>Which made me cringe the moment
>i said it, but anyway, what I meant was - art is always a
>representation.
There are representations in art, but art is not
always a representation. Absolutely not.
Similarly, there are representations inside
computing, for example how you construct your
data model, or how you arrange your inputs. But
there are very real effects taking place inside
of computers, I hope we can all agree on that
one. For example, there are very real political
struggles taking place via computing: power,
social relations, money exchange, expressions of
all sorts, etc. And there any many other
phenomena taking place inside of computers:
calculation, simulation, recursion, etc.
Even the tree in your example has
representational aspects. So be careful not to
conflate "art" with "representation".
I make a point of this, because for me Livecoding
-- and even more so the TopLap manifesto -- is
very much a humorous redux of some of the debates
that have traversed the history of art, but which
really came into focus in the multitude of
activities surrounding the period of conceptual
art, and art after the 60's. A lot of that debate
surrounded the question of art and
representation, the repsentability of art, etc,
and was a playful reworking of the more formalist
aspects of minimalism, american abstractionism,
etc.
Part of the "point" of livecoding, if there is
one, is to precisely play with these ambiguities
oscillating within the representation of code,
the action of code, the lingustics of code, and
the performance of code, etc.
>Similarly, computer systems are representations of something. You can
>make a computer to represent interactivity. You might say it isn't
>'true' interactivity, but it still MEANS true interactivity. Circles
>that we draw with computers aren't 'true' circles, but we do call them
>circles.
>
>[1]: http://www.natuurkunstdrenthe.nl/index_en.php?id=en/home
--
/*
// Douglas Edric Stanley
<douglas_at_abstractmachine.net>
// Artiste
http://www.abstractmachine.net
// Professeur d'Arts numeriques, L'école supérieure d'art d'Aix-en-provence
http://www.ecole-art-aix.fr/
// Chercheur, Laboratoire Esthétique de l'interactivité, Université de Paris 8
http://www.ciren.org
*/
Received on Fri Jan 11 2008 - 06:37:39 GMT