On 19/1/09 01:00, Julian Oliver wrote: > (to these ends some friends and i are planning a workshop on object-oriented > programming for artists without a single computer in the room..)
Julian Your comment above suggests you agree with me the digital does not require a computer. It is an idea, an abstraction, before it is anything else an idea concerned with language and communication. Some artists chose to reject the artefact as the basis for art many years ago. They sought to produce an immaterial art that might not be commodified or fetishised as object. They probably failed in their objective, but this was the logic they (and I) pursued. What originally attracted me to computing as a medium was its immaterial character it was just numbers, abstract signifiers. You could make them do anything and there was no requirement to fix them in relation to a signified. The relationships you were creating could remain fluid and playful. This remains (for me) the compelling characteristic of computers. When I taught introductory classes in Ocomputer art¹ (back in the 1980¹s) my first class used the approach you are proposing. I would ask the students to sit in a circle. We would then develop some simple rules focused on how they related to the actions of individuals in the circle and how those actions would then modify the actions of others. We would then Orun¹ the system we created. It was important that the students understood, from the outset of the course, that computation was not dependent on what they (we) commonly understood to be computers; that they understood computing as an activity where language became externalised, potentially distinct from intent and utterance. My hope was that they would get a sense of the ontological problems they were engaging when seeking to make a self-sustaining (and abstracted) system. I am not going to get into an argument about whether Ocomputer¹ or Odigital¹ is the better term to use in this context. In some respects they are interchangeable terms, if by computer we mean to signify the computational (rather than any particular configuration of hardware or even a specific notion of software) and if by digital we mean to refer to the basic stuff of computation (the most reduced form of differentiation possible, a binary difference). As has been shown in the past, there is little to be gained from such arguments. The question is whether we agree (or disagree) that there is something particular about an art that employs computation as fundamental to its raison d¹etre (by which I mean the process of computation is the art not any secondary artefact associated with it). regards Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
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