Art is driven by technology?

Lets make the resolution of the flash to 1024x768 px and put them on website for showing.

This is a comment written by a MMU FCM (Faculty of Creative Multimedia) lecturer to one of his student's final year project report. Later, this friend of mine come to me and ask me why her flash so lag when view from a website. I was surprise when i get to know the swfs resolution and file size (one of them go up to 1MB!).

This is not something new in the faculty. There was a case happened in Digital Media major before where the lecturer ask the student to create a computer game with flash that not using keyboard and mouse as input device. I am sure he is thiking about to be creative by not using these typical devices but he must have forgotten that his student are artist and know very little of scripting language. Last, some of the student are still able to finished their project by outsourcing.

Other faculty such as Faculty of Management also have this kind of problem. There is a lecturer that ask his student to create e-commerce driven website but expected all those php/asp code could just run from the CD. The faculty also have a major that is named E-commerce but the students in it only learn scripting language such as PHP on the last year. And yet, they are requested to finish their final year project in time using PHP and MySQL. Come on, this is unfair to them as you keep on teaching them HTML repeatingly and only teach programming on the last year. How can a management student cope with it? At last, they outsorce also.

Not to mention those lecturer that mentions pentium 8, 6G and so on... I would like to ask these people that never respect technology and yet thinking they are so easy to update themselve first.

After complaining so much, I am still not entering the topic: is art driven by programming? Assume the art I talking here is digital art. From the example above, the FCM lecturer that blindly asking for creativity from his student appearently doesn't understand programming.

Not only the lecturer, alot of FCM student think that creating a game is easy. They never thought of the logic behind it and keep on adding features into it (on design phrase); by not knowing is it possible to implement. When they face difficulty, they finally understood that creativity is limited by technology and also their programming skill.

We always see poster, movie and advertising around us keep on changing "style" and it is kind of like a fashion. For example, you suddenly saw alot of pixel art appear (because of hardware limitation), then line art appear (because of vector design tool become popular), then abstract 3D art (3D modelling get easier), then suddenly all webpage design become difference (no more frame, no more gif, heavy css.....). These are all the examples where art and design is lead by technology such as the programming.

Art and programming should not be saperated. Ones that believe they are saperated will have problem when communicating with the people from other side. That is why programmers always find that artist doesn't understand file format and don't care about file size limitation (optimization) and artist always doesn't understand why programmer setting so much limit to him.

I still believing in art is beyond technology. However, to apply art, you are bound by technology. The way how you realize your idea under all the constraints and limitation will show your creativity. Thus, game programmer always have high creativity as they always bound by hardware limitation and have to solve them using tricks.

Creativity is not exclusive to artist only. Anybody can be creative from how they solve a problem.