Redmond Digital Arts Festival | Artist: Digital arts help transcend language barriers

The Redmond Arts Commission will present the city’s first Digital Arts Festival, Oct. 4-5 at the Redmond High School Performing Arts Center, DigiPen Institute of Technology and the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center.

People of all ages, whether they’re digital arts enthusiasts, working in the industry or merely curious, are invited to participate.

Most of the events are free but registration is required. For details, visit www.redmondartsfestival.com.

This festival won’t focus on the latest technology. The purpose is to highlight the human elements of talent and imagination which lead to the creation of such products as video games and animated films.

Former Redmond Arts Commisioner Abbott Smith is thrilled to see the Digital Arts Festival becoming a reality, after the idea had been tossed around for years. Smith helped to build the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at DigiPen. He now freelances as an illustrator and art instructor from a studio in his Redmond home and will be among a panel of experts at the festival.

Well-versed in both traditional and digital art, he believes they are equally valid in society and need to be supported as a part of basic K-12 education here in Redmond and elsewhere.

“Art is first and foremost a type of communication,” he stated. When considering the usefulness of digital art, he pointed out that it affords great opportunities to “see something in its entirety ... the relationship of things that are the sum of all the parts.”

For example, he said, you could try to verbally describe a room such as an office and all the things that surround you as you work. But someone who doesn’t speak English might not understand it.

Digital images, however, clearly convey what is there in ways that transcend language barriers.

That said, “The computer is a tool. You’re fully capable of using a pen or pencil, but not everything people write or draw is high art,” said Abbott. “The computer has a set of skills — it’s brilliant at moving things around quickly or arranging layers of information — but what’s created is only as good as the operator who uses it.”

That’s the whole concept behind the Digital Arts Festival. There are no substitutes for the heart and soul that fuel the creative process.

Smith compared it to the invention of the paint tube, a product that freed artists from working only in their studios and allowed them to paint in places like a public park or marketplace. Through this development, the “pleine aire” movement began.

Yet, not everyone can paint like Claude Monet or Pierre-Auguste Renoir, famous artists who are linked to that movement. A tool, whether it’s a paint tube or a computer, is merely a tool.

“If I had a goal for the Digital Arts Festival,” said Smith, “it would be to have people understand how a lot of Redmond’s economy, with companies like Microsoft and Nintendo, is tied to the skills of the artists that create (the products). ... We think of art as some kind of gift from the gods that you either have or don’t.”

The problem with that kind of thinking, Abbott added, is that people downplay or dismiss the importance of art in basic K-12 education.

“If a kindergarten teacher tells a parent that little Johnny doesn’t have an aptitude for art, parents just accept it in a way that they wouldn’t accept if they were told that their child had no aptitude for math or reading. There’s an assumption that ‘there’s no jobs there’ in art, when in fact, how many jobs in Redmond hinge on art?”

Contact Redmond Reporter Reporter Mary Stevens Decker at mdecker@redmond-reporter.com or (425) 867-0353, ext. 5052.

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