----- Original Message ----- From: "Mathieu Bouchard" matju@sympatico.ca To: "B. Bogart" ben@ekran.org Cc: "thewade" pdman@aproximation.org; "the list" pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at; "Pall Thayer" palli@pallit.lhi.is Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 5:17 PM Subject: [PD] Re: Code Art
On Sat, 6 Dec 2003, B. Bogart wrote:
I suppose we have been popping back and forth between material and conceptual supremacy. In my own art education concept has tended to be the emphasis, with material asethetics there to "complete" the package.
But is that emphasis visible in the art object, in the process of constructing it, or in the small blurb every artist's got to write to keep critics happy ?
Good point. The emphasis is only visible in the process/documentation (lord I hate making these "reductionist" writeups, which are too non-material, the idea is everything. How else to get grants though???)
In my own work I find it more and more difficult to seperate the "material" (bits? algorithms? electrons? phosphors? ICs?) from the "concept". I think its probably my abandoning of black and white logic for a more fuzzy conception.
I don't think it has anything to do with fuzziness. It has to do with the stereotyped material/conceptual dialectic that assumes that the concept never can be about the material used, from the axiom that the art is an idea first, and it's just a sad thing that it has to be incarnated into puny petty materials [that make it impure]. ;-)
Agreed, In fact dialectics are not just blank and white anyhow. I'm happy you say dialectic here and not dichotomy! Oh the impurity of reality! On this topic I have some (related) writing:
http://www.ekran.org/ben/oracle/process/art_in_the_face_of_the_sublime.html
But in your process there is, as far as I can infer it, a dialogue between the concept and the material.
Absolutely, I would say for myself (dispute the eductation perhaps) that both sides have to be taken in a dialectic relationship. Not one being the master of another.
It's a pity that "computer science" is called like that when it could
be
called "computing science". Computing in general is something that can happen anywhere. Plants grow following algorithms.
Neil Postman said that "For a programmer, everything in the world
becomes an
algorithm."
It is also that the world also lends itself to be seen as such.
I find it hard to seperate our world from our conceptions of it.
I've always hated that term, In fact I could not mind dropping the science part altogether, since its a little closer to engineering than science.
It depends which compsci you are talking about. Topics of computing have grown like mad in the 50 last years and have invaded all surrounding domains. It reaches around for logic, mathematics, statistics, operations research, linguistics, psychology, engineering, and so on.
definatly true, even more reason for a better term! But what?
It is at the technical level still "computation" -> but is that not almost anything?
Hired "computers" only had to deal with computing numbers explicitly to get results needed by engineers and the military.
This is true, those old trajectory tables!!! Eniac's main (only?) purpose.
don't reductionists think thought processes can be reduced to compuation?
Yes, but it depends: if it is the case that the reduction is valid, it doesn't mean it is useful, and still the higher levels of thought may remain better ways of thinking.
This is also a great point. A reduction may be technically/empirically valid, but that does not mean something has not been lost. (Postman talks a lot about this)
Without structure the concept of "material" is meaningless.(except for the case of noise as material) Without material the concept of the word "structure" is meaningless. These things are utterly inseperable, and to reduce to one or the other is just that, a reduction.
I didn't reduce them. I was talking about the structure of matter. (!)
A small bit about noise: every noise has its distribution, and a distribution is a pattern. Noise/randomness has _some_ structure, albeit less than anything else.
Very true, I was talking about uniformly distributed noise. But does this really exist? Or is all noise also chaos? (structure and indeterminacy) What is the lyapunov (measure of chaos) exponent of white/brown/pink noise?
B.
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju
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