In 1976 Tom Waits sang “Tom Traubert’s Blues”.
In 1992 he sang “I Don’t Want To Grow Up”.
Each is equivalent given its environment.
Category: Uncategorized
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Readymades
A readymade is an ordinary object that has been nominated as an artwork by an artist. Nominating the object as an artwork transforms it into an artwork. This is not a million miles away from The Institutional Theory Of Art, which says that the answer to the question “what is art?” is whatever the artworld says it is.
Nominating a readymade is an act of transubstantiation. Readymades are aethetically null, it is a category error to say “look at how curvy and shiny the porcelain of that urinal is”. You are not looking at the readymade when you say that, you are looking at the non-art object.
Found art is different from readymades, however confused Wikipedia’s entry on the subject may be. Found art is not transformed, its latent aesthetic potential is recognised and capitalised on by the artist. It is a mistake to invoke Duchamp when trying to create a lineage for found art.
Semiotics, the ventriloquial grinding of the symbolism of a cultural artefact to dust, is problematic with regards to artworks. Do you analyse the symbolism of the object qua object, or of the object qua artwork? With regard to readymades it is again a category error; the meaning of the readymade is artistic, not functional.
So in summary:
- Readymades are ontologically transubstantiated objects.
- It is a category error to attempt semiotics on readymades as aesthetic objects.
Anyone claiming to be both working in the tradition of Duchamp and doing semiotics is confused.
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Where I Will Be Tomorrow Night
Open Source Embroidery: Craft and Code
HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1LDCome and see the show and meet up with lots of extremely excellent people. And me.
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Robert Rauschenberg RIP
Robert Rauschenberg, RIP – Boing Boing
Robert Rauschenberg, a pioneer of multimedia art in the truest sense of the phrase, died last night. He was 82.
Rauschenberg’s work had a massive impact on me when I first arrived at art school. His art was high stakes aesthetics in which either everything was transformed into art or… But it was always transformed into art. Rauschenberg convinced me that freedom was not only possible but worth pursuing in art, and that art could transform any materials while still (or possibly thereby) retaining a link to real life.
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MySpace.com – Beyond the Rave: Official Page to Watch the Premiere. Begins April 17th, 2008.
MySpace.com – Beyond the Rave: Official Page to Watch the Premiere. Begins April 17th, 2008.
Content is only suitable for adults and contains very strong supernatural horror, swearing, threat and gore
Which sounds right for the first Hammer horror film in a generation. The first episodes is on MySpace now.
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Goodbye Crestfallen
Aaron A’s g— comic series Serenity Rose is very good. The new story is now starting as a webcomic and I recommend you give it a go:
GOODBYE CRESTFALLEN PAGE 001 | heart shaped skull
Find out about the story so far here.
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From BxAL To PR(u)
Google’s web search engine is an index of pages on the World Wide Web constructed and constantly reconstructed by algorithms running on thousands of computers in parallel. This “PageRank’” algorithm is a mathematical formalisation of the informal heuristic that academics use to judge the influence of a published paper. The more people cite the paper, or the more people link to the document, the higher its score.
This is an automated solution to an organisational or methodological problem. The users of the Web are faced with a highly interlinked but highly diverse space of information to search in order to achieve their various ends. There are alternatives to this. Yahoo and Dmoz are human-managed directories rather than machine-generated indexes. Wikia is a human-managed search engine, although it is currently in its infancy.
In Art & Language’s Index projects I see a precedent for both the practice and critique of web search. The Indexes took Art & Language’s written work, highly interlinked but highly diverse, and produced an index for it based on various concepts in such a way that an imagined audience could navigate this sprawling and opaque practice.
The later Indexes were computer generated (randomly according to one report) or crowdsourced by Art & Language New York, the earlier ones were typed up by the British group. Their production was a strong application of the technology of business (filing cabinets, typewriters, and then computers) to a social and procedural problem: how to map and represent the conversational artistic practice of Art & Language in a form meaningful to the group and to an imagined audience.
To use the Indexes you check a table on the wall or a hand-out and then look up the relevant document in one of the filing cabinets. The bundle of notes in a plastic envelope (or on microfilm) that results may be of more general interest, and similar or different documents can be found by consulting the table further. This looks like a low-tech precursor to Googling for information.
The Indexes have important differences from search engines in the way they operate. Documents in the Indexes are differentiated and classified, and are unranked. Search engines use only a single information-destroying ranking measure, not positive and negative relations or grouping concepts. Directories use grouping concepts but not relations.
What is obscured in considering the Indexes as prehistoric search engines is their social construction and the specific purposes they served. Google’s users mostly regard it as neutral, but it is neutral only with regard to the demands of global capital. The Indexes were both the product of disagreement within Art & Language and of Art & Language’s ideologically radical position relative to the mainstream contemporary art of the time. It is both a product and a producer of discord and hard interpretative work both inside thr group that produced it and between that group and society.
The Indexes provide a historical source of concepts that can be applied to search engine production and critique, both in their social and technical production. The most important question the Indexes raise for search engines is what social forms have produced them and what social forms they produce. These questions are all the more important given search engines professed neutrality.
(There is an image of Index 001 near the bottom of the page here.)
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Comrades, Social Objects and Affordances
In Imagine No Possessions, Christina Kiaer investigates the Russian Constructivist conception of objects as being more than commodities. “Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades,” wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925. Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capitalism’s commodity fetish by examining objects produced by Constructivist artists between 1923 and 1925
2. Social Networks are built around Social Objects, not vice versa. The latter act as “nodes”. The nodes appear before the network does.
[…]
6. The Apple iPhone is the best example of Social Object I can think of. At least, it is when I’m trying to explain it to somebody unfamiliar with the concept.
[…]
8. How do you turn a product into a Social Object? Answer: Social Gestures. And lots of them.An affordance is the quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform action.
So…
Both state capitalism and neoliberalism have produced devices that are meant to be more than commodity fetishes. Are these just reification, however much academia and the blogosphere may protest to the contrary?
Under the theory of affordances the online social graph is produced through social objects, that is it is afforded by them. Is this reification? Are online social networks themselves hypostatization? Or are they intensification (pace Christine Harold’s OurSpace), or just implementation (utilities, to take them at Facebook value)?
If social objects are fetishized/reified they must at most be arcs, not nodes (lines not points). They will be the value of any line that they afford between other nodes. But if they are not fetishized/reified then they could be represented as nodes/points, with the lines they afford more clearly identifying that they are “comrades”, peers, or at least mediators.
Constructivist and technogeek objects, objects as comrades or social drivers, are affordative objects. They are morphisms on the social category. To avoid the “what is art” equivalent question for this we can declare all objects socially affordative and then ask which are better at it. Is an iPhone really a better socially affordance than a cup of coffee? Is a Facebook widget really a better way of making links really or virtually than meeting for a realtime conversation?
Online social networks would at most be events or contexts in a sociologist’s Social Network Analysis matrix. Would the telephone get a row, or a lonely hearts column? What kind of theory of society would that illustrate? What kind of theory of society would it illustrate if between Mrs Ingram and Mr Ippolito there was a column marked “iPhone”? And would every iPhone get its own column? Or everyone’s Facebook usage its own column? If not, why not?
Looking back into the history of ideas can expand the frames of reference that contemporary phenomena are considered in relation to. And applying contemporary sociological and mathematical concepts to social networks and affordative devices will be very fruitful. The problems of classifying relationships and of measuring relations in large populations were faced a long time ago in sociology but have just started to be of interest to bloggers encountering the iPhone. Treating social networks as sets, categories, topographies or graphs affords (fnarr) all kinds of analytical and philosophical tools.