On 09/10/2012 01:03 PM, info wrote: > Making the Digital Divide Cheap and Nasty.
"Digital or Computational art needs to be cheaper and nastier, as the artist's tools of use are getting increasingly dirty with critical engagement and proflirefation of code..." There are various values of "nasty" at play in contemporary society. Maker culture, a cargo cult of cold war industrial "innovation" turned post-industrial corn dollyishness, takes "nasty" to mean ad hoc rather than designed by Jonathan Ive. Grinder culture, a cargo cult of cold war cyborgism turned body mod chic, takes "nasty" to mean the kind of bodily invasiveness that people who call mobile phone users "cyborgs" run screaming from. DARPA are subbing Maker events in the US. And cheapness and nastiness are aesthetics that can launder wealth and power, as relational art demonstrated. At the other end of the market of ideas are startup culture (whether VC or crowd funded) and large-scale computing (in the cloud or on clusters). They are cheaper than previous forms and their nastiness is the fact that they are economically and socially problematic. This makes them harder to use in isolation and with a clean conscience, which makes them very interesting. These forms intermix, with Kickstarter-funded 3D printers and cyborg sense startups. And they have long since crossed over with art. But intensifying them, and getting one's hands dirty (and scarred) is not just unpaid military research or corporate skill development. So yes this is a productive direction to pursue. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
