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 ?
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]. ;-)
But in your process there is, as far as I can infer it, a dialogue between the concept and the material.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju