October 15, 1984

The more I think of the uses of high-technology in art the more I think I should steer clear of it altogether. It could ruin me because once you lose touch with the material your work suffers. But, then again, materials change and why can't a microchip be thought of as a tool as much as a paintbrush? Because you can't hold a microchip in you hand to work.

Investigate the possibility of working directly on the screen. A large frosted glass screen that can be tilted like a drawing board, you would move the mouse around on it. This would seem unnecessary to the computer designer or operator but it is important for the creator to be able to touch what he's doing. Because the art director knows there will always be people to do what he thinks up he does not have to have any capability other than the idea and the ability to express that idea in some kind of language that will be understood by the person executing his idea.

In art his seems to be the degradation of the individual, a short-circuiting of the perceptual process. Andy Warhol did it but then he wanted to have more time to work on his own persona and also seemed always to hold back, to think that he wasn't really a machine (no matter how much he wanted to be one) and that he didn't want to be a machine. He was expressing his individuality through boredom (as was Duchamp by not working -- who, of course, was working and creating in secret to short circuit the whole thing). Robert Longo, on the other hand, wants his work to be exciting, impersonal, slick, clean, well-made -- of the time. And perhaps he does come closest to the modern American Zeitgeist. Also Robert Wilson -- visual without literate. Using charged images for their look only.