you do these things is a natural outgrowth of who you are as a person and the experiences you have so far undergone.
This isn’t just for visual art. The core of it remains the same in writing, in music, in other forms of creative expression. Other things matter, of course, but it’s the impetus that’s vital to a creative work. That conflict-driven meeting between idea and inspiration and expression.
Plagiarism takes away all the triumph and loss and risk of that struggle.
It’s a theft not only of the form of the work itself, but also of the victory. Or the defeat. And in many cases, another’s simply reaping the yield of all that toil and struggle overshadows one’s sense of satisfaction in having actually endured the whole thing. Saying that “another’s imitation shouldn’t diminish one’s own efforts” is one thing. Actualizing it is another. For a lot of people, seeing one’s hard work robbed of its identity and the effort one expended to create it is something of a violation. Suddenly one’s struggle is no longer completely and wholly one’s own.
Maybe it’s a little like using an illegal exploit for a fiendishly difficult game. Or map-hacking. The medium and the process may be different but the nature of the theft is essentially the same. You can read strategy guides and walkthroughs all you want but when it comes right down to it, you’re the one who’s playing the game; claiming you’re good because you got a high score piggybacking on someone else’s replay or exploit is just… completely missing the point.
Why do we game? Why do we do art? Partly for enjoyment, sure, and partly for the satisfaction of completion, accomplishment. But the process of struggling with our own limitations and rising to the challenges presented by the medium — confronting the questions of message and inspiration and creativity that will inevitably arise, time and time again — should be as much a part of the reason for the act as everything else. Art achieved without genuine effort is false art. An endeavor absent of the conflict arising from one’s grappling with outside forces as much as oneself is a hollow endeavor.
The root and the crux of the matter, maybe, is this. We struggle because we are human. To expect to arrive at a fully realized, truly individual creative work without going through that struggle is to rob art of its humanity.
(Title from Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays by James Richardson.)
Some time ago there was an LJ fandom auction of art, fiction, and other miscellaneous things wherein the “currency” of the bids consisted of donations to charities helping Haiti. I signed up for both the auction and one of the lightning rounds, and this is a quick calligraphy piece I did for one of the people who signed up on my lightning round thread. Watercolor, ink, gouache, and the gray highlights are silver acrylic. I manipulated the scan mostly just by adding a little accent in the middle and ramping up the color, since the way the yellow and the ocher played with each other reminded me of something more vivid: fire, heat, burning. The pictures show that the original’s colors are much more muted, but it also looks rather pretty in real life.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep this up, but I really would like to get more calligraphy practice (and do it more regularly) even if, for lack of ink, I’m currently limited to digital calligraphy. I have some commissions I’ll need to finish soon, and so I need to force my hands to recover from a period of prolonged inactivity and illness.
This lyric, from a song by Toad the Wet Sprocket with the same title, was playing in my head for hours as I tried to figure out what to do for two friends of mine to show my appreciation for how they’ve been with me this past year. It’s both a promise and a reminder, I think. If one loses one’s sense of gratitude, so much richness and depth goes out of life, leaving the days dry and hollow. Not for nothing do we equate thanklessness with misery.
Inkscape for the initial calligraphy, then Photoshop for the background and edits.