Old Time Out article on the Strange Attractions shop

Strange Attractions is a freaky new “sort of front-line cultural science centre cum fractal_art/boutique” in Kensington Park Road, Portobello

Or was in 1991. I used to make my way there to get fractal stuff in the early 1990s. Well, it was generally 2 or 3 dimensional, but it had images of fractals on it. I never got any of the music. I must try to find some.

I’ve a soft spot for fractals. I’ll write about why another time.

In the mid-1990s there were four problems with internet-based Virtual Reality (VR).

1. The plug-ins were all for Windows, not Mac. Ignoring early adopters and designers is a bad idea when launching a new visual medium.

2. People’s PCs had anaemic graphics cards and processors. Skilful design could offset this, though.

3. People were on 24-56k dial-up modems for the most part. Again, skilful design could offset this but it did set a limit.

4. VRML 2 was an unimplementable turd of a standard. It destroyed any company that tried to implement it.

I think people underestimate the Mac angle. Apple had a miniscule market share but Macs were disproportionately represented on the Internet and within that there were a disproportionate number of the kinds of people you need making and consuming your new medium if you want it to succeed. But I digress.

Reading the VRML 2 standard when it first came out I was struck by its complexity and by the naivete of some of the implementation notes. I couldn’t see how to implement it without much more work than the notes seemed to suggest was needed.

Events showed my concerns to be well founded. Cosmo, SGI’s VR outfit, was spun off and failed before they managed to finish implementing VRML 2. Intervista also failed to implement it and got bought out. A trend was emerging. Try to implement VRML 2, fail, lose your company.

VRML 1 had been OK. Black Sun had based a multi-user VR system on it. It would have been better for VRML 2 not to have been specified and for VRML 1 to remain the standard with external animation added by the likes of Black Sun than for VRML 2 to destroy the industry.

A couple of years ago the corpse of VRML 2 was exhumed and wrapped in XML to produce X3D. The problem with VRML 2 was not that it wasn’t verbose enough, and wrapping it in an extra layer of verbosity in the form of XML tackled the wrong problem. As a comparison, SVG is basically PDF in XML but it is easier to parse than PDF and better suited to inline web graphics because of the choices that were made when considering which bits of PDF should be included or left out.

VRML 2 played a unique part in the failure of the first wave of Internet virtual reality. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that a second wave arrived with less powerful scene description than VRML 1 and a walled-garden, service-based approach that is at odds with the freedom of the hypertext internet that VRML sought to extend.

I long for the return of internet virtual reality based on open standards, distributed client-server systems, and text-file-hackability. With meshes.

A debate about net art at Rhizome.org has some of the younger hipsters of the New York internet art scene circling the wagons. I’m not sure what around.

There’s not being careful what you wish for and then there’s not being touched by your own irony. Surf Clubs remind me of the night club events I’ve been to that have been organized by cultural studies lecturers. Empty dancefloors with a few scattered would-be observers around the edges.

Turning the dross of popular media into fine art has a long pedigree, one that I am invested and implicated in. Art may be the superstructure of kitsch. Animated gifs and lolcats are not immune from this, in fact they are a logical progression. Internet time is measured in months, and to ironically act out a group blog a la 2001 in 2006 is no worse temporally speaking than screen-printing Marilyn Monroe in 1962. Or 1984.

But to act out acting out, that is to make a performance of a culture that is already more performative than the artist’s performance, and to regard oneself as terribly clever for doing so misses a layer of irony. Several layers of irony. And to be terribly offended by people mistaking what you are doing for what you are doing shows that you should retain a lawyer before rubbing any lamps.

Yes, I am curmudgeonly about the current state of the internet. But the Jemima Puddleduck economics and reified, servicized social relations of Web 2.0 isn’t a case of be careful what you wish for, it’s a case of don’t pawn the family silver. And even within inauthenticity there can be refinement. Hipsterism is an ethic of consumption masquerading as an aesthetic of flaneurie. Compared to that, the technohippies of the early 1990s were gods.

If you are interested in progressive art and music at all, do buy Toplap’s new CD. See here.

My latest review for Furtherfield is of igloo’s excellent “SwanQuake the user manual”.

See here: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=300

Igloo are having a launch party on Friday, which sadly I can’t get to but I would highly recommend if you can make it.

Harold Cohen’s AARON is exemplary art. Cohen’s painting of the 1960s was world-class abstraction, a serious and capable investigation into the nature of signification in image-making. His adoption of computer technology as a way of furthering this investigation was not opportunistic or promotional, it was a natural and effective embracing of a means of furthering his artistic aims. The aesthetic and critical content of Cohen’s painting has continued and extended in his art computing work.

AARON is exemplary artificial intelligence software. The AARON of the 1970s was an artifical-intelligence inspired production system written in C. The AARON of the 1990s was an object-oriented Lisp system. The AARON of the 2000s is still written in Lisp and is more inspired by the new dominant paradigm of cognitive science. Each instantiation of AARON is amongst the most successful examples of its programming and conceptual paradigms. It also reflects Cohen’s biography in its subject matter (from pictograms through social imagery to abstract pictures of house plants), although I will not discuss that here.

AARON is a combination and mutual intensification of the symbolic logic of Cohen’s painting and that of artificial intelligence. Rather than trying to approximate the appearance of art with computer technology, or trying to apply readymade forms of computer science to image processing, Cohen broke the theory and practice of his painting down to its most basic methods and imperatives. He then painstakingly embodied this in software using the most powerful methods available of representing not images but knowledge and behaviour.

AARON bears comparison with the most successful expert systems of the 1970s, and its output with the most successful of Cohen’s manually produced paintings. It is competent as art because it is competent as an expert system, and vice versa. Every smallest movement of the pen is a production of the expert system, and every part of the expert system exists to model Cohen’s artmaking. This is a result of the uncompromising pursuit of the practice of art through the means of computing where those means are appropriate to the artists ends.

The irony is that AARON creates more human-like art precisely because it more fully models art using the technology of computing.

AARON’s development is historically authentic given its historical environment. To reverse-engineer AARON now is to be an Impressionist in the 1920s, or a surrealist in the 1970s. At best it is to make woodcuts in the 1910s, or to re-make the Large Glass in the 1960s.

This is a criticism of my current projects. I would answer it with reference to Liu and to Art & Language: inconvenient history and genres are at least potentially resistant to the dominant paradigm of corporate knowledge culture. And AARON is very inconvenient history, paradigmatic software with irreducible aesthetic content that outperforms corporate exploitations of the same technology.

But AARON’s history is not my history (despite us both being born around the same time), and its historical environment and resources are not those of today. Contemporary computing is the social graph and dataset clouds of Web 2.0 . The crowdsourcing of “The Sheep Market” is exemplary within this environment and against the backdrop of relational art’s service-economy-that-protests-too-much. So is Casey Reas’s data visualisation, although it lacks the critical potential of the former.

The resources of contemporary computing are the vast data sets of wikipedia, archive.org, etc., and of the distributed processing systems of Amazon and Google. The coding paradigms are Ruby and its Rails framework, Python and Google’s mapreduce, and surprisingly a resurgent Lisp. Reas’s Processing is too neat a solution to too uncritical a position to corporate knowledge culture. It is exemplary, yes, but not critically exemplary, which to be fair it is not intended to be.

The lesson of AARON is that intensifying the aesthetic and significatory core of art using the resources of corporate knowledge culture’s contingent computational technology can provide an immanent critique of both. To be of value, the implications of this lesson must be worked out and through within the indexical environment and with the resources of art and computing for each historical moment. And this must be done as art if not for art’s sake then not for the sake of the efficiency of managerial regard.

Rhizome is now in the midst of the sixth year of our Commissions Program — a singular initiative that supports the creation of original works of new media art work. This year, we will award seven artists/ collectives with commissions ranging from $3000-$5000.

Guidelines and application forms can be found here:

http://rhizome.org/commissions/