Rhea Myers

Blog

  • Crisis

    (After ‘Art & Fear’ p70).
    Not a crisis in representation in art, an art in representation of crisis.

  • Perfect Language

    One of the more tedious quests in philosophy and aesthetics is the one for Perfect Language. A Perfect Language would unambiguously allow representation and discussion of its subjects. But any translation (for example from subjects to terms in the langauge) risks losing information (or worse, introducing it). Perfect Language might therefore be reflexive. Reflexive language avoids translation and is in a trivial way self-underwriting.
    The Perfect Language for discussing writing is therefore writing, for art is art, for music is music. This means that the best language for discussing the real world is the real world. But this reduces communication to wollen (ew) if another meta-principle can’t be found.
    If no universal Perfect Language can be found, an imperfect language (one bereft of philosophical terms) should be used (which still suffers from wollen, but ironises philosophical pretensions). This removes any question of the suitability of the language: it is manifestly unsuitable. I recommend Bislama for English speakers and Creole for French speakers.

  • Ethics Or Aesthetics

    “Ethics or aesthetics?” – Paul Virilio, ‘Art And Fear’, p61.

    Aesthetics. This was decided decades ago in the ‘First World’. But the question is what the constraints on or values of those aesthetics will be.

  • Algorithmic Aesthetics

    I finished reading “Algorithmic Aesthetics” today. It’s a tantalising glimpse into how entirely procedural, rule-based description, evaluation and/or generation of artworks might function. I’m not convinced that length of input divided by length of output tells us very much about an object’s aesthetic interest, but Gips & Stiny cite more than one historical example of just such an aesthetic measure, and the complexity of execution versus the complexity of effect of a work can be a convincing measure of one dimension of an artwork’s interest.
    I think that the examples Gips & Stiny construct deal with style and pattern rather than with higher-order aesthetics. But style is certainly part of aesthetics, and the authors’ separate work on describing specific styles of architecture and design using Shape Grammars shows that their ideas could be effective even with 1970s technology.
    The book contains the first reference to “generative” art, well, “generative techniques”, that I’m aware of. Well worth a read if you can find a copy, or you can browse the complete text on the web.

  • Aesthetic Semiotics

    [From Aesthetics-L]

    Meaning may have a larger existence as a direct product of its have no existence beyond individual mental associations. Symbols may exist as fuzzy isomorphisms across minds, transferred to verbal, textual or other forms then reconstituted. Below a given threshold of accuracy, many minds will identifiably share a concept. Above a given level of accuracy, none will. Miscommunication, ambiguity and other edge-cases don’t falsify the existence of meaning: the fact that they are identifiable strengthens the case for meaning.

    This does not give us timeless or metaphysical meaning, but it does give meaning that will last as long as humanity and its media do, and beyond the arrogance of any given individual or group. Which is as much as is possible given a non-deistic worldview.

    Semiotics must quantise this mental fuzziness to grep symbols, otherwise it has nothing to work with. Once we have a system of quantised symbols, these can be mapped into another system, assuming that that system is sufficiently powerful (pace Godel or Turing). Communication is therefore possible, unless this won’t work, in which case semiotics is impossible anyway.

    Quantising an already quantised system can result in loss of information, so this makes communication problematic. However it also introduces the possibility of *generating* meaning, as the system being mapped into must extend or create new structures to allow isomorphism. Blah blah blah metaphor blah blah blah.

    Any reduction of art, or indeed language, to an unambiguous, discrete system will make it tractable to theory but have none of the expressive power of the system supposedly being studied. I would further state that any attempt to do so is unlikely to ethically survive historical or psychological deconstruction.

    What does this have to do with aesthetics? Aesthetics is concerned with the surplus value of symbol systems, with the interrelation of the structure rather than the arcs of the structure. Semiotics is concerned with the structure (allegedly). Semiotics is an aesthetic, a way of seeing the world. It produces symbols from symbols, it has a stopping problem like deconstruction. Its structures need analysis in terms of their interrelations. Semiotics needs aesthetics.

    Forget semiotic aesthetics. What’s needed is aesthetic semiotics.

  • Goethe

    I’m probably porting Draw Something back to Lisp. And I’m porting ae (the toy aesthetic description generator) to Lisp to use as the basis for the art knowledge-base (ontology) that the programs will use. I’ve decided to start with colour, and as there’s no rational basis for colour choices, the program will be called Goethe…

    Sourceforge haven’t approved rheart yet. It’s a shame that Lipparosa doesn’t seem to have come to anything…

  • Quote From Harold Cohen’s Talk

    “If programming in C is like marching, programming in Lisp is like dancing”.

    Too true. To which it might be added that C++ is like walking on hot coals…

  • Asset Stripping Licenses And Value Creation Licenses

    “Asset stripping” is breaking up a company and selling off its assets. This does the company no good whatsoever but makes the asset stripper (or “corporate raider”) a lot of money.

    http://www.anz.com/edna/dictionary.asp?action=content&content=asset_stripping

    An “asset stripping license” would be one that allowed work to be broken up and sold off by an asset stripper (or “cultural raider”) without any value returning. This would be done to make sure that business isn’t scared of the work and feels comfortable using it, as per “Open Source” vs. “Free Software”.

    “Value creation” is revenue generation that is “greater than the sum of its parts”. Good management, customer loyalty, new products and services and other innovation or good corporate citizenship can add value.

    http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_8/cedergren/

    A “value creation” license would be a “Gift Economy” license (still don’t like that phrase…), ensuring that value is returned with use and protecting against asset stripping, literally creating value in the commons.

    Both terms are ones that businesspeople will recognise, and so are useful for boosting or disparaging concepts in that arena.

  • Things AARON Doesn’t Do

    What AARON does is fascinating, but AARON doesn’t do is interesting as well.

    AARON doesn’t:

    • Remember anything between drawings.
    • React to the outside world.
    • Request extra information or abilities.
    • Write its own programs.

    These capabilities are handled by another module called “Harold Cohen”. 🙂

  • Draw Something

    I’m getting Draw Something ready for a release, which will include the code and PDFs of the literate documentation and outputs (unless everybody has a Dylan compiler :-)).
    I’ll probably get my creative coding projects hosted at SourceForge, so that will make distribution easier as well.