YORI LIVES ART - DAVID BIRD

David Bird is the artist who created the Yori disc pictured left with Cindy Morgan. I was able to ask him some questions about his work, art and Tron.

In the movie TRON, (in the scene which was deleted) Yori has the creative power to transform her quarters into a beautiful space filled with color and light. She is the design coordinator of the Solar Sailer. Tron's design and setting is a world full of light, a photonic Oz, where the forces of light struggle for freedom to allow USERS to express their dreams in the electonic world. Yori embodies this expression of creative freedom.

"To me Yori is a Being of Light and also a Designer of Light/Power."

After graduating from Brigham Young University degrees in design and anthropology David Bird worked in various design firms around the country and is presently working freelance work in Utah. He has been working in the “Tiffany” style of stained glass for the last few years and has been working with Disney since 2003.

How or when did you start working with glass as an art form?

"I started working in glass in 2000. It was a natural off-shoot of my"day job" of graphic design. While I love beautiful line work in artwork, working in glass introduces that beautiful, Pure Color of light. no other medium can rival pure light. I just bought supplies and started learning the art. After lots of practice, I began to understand the artform and I am still learning."

"I got to meet Cindy at Comic-Con and it was my first Con.....I didn't realize that a person could actually talk with the celebrities! I found Cindy to be just amazing, beautiful, and personable. I then met her again at the 2011 Comic-con and I had a mickey mouse head necklace that I gave to friends and she loved it. I thought that the next time I met her, I would have to have some kind of gift for her that was in the theme of Tron. I first came up with a disk shape (of course)."

How did you come up with the Yori disc?

"I wanted to have something more personal for Cindy/Yori. To me Yori is a Being of Light and also a Designer of Light/Power. I wanted the piece to literally glow in the room. Glass is my medium of choice of course. Nothing has the Light power like glass. No paint or medium comes close to the magic of pure light. I wanted something of Yori and found it in the design of her suit. That is how I came up with the disk I gave Cindy."

"I am a guest artist with Disney and was lucky enough to do some artwork for the D23 Expo auction and I knew that Cindy was going to be signing on Tron Day. So I created the disk to give her at her signing."

"When I gave her the disk, she got teary-eyed...I knew I had made her happy (It made my day too)! It wasn't about my artwork or me, I wanted to show Cindy that Tron made a difference in our lives as artists and fans. Cindy had fun showing off her disk to her fans that day! .I wanted her to show her friends that the visuals in the movie made a big impression of design, light, and color on not only me but opn many others. I translated that idea into something she could hold."

Do you draw up designs, plans, and then what's the next step for creating one of these artworks?

"I always sketch ideas first with a pencil then I start to tighten it up and put it into lines in Adobe Illustrator. From there I print out the patterns and start cutting the glass."

Glasswork, which dates to ancient times, but historically employed since the 4th and 5th centuries in churches and religious icons, seems to have its roots in religious art, do you find that Tron has a kind of religious style in its design? Not necessarily particularly any specific religion, but for instance Tron enters the I/O Tower, and it looks like a cathedral. Do you have any thoughts on what art such as glasswork is trying to achieve in its power of reflecting light, or perhaps what artists are pointing to with the beauty of art?

"To me, nature is a God given gift to us. The spiritual side of life to me is Light. I believe that we are spirits of light. In literature there is always that confilict between Dark and Light but for me the Light dispels the Dark every time. Stained glass has always brightened the souls of the world. We are always striving to return to the Supreme Being that we call our Heavenly Father. We want to go to the light! When the light goes through the colored glass of one of the pieces in my studio, it is something that is almost out of this world."

Are you a science fiction fan? What is your favorite sci-fi movie or series?

"I love science fiction. I even got to meet Ray Bradbury a couple of years ago at Comic-Con! Of course I love star wars but Tron came out after I graduated from high school. To me, that was the beginning of the computer age. I started working on an Atari computer a few years after that and then I began working on an Macintosh/Apple in 1987 and have not looked back since."

"I loved Tron Legacy (except I wanted to see Yori!!! .....I wondered how could they leave her out?) I loved how they updated the look of the world of Tron BUT it was still the base world of Tron that we grew up with. The characters and costumes were definitely Updated but were still Light Designed. No wonder that my small company is named LightDesign Studios."

A collection of his art can be seen at his website. http://www.davidebird.com/

http://www.etsy.com/people/DavidBird

TRON - Art and Technology

by Bob Plissken

Tron was born of art, and not necessarily technology, but it is necessarily technological.

Tron was essentially the first film to utilize computer animation. While there were many films that came before it that dealt with computers, computers with artificial intelligence, and disappearing into another world, none dived into the inner-realm of the computer, whether its depiction was virtual or literal. Director, Steven Lisberger was interested mainly in the artistic rendition of the technological. He not only got Syd Mead and Moebius on board to design, his own roots come from animation, and illustration. Tron is more art than comic book, and more science-fiction than even Star Wars. Star Wars implies nothing about science, or technology, everything in it is matter-of-fact, taken for granted. It's art is basically utilitarian, it serves to describe its generalities. Bad guys look like nazis. Vile characters are ugly aliens, and good guy allies are cute and furry creatures. The rest is technical graffiti, whatever looks good enough. Its brilliant art designer was not George Lucas, but Ralph McQuarrie, and without him, it would have failed miserably. His talents far outshine George Lucas' abilities to tell a story, and it was McQuarrie who really gave us Boba Fett, C3PO, Darth Vader, and what Star Wars looks like. His vision was his own, and while Lucas likes to claim he invented everything, he never would have made the Star Wars we know had he really been in control of every detail. Star Wars was nothing but an amalgamation of prior science fiction novels, comics, and designs. Add John Williams music, the talent of the actors, and you then have something.

Tron's story takes place in two worlds, and in the world of the computer-realm, or 'the Grid,' nobody knew or let alone imagined such a thing at the time. Tron imagined something we hadn't. Star Wars imagined something that we had seen, only it was in higher definition, more detailed, and arranged in such a way that appealed to us. Tron took a bigger risk, it tried to imagine beyond what we knew, beyond where we were, technologically, and culturally. In order to do such a thing, it requires the talent of artists. Science fiction authors can only attempt to describe what they see as what is beyond, and often, one can only write what they cannot convey in images, an artist in the visual media must 'show' us what is that beyond.

This is not as easy as it seems, especially in the guise of a movie which is a story--which requires writing. Obviously, all films are of the combination of writing, music, acting, and art design, but a science-fiction film which attempts to reach beyond, and take a step further and attempt to deal with technology which is just beginning to reach the masses, and technology which is years away, and how characters, or how 'we' will be involved in such things, is a very risky thing indeed.

What Tron did was imagine a world in which we are somehow so involved with computers, where we interact with programs, and applications which will one day perhaps be tyrannical, some sort of corporate control of our computers will hold us back, and we will have to figure out a way to deal with this problem. At the time, nobody was using programs to the extent we do now, people attempt suicide when they can't get on Facebook now. Perhaps that's tyranny. Perhaps that's insanity, but as the characters are sucked into the computer world, we are just as much 'sucked into the world of the computers.'

Art sometimes has to be literal, it is after all visual, the characters in Tron were sucked into the world of the computer...this weird esoteric alien realm, which hadn't even been fully put into place yet in the real world, yet somehow this is what it predicted. A world where things like wikileaks, hackers, and corporate fascists will be an ordinary everyday thing. Inside this 'Oz' like computer-realm, the shadows of ourselves live out a dreamlike version of our true intentions, hopes and passions. There simply aren't enough films like Tron, and possibly because as hard as it is to describe all this, these ideas, people assume one means more movies 'exactly' like Tron--which is the way Hollywood studio executives think, how non-artists think. To put it plainly, we need more artists, and we need more artists to do more of what they do, and that is--imagine.

With the movie Tron, in both the making of it, as well as within the story of it, we have science, technology, and the development and implementation of the highest tech possible, there are people who have 'created' programs in order to display images in ways we haven't seen or imagined them before, we have people who are taking real objects, and having them converted into computer data, perhaps so that they can be observed with the computer itself, studied, taken apart and examined, and many of these technicians simply aren't capable of looking at real-world objects and studying them as they are without 'deconstructing' them with technological toys. One can look at an Orange with the mind, and the imagination, and understand it in ways one never previously did before without having to disintegrate it and reconstitute it with a computer, but it requires imagination, the very same kind of imagination required to building such devices which will perform such an elaborate and pointless task.

What this means is that art is as important to develop as 'science' or 'technology' which is really what supposed science is really doing these days, nothing but improving and developing more technology, not 'understanding.' As much as we are proud of ourselves in developing more and more technology, and constantly fund and support the building of more toys, almost with a politcal ambition, boasting that it is 'evolution' and that we are performing 'miracles' and that science must march on, we fail to see that 'art' is something that must always catch up, and that we consistently fail to push the 'art pedal to the metal.'

Tron is an example which both illustrates this fact, in its story, as well as its production. Since there really are no 'scientists' anymore, only technologists, and scientific politicians, (as well as unscientific politicians), all that we are doing is advancing our technology, often for the sake of itself. We need more artists, more art, and more imagination which comes not from technology(a computer didn't film TRON), and which can both realize and re-purpose the crap we already have, and instead of inventing more and more deadlier crap, (more deadly than it already is), we have to figure out what we can do with what we have now, and what we will have to do in the future. We've reached a point where we have to imagine just how bad it is going to be in the future, in order to convince people to stop, and we've been doing this for so long, we have either forgotten, or simply been so beaten down, that we haven't been imagining what good there could possibly be way beyond all of this. So far beyond it all, that we have to think beyond apocalypses, and world wars, and cybernetic holocausts. We know all these things will slowly unfold now if we do not do something to stop them, but how do we stop them, now that we know? The answer is back with the imagination once again. The artist has the talent, the skill and the ability as 'mere training' in order to take up this challenge, and perhaps the only people who can take the first step in the direction which will 'save us.'

Art can be terribly bizarre and confusing, and shocking and frightening, and yet, it is also beautiful and amazing, filling us with wonder, and even hope. What an artist can do is change your frame of reference, and pre-concieved notions, it can displace you, and put you in a state of awe that you didn't have before, such as seeing a film about people going to another world. One has to imagine that world in order to transport you there, and though I don't think we can be sure whether or not we really create it, or whether it creates us, but an artist can help take us there. Technology doesn't take us to another world, it only seems to dissolve one world, and replace it with another, it alters a world, and temporarily perhaps for the better, but being what technology really is, nothing but a mirror reflection of ourselves, how can nothing but a mere shadow of ourselves direct our future?

Artists look around, and take something they see before them, and re-purpose it for something that they see needs to be done, they are like 'inventors' of the imagination, they create the smallest simplest things, without wasting time with mathematical equations and technicalities, though they can make art out of those things too. An artist can reach out and see a physical object, such as even the computer in front of you, and see it as something completely different than it ever was before, all without doing a single calculation, or any scientific research. With the simplest things, art comes into existence, with the artist, and immediately begins to transform the world around it. If only more money was used in some way, some how to support, inspire and advance the arts, and the artists, we could turn this world right around, and though it seems obvious that 'art' might be an element of the 'design' of every piece of technology, we must never let 'art' be nothing but a cog in the machine. Art is more than that, and if we ever want to be more than what we are, we better apply ourselves to our art, and to our artists, before the machine takes us all.

--Check out John Wesley Huff's TRON REDEMPTION HERE

The Yori Art Project Gallery

Coming soon to this site is a "Yori Art Gallery" where artists can contribute their art of Yori in Tron. There are several reasons for this. There is quite a bit of art out there for TRON and of course, specifically YORI. Having a place where people can post this art so that others interested in this subject can also view it will show that there is still significant interest in Yori, thus contributing to the campaign to 'Return Cindy Morgan to the Grid' but also to provide links, which credit the artists. A lot of this art has been posted in forums and sent around Facebook and nobody knows who the artists really are, most often people are assuming that the person posting it is the artist. In such a gallery here, Both the Fans of Yori, Cindy Morgan and Tron will have the opportunity to see who has made this contribution, as well as anyone visiting who might like to further communicate with the artist.

The objective is more than a "Fan Art" page, it will hopefully inspire more art, and in the spirit of what "YORI" actually represents in the movie, the point is to spread the meme of the character as artist, as a 'design program' as 'creativity' itself.

Submit your articles, art, pics of your paintings, photoshops, etc to philsternwise @ yahoo . com

Art has already begun being collected and the gallery will be up within a few days.

Long live the Users.