By BEN BLOCH for the Missoulian
Greg Twigg has just shown me two foot-high glass obelisks rising up from his desk. They are Montana Addie awards (first place golds), bestowed upon creators of the most original and effective advertisements currently being made in the state.
These days, though, he's keeping busy at all three.
This is in part because there is no shortage of demand for people who know how to gracefully use a computer to produce visual stimuli that are fresh and, more frequently, interactive.
If you think this sort of work is easy, or artless, think again. There's a certain beautiful irony in the fact that several of his recent productions have been used to draw public attention to other arts organizations, since the digital motion design he does is - both technically and conceptually - such a relevant and developing art form in and of itself.
Twigg, it seems, has always had a knack for handling the creative tool that is the computer. When he was 10 years old - back in the days of the Commodore 64 and first-generation Macs - he was designing skateboard stickers, printing them on a dot matrix printer, coloring them in with markers, attaching them to double-sided carpet tape and giving them out to friends. Later, as an undergraduate in college, he found himself spending obsessive late-night hours creating intricate cartoon frames in Adobe Photoshop, and later animating them in Adobe Premiere. He found the work to be as tedious as it was rewarding, and also fell in love - as so many artists do - with the "process" of using his weapon of choice.
Having myself trained as a painter in graduate school, I find the discussion of the revolutionary possibilities for the future of motion design to be enormously exciting, and I have little doubt that it will cause major shifts in the world's experience of art. Screens, being flat and harboring the kinds of spatial illusions that they do, are quite like paintings in this way; and the act of conceiving the events that occur upon the "canvas" - whether physical or digital - is not dissimilar either.
Twigg agrees.
"You see that picture of strawberries on the wall over there," he says, pointing at a photo hanging on a wall at the Union Club. "Just imagine looking at that and then suddenly, boom, a knife cuts through it. That's the sort of thing people will have on their walls in the future."
"They're making plasma screens that have flash card slots that you just plug in and watch wherever you are," he says, showing me a flash card that cleverly folds out of his Swiss army knife.
Twigg notes that the Internet, as young as it is, has already shown us how easily it will move beyond the potential of television.
"Eventually we'll just watch all our television on the Web. And on top of that, there'll be plenty of media that we will experience differently than we do television. There will be a whole host of new dynamic experiences, where we'll have a hand in making decisions that affect real outcomes.
"But," he adds cautiously, "it's at such an elemental stage. It could become anything."
Twigg, who at 30 recently became the father of a baby girl, received a B.A. in fine art as a UM undergraduate, and later completed an MFA in the newly developing media arts sector. This combination of traditional and more cutting-edge studies has served him well, as he finds numerous ways to weave the two realms into his work. For instance, he'll videotape light scanning across the glass top of a photocopier and play the "handmade effect" on his computer in an After Effects program. The result evokes a real life sensation of being next to the copier, though the perspective - and the energy - have shifted. The reconfiguration of the copier light is pleasing, and allows some insight into just how many ways we can document, digitize, format and represent any of the more fleshly experiences of our world.
After graduate school, Twigg worked full time for a local advertising firm, where for a year and a half he sharpened his image and motion software skills. Then, when the opportunity arose to teach at the university last year, he seized it. Though he still keeps his hands in numerous, more solitary freelance opportunities (just last week he completed an introduction sequence for an upcoming boxing documentary that aims to air on HBO, as well as three short motion ads for a local Circle K), he obviously has a passion and a gift for teaching his skills to others. He seems to truly appreciate being, as he says, "involved in the variety of creative work that students bring to the table" when working in the media arts.
Having born witness to Twigg's classroom, I can testify to the seemingly inexhaustible patience he exhibits before situations that - if he were possessed of a different demeanor - could be incredibly frustrating. He has the answer to most every technical question that arises, and frequently hosts a purely aesthetic critique (a nice balance with all the technical complexity) of student work as well. This kind of hands-on attention is invaluable to any eager media arts student, as no embedded help manual, or audio tutorial, can provide the same clarity.
In my view, digital media arts is one of the most exciting art realms to be involved in these days. Like it or not, in the coming decades, we are going to witness some continental drift in emphases within the arts. As the possibilities for more traditional material-based arts appear more and more exhausted, the digital possibilities seem almost entirely out on the horizon. While painting may not yet be dead, it's certainly a lot harder to create a "new" painting than it is to birth a startling digital concept. It seems certain to me that this will be a trend that will increase in the future with exponential speed.
While Twigg's interests and inclinations, to his credit and benefit, may not have changed much in the past 20 years, his tools certainly have. He's giddy about his upcoming plans to purchase a Mac G5 tower and two 23-inch flat screens, a set-up which is going to add much ease and execution power to upcoming projects. For the media artist, these upgrades are the equivalent of trading in an Ibanez guitar for a Martin.
Ben Bloch writes a weekly arts column for the Entertainer. He can be reached at BBloch4775@aol.com.
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