Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile :)
--empyre- soft-skinned space--I keep thinking about McLuhan's, The Medium is the Message. The networked reality we are living in is very exciting and changes al the time. The networks have invaded our personal space with cellphones and tablets. AR will be a further integration. I watch people texting and tweeting while walking on the street. their social space and thoughts are hooked together via the networks. This is an entirely new consciousness that is just developing. Big Data and government surveillance on the other hand is part of a macho protection racket that most governments engage in. It's paranoid fear-mongering. There's a couple of issues here that overlap. Corporate marketing, Government Control and social networks. I believe that the way forward is to keep evolving and changing. If the fear mongers what to study us, so what? Of course it would be nice if governments faded away, Corporation became responsible citizens of the word and wars stopped happening. That can happen if people talk to each other and learn from each other. That can happen on the networks inspire of Big Data. On Jul 2, 2013, at 8:13 AM, Simon Biggs wrote Big Data could be considered in these terms - a sort of dark matter that permeates what we recognise as knowledge - that which we can articulate as a shared understanding of things. How does Big Data, as a form of collective pre-knowledge, relate to our perception of things and sense of self in a technologised society G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] all call to -empyre- subscribers- see below
--empyre- soft-skinned space--G.H. Hovagimyan is an experimental artist working in a variety of forms. He was one of the first artists in New York to start working with the Internet in the early nineties. His work ranges from new media and hypertext works to digital performance art, video art, photography and multi-media installations. His works have been exhibited at MoMA, Mass MoCA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, The Walker Art Center, Jeu De Paume, MAC Marseille, MAC Lyon, Pompidou Center, Lincoln Center, ICA The Clocktower, The Kitchen, The Alternative Museum, Eyebeam Art Technology, List Visual Arts Center, La Gaite Du Lyrique, Stuttgart Kunstverein, Steim Institute, the Moscow Center for Contemporary Art, Postmasters Gallery, Pace Digital Gallery He has also exhibited works in major festivals and art fairs including; Art Basel Miami, Pulse Miami, Art Cologne, Split Film Festival, Conflux Festival, Video Dumbo, Scope Art Fair, Frieze Art Fair, Avignon Numerique, The Documenta, Interferences 2nd International Festival of Urban Multimedia Arts, Les Musiques, Marseille and Prix Ars Electronica 98 where he won an award for his collaborative work with Peter Sinclair. His works are in the collections of The Walker Art Center, The Whitney Museum, The Alternative Museum, Computer Fine Arts Collection and Perpetual Art Machine Recent awards include: AIR - ISIS Arts Newcastle, UK – 2013, AIR - Pixel Palace Newcastle, UK – 2012, AIR - School of Visual Arts MFA Computer Arts Dept. 2011-2012, LMCC Governor’s Island Residency - 2010, Plazaville - 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003 fellowship from Experimental Television Center, 2003 TAM Digital Media Commissions, 2002 Artists Fellowship from Franklin Furnace, 2002 pilot artist in residence program from Eyebeam, NYC. --- LINKS; http://nujus.net/gh http://nujus.net/nublog Recent Essay: Tell Me About Your Mothers's Tumblr http://hyperallergic.com/65968/tell-me-about-your-mothers-tumblr/ __ At the moment I'm working on a post browser interface that uses a kinect camera and a 3D space. On Jun 3, 2013, at 11:21 AM, Renate Ferro wrote: An Archival Event: Who is –empyre? G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Beatriz da Costa - the early years
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Shani was a student of mine Peter Sinclair's in Aix (Ecole D'Art D'Aix-en_Provence. Peter is the head of the Sound lab and heavy influence on the new media scene especially in sound Art. Peter I were doing our first soaPOPera for Laptops and she was one of the members of the team She was quite a lot of fun in Aix. We were amazed at how far she surpassed us when she went to Carnegie. There's a whole crew in Aix that are deeply saddened by her passing. /gh On Feb 22, 2013, at 12:06 PM, Robert Nideffer wrote: I first met Shani in late 1999 at Carnegie Mellon where she was an exchange student from Aix-En-Provence finishing her thesis project (the cello) and I was a Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy
The flooding and power outages are a bummer. I live in zone B which is the secondary evacuation zone. Zone A is one block from me. The subways are flooded and they are beginning to pump them out. Last year we had a hurricane hit New York at the same time. It's odd because the year before that we were sent emergency evacuation plans for our neighborhood in case of hurricanes. The hard part is all the people who must evacuate. This also happened during 9/11 and the hurricane last year. Without power the high-rise apartment building don't have water. So if you want to flush our bath you must carry water up the stairs. And of course theres no elevator, no refrigeration for food etc.. But this is the fourth blackout since 9/11. New Yorker have no choice but to cope. I have a house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I split my time between New York and PA. We were up there when the storm hit. We also have a backup propane generator because we tend to get hit with high winds that known out power up here. I always thought of this place as a refuge and it appears to be becoming more so. On Oct 30, 2012, at 11:34 PM, Maria Damon wrote: wow~ chicago! On 10/30/12 8:03 PM, Lichty, Patrick wrote: In Chicago, we're having 40 MPH winds and 20 foot waves out near Lakeshore Drive (LSD) Patrick Lichty Assistant Professor, Interactive Arts Media Columbia College Chicago 916/1000 S. Wabash Ave #104 Chicago, IL USA 60605 Some distractions demand constant practice. From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jonathan Marshall [jonathan.marsh...@uts.edu.au] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 7:54 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy I was amazed to hear from someone in Michegan who said they were experiencing 40mph winds, so the effects in NY must be staggering. The news this morning was full of pictures of the sea moving inland, and the kind of heavy debris blowing around that Alan was talking about yesterday. hoping its moving out now. jon From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim [sondh...@panix.com] Sent: Wednesday, 31 October 2012 10:15 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy Hi, thanks Renate, we're ok, have been out numerous times in the hurricane. NYC and NJ and coastal Connecticut are epitomes of suffering at the moment - a real mess here, no one was expecting this. But our roof and our repairs held! Thanks to everyone who wrote in as well. love, Alan and Azure == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Machines - Drones at Home
Tom Schofield contacted and asked for this to be corrected. It appears that I misunderstood what he told me. Here's Hey GH Weirdly through a friend I just got this below about the new creators show. Thanks for the credit but this isn't my work! I said I'm working with Memo Akten who was one of the creators on a different project! Could you possibly post a correction to the list? Also it was in Cannes! many thanks! T On Sep 13, 2012, at 1:41 PM, gh hovagimyan wrote: Speakiong of drones -- Here's a performance in the UK. Tom Schofield did the programming -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uMfeature=share G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Machines
Hi David et al.. I just did a piece called 3D Karaoke using kinect cameras and meshlab to produce a live 3D video with Karaoke songs and text. I did this at a residency at the pixel palace in Newcastle,UK. I could try and make it a commercial product but how boring is that? It would take a number of years to release and cost millions to develop. So I decided to release it as open source. It was after all built on processing with open source code and hacked Kinect cameras. So what does this mean? two things, the equipment and code are public/ private(developed at MIT and ITP and Microsoft) also Stephen Pedersen and Bang Guel Han at an Artists Meeting workshop did the initial code based on two books , Making Things See and Kinect and Arduino. As I said in my earlier post, it's a two way street, we see like machines and the machines see more like the way we do. What does this mean? Away from the big museums, big business, big hollywood, big silicon valley, big academia are artists and hackers working in the world. They're more interested in using the tools to alter the balance and change the way people perceive themselves and others. I'm interested in playing with the border between physical and virtual. Between calculation and comprehension. /gh On Sep 13, 2012, at 1:21 PM, David Berry wrote: But it doesn't have to be that way, and so far I have more hope that it even in its impoverished consumerized form, it still serves to serve notice of computational thinking and processes, which stand out then against other logics. This is certainly one of the interesting dimensions to the new aesthetic both in terms of the materiality of computationality, but also in terms of the need to understand the logics of postmodern capitalism, even ones as abstract as obscure computational systems of control. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] This drawing while turning on a computer.
A cursory search on the internet turns up a lot of info on Cogsci, Phenomenology and A.I. So I have to dispute your assertion that these sciences are not being applied to Computer Science see-- Phenomenology in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405110778_chunk_g978140511077829 There are also A.I. Labs and research groups at MIT and NYU pursuing the application of these sciences... xDxD.vs.xDxD wrote: [on Lewitt] Much of what he deals with has it's roots in both topological psychology and phenomonology. These sciences are no being applied to cognitive research and A.I. to get a more naturalistic result from computer decisions. -- http://nujus.net/gh http://nujus.net/~nublog/ http://artistsmeeting.org attachment: ghh.vcf___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
I believe the cognitive scientists say that language is acquired and learned at an early age and it has to do with establishing neural paths. This establishment of neural paths stops or slows down dramatically after a certain age. (Is it 4 years old?) From there the social aspects of language take over. It seems to me that self is formed first and then the self interacts with the group. If you trace that teleology and map it onto the art making process, a person first make art because of some desire to express the self. From there art becomes a social activity in it's natural path to communicate. OF course all humans have both the self and the social as a system. My feeling is that art is a dissociative state. I also think that the first symbolic abstraction of cave paintings was the manifestation of that dissociative state. It's a step back from the social and the world and a recognition of a linguistic system. On Jul 6, 2010, at 4:20 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: As for art being akin to language and both being somehow hard-wired into the brain...this is contentious territory. This Chomskian view, popular in neuroscience and other empirical domains, that regards language (and thus many aspects of self) as determined by cerebral biology is in direct contradistinction to a view that would regard language and self as emerging from the social. It is basically the old nature/nurture debate re- hashed. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] diapers art.
Artists make their art for their patrons. When applying for a grant one is applying for patronage. By the time you have developed a work and put together a work to send out for grants you have already created a conceptual art piece. I'm planning on making a book of all the projects Artists Meeting and the individual artist have proposed but not been accepted by patrons. The panels who choose the artists always have an agenda. It's usually a luck of the draw scenario when it comes to getting a grant o residency. I've been struggling against all the constraints on artists and roadblocks and problems to being an artist for years. I think that the most creative of us all find a way to make art in spite of support system and patrons, markets, academies etc.. and so on.. On Mar 19, 2010, at 7:45 PM, christopher sullivan wrote: once during a lecture on how to write grants and artist proposals, a student asked..how do I get grants if I have not finished anything? to which I said, well I hope you don't The student wanted the feel of the artist life, but no actual evaluation of quality. the simulacrum. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
gh comments below: On Jan 2, 2010, at 8:52 PM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Artists should make what they want. But when we get to the critical discussion of the cultural role and function of aesthetic objects, the claims for the work often come out of a need for critical discourse to find suitable objects rather than out of an engagement with the work. gh comments: That's been the problem with most recent art criticism. The writers try to find other critical thought that illuminates the art. That's been a good strategy in the past put has recently begun to obscure the actual meaning of any artwork behind a veil of theory. I love your description of Anish Kappoors work. It does indeed take a poet to get to the meaning of art! G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
gh comments below: On Jan 3, 2010, at 4:30 AM, Sally Jane Norman wrote: where and how do/ can we draw the line between bad art and bad causes? gh comments: Bad art is an aesthetic decision that is subjective. I've seen in my lifetime art that was considered bad to become re-evaluated as good. Actually I think the aesthetic kick is in playing with that contradiction and skating close to the line of bad art and bad taste. Otherwise good taste and good art turn into so much decoration. I don't know what you mean by bad causes but in terms of art I would say that when you make art as a political statement its propaganda rather than art. If you make art to make money it's commerce rather than art. If you make art to illustrate a particular theory or piece demonstrate a piece of software it's illustration. I think the only proper cause for making art is to advance the art discourse or critique it or expand the aesthetic milieu. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
gh comments below: On Jan 2, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote: But the legacy of Adorno’s aesthetics is problematic for us because it has become academic, and because it is premised on a description of the world and of art that have become formulaic. gh comments: I think I learned about Adorno from reading Artforum in the 1960's. He was referred to by art writers in support of the conceptual art of the time. I wonder whether anyone outside of Academia and the art world knows or cares about Adorno or Agamben for that matter. It occurs to me how bizarre a marriage the art world is taking academic theory and philosophy and melding it with the aesthetics of marketing and desire. In New York we often look to Europe for the theoretical underpinnings of art. It's an odd idea but it gives some veracity or credence to art works. The other verification is of course the market. If art sells than it must be good enough for someone to buy it. As I've often quoted Rimbaud here it is again sort of paraphrased, all an artists needs is a poet and a patron. Of course poets were the first art theorists entrusted with the task of explaining an art work. The patron obviously gives monetary support to the artist. In the 21st century art world there is an art industry that includes Academia, galleries,museums, alternative space, artists collectives, art fairs, arts festivals etc.. all of these function as patronage to a greater or lesser degree. The word complicit has a negative connotation as if being involved in these mechanisms has a taint to it. That's a strange notion. I've aways thought an artists is part of a culture and times even as they stand apart from it and try to present their own work. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Three Little Words
GH comments below: On Jan 1, 2010, at 12:44 PM, John Haber wrote: explicit,” “implicit,” and “complicit.” They might sum up three attempts at escape. GH comments: I ask the question of other artists, why make art and who do you make art for? Is it a dialog with art history? Do you think there's some sort of aesthetic problem solving involved? Maybe you consider yourself a sort of cultural barometer or aesthetic researcher. Of course there's always the howl of expression.Personally I don't understand explicit, implicit or complicit in reference to art. Maybe you are talking about the huge art world support systems, jobs, markets, art fairs, galleries and so on. Does an artists engage these systems, ignore them or create alternatives? If one tries to create alternatives as many do, are they relegated to aesthetic backwaters without galleries or market shares? Who decides what is relevant to art discourse and what isn't? Aren't most art writers dependent on the system as it exists? Jerry Salz, the New York art critic recently posted on facebook about how the market limits what and who art theorists can write about. He said something to the effect that with the recession maybe there will be less writing about Jeff Koons and other blue chip artists. Even the idea of blue chip is laughable. It has a stock market connotation. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen
On Sep 2, 2009, at 5:48 AM, Julian Oliver wrote:
detected and substituted for art ('Artverts')
gh writes:
I like the your notion of creating the software for multiple
devices. It speaks to the idea of re-configuring the Advertising
Cloud ala Minority Report. The latest tech has cellphone projectors
that cost $300 and project a 4x6 foot projection. It won't be long
before holographic projections will be commonplace. Just imagine
SPAM being projected on every surface and floating in the air! You'll
have 11,000 choices for diet pills, refinancing your mortgage,
trimming your nose hair etc... The question is whether substituting
fine art images for advertising images is any different? After all
the fine art images are just higher priced commodities that follows
the same basic visual techniques as advertising.
The conflation and analysis of the art image and the advertising
image is an interesting subject in and of itself.
My first *internet art* work in 1994 called Terrorist Advertising
started to investigate these ideas. -- http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/
terror/index.html
Regis Debray, a French Philosopher/theorist is the major proponent of
Mediology, here's the quote from wikipedia;Debray is the founder and
chief exponent of the discipline of médiologie or mediology, which
attempts to scientifically study transmission of cultural meaning in
society, whether through language or images. Mediology is
characterized by its multi-disciplinary approach. It is expounded
best in the English-language book Transmitting Culture (Columbia
University Press, 2004). In Vie et mort de l'image (Life and Death of
Image, 1995), an attempted history of gaze, where he distinguished
three regimes of the images (icon, idol and vision), he explicitly
prevented misunderstandings by differentiating mediology from a
simple sociology of mass media. He also criticized the basic
assumptions of history of art which present art as an atemporal and
universal phenomenon. According to Debray, art is a product of the
Renaissance with the invention of the artist as productor of images,
in contrast with previous acheiropoieta icons or other types of so-
called art, where these works of art did not fulfill an artistic
function but rather a religious one.
I'd be interested in creating the Artverts it coincides with an
ongoing project of media critique and rant performances 2001 -
Palm Rants-- http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/gallery14.html -- Rantapod
-- http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/gallery15.html -- and HD rants --
http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/hd_rants/index.html
The notion is how to Re-Claim public space that is now taken over by
corporate interests. Walking through Times Square, NYC one of the
most interesting visuals is the news crawl on 1 Times Square. It
still claims a neutral discourse that engages public space. Jenny
Holzer of course makes brilliant use of that specific emotion of
pausing and receiving neutral information.
G.H. Hovagimyan
http://nujus.net/~gh/
http://artistsmeeting.org
http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville
___
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http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] A Post-Futurist or a Neo-Baroque perception?
Manifestos are really old fashioned especially in the digital age. Information systems are constantly being changed and updated. The truth is that any programming language or software tool can be learned in a couple of weeks. In terms of manifestos the only rule I find interesting is the one that is about the democratization of art, this is the consequence of the networks. All information is equivalent on the networks. Time and space really don't exist or rather all information exists at the same time on the networks. The meaning of any bit of information is created by it's use. This goes back to Wittgenstein's axiom, the meaning of word is it's meaning and the meaning of a word is it's use. Since I am an artists, the meaning that I create is art. As an example my group Artists Meeting is doing a series of video shows of curated youTube videos. We use the found material to create art. This is a consequence or result of web 2.0 and the democratization of art. Here's a link -- http://artistsmeeting.org On May 7, 2009, at 12:01 PM, stamatia portanova wrote: In short, my final question is: given our intensive, Post-Futurist conception of time, how do we critically respond to the small-scale quantifications and restrictions, or accelerations, of space-time by digital technology, without going back to a simultaneous chronological and metric conceptions? In the end, one moment can be as long as a life... G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh/ http://artistsmeeting.org http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Eddies, Whirlwinds, Trade Winds
On Apr 1, 2009, at 8:35 PM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote: Aside from Warhol, the place toward which my mind immediately turns as I think about what Nicholas refers to as the Immaculate Deception is Camille Paglia’s identification of Jacques Derrida as a junk-bond salesman in her “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (part of Sex, Art, and American Culture). I think my mind races to this piece of writing because it does raise the important question of the potential bankruptcy of theory in general (a risk that does not seem to plague philosophy quite the same way). Well now what. As a child of the 1970's art world, I remember Warhol as more commerce than art. He did have three areas of production that related to each other and were reflections of commodity capitalism, the mode of America in the late '60's. The three areas were his films which involved a party culture at the factory, his silkscreen paintings and Interview newspaper. The social scene,party culture migrated to Studio 54 and the clubs in the 1970's. My friend the Art Historian Alan Moore coined the term, Clubism when that scene morphed into the Late Seventies East Village Punk/Performance scene. The idea of a brand name and signature style was the legacy of Warhol's silkscreen paintings. Interview was a sort of media art work that was about celebrity as a commodity. The progression of these notions in American Culture continues. Reality TV shows are about banal people being promoted to celebrities. celebrity as commodity becomes a quality that can be created by obsession. The signature style/ brand name products of Warhol became appropriation in the late seventies and copyright, remixing and sampling culture in the present. The other part of this commodity matrix continued in the 1980's when the market became more important than the art object or the ideas behind it. This occurred with the Neo-Expressionists and Neo-Geo. The discussion was that if there is an end to historical modernist progression than all styles are viable. The market decides what is art. Money trumps ideas. This market logic was manifested in the first explosion of 400 galleries in the East Village in Mid-80's and continues today in various art market expansions in particular the latest L.E.S galleries and the art fair as a sped-up/condensed art buying experience. I come from the intellectually opposite camp. I believe in Idea overs form and in particular that art should be a force for experimentation that critiques the main culture rather than glorify it. I also feel that the utopian spirit in art is alive and is an anathema to the Extreme Marketism of the art world mantra of unique object/ signature style/ brand name. What this means is that in this 21st century art world the signature style and uniqueness of any any art work gives way to collaboration and collective expressions. Interestingly enough that doesn't mean that individual expression and creativity goes away. Within any collaboration there is something else that occurs; the collaboration encourages the individuals to push their practice further and to look at the world from unthought of points of view. What has occurred in the USA with bubble markets is a lot of money (capital) in the world seeking a safe haven and a decent rate of return. The US has been the beacon for this because most of the rest of the world is politically unstable or doesn't give a decent rate of return. Essentially it's capital looking for an investment instead of a producer looking for capital. It's essentially a disease of success like obesity. It's also a consequence of the dismantling of our manufacturing base. Manufacturing creates wealth. The logic o Capitalism is the differential. Labor is still the basis of that. What happens now is that we have a situation where the culture and the world are trying to find a new world system based solely on ideas and abstractions. The problem is that the motivating force behind this is greed and markets. In an earlier time it might have been war, conquest and plunder that was an organizing principal for societies. This current moment is about creating small utopias that are outside of the markets. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh/ http://artistsmeeting.org http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Gross materiality
gh comments: There's a discussion afoot on what constitutes a new media archive and a new media curator. I envision a new media curator as a person who is trained in code and hardware systems and technology. They are able to assemble show that range from finding old hardware to assessing the artists intention and updating the work to new hardware. Going along with that I always assume that whatever software you use or if you hand code you will be using a variation of c or c++ etc.. Therefore part of any new media piece should be a general description of how what the intention of the work is by the artist, how it is to be shown and the underlying coding structure and any files or database associated with the work. It should be that an astute new media curator can re-constitute a work using the latest hardware and software for these elements. This allows for the curator to function somewhat like the conductor of an orchestra using the score of a musical work and interpreting. The other aspect of new media is maintaining a new media archive. This is essentially a server/database that contains all the files and copies of one's ouevre. This Archive can be either maintained online run as a server and/or also be gifted to a university, museum or library. With these parameters I think one can begin to define what *digital art* will look like in the future and what it will be like looking back. In anycase none of this has to do with markets and the art world and gross materiality. It does however point to a direction for the future of art no matter what the current object obsessed art world demands. Think about this, the global manufacturing system has reached a plateau of objects where the only path now is to make every person on earth live like an American. If this happens there won't be an earth. Object making and manufacturing are not only not sustainable they are not forward looking. This goes for art as well as general manufacturing. On Jan 18, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Julian Oliver wrote: there's work i've made that i can't run on modern systems - far beyond a problem of mere emulation. in many ways software based art degrades with the hardware (and software) on which it depends. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh/ http://artistsmeeting.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15
The bigger reality of the Art World is about a market system that is tied to the circulation of objects. I know that Simon works in a variety of forms that use projection, interactive video, sound and live performers. In new media and digital art the network is the conveyor of the Art Experience. This is pretty hard for the art market to incorporate. There's no way to monetize the art. One of the things that happened in the 1980's return to objects was that the market demanded objects to collect and circulate. It's the question of patronage. I also like Simon's comment about art and fashion cycles. Fashion and money is cyclical. I think it's more interesting to make art that uses the global information networks and bends them to arts purpose. Recently my art group Artists Meeting did a collaboration/performance where we curated found videos from youTube. We did two events at Postmasters Gallery. It was a question of pushing the idea of Objet- Trouve to include Web 2.0 applications. The second time we collaborated with Steve Crouse, an eyebeam resident who had developed a youTube triptych app. you3b.com. The art world showed up (MoMA video curators, NY Times writers etc..) Their comments was how fresh the event was. Of course there's no way to collect the work which means that the art world can't deal with it other than as a cocktail party diversion. On Jan 17, 2009, at 4:40 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: The art-world being the art-world (more concerned with money and fashion than epistemology or ontology) jumped on the band wagon and, lo and behold, post-object art was dead. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
