(Figurative) drawing and programming are both about structuring perceptions in-keeping with representational schemes to enable engaging with subjects. Competent drawing is regarded as technically conservative. Which is ridiculous given that the last fifty years have seen drawing used more than ever before. Animation, computer games, graphic design, movies and web/UI design all use drawing as part of their design process. Programming must also be technically conservative, which means that “technically conservative” is a weak and suspect label.
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Bitfastness 2
Data-driven programming allows a lot of the work to be moved from the code to support files. This makes programs easier to maintain and re-implement, and so more bitfast. Lispers claim Lisp is a file-format as well as a language (S-Expressions), and ontologies are often expressed in Prolog. A language that is a way of structuring data might be ideal.
Pseudocode listings, or implementations in languages simple enough to read as pseudocode (Lua) would also be robust. Harold Cohen’s verbal descriptions of AARON’s production systems would allow re-implementation in any programming language, but some accuracy would be lost without the supporting data. -
Breakthrough Fetishism
Why is conceptual art criticism so hung up on breakthrough works?
This can be parodied by making a SETI-style distributed aesthetic search system, looking for new paradigms during coffee breaks. -
Screensavers
Screensavers are contemporary cabinet art, with all the negative associations that brings. But if they give the viewer work to do they need not necessarily be kitsch. -
Chordinator
Colour scheme generation by software seems to be as random as everything else (see Tim Head’s work). Colour theories are cultural products and random colour is no exception. For random colour to be interesting the viewer must either see some intention into the work, or enjoy exercising their taste unchallenged. A program that works with colour in a directed way would be more interesting.
This program would colour chords to aesthetically satisfy a set of technical or referential demands, making colour schemes that have a relationship to external conditions (visually referential, expressive, social) using a set of discrete colour spaces, a colour ontology, an emotional ontology, a compositional ontology, a relational slipnet and a set of referential palettes (natural colours, city colours, clothes colours, human colours, art colours).
Valence the ontologies and start building, weigh colour proportions and relations, vary colours and backtrack to get things right for each set of conditions. Colour graphical microdomains with the colours. Start 1D (stripes) then go to 2D. -
Graphical Microdomains
High Modernist art is full of graphical microdomains. Its grids, stripes, spots and simple geometries are much easier for programs to work on than an impressionist canvas and allow useful activity to be demonstrated without having to build a general visual parser first. Stripes are particularly useful as they are effectively one-dimensional, making relationships between each element much simpler for a program to manage. -
Dye
Procion MX and Rit are good on paper. There’s anecdotal evidence for lightfastness, but they won’t be as lightfast as acrylic (one poster had been told 25% by a sales rep). -
Bushomatics
VCS games were produced under the Cold War, and later under Reaganomics. What would the same games look like if they were produced under The War On Terror? -
Finding The Aura
Get a tri-field EM meter and search Tate Modern for the aura of the artwork. Dowsing should work well, too.