Rhea Myers

Category: Uncategorized

  • Random Aesthetics Links

     

  • Art As Programming

    Here’s Knuth’s original “Art As Programming” lecture as a PDF:

    http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf

    Any new activity tries to dignify itself by declaring itself “the same as” an older, more respected activity. Art is still trying to make out it’s a liberal art… As the new activity becomes more respected for its own achievements, this becomes less of a necessity.

    I’d make the opposite claim to Knuth. It’s not that programming is an art. it’s that art is a form of programming. By this I mean it is a way of structuring a set of symbols to generate a state or set of states in a given system, in this case human consciousness. The state generated may not be the same in all people but then a program may not generate the same states (or even run) on different machines, even if it’s written in java or ANSI C.

    Cave paintings are programs for hunts or rituals, and it goes on from there…

  • Drop The Constraint

    An aesthetic can be regarded as a set of constraints. “Realistic” representation has the constraint that everything share a common viewpoint and space. Other constraints may be more important. If showing forms from their canonical viewpoint is more important, you have to drop the constraint on showing things from the same viewpoint. If you do so, you get Egyptian art or some of Picasso’s work.

  • Oh, the irony

    Compare the figures in a Maloney painting to the figures in an AARON painting. AARON is working hard to reach this state, Maloney is dumbing down to it. AAARON comes from a fondness for painting, figures, and art. I don’t really care where Maloney is coming from. Both ironise the figure through technique, yet ‘s cack-handedness tells us much less about people at the end of the twentieth century than AARON.
    It’s the difference between Nu Metal’s not-knowing-enough-to-cover-its-ineptness signifying and electronic music, where you have to find your own soul if any. This potential for representing, ironically, humanity is becoming one of the main things that interests me in making art with technology

  • Cabinet Of Disinterest

    Cabinet paintings are reviled as the precursor of kitsch. Kitsch is reviled by critics. Left-wing critics object to the content of Kitsch, which they regard as saccharine distraction, sentimental, void of social content, worse than null. Right-wing critics object to the form of kitsch; its low quality and therefore its low value. Neither particularly object to the subjects of kitsch. People, animals, scenery, all can be found in high art. If realism is the necessity of the translations required to maintain isomorphism between real-world referents and aesthetic signs, then Kitsch transformations are degenerate, destroying value and reference and substituting low-level self-referential sentimentality. Kitsch is unrealistic, even anti-realistic.

    Cabinet paintings are also the precursors of screensavers. Small, personal distractions that ironise their context. Beyond this, it is the screensaver’s avoidance of work for the viewer to do that places it firmly in the category of kitsch. Screensavers need not be kitsch. Julian Opie has made screensavers, and AARON is available as a screensaver. In both cases the relationship of the screensaver and the user to work is what gives the piece value. Opie’s ever-changing abstract landscapes and cubes don’t allow the viewer to rest, finally forcing them to leverage their environmental aesthetic knowledge to complete the work and exercise some degree of control over the experience. The screensaver version of AARON creates original compositions at a frightening rate whenever a computer’s user isn’t doing anything else. It is working, even if the user isn’t.
    Critical fetishism of breakthrough and transitional works operates against anything as seemingly prosaic as the screensaver. This should be taken and ironised, or at least parodied.

  • Image

    In cultural studies, all the world’s a text and all the men and women in it are but signifiers. Art is a poor cousin of text, as text is more like text than art is.
    In computing, when a program is copied from memory to a disk so it can be restored later, it’s called an image. When an entire computer disk is copied for a backup or to be moved to another computer, it’s called an image (or sometimes a mirror). Programs do have “TEXT” sections, but those aren’t the important bits.
    So hackers have got it right, anyway. 🙂

  • Genetic Aesthetic Determinism

    NewScientist is asking whether we all inhabit the same sensory universe (“In The Realm Of Your Senses”, 31/1/04). Yes, that old chestnut. There’s interesting new evidence on genetic variations in the senses such as taste and smell. And of course we learn from our senses, so this may have some bearing on the construction of our self.
    But, as NewScientist recognises, once you get the data from your senses you have to process it. And then all bets are off. The processing may vary genetically, or the brain may converge on a coherent and normalised view of the world.
    I wouldn’t mind having orange-receptive eye cones, though, which are a very uncommon bit of genetics. I think I have trouble with orange. I can see it, but I’m never convinced I’m seeing what everybody else is seeing. I tend to see a reddy yellow or a yellowy red, very rarely an orange. Maybe it’s just a mental block from one of my tutors accusing me of being colour blind one time when I was using deliberately horrible colours. I can see the numbers, anyway…

  • Atheism

    As the prefix indicates, atheism is the absence of belief in God rather than the belief that God does not exist. It’s therefore not contradictory to be an atheist and to be open to proof of the existence of God or anything else should it ever come along. It’s simply rational.
    Article on this aspect of atheism.
    Being an atheist has its comforts. When bad things happen to good people, you don’t have to look for a reason why. You just have to help them deal with whatever random misfortune has befallen them. You also don’t need any motivation beyond basic human sympathy for doing so (or enlightened self-interest if you’re cynical). Whatever I do in life I don’t expect eternal life as a reward, so I have to do the best I can while I’m alive.

  • Duchamp Stoppages Hoax?

    An article showing that Duchamp’s “Stoppages” function on a different level to the one most Duchamp scholars accept, via Sam Woolf on eu-gene:
    TOUT-FAIT Article

  • Materials Fetishism One: La Vie Boheme

    Amongst other things, Evie gave me a Moleskine for Christmas. I’ve used Paperchase, Muji and Smiths for notebooks, but Moleskines are just altogether more notebook-y. My Newton will continue to gather dust… 🙂
    Moleskine US, slightly larger site.
    Moleskine ink discussion…