Garage Band reminds me of digital painting- it is the same breaking down of music or art and recontextualizing it. Imagery and music are the same at the data level. Once again Shannon’s “just information” comes into play. Music is broken down into bits of tone and volume, while imagery is broken down into bits of color and intensity. Either way, these are just tiny pieces of information (0’s and 1’s) without any meaning until they are put back together into something that is created outside its original context. This seems so curious and odd when juxtaposed with traditional ways of creating music and art. I do believe there is a place for digital painting – graphics are used everywhere nowadays, and graphic artists need the efficiency provided by the wealth of tools that are available. The job of creating graphics is a typical deadline-hanging-over-you kind of occupation, so graphic artists have to be efficient. But a painter creates in a different way. They usually can set their own schedule, even though most of them want or need to paint within a certain time-frame depending on their need for money. Graphic artists and traditional artists approach their canvas in different ways. Traditional painters have a more direct tactile contact with the canvas and the pigments and the brushes with which they create a painting. The thought behind each brushstroke travels from their brain, down their arm, into their hand, and the fingers holding the brush, letting it flow onto the canvas. Making mistakes and having to fix them is more difficult in traditional painting, but I believe that is an important part of the creative process. And this is the key. To me, a piece of music or a work of art is more than the object. Within that composition or painting, there is a sense of the artist who created it, a feeling of direct physical and mental connection, of deliberate intention in placing musical notes or pigments together, of authenticity and control over the creative process. They own it, they are the authority. I can’t help feeling that the computer program or graphics tablet or whatever digital device is used steals some of this authority away from the artist. We have so many contrasts nowadays between traditional forms and digital forms, in music, in art, in literature and language, and in so many other things. The similarities of the traditional and digital forms set against their differences might not be a new phenomenon, but it seems more glaring and harsh now, as though some of the heart and mind are being digitally replaced. Just as I hope that digital music tools such as Garage Band won’t ever completely replace traditional composition of music, so I hope that digital painting won’t replace the magic of artists personally and intentionally placing pigments directly on a canvas.