On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:
I believe all art does, at some level, require specific knowledge of specific "languages". If we look for instance at the emergence of Impressionism, it wasn't commonly accepted because people didn't understand its "language".
I don't think art has specific languages, but that's a very long argu- ment here; I'd combine Eco with Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language in this sense. I have no idea at all what a 'language of impressionism' is, although I usually can recognize an impressionist painting, but even then there are Americans that I'd have no idea how to place within the aegis.
I probably come off sounding really "elitist" but art has always been and will always be "elitist".
Now Thomas Kincaid is _not_ elitist and is certainly an artist. So is Brittney for that matter.
I do want to make it clear this isn't about your work which I like! But about 'art in general' however that might be!
And thanks, Alan
best r. Pall On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:And of course it's valid; I actually don't think 'validity' is a reasonable category in aesthetics - it can be defined in terms of social groups or language games, but has nothing intrinsic about it. Another interesting point - Seedbed could be 'directly' experienced, even without reading the wall-text, but your work requires a knowledge of a specific computer language. So the program can be translated one to another; I don't see Seedbed itself translating, which is why I have fairly negative feelings about 'recreation' art, especially in Second Life... - Alan On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:Well, actually the perl code: #!/usr/bin/perl $p = `Seedbed`; would run without error. $p would contain the "not found" error. But I don't feel that it does much in pointing out the significance of the medium in this particular case. Perhaps if the work was about something lost or nonexistent, it would work but not for the "Seedbed" piece. The title of each of these Microcodes is as much a part of the complete work as anything else. The direct reference by name has already been made in the title and therefore I don't see any meaningful reason to reference it again in this way. Someone might say, "But you did it in 'Sleep'." However, I don't see that as the same thing because 'sleep' is an actual Perl function. If you want to attempt a phenomenological examination of the reference itself, let me explain exactly what led to the creation of this Microcode. I was doing some work the other day where I had to use the "touch" command legitimately. This reminded me of James Morris' "Microcrudities" where he used the command along with the variable "myself". This reminded me of my code piece "exist.pl" from last year where a perl code referenced itself in various human ways, i.e. my_existence, my_experience, my_environment, etc. When I thought of a Perl script referencing itself as the location of the actual file and then 'touching' that file, it reminded me of "Seedbed". And so I created the script that locates 'itself', that is, the file containing the runnable code and then 'touches' the file. I decided to print the long listing of the file each time to show the effects of 'touching' the file (the creation date is updated each time) as a hint that this sort of 'touching' is very different than Acconci's 'touching'. Of course, more people are going to understand the referenced meaning than the real meaning. But does that make it any less valid? Now that I think about it, the work isn't about Acconci's "Seedbed" at all. It's much more about the intended and almost inevitable misunderstanding. best r. Pall On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 11:08 PM, Alan Sondheim<[email protected]> wrote:I agree with you here, and as usual a couple of points. If k:> Seedbed doesn't run, can it be said to run as not-run? This isn't trivial; Max Black discussed it in terms of defining blackbirds as not-this, not-that; obviously the list is infinite. Certainly 'Seedbed' as a command tells us something - that the only thing it will run is the generic not-found - but that's something. I do understand the non-issue of reproduction of other work in micro-code, and as you say, Seedbed is referenced; what I was on about, was what sort of reference? There's a whole phenomenology here of course, which might or might not be of interest. - Alan, and thanks On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:I think I have to bring things back down to the ground now. After taking a bit of a break in the country in glorious weather, I see that this discussion is really going far beyond the work that's being discussed. Obviously, none of the microcodes that reference other work (and keep in mind that there only 3 or 4 out 20-some codes that do this) are meant to be accurate reproductions of those works. Actually, as reproductions they are meant to fail and in doing so they become new works of art. "Seedbed" attempts to reference the original performance with the words "touch myself" and by using the same title. But the way these words are applied within the code gives them a very different meaning as code. They also produce a result and it's a result that has absolutely nothing to do with the non-code meaning of the works. So these arguments about whether or not the code version references the original "Seedbed" accurately enough, are entirely beside the point. The reason some of the Microcodes reference older work is to highlight the differences between the media. To show that while code as a medium is incapable of reproducing other work created in different media, it is also a distinct medium of its own that is capable of doing things that other media can't. Your suggestion of "an absolute minimum" wouldn't work as a Microcode because, as I mentioned earlier, I set a rule for myself, that all of the codes be runnable. Since, as Alan points out in his post, "Seedbed" doesn't run as a Unix command, this code wouldn't really be runnable. As mentioned above, the idea is simply to bring the original performance to mind. No more. Because the medium being used is incapable of doing more. It's entirely incapable of "bringing it to life, enacting it, redoing it, reperforming it". At the very most, it can "suggest it". best r. Pall On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:16 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:At the risk of stating the obvious, perhaps the problem here is that there is no one essence of this performance, or any performance for that matter. While you do say "a single 'essence'", and not "the", to me a major part of the very idea of performance is to create something which is in excess of language and representation, something which the techne of words or photo or video don't capture, much less a few lines of code. While I think the notion of translating a performance into code is interesting, perhaps what this discussion precisely raises is that there are a multiplicity of essences, dirtiness, fantasy, masturbation, soreness, mystery, discomfort, the body, the absence of the body... Your microcodes seem to be a sort of review or remix of another work, based on your personal interpretation. In fact, I think that the reduction of the body to a set of files in your home directory is in itself an abjection and a sadness, a departure from all the rich, sensual complexity of the body and a reduction to a few digital bytes. Perhaps the sadness of the digital is expressed very well here.Pall Thayer wrote:I guess by "the essence" of the work, I'm considering the absolute minimum that it takes to bring to mind "Seedbed" when looking at the code.Hmm, but here is sounds like you're talking about a simlpe representation, and I think being very reductive! Wouldn't the absolute minimum be something like #!/usr/bin/perl $p = `seedbed`; ? When in fact, the interesting part is to go beyond simply bringing the performance to mind, but as the furtherfield review writes, to bring it to life, to enact it, to redo it, to reperform it, in the form of an actual running program?On 2/7/2009, "Alan Sondheim" <[email protected]> wrote:Hi Paul, The essence it seemed to me wasn't self-referentiality or touch (good unix command too), so much as it was about targeting the ab/use/er, as well as dirtiness. And code's always clean; even dirty code's clean, so there'sOn Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Pall Thayer wrote:Hi Alan, One of the primary reasons that I've "redone" a number of known pieces by other artists in these Microcodes is more to point out the difference between code as a medium and other media. So the point isn't necessarily to emulate the work as closely as possible but rather to capture a single "essence" of it in very compact code. I think that trying to work the incline and fantasies into this "version" of the work would result in considerably more code which would in turn make the work overly complex._______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour| Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [email protected], [email protected], tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour-- ***************************** Pall Thayer artist http://www.this.is/pallit ***************************** _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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