Re: [NetBehaviour] On Paintr
2009/6/14 Pall Thayer pallt...@gmail.com First of all, I just want to say that I'm honored and proud that my own work played a part in influencing this very intriguing work. I was just talking with another Icelandic artist yesterday (Gudrun Kristjansdottir, painter) and we were discussing artistic motives. I.e. what do we want from our art and I told her that what I wanted most was for my art to have some sort of an influence on art being produced 50 years from now. So this is what it's all about for me. If someone says that my work influenced theirs, I'm reaching my primary goals. That's great. I always try to highlight the work I am building on. Another thing I wanted to mention is an article that I think you should look into. I took the same approach as I believe you're expressing which is that the subjectivity of the resulting work becomes very complex (perhaps even non-existent) as the program guiding the production is incapable itself of subjectivity. However, as H. Gene Blocker points out in his essay Pictures and Photographs (1977, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36(2), pp. 155-162), the mere act of avoiding subjectivity is in itself subjective. Yes the denial of emotion is a very emotional thing, so perhaps the avoidance or denial of subjectivity is somehow very subjective. The follow up to my paintr post (which should be finished in the next few days) begins - The perceived lack of psychological content, subjectivity, interiority, or affect is not a problem that concerns me in art computing. It is a deficiency of criticism, not the art under consideration. Software is ultimately made by human beings and its output is experienced by them. Visions of order are psychologically and ideologically interesting if you choose to look into them. Fractals, alife and evolutionary art all have this cognitive and social aesthetic value. Their un-Frankfurt-school-illustrating nature is a feature, not a bug, of their artistic worth. This is one of the things that reinforced my idea that code should be displayed along with this sort of work (and later that only the code need be displayed). Is showing the code like showing the model or the preparatory sketch, or is it like presenting the concept? Or is it Like Sol Lewitt's drawing work? SoDA exhibited some of my code at a show when it was too difficult to get it running on the Mac IIvx we had for the purpose. Before that they exhibited the work as a URL. I'd love to claim that these were radical artistic acts on my part, but they weren't. That's where the artist's subjectivity lies. Avoiding subjectivity is an interesting approach that can produce interesting results at a conceptual level but when it comes down to it, the work is still a product of you and that's what makes it significant. I had an interesting conversation with a lawyer at a conference once about who owned the copyright on an artwork made by a computer program, then on an artwork made by a program made by a program, then on an artwork made by a program made by a program made by a program and so on. It's always the person who wrote the first program, it has to be a human being. Copyright is interesting to me in part because it's a kind of degenerate ontology of art. I think code can also illustrate the ontology of art, what art is and isn't and how, but I tend to do this satirically just to be on the safe side. ;-) And finally, thanks for pointing out colr.org. Very interesting website. It's like colourlovers without the claim of an NC licence on the palettes. The guy who runs the site got in contact with me when they saw Paintr in their server logs, and they were very helpful. - Rob. ___ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] On Paintr
I came up with the idea for paintr one Friday morning in 2005 while thinking about Harold Cohen's arguments regarding computer art in his essays and while thinking about the work of Pall Thayer. Paintr's tag line was art in the age of network services, or art as a network service. By lunchtime I had something working, and by late afternoon on Saturday it was feature complete. A few weeks later I exhibited it at my show Howto in Belgrade. Artists don't make art by sitting around waiting for flashes of abstract conceptual or aesthetic inspiration then realizing it in visual form, but paintr does. The original version did so purely using Web 2.0-style web services; colr.org for colour palettes, flickr for (copylefted) photographs, and an online version of autotrace to convert the photographs to drawings. These paradigmatic web services were glued together with the paradigmatic web scripting programming language PHP. Many of my projects take a linguistic (verbal or visual language) description of art or reality and drive open the cracks in it by taking it literally to making something ironic and unstable. They are disproofs of theories, illustrations of mistakes, but they have a remainder that has its own meaning or effect. Paintr is a good example of this. It's an analogue to art or artistic activity, the realisation of a popular misconception of how art is made. It's an exploit on the idea of art or on the misunderstanding of it. The relationship that paintr has to Web 2.0 hype is similarly ironic. Web 2.0 makes it easy to create new software by gluing together the public APIs of web services, but you are limited in what you can ultimately do by the affordances that those services provide. Human socialisation can be planned, effected and recorded online in great detail and with great reach through social networking sites, but it is reified and channeled through normatising affordances. Art isn't something that should be created and vended as a web service like weather data or news tickers, but if that's the case what is special about art as a human activity that isn't about human activity in general? Paintr makes something that isn't art. It's easy to say why it isn't art but it's less easy to see why it isn't art, unless contemporary art of the housepaint-on-aluminium school also isn't art. This entanglement makes paintr about something more than itself artistically as well as socially. Art computing is usually dismissed out of hand by mainstream art critics because of its perceived lack of psychological content, subjectivity, interiority, or affect. Dismissing paintr on that basis is trivial because it isn't even trying to express something. But the intentional fallacy starts to seep through the cracks, and entanglement means that this leads to collateral damage for more critically acceptable forms of art. Aesthetics is resistant to corporate information culture because quantifying it doesn't capture its value. We can chain back from this obvious example to the more general case of human experience. The supernaturalism of qualia isn't necessary for aesthetics to have an experientially irreducible core. But paintr itself cannot experience this core. It weaves human affect and activity into its activity (colour palettes and images posted to social networking sites) but it is inhuman, beyond even death-of-the-author, a representative of corporate information culture and its exploitative cultural asset-stripping of cool. It loops back, conceptually. The remainder of this loop is its artistic value. The latest version of paintr has a back end written in Lisp and runs autotrace locally. It now has an RSS feed, always part of the plan, although it doesn't have an API yet. It's going to expand to start from expressing emotions rather than from abstract aesthetic inspiration. It will probably use Wordnet to map more creatively from its initial tags to the colours and images it searches for. It is becoming increasingly an example of social-network-based collective intelligence programming and increasingly an example of how this reifies human experience. And it looks good while doing so and in order to do so. http://robmyers.org/weblog/2009/06/paintr-1.html http://robmyers.org/paintr ___ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
Re: [NetBehaviour] On Paintr
and images posted to social networking sites) but it is inhuman, beyond even death-of-the-author, a representative of corporate information culture and its exploitative cultural asset-stripping of cool. It loops back, conceptually. The remainder of this loop is its artistic value. The latest version of paintr has a back end written in Lisp and runs autotrace locally. It now has an RSS feed, always part of the plan, although it doesn't have an API yet. It's going to expand to start from expressing emotions rather than from abstract aesthetic inspiration. It will probably use Wordnet to map more creatively from its initial tags to the colours and images it searches for. It is becoming increasingly an example of social-network-based collective intelligence programming and increasingly an example of how this reifies human experience. And it looks good while doing so and in order to do so. http://robmyers.org/weblog/2009/06/paintr-1.html http://robmyers.org/paintr ___ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour -- * Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit * ___ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
