Technology as creative control and pure expression: one artist shows us his process

Where in the days of yore creative disciplines were more markedly defined into neat labels like graphic designer, fine artist, animator or music producer, today things are a little more murky. Thanks to the advent of new technologies, and increasingly blurred roles within agencies, it’s a rare graphic designer who works, say, solely in print; or an illustrator who can’t animate. One creative merging disciplines with an unabashed adoration of digital processes is Micah Ganske , a Hawaii-born creative who works across painting, photography, illustration and motion graphics. He recently joined forces with Microsoft to help show off what their new Surface Pro 4 device could do, and the wonders it could work across a creative project.

“I don’t really see any difference between art and design: the truth is that there are designers with more art in their design than some fine artists, and there are artists with better design sensibilities than professional designers,” says Micah. “Fine Art and design are both about communication, but design tends to be more direct.”

He adds: “I want to create conversations around science and technology that take a realistic but still optimistic view of the future…I’m a weirdo in the art world because I’m an optimist and a technophile.”

In the space of just one weekend, Micah created a video piece using animation, 3D printing and filmmaking technology. “It still blows my mind how much one can do with just a computer – I was able to do everything myself without a team of people. That would have been impossible 15-20 years ago,” he says. “Technology, if you’re willing to learn and adapt to it, makes it possible for creatives to have complete control over their creations without having to rely on others or take input from teams of people. This is powerful. Technology allows one to more purely express one’s ideas.”

As with much of Micah’s work, the piece uses “rotating space habitats,” but this time is formed of an asteroid. “It’s a little different from the rest of my work since it uses the asteroid motif, but it’s still very similar and related,” he says. “It was something I wanted to make since using an asteroid for the structure of a habitat is a viable option once the technology is there. It also gave me the chance to put some of Zbrush’s awesome texture sculpting capabilities to use. The other habitats I’ve made all had a purely machine aesthetic to their design.  As for the video itself, I knew I wanted it to show part of the creation process, and I just recently got some new cameras in the studio for doing time lapses so the rest if the video just sort of fell in place from there.”

To create his work on the device, Micah used programmes including Zbrush and Solidworks (“they run shockingly well for how small the Surface Pro is”) and Keyshot. Given a longer time to make the piece, the artist would have expanded on it by modelling the windows and details of the buildings on the sculpture, and would have also sanded and painted the finished print “to give it a better finish,” he says.

According to Micah, using the device was very similar to his usual working process, in which he’s completely shelved physical tools. “I love sketching digitally because it’s faster and can be directly fed into the other programs I’ll eventually use to create whatever it is I’m trying to create,” he says. “I’ll take my Surface out into the garden, or sit with it on the couch and just sketch while listening to audiobooks. I get most of my inspiration from those and whatever books those lead me to.”

It’s this mixture of a love of traditional storytelling combined with an impassioned curiosity about the possibilities of tech that makes Micah’s work so compelling. He says: “The art world is full of neo-luddite pessimists who think we’re all going to be dead in 30 years. If you pay attention to the scientific and technological developments that are happening on a daily basis, I think there’s good reason for optimism.”