response to Flash flood of messege passing

Well it seems we've hit on a few nerves. Apologies if anyone was offended. I ask questions and
take positions on matters of art like others do and sometimes it's about contentious things in
net.art/web.art and away we go.

Curt said:

"I'm always amazed at the sort of patronizing, look-what-the-cat-dragged-in reaction that net
artists have toward Flash. The tenor of the dialogue usually runs like, "Could this be art? Do
you think so? Really? No! Could it be?"

Yes, that progress is evident on previous discussions about Flash and net.art on some other
lists.

The pity is it rarely gets beyond this relatively inconsequential phase of the issues involved.

But there was some depth in some of the responses.

So rather than responding to about a dozen emails, I'll take a different route and respond to
the lot at once.

I would have wished for more urls to the work people with opinions on these matters hold up as
exemplary. Arguing about these things without pointing to the work in question by a simple URL,
at least doing this constantly, never bringing the URLs into it for direct inspection, is
unfortunate and does not help the advocates of Flash work. Part of the dialog is toward direct
experience of the work. That can also be part of criticism now–criticism can call the work in
question up on the screen. That is a boon to the relation between art and criticism. It also
ties the remarks to a very solid context.

Of course one does not want to include a URL on everything one says. But asking for URLs to
works involving Flash that people hold up as terrific works is not unreasonable. A shame they
were not particularly forthcoming.

Many people argue about Flash/Director/Java/whatever work without actually experiencing the
work. That isn't so prevalent on rhizome, which is good–there are lots of people here who do
take the time to surf a lot of work–but it happens rather widely nonetheless. That is among the
worst of criticism. Willful ignorance of the work and judgement of it and its kind all the same
is rather fearfully prejudicial. Providing URLs helps to minimize this.

I liked t.whid's point about message passing, and art as 'information'.

one can imagine software as being about message passing, also. The object-oriented methodology
of programming addresses issues of message passing centrally. One could say that the methodology
was developed to address the problems of message passing in software architecture. And yes, it
is also true, as t.whid points out, that net.art is, in a certain sense, all about message
passing between people.

i have been working on a game for a couple of years on and off. one of the observations about
the code of the shoot-em-up i started with is that the code itself has not much to do with a
shoot-em-up. Much more to do with strong message passing. And the code is also 'about' data
structures and structures, on a higher level, between scripts. And is about the way that
different media types are handled and even (o that dreadful word) managed. And about the
behaviors associated with the media entities. Levels of 'aboutness' rise from there into the
airy realms of art, even. The political. The frame in the world. The song. The artistic contexts
and types.

One of the interesting things about art is that it comprehends all the levels of meaning.

It is an architecture that stretches through all that is and is imagined and imaginable, through
all fields, through private and public experience, through the subjective and objective, the
abjectly personal through to the heavens above and beyond.

'Art as information' is interesting because it is somewhat mysterious. Information?

t.whid says:

"the visual has been in the mainstream of art since at least the 80s. but you'll find more
conceptual art in net art, i agree. why is this? it's because it suits the medium. the original
conceptual artists thought of their work as *information art*. they reduced their practice down
to simply passing information from artist to viewer and it was a very radical notion for the
time. Passing information between computers is the essence of the 'Net. no wonder artists use
conceptual strategies via the net."

We can think of many things other than art that can be conceived of usefully as paradigmatically
involving message passing, ie, being coded as information and having a process of message
handling/generation/disposal. One can think of this at the assembly language level or concerning
the political dynamics of a list. Etc.

I agree with t.whid that we may then inquire into the nature of the permissable/possible types
of messege passing that can transpire over the net, and this question is entirely relevant to
net.art. Matters of bandwidth shape net.art. So do processing power and refresh rate. They don't
necessarily 'determine' many aspects of net.art, but to view them as inconsequential to the form
of the message passing–and therefore the messages themselves–is to miss the obvious. The
phenomenology of net.art is usefully viewed as a superstructure which has embedded in it the
phenomenology of the net. But software on the net, such as Flash and Director, have their own
protocols, additionally. And the nature of these tools and their possibilities shape net.art
also.

It's also clear that spirit can come even in the form of a short koan, something that when
contemplated opens into understanding and mystery.

So the spirit of the discovery is not proportional to the size of the message or its media type.

I also admire compression, which in art is necessarily lossy, like a jpg rather than a bmp, and
the recovery and reading of the work is utterly dependent on the person reading it.

I certainly enjoyed Kosuth's book 'Art After Philosophy and after'. And yes, as someone noted,
from an American Marxism intent on questioning the object involved in the message passing and
the message and the object.

Virtual objects are files and the things coded in information in them.

I think a good part of these discussions is that different approaches to art and their value is
revealed.

Well the post is already long so I'll end it with a URL to a Flash work by Dan Waber. It's a
suite of 'poems' at http://vispo.com/guests/DanWaber called "Strings". These eight Flash pieces
have more to them than meets the eye and subtlely comment on digital writing, the possibilities
for poetry in Flash work, and the place of the hand in digital art.

This suite has been quite successful since launching and is studied in many courses on digital
writing around the world.

ja