Frustration with technology

Yes, I get frustrated with technology sometimes, but that's not what I'm crabby about today.

Today I'm crabby about other people's technology skills -- or rather, their lack of same.

My local fiber and textile art group is getting ready for a show and we want to prepare a gallery notebook with information on each piece in the show.  We have asked members to submit the info and a photo of their artwork; I'm in charge of compiling the info for the notebook.  I want the notebook to look professional, so I want to copy everybody's information into a single document and make sure it's all formatted the same.

We thought it would be easy -- provide a form in a Word document that people would fill out (so all the information would be there in the right order to be copied and pasted into my document), give directions for submitting the photo (don't have to crop or resize, just send us the image straight from the camera).  But it's not.

We are surrounded with technology, everybody with her various devices and connections, and yet to judge from the responses to our call for entries, a lot of people cannot use them for what I consider to be ordinary activities.  They can't figure out how to get a cellphone photo attached to their entry form.  They don't know how to tell whether their photo has been saved as a .jpg or a .dat file. They don't notice that their computer automatically resizes photos to a handful of pixels when sending email.  They send their info in a Pages document or a PDF instead of a Word document.  They don't have Word on their computers and can't open or can't fill in a document.  They don't know how to work around by typing their info into an email.

I know I'm a curmudgeon, and I know I'm way more dedicated to the written and printed word than most people are.  But I worry that ordinary, everyday capabilities that every educated person used to have are now endangered, washed away in the flood of cellphones and tablets and Facebook and Instagram.  The tech industry has enabled this by equipping many smaller devices with alternative programs, perhaps easier to use for minimal tasks but incompatible with the grownup programs like Word on which the business world operates.  And people who own these smaller devices often retire their actual computers, on which grownup business tasks would be much easier.  Meanwhile, the proprietors of grownup programs discourage people from using them, by charging continuing user fees instead of allowing people to buy the programs outright.

As a result, people can easily do minimal things on their phones or tablets, but they can't produce any kind of work that is compatible with the grownup world.  Is this progress?  What do people use when they have to write a letter?  (Do people write letters any more?)  What do they do if they need to print out a biography or an artist statement or a page for a gallery notebook?  What if they are asked to give a presentation to a group?  How do they keep track of their artwork and their show entries?

And I try not to even think about how the "informality" of text and email, plus the "convenience" of voice-recognition dictation, has turned us into a nation of inarticulate, ungrammatical misspellers who never think to proofread before they hit the send button.

I try to be tolerant of people who feel overwhelmed by learning new tasks, particularly older people like myself.  There are tech tasks that I have resisted, preferring to play dumb and hope my kids will step in and do it for me.  But if you want to participate in a serious art activity and can't do things on a computer to enable you to enter a show or take good photos or whatever, then I think you should find a friend or hire a geek to help you.

Now back to retyping my gallery notebook, since I can't copy and paste from what people have sent me.

Refugee quilt people

Longtime readers of my blog may recall how last year I made a lot of little sculptures of people and had a lot of fun doing it.  But after I put them all together into a single installation for a show, and then took them apart and put them back in their boxes, and then sold a few of them, I thought that project was over.

Until a few weeks ago when I noticed the weekly email from SAQA with a call for entries for a new show with the theme of refugees.  It's called "Forced to Flee" and the entry deadline is October 31.  And it specifically allows 3-D entries.

I decided I needed to make some more people specifically for this show.  But I knew they would have to fit the SAQA definition of a quilt, which is “a creative visual work that is layered and stitched or that references this form of stitched layered structure.”

After a bit of thinking about how I could make sure that my people, who were generally layered but not stitched, would fit that definition, I had a brainstorm.  What if I were to start with pieces of actual quilts?  And I knew exactly where to get pieces of actual quilts -- I would ask my friend Denise Furnish, whose art M.O. is to paint onto beat-up old quilts, if she had some leftover bits and pieces she could donate to my cause.

She did, and I have been making quilt refugee people for a couple of weeks now.

While my previous batch of daily people were all shapes and sizes and made out of all kinds of materials, these guys are all pretty similar.  Their clothing all looks beat-up, faded and torn, as befitting people who have trekked across the desert or sailed in a leaky boat across the sea.

I have made no attempt to conceal the holes and stains and frayed edges and the cotton batting leaking out from between the layers; I think it gives my little people substance and character.  The only thing I've added to the quilt pieces, besides thread and cord, is some walnut ink to give many of the people dark skin.  And they all have heavy wire armatures inside to allow them to stand up on a board with drilled holes.

I have a lot to do these days and I know I can't spend the entire fall sewing up little refugee quilt people, but I hope to get a fairly large number of them finished before the entry deadline.

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Thought for the day

Every so often I fall through a time hole and spend some time with old posts on a favorite blog.  That happened to me while reading Tanya Watanabe's great blog, which I discovered a few years ago and have been addicted to ever since.  She is an American who went to Japan 35 years ago, got married to a Japanese, and still lives there.  She's a quilter but what I love most about the blog is her description of daily life in Japan.  Check it out here.

But you don't have to read the blog to enjoy the thought for the day:

I remember hearing a story about a missionary who lived in Central America for many years and when she was getting ready to return to America, the missions board sent out an announcement to all the churches she had ministered to that she was leaving.  One day an old man arrived at her door carrying two coconuts as a thank-you gift for her time with them.  She was very touched by the gift but she was more concerned about the man, who she knew had had a four-day walk from his village just to give her the coconuts.  "Thank you so much for your gift, but what a long walk you had to have!"  The old man replied, "Long walk part of gift."

Daily art update 8 -- I've been there

One of my favorite recurring formats is "I've been there" -- I find a photo in the newspaper of something happening in a place that I've been, then paste it up with a map of that place.  I wrote about this format earlier in the year and since then I've done dozens.

Sometimes the "there" in I've been there is interpreted relatively loosely -- I've driven over that particular bridge or been through that particular town.

But I'm getting much more satisfaction out of a tight reading of "there."  For instance, this photo of Stuttgart, with the cutlines referencing the main train station in the background.  I give myself extra points because I've not only been to Stuttgart but came and went through the main train station.

Here's a photo of Wrangell, Alaska, where I've been -- but extra points because the story was about getting to Wrangell on the Alaska State Ferry, and that's exactly how we got there.

This photo shows a nurse in the St. Cloud (Minnesota) Hospital, and I'm sorry to report that we once spent a very long night in its emergency room.

Here's a photo of 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, a troubled property owned by Jared Kushner's family.  Not only did my parents occasionally take us to dinner in the very fancy restaurant on the top floor ("Top of the Sixes") but at least twice a month I would take the E train to the Fifth Avenue station, walk upstairs into the 666 building and turn left on 53rd Street to get to the Donnell Library, my favorite teenage haunt.

And here's a story about a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996 that led the Australian government to effectively ban most private guns.  We visited the actual site of the shooting, at a national park, where they have set up a little remembrance area.

This project has added a new dimension to my morning ritual of a cup of tea and two newspapers; now in addition to reading what fabulously good news has developed throughout the world, I scan every photo to see if I've been there.

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