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Post By Visionary Sun Apr 17, 2005 at 01:42:56 pm EDT |
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Appointment with the Dean | |
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“He’s ready for you, Miss” the secretary informed her gently. Hallie nodded and, straightening her skirt, made her way through the office door. Dean Ensor was sitting behind his desk studying the contents of a folder through the reading glasses perched on the end of his slightly pug nose. The balding academic glanced up at her and confidently waved her to a seat across from him. “Come in… come in… Just going over your transcripts. Quite impressive.” “Thank you sir” she replied, artfully brushing a lock of her jet black hair behind her ear. The color was perhaps a trifle cliché, but now wasn't the time to take risks. “I was a little worried that…” “That we’d look down on you for earning your GED through night school?” the Dean surmised with a warm smile. “Not at all. And really, with SAT scores like yours, I rather doubt even Ivy League schools would turn their noses up at you, let alone Parodiopolis University.” The living computer program smiled and nodded in thanks. She was actually quite proud of her scores on the aptitude tests, as she had taken them while temporarily in the flesh after the LL had all returned from Christmas vacation. Not having access at the time to the vast stores of information her cyberspace consciousness had offered her, she still retained a sharp mind despite the various deficiencies of her then human brain. “And your letters of recommendations are particularly of note as well. You apparently move in some pretty lofty social circles… Tell me, are you by chance any relation to Police Commissioner Graham?” Hallie froze. “Um… I’m sorry?” The Dean looked back to the file lying open on the blotter. “You are my 3 o’clock appointment, aren’t you? A Ms… Graham? First name Hallie?” A pinprick of anger flashed in her eyes, sparking a look of concern from the Dean. Fleabot. She forced a smile across her face on and nodded. “Yes… that’s me. Hallie… Graham.” Fleabot and Hacker 9. Those puerile little… “And… no. No relation to the commissioner. Not by blood.” “Ah” the Dean replied, deciding to move on. “Well, both Mr. Bautista and Prof. Harper are good friends to this University, and with math scores like yours and their recommendations, you could write your own ticket with any of the engineering or science colleges here. So I guess the big question is… Why do you want to be an art student?” Hallie took a deep breath and tried to gather her thoughts, ignoring the nervousness that made her palms sweat and her heart quicken, before she remembered she could consciously control such things again. “I’m not sure how to answer that… I never admitted it to anyone, but secretly I always considered myself an artist” she began. “Not literally, of course… but just how I lived my life. I… I worked with computers, and I was often called upon to create graphics… photorealistic ones, at a moments notice, using various… programs.” She swallowed. This was harder to explain than she anticipated. “I worked hard… very hard… to try to make my images do anything but stand out… to be completely unnoticeable… inseparable from what you would see every day in real life.” Dean Ensor nodded. “And did you reach that goal?” The holographic women met his eyes. “Pretty damn close” she admitted. “And then what happened?” “It… felt empty. All that effort, all that time… just to needlessly reproduce what already existed. As if the best I could ever hope to achieve was the barest minimum that could occur naturally. And so I started altering things. Little things. Instead of random generators mathematically simulating hair waving in a breeze, I began to fuss over it. I began to make decisions as to which looked better, rather than more realistic. I began to drift farther away from unnoticeable to the point I… or rather, my work… began to stand out. I suddenly felt like I was making an impact in the world for the first time… That I was of note. I… my work… felt more…” she struggled to find the right word… “Real?” the Dean offered. Hallie blinked in surprise. “Yes” she admitted. “The more I drifted from mimicking nature, the more real I became.” He smiled at her phrasing of it. “It’s actually a common lesson students must learn early in drawing classes. Invariably, someone’s view of a still life will have an intersection of elements that is compositionally problematic. It’s always something of a minor breakthrough when a student realizes that they don’t have to be slaves to the reality of what they see when translating it to paper… Even in striving for precision, they have the power to rearrange elements on the page as they see fit. If you want a literal representation of a simple visual, well… we have machines that can do that. But a person… a person can make decisions… decisions that go to the essence of what they see. And those decisions are what make a person an artist. Hallie smiled tightly. “Yes. That’s the answer I was looking for” she said. “I want to learn how to make those decisions. I don’t want to mimic reality… I want to create it. I want to be an artist.” “Well then…” the Dean suggested with an encouraging nod, “why don’t we take a look at your portfolio…” |
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