Calder Mobile on Google Hailed as a “Doodle” Breakthrough

A Powerful New Computer Language Poses New Challenges to Fine Art

As an art gallery, the Google search page—with its “doodle” images based on the company name—is the most-visited art venue in the world. Not a few art students, especially illustrators, dream of the day they land a job as a Google “doodler” and have their drawings seen by millions of people.

            On Friday, the Google art gallery changed dramatically. The doodle was an image of a famous Alexander Calder mobile from 1960 titled “The Star.” This time, however, if you had the right browser (the more advanced version, from Chrome to Firefox), you could drag your mouse on the Calder mobile and make it move around.
            Even Google declared this new feature to be a milestone in technology and art. “This is Google’s first doodle made entirely using HTML5 canvas,” software engineer Jered Wierzbicki explained on the company blog. As computer aficionados know (and the general public is slow to learn), HTML has long been the shared software language used by computers on the Internet. As time passes, however, the language is improved to do more, which moved it up to HTML4 in recent years.
            Now comes HTML5. With its additional power, it can do far more with motion graphics, from video to effects such as the Calder mobile, which moves around so naturally under the pointer of a mouse. For Internet users who don’t yet have the ability to “read” HTML5, the Calder image just sits there—pretty, but nothing surprising,
            Fittingly, Google has posted the Calder mobile to mark his 113th birthday. “I like to think Calder would have appreciated today’s doodle, since we’re setting up shapes and abstractions and letting them act on their own,” Wierzbicki writes. He also explains how the idea came to fruition: “I coded up a very basic demo of a mobile and showed it to a friend, who showed it to one of our doodlers—and then this amazing thing happened: talented artists and engineers who liked the idea just started to help!”
            The stunner in all of this is how the new HTML5 gives ordinary computers using the Internet a new level of power with motion graphics, a power and versatility once unheard of in the simple context of the browser itself.  For the art world, there are other stunning things now to consider. In a new way, Google has crossed a Rubicon with the fine arts.
            In this episode, as Wierzbicki explains, “talented artists and engineers” cooperated to pull it off. Some day, however, that cooperation may not be necessary. For instance, will the computer engineers soon be able to do this alone, no longer needing “artists” to hand them a picture of a Calder mobile? Or, as an alternative, will artists need to put down their brushes and chisels to devote all their time to learning computer coding skills?
            Today, you can find advocates of both sides. Meanwhile, more traditional artists who are not interested in computer engineering may be shaking in their paint-splattered shoes. Increasingly, the leaders of art schools—even their presidents—are arguing that everything in art must now go digital. In many galleries, digital is hot, mobiles are not.
            As with the revolution in e-books, which has sent the print-publishing industry into a tailspin of uncertainty, the future of fine art seems to be hanging by a frayed computer cable. On the other hand, the application of HTML5 to Google’s daily art gallery may not be the proverbial writing on the wall. The human desire to read books made of paper will never die. By analogy, the taste for art work done on real “canvas” with paint, not by computer code, also will surely survive in a big way.
            Still, the Google event makes us wonder. The company, which has done so much for artists and writers to get their work onto the Internet, naturally believes that Calder on his 113th birthday would be pleased at this digital milestone. After all, Calder was one of the most good-natured artists of the 20th century.
            However, what if he was told that making drawings, applying paint, and cutting sheet metal by hand and trying to balance it in a greasy workshop was about to be banished from the face of the earth—by software code? No doubt he would turn in his grave, much like a Google mobile.