Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
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). it makes me think of F.Morellet, using algorithms to compose some paintings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Morellet http://cf.hum.uva.nl/computerlinguistiek/scha/IAAA/rs/courses/art92.html i agree with this in essence. sadly though a huge proportion of audiences, archivists and curators have no idea how any of this stuff works: Do they have any idea about how stones, the sea and the wind are working? ;-) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Goldsworthy ) Most of problematics arising from so called 'digital art' are also present in contemporary art (preservation for example), and often with a more acurate view from artists not necessarily involving computers. Best regards, -- Yann Le Guennec http://www.yannleguennec.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
..on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 10:26:50AM -0800, B. Bogart wrote: Computers, computation and the digital are simply extensions of (a subset of) our cognitive abilities. (Cognitive in relation to mind-body, not some aspect non-physical cognitive space.) very much so. (to these ends some friends and i are planning a workshop on object-oriented programming for artists without a single computer in the room..) I'm generally a proponent of the title Electronic Media Art, this is in relation to the other dominate labels (new media, information art, digital art). The main reason of doing so by locating my work in the tradition of electronics and engineering in art, which was inspired (at least in part) by the mechanical media arts of kinetic sculpture. yes exactly! this is precisely where it all began. with engineering. over time the parts have got smaller - the mechanisms less transparent - and so the ability to 'read' the processes at work in an example of Electronic Media Art became more difficult. at a certain point it was all just generalised into the digital whereas in fact a huge amount of engineered physical activity is at work just to plot and colour a single pixel. What I realized why reading Julian's deconstruction of the physicality of digital art is that all these terms are stuck in the realm of representation. Something being digital or information does not mean that it is dynamic and changeable. For me, it seems this is the aspect that is most important, the conversion, the change, the shifting of the representations, not the representations themselves. good words. cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
Julian Oliver wrote: having learnt about operating system design, how kernels abstract over hardware, the role of CPU assigned registers in writing data to physical memory, i realise that what comprises the delivery (and often outward appearance/presence) of a 'Digital Artwork' is very much non-digital. the metal and plastic computer, in all it's gross materiality, is more than the frame, even the support (canvas). it is, for the most part, a physical context that cannot be separated from the digital content, critically, functionally and historically. an ingredient of Digital Art, it could be said, is fossil fuel, the liquid bodies of things long dead. furthermore so-called Digital Art is dependent on hardware, operating systems and often tools provided by corporations. a huge stack of upward dependence, from state-infrastructure to private capital entities, just to run my 1000 lines of C code in a museum. A fellow grad student was playing with an argument to justify digital artwork by stating that certain (aesthetic/artistic) problems are only possible in a computer. I was quick to point out that mathematics and computation are very human things. A computer could never do something that was not reducible to something a human can do. His example was fractal art. Of course it would take some time to manually plot, with pen and paper a fractal, but there is nothing about the operation that is beyond the cognitive ability of a human. Computers, computation and the digital are simply extensions of (a subset of) our cognitive abilities. (Cognitive in relation to mind-body, not some aspect non-physical cognitive space.) I'm generally a proponent of the title Electronic Media Art, this is in relation to the other dominate labels (new media, information art, digital art). The main reason of doing so by locating my work in the tradition of electronics and engineering in art, which was inspired (at least in part) by the mechanical media arts of kinetic sculpture. What I realized why reading Julian's deconstruction of the physicality of digital art is that all these terms are stuck in the realm of representation. Something being digital or information does not mean that it is dynamic and changeable. For me, it seems this is the aspect that is most important, the conversion, the change, the shifting of the representations, not the representations themselves. From Digital Art to Process Art where the form connects to the trajectory of ideas that move art from an emphasis on object to an emphasis on process. A process that is just as physical as the object. An interesting aside is that electronic media art (as a label) may be considered in this light, as electricity, physicality and movement are intrinsic. Electricity is always in process. In fact everything physical is always in process, we just like pretending things are static. B. Bogart www.ekran.org/ben ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
In fact everything physical is always in process, we just like pretending things are static. B. Bogart www.ekran.org/ben good point, nothing is digital, everything is digital, it means art is not (only) digital but a continuum. love (soft skinned), http://www.yannleguennec.com/works.html ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
..on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 12:02:16AM -0500, Eduardo Navas wrote: On 1/15/09 12:48 PM, Renate Ferro , Timothy Murray r...@cornell.edutcm1@cornell.edu wrote: hola a todos, my Digital Resolution is to stop using the literal term Digital Art, a term that suggests art can exist in an entirely digital frame. while the category may have been useful some years ago, i feel it's now destructive and misleading - in the contexts of historisation, criticism and education especially. This statement is the ideological template often used to argue for total assimilation of a minority to a majority--often promoted by the monority. In other words, moving to cultural politics of difference, you could make the same argument as above for people of ethnic backgrounds other than white and part of the Bourgeois, or ruling class, who have been marginalized in the past, and who may want the whole issue of race, gender and ethnicity to go away. i was not drawing from an ideological template used to dissolve difference within historically political diametrics. i don't want to close any gaps. rather, the statement represents a personal recognition that the term is no longer useful to describe my work and much of the work i see labelled as Digital Art for reasons relating to the term's descriptive integrity. Digital is in every sense of the word a contemporary manifestation of difference, yet it is also becoming assimilated by the institution that is unable to completely be successful to say that digital is the same as any other field of art practice. Consider this: we don't hear painting as a practice worrying about the fact that it is painting anymore... We don't hear sculpture denying its thingness... We don't hear conceptual art denying/celebrating itself as an idea... Yet they are all different and are part of history according to the very names that make them identifiable as discourses within art practice and its history. the 'thingness' of painting - in the sense of an unnegotiable, opaque corporeality - cannot be held in the same question as the 'thingness' of Digital Art: having learnt about operating system design, how kernels abstract over hardware, the role of CPU assigned registers in writing data to physical memory, i realise that what comprises the delivery (and often outward appearance/presence) of a 'Digital Artwork' is very much non-digital. the metal and plastic computer, in all it's gross materiality, is more than the frame, even the support (canvas). it is, for the most part, a physical context that cannot be separated from the digital content, critically, functionally and historically. an ingredient of Digital Art, it could be said, is fossil fuel, the liquid bodies of things long dead. furthermore so-called Digital Art is dependent on hardware, operating systems and often tools provided by corporations. a huge stack of upward dependence, from state-infrastructure to private capital entities, just to run my 1000 lines of C code in a museum. i'd love to get my hands on a Compaq Presario with a 19 CRT monitor running Windows 98 Service Pack 1 so i can see the last artwork i made for Windows, as i intended it to look and perform, before switching to Linux and free-software entirely. i don't want to see it emulated, i don't want full-screen-antialiasing on a modern NVIDIA card, i don't want it on a matte LCD screen or completely out-of-context on an style-pointed iMac. i want it as it was outwardly intended to appear, to me, the artist. (consider a Nam June Paik video work in HDTV on a 100 plasma screen or 'archived' on YouTube) a Painting refers to the paint and its support yet a Digital Artwork assumes only digits comprise the work - it defies its inherent material dependence under a pretense of transcorporeality. again, i refer to the (Euclidean) myth of the digital as unbounded, ageless space. again, this is a personal distinction and one that informs why i and some other so-called 'digital artists' no longer refer to themselves as such. To worry about digital as a label is a way of defeating the strength of difference as a vital part of day to day production, not only in the arts, but even when we walk down the street. To try to dismiss the digital, or to stop considering how a work of art is informed by the digital is a way of feeding the well established monolith of the art institution as it has been established prior to the rise of new media culture. The term digital should be constantly questioned for its strength and flaws. The term should not go away, and because it is beyond the power of anyone of us on this list or in global media culture, it will not go away, but will be considered according to its flux as discourse. i believe the term will probably just become increasingly irrelevant. a symptom of ubiquity is dis-appearance. the more digital in art, the less 'digital art'. cheers (and good to read you!), -- Julian Oliver
