problem with rhizome raw

To stir a hornest's nest

most of the email on raw talks about code
but isn't content the issue?

It seems intellectual activity has been the 'darling' of the arts
these last thirty years; and yes it's impressive what thought,
systems, machines can do, but the fault and weakness of the intellect
is it's limitation based on knowledge, which is always and by
definition selective according to one's agenda. This last part,
hidden motivators, is normally with good reason left unexamined.

I've always thought the popularity of much conceptual and digital
artwork due not so much to content but rather to it's mimmicry of
other more powerful and effective social systems (surveillance,
database, etc.); by appropriating the form it seems to appropriate
their effectiveness and so reassures the art world that we're on
track, not being left out of contemporary scientific developments.


Miklos Legrady
310 Bathurst st.
Toronto ON.
M5T 2S3
416-203-1846
647-292-1846
http://www.mikidot.com

Comments

, Jim Andrews

> To stir a hornest's nest
>
> most of the email on raw talks about code
> but isn't content the issue?
>
> It seems intellectual activity has been the 'darling' of the arts
> these last thirty years; and yes it's impressive what thought,
> systems, machines can do, but the fault and weakness of the intellect
> is it's limitation based on knowledge, which is always and by
> definition selective according to one's agenda. This last part,
> hidden motivators, is normally with good reason left unexamined.
>
> I've always thought the popularity of much conceptual and digital
> artwork due not so much to content but rather to it's mimmicry of
> other more powerful and effective social systems (surveillance,
> database, etc.); by appropriating the form it seems to appropriate
> their effectiveness and so reassures the art world that we're on
> track, not being left out of contemporary scientific developments.
> –
>
> Miklos Legrady

Hi Miklos,

What I want to read is a binary poem as though the medium were transformed
to imagination's space, and the poem, whether of words or more recently
digital glyphs, became proof, of sorts, that it was a truly human extension
of the mind and our quandry, though artifice. The idea was to make it fully
human, not literally, but figuratively, fully human as a figure of speech.
So that an artificial intelligence is a figure of speech or code, or
writing, and its life, as art, is the life of art, which is figurative yet
as lively as can be. Similarly, the life in artificial life, as art, is not
artificial life, or even life, but the life of art, which is not about
algorithms and whatnot but how lively it is not so much as entertainment but
as profoundly human creation, realization, recognition, acknowledgement,
third eye of apprehension…

To take a medium and turn it into a part of the brain and senses, a part of
how we think and feel, like print is, or like cinema is, by now, is at least
to have a feeling for its full capacity like we do with our bodies when we
are young and our (stranger and stranger) minds, as we age. The full
capacity of this media/um is hardly yet plumbed, but I would like to
read/experience such a poem plumb, pick it off the net-tree.

Knowledge is involved in this, and so is code, but it isn't the goal. Code
can be fetishized and so can knowledge, as though these were the goals. But
really it's giving this media/um the life of art that we're out to achieve
as artists, isn't it? And that's a matter of putting it all together. The
intellectual, the emotional, the technical, the creative…

ja
http://vispo.com

ps: Have really been enjoying the "NYT art critic reviews Pixar exhibition
at MoMA" thread. In a sense, this is part of that thread, it seems. And
sorry for the poemy post. Couldn't help it.