Nevertheless:

I am commonly asked two questions. The first of these is some variant of, "Why do you make icons that are not useful?" Why, in other words, do I make icons that do not represent a printer, or CD-ROM device, or some popular application or another? Well, there are several answers, one of which is that there already exist many icons by other artists that serve these functions quite well. Another is that attractive icons seem to me to be worthy in their own right, even if they do not immediately suggest some utilitarian purpose. When I find an appealing icon by somebody else, I commonly put it where I can see it easily, just for the pleasure I get out of looking at it.

Yet another answer is, "You never know." Although an icon showing a rhinoceros under a quarter moon does not immediately suggest a function to most viewers, there are a few to whom the rhino may be just exactly right for one of their specific applications or directories. For example, I recently acquired a solitaire program that employs a drawing of a lighthouse as part of its graphic layout. My own LITEHOUS.ICO, which I had drawn several weeks before, was an ideal icon to invoke the program.

The final answer is that drawing icons -- trying to milk "beauty" and artistic validity out of a 32 x 32 pixel array with 16 colors -- is just plain fun. It used to be that when I needed a break from work, I played a computer game; now I draw an icon: far more satisfying. I distribute them because, well, communication is part of art, and because people have asked me to.

The second question is perhaps more profound: "Why, as an artist, do you work in a medium that is so obviously transient?" In other words, why aren't I sculpting objects out of deathless marble, or painting in oils (or even acrylics), or doing something -- anything -- that might insure some degree of immortality or at least relative permanence to my work?

Well, it's a good question. For surely, other than performance art (which I generally enjoy immensely), there are few artistic media more ephemeral than computer icons. For example, in the next few months or years, the standard icon will perhaps become 40 x 40 pixels, or 64 x 64 or something, rendering my work not merely archaic but also, on most systems, simply invisible. Or graphic interfaces may come to use devices other than icons. Whatever. In any case, it is a virtual certainty that archeologists 2000 years from now will not be digging up my work and marveling at its beauty, as they conceivably might with a marble statue or clay pot.

Consider an analogy. I understand (perhaps from the writings of Jane Goodall; I forget) that chimpanzees produce a form of art consisting of piles of sticks and stones. At least it's reasonable to assume that these are artistic endeavors, although they certainly could be strictly utilitarian: chimp icons meaning "Here there be leopards" or something. But assuming they are art, they are remarkably without human aesthetic value: they are just untidy piles of sticks and stones. The beauty they offer their chimpanzee viewer is pretty much limited to that species. Indeed, if the chimpanzee species somehow advanced to human level, the subjective beauty of these objects would doubtless vanish.

I read a lot of science fiction. Many such stories are set in the distant future: 20,000 years from now, or even further. Usually the technology is incredible, indistinguishable from magic and all that. But the really remarkable thing about such tales is their depiction of humanity. The human characters, mentally and usually even physically, are pretty much, well, the 20th Century versions. They have the same ambitions, jealousies, peeves, ideals, motivations, responses, mental abilities, and just about every other human trait that you or I might have, way back here near the early moments of the 20th Century.

Well, this may be good fiction, because absolutely alien people would probably make for incomprehensible and hence dull reading, but it is poor futurism. It entirely ignores, or soft-pedals, the probable developments in human biology that can reasonably be expected. Fact is, we have already begun tinkering with the human genome. Within the next couple of centuries, humanity will probably undergo a dramatic artificial acceleration in evolution, with results that are presently unimaginable.

Perhaps the result will be spindly, dome-headed zombies; perhaps vast brains floating in jars; perhaps disembodied spirits inhabiting multiple dimensions; who knows? Whatever, the minds of these folk will almost surely be occupied with matters that are not necessarily loftier but certainly different from what we think about today.

Their aesthetic sense will be greatly different as well. Perhaps they will reach aesthetic ecstasy by listening to an endless monotone; perhaps their artists will directly stimulate specific neural centers in fascinating sequences; perhaps their visual senses will appreciate vast, swirling works done in wavelengths far beyond our present and painfully limited visual spectrum. I dunno.

But it seems fairly likely that their artistic sensibilities will be so different from ours today that, to them, all the works in the National Gallery will resemble the products of chimpanzees: piles of sticks and stones, crude productions and clumsy depictions that might be of some possible interest to historians or anthropologists, but with no broader appeal.

Art as a vehicle of immortality is doomed. Long live the ephemeral! Let us consider computer-icon art as a variant of performance art, cognate with the public plucking of a chicken or the gift-wrapping of large buildings, and revel in it while we may.

David Edwards