(AFH) CURSOR

CURSOR 10

CURSOR 10: 21C Artists and the Big “T’s”; On the immediate need for Digital Humanities and strategies for implementation in the dimensional art production schematic

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

In a vision-enabled society, reliant upon dimensional tools and methods, one important job-description of the visionary is to see a potential threat (the “T” in SWOT), and alert his fellows to the impending danger. (Please refer to “Maciariello’s Proof” for a structural diagram of the vision-enabled society, and for the structural diagram of the anti-visionary society.) A determination of what social elements pose the internal threat of anti-vision, is therefore of vital interest to the sustainable society.

In previous CURSOR entries, we have at least superficially raised warnings about environmental threats to art and the Humanities. I have suggested that these threats not only endanger the survival of traditional forms of discourse and the preservation of our shared cultural assets, but also threaten the enlightened civilization that deemed humanistic enterprise valuable.

At the top of the list, I have suggested, we find ensconced or embedded (in a broadly relevant usage of the term, in both old and new media) a minutely fractional portion of the civilization that benefits massively from an epistemological status quo. In my Thesis I reductively identify this contingent as the “Davos Man” or “Superclass,” to use another writer’s assignation.

The tool of implementation utilized by that Superclass to substantially dominate global affairs in Drucker’s three sectors (government, business and social) is the multinational corporation. It arises from two key components: private ownership (especially of land) and artificial personhood. I have devoted significant resources to identifying and documenting through dimensional analysis the implications of this phenomenon, which is now approaching the twilight of its second century in operation.

The primary vehicle for design implementation of the will of the Superclass upon the rest of us is the field and class of Management. With any field and class there is culture formed. I have established a symbol to personify that culture. It is the Golem. The Cyclops in my work is the anti-golem, a construct I intend to explain in detail, but which I have already begun to comment on fairly extensively. I have suggested that the Golem possesses a sort of artificial intelligence that operates relationally and congruently to the corporate body, its artificial personhood.

To begin to profile the corporate AI, one only has to research the needs a corporation satisfies, the mechanisms it employs to achieve its aims, and the effects the corporation evidences in the world. One need satisfied by the corporation in service to its owners that has proven particularly onerous for art and culture, and by extension, Democratic freedoms, is that of risk minimization, and its close relative damage control (not speaking of the common welfare, but rather solely with regards the corporate welfare).

There is little in the creation of art or the defense of representative, bottom-up Democracy that prioritizes risk aversion and damage control. Art and Democracy are messy.

Corporations as they now exist evolved on a timeline. Although there are millions of corporations, it is not unhelpful to reduce the corporation to a construct in order to identify its general functions and attributes. For the purposes of CURSOR, this contention is easy to illustrate.

I suggested that conceptually the 21C Museum Hotel and Destination Gallery at First Union Tower are similar. Actually, they are very nearly structurally identical, although the articulation of corporate action is slightly differentiated in each case. This would also be true of the Hollywood and Corporate Curator cases (and by extension, the case NY Times, which faces serious problems of its own in the old/new media hierarchy shift), with some slight modifications relative to the extension of property definitions to include old and new media “art” material, which can be owned and exchanged like portions of land.

To state the obvious, Destination (at First Union Tower) and 21C Museum Hotel are examples of sited enterprises. The fates of most property-based enterprises, at least in America, are directly or indirectly predicted by the decisions of managers. A corporate management apparatus will base those decisions, contingent on funds and property, on a cost/benefit analysis and other such measures.

Cost/benefits and measurements have little to do with representative Democracy’s definition of accountability. Democracy is a bottom-up proposition. Corporate projections and measurements are bottom line propositions. To understand the difference, refer to the disgraceful GM C/K truck line (“side-saddle” gas tank) and Ford Pinto cases. This is fundamentally a question of the value of human life.

>

From Richard Haass’ The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How To Be Effective in Any Unruly Organization:

Understanding why business management precepts tend not to provide much guidance for the public sector requires a quick look at the basic differences between the two worlds. In business, success and failure can be measured and identified by the bottom line: profits. The public sector has no clear equivalent; there is no profit. Rather, performance measures can vary according to ideology and policy preferences… In short, Peter Drucker’s question – “What is the bottom line when there is no ‘bottom line’?” – is difficult to answer.

Richard Haass belongs to the Superclass. So did Peter Drucker, although you would have a hard time proving it. What both Haass and Drucker fail to acknowledge is that representative Democracy does have a clear, articulated bottom line: maximum individual freedom in an equitable commonwealth. The problem such men as Haass and Drucker have with representative government is that the top-down corporate bottom line culture and the Superclass it services are antithetical in needs, aims, means, effects and mechanisms to those of the Democracy. Why, then, would someone like Haass devote so much of his life to public service, and how is it that Drucker would receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom just before his death?

>

Axiom: In its operational modality, freedom is a self-contained and shared mandate. The obverse of this mandate is the cost-benefit analysis for the purposes of risk aversion, as demonstrated by the corporate multinational.

>

My friend Jason Coulston commented on my Facebook “What’s on your mind?” post (“Art and Democracy are messy.”): “Love and food are also just as messy.” Let’s carry this a little further: Life and Death are messy. But this isn’t really true, is it, if one happens to be an artificial person, a corporate golem? If “you” happen to be corporate person Blackwater or AIG, and it helps clean up the “brand” or solve legal issues, “you” simply change your name. “You” can take your free speech (money) with you, and your rights (to own land/property). “You” can legally deprive your employees of privacy, free speech, and property rights. And so on, as Kurt would say.

>

Axiom: Representative Democracy is managed by and accountable to the people that it represents. Corporations manage workers and are accountable to the bottom line.

»

Continuing our dimensional analysis, let’s scrutinize sub-currents in the waveform. One is the emergence of online social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Delicious, to name only a few of the more popular of many. As we have discussed in class, corporate ownership (e.g., Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace) of these social networks is problematic. Exactly how extensive are the ownership rights of these corporations, relative to the personal data, artwork, ideas, etc., that people post on social network sites? In light of recent layoffs at MySpace, and rumors that Murdoch might sell the company for which he paid an astronomical sum, is it possible he bought MySpace to kill it? Only last week, Representative John Conyers questioned Murdoch’s the politicization of the editorial page at the Wall Street Journal (the WSJ is another recent Murdoch acquisition). Perhaps a more appropriate direction for our inquiry would involve taking a look at the consolidation of media.

>

One of the most troubling trends for the American Democracy is the consolidation of media over the past half-century. I leave it to the reader to research this subject. I would recommend Ben H. Bagdikian’s work on the subject. Recent coverage of alleged deals between Murdoch (Fox, Bill O’Reilly) and GE (MSNBC, Keith Olbermann) to arrest or suppress contention between the two program hosts reveals the relevance of the subject. What about the surveillance of US citizens by Federal operatives, facilitated by the nation’s most powerful telcom corporations (ATT, Sprint, etc.)?

From the Media Reform Information Center (www.corporations.org/media/):

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote “in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media” — controlling almost all of America’s newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

Here is an excerpt from the book, immediately relevant to our discussion in CURSOR:

In the last 5 years, a small number of the country’s largest industrial corporations has acquired more public communications power-including ownership of the news-than any private businesses have ever before possessed in world history.

Nothing in earlier history matches this corporate group’s power to penetrate the social landscape. Using both old and new technology, by owning each other’s shares, engaging in joint ventures as partners, and other forms of cooperation, this handful of giants has created what is, in effect, a new communications cartel within the United States.

At issue is not just a financial statistic, like production numbers or ordinary industrial products like refrigerators or clothing. At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman, and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country. And with that power comes the ability to exert influence that in many ways is greater than that of schools, religion, parents, and even government itself.

Aided by the digital revolution and the acquisition of subsidiaries that operate at every step in the mass communications process, from the creation of content to its delivery into the home, the communications cartel has exercised stunning influence over national legislation and government agencies, an influence whose scope and power would have been considered scandalous or illegal twenty years ago.

The new communications cartel has been made possible by the withdrawal of earlier government intervention that once aspired to protect consumers and move toward the ideal of diversity of content and ownership in the mass media. Government’s passivity has emboldened the new giants to boast openly of monopoly and their ability to project news, commercial messages, and graphic images into the consciousness and subconscious of almost every American.

Strict control of public information is not new in the world, but historical dictatorships lacked the late twentieth century’s digital multimedia and distribution technology. As the country approaches the millennium, the new cartel exercises a more complex and subtle kind of control.

For the reader, and for the purposes of our dimensional analysis, it should now be clear why the Digital Humanities are so important. The DH movement places the most powerful new tools ensured by the “old” Democracy directly into your hands, permitting the user maximized independence for unmediated expression, at least insofar as any tool can. To produce content for the web and to self-publish it - without the intervention of agent, publisher, critic, or any other managing entity, for direct and immediate review by one’s peers - is in fact a revolutionary action.

>

For corporate multinationals, risk management is a primary concern, and this entails forecasting in real time. As any of us knows, making a plan is a dodgy enterprise. Comprehending the decision-making apparatus of a corporate multinational, if such a thing is actually possible, should cause great concern in any Democratic free thinker. What’s at stake is the present and future quality of life for the individual in a free society, as opposed to a society of organizations (ref., Drucker) or corporations. Given the current public discourse, what is the syndicate of corporations planning for you and your fellows?

I am now speaking to the presumptively intangible (dimensional) components of free society, such as free expression, free press, privacy, or, really, any form of personal freedom. I routinely argue that fine art occupies the pinnacle of the free speech hierarchy, whose locus is variable. Art, as has been fairly demonstrated, can be made portable, but in others is dependent on architecture. Architecture, clearly, is a medium that is land-based and site specific in its articulated state. Policies affecting or determining ownership of land or occupancy on it are therefore of central concern to the artist whose art is relational to or contingent upon brick-and-mortar architecture. Inherently, then, art in the context of architecture is contingent on the definitions assigned to ownership of land by the civilization in and for which art and architecture is created.

Now we can see why new media is such a quandary for those whose power is dependent on command and control of the exchange of funds and land. New media threatens the hierarchy, the management (selectivity) apparatuses for ownership and occupancy of land. This can only be understood dimensionally, presupposing a comprehension of asymmetrical strategies and tactics, as motivated by risk aversion and damage control.

In short, any art (free speech) that is not contingent on owned property constitutes a threat to the ownership society, the society of organizations that manages that society, and the messaging system in place to serve the corporate agenda. To illustrate this point, we can look at the NEH Digital Humanities grant guidelines and ask some simple questions:

·      Why is the selection criteria for applicants not based on the value of the proposed project to free and Democratic society?

·      Why are certain commercial applications excluded as potential outcomes for proposed projects?

·      Why are examples of successful proposals so narrow in their academic and historical purview, if not their technical trans-platform/project potential?

·      Why is the emphasis on technical innovation, and what controls exist for regulating the secondary market for those innovations?

·      Why are projects benefitting established Humanities communities and conferences excluded? Doesn’t this policy weaken their capacity for capitalizing on technical innovation and make them vulnerable to obsolescence?

·      Why are corporations who will likely benefit from technical innovations resulting from the proposed projects not required to donate hardware, software and technical assistance to participants?

·      Why are artist/creative projects excluded from the program? Does the NEH not realize that the NEA does not offer individual artist grants? Does the NEH not realize that it serves the Arts & Humanities? Does the NEH not realize that best practices in contemporary research methods for art production inherently involves “social science” technology and findings?

·      Why, when a vital function of graduate/academic programs is to afford students the time, space, access, support infrastructure and other valuable cultural resources to devote themselves to innovative exploration, should this class of citizens be excluded from consideration?

·      Why would the NEH exclude projects that would directly benefit the academic community, projects whose findings/output/technical advancements could provide immediate currency in/through free access to the most innovative projects and players, whose work is of immediate value for old/new media training processes across the educational spectrum (K through post-grad)? I am referring here to projects that result in textbook production, still the most common tool in classrooms.

·      Why does the NEH discriminate against Point of View (POV)? Is not POV the very essence of the Arts & Humanities?

·      Most tellingly of all – why does the NEH discriminate against “social action?” Is the NEH not an agency of a revolutionary form of government, namely the representative Democracy?

·      Why does the NEH emphasize a globalist mandate, instead of a national mandate? Who is paying the bills?

>

Ostensibly the free speech hierarchy is contained in the far-ranging knowledge-base and practicum known as Arts & Humanities. So-called Pop Culture has given A&H a run for its money, and according to proponents in the culture studies, entertainment or Marxian camps, won the race. For them, Jerry Springer is as relevant and successful as Dostoevsky. In reality, what we call “Pop Culture” is corporate culture.

>

By owning popular culture, the corporate syndicate/monopoly has minimized the threat free speech poses to its messaging system. It has stabilized (see Drucker’s writing on the value of stability to the society of organizations) the inherently messy or “unruly” (Haass) Democratic free speech apparatus to serve the corporate interest, and enforce the will of the Superclass that owns, runs and funds the global corporate syndicate. The corporate syndicate promotes a culture of managed or stable society, a society for planned outcomes based on risk assessment, not a free society of driven by vision.

>

From In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (p. 66, “Ideology and economics”) by Charles S. Maier:

As one of the more perceptive articulators of business aspirations, Peter Drucker, claimed in a 1951 symposium sponsored by the Advertising Council: ‘We have gone a very long way in the direction of solving the basic ethical and basic political problem of an industrial society, the social and ethical harmony between the self-interest of our economic institutions and the social interests of society.’

…

With the participation of the businessman in a fabric of social responsibility and national policy making, management ideology claimed a new inclusiveness. No longer could the managerial function be conceived in terms of the firm alone. In the era of the Cold War it involved a national mission: ‘There is no higher responsibility, there is no higher duty, of professional management than to gain the respect of the general public through objective participation in, and consideration of, national questions, even though these questions in many cases do not relate directly to their business problems.’ In effect this attitude represented the socialization of management: the tendency to fuse factory and society. Indeed one aspect of the new managerial claims was that the role of the manager was losing its specificity or becoming ambivalent in its meanings. ‘Manager’ now often implied more the concept of middle-management, the supervisor of a unit within a larger enterprise. ‘Executive’ was increasingly reserved the concept for those at the top, and this role was described as almost a super-human calling:

In many respects the role of the policy-forming executive in a business enterprise is unenviable. It is a perpetually demanding role; its rewards, both economically and socially, are rarely commensurate with the sacrifices it entails. Perhaps because of this, policy-making is an activity for which, like advanced medical research, only the exceptional and dedicated individual is truly fitted.

But top management had abdicated its leadership role to unions and government; its task was to reclaim them: ‘to play, once again, the part of the leader – the kind of leader who can capture the loyalty of employees, represent and personify the company in the public eye, and present a point of view effectively at a Congressional hearing.’

In this brief passage, we can see all the elements that contributed to the national catastrophe of 2008-9, the seeds of the Bush Presidency (that honored Drucker with a Medal of Freedom), the most massive redistribution of wealth in human history (to the Superclass/Financial Sector/Corporate Syndicate), the pervasive corruption of the national discourse and public institutions, and the near-bankruptcy (social, governmental, fiduciary, cultural) of America and her citizens.

>

From: American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century by Nelson Lichtenstein:

Ventriloquizing through Stahl, Drucker argued “that state authority must lie with the rulers” and “the monarch is entitled to exercise supreme power completely and indivisibly.” Although the principle of state authority was inviolable, Stahl emphasized that the monarch was duty-bound “to subordinate his interest to that of the state and to respect the rights of his subjects.”

How is Drucker’s benevolent King/manager>CEO construct working for you; for the Arts & Humanities; and for America? This consideration of Drucker’s dimensional effects on A&H is particularly important, because the Drucker Institute is engaging in a campaign devoted to defining management as a liberal art. To develop a broader sense, using dimensional analysis, for assessing Drucker’s management schema on Democratic society, scan these seemingly unrelated issues (points of origination):

·      The relationship of Yucaipa Companies to Claremont Graduate University

o   Who is Ronald Burkle? ( http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording-movies/6026975-1.html )

·      GM and the UAW

o   Question: was the recent “creative destruction” of GM designed primarily to eradicate the social, economic and political power of the UAW, a long-time aspiration of the management class?

o   What was Peter Drucker’s first major gig as a consultant?

o   How does this case scan trans-migrate to the issue of public education and health care (hint: Unions)

o   How has corporate media framed these three issues involving unions (auto industry, health care and education); how does the corporate media profile the SEIU?

o   What are the potential unionizing applications for Digital Humanities collective constructs and tools? What the potential democratizing applications for Digital Humanities collective constructs and tools?

>

From the Yucaipa Companies website (http://www.yucaipaco.com/):

The Yucaipa Companies is a premier investment firm that has established a record of fostering economic value through the growth and responsible development of companies. Founded in 1986 by Ron Burkle, the firm has completed mergers and acquisitions valued at more than $30 billion. As an investor, Yucaipa works with management to strategically reposition businesses and implement operational improvements, resulting in value creation for investors.

>

For the corporate multinational, short-term or immediate returns on investment animate the entity, but the entity’s long-term survival depends on a sequence of short-term choices by people. In such a schema, ownership and management of both Springer and Dostoevsky (as types) will be the best bet. In fact, ownership and management of everything is the best possible outcome.

Obviously, an inherent conflict between the corporate multinational and a representative Democracy exists. After all, free speech is by definition free. The Democratic form of government is managed by the people (for the people, etc.), with a mandate to protect the freedoms of the people. In other words, the multinational corporation by nature is anti-Democracy and anti-American.

>

The structure of the corporate multinational is founded on management design principles. As one after another societal vehicle for free concourse in the commonwealth of individuals falls to the onslaught of corporate management anti-culture, the mechanisms of personal freedoms diminish proportionally. With those freedoms diminishes the value of human life. Where human life is not valued, there can exist little expectation for the environmental valuation, upon which human and possibly all life depends.

In the post-Hiroshima world, we must at least acknowledge that the ecosystem is contingent on human decision-making. If one is depressive, or has reason to be skeptical of the record of human choices, based on bad experiences, the realization that one bad choice in particular could be particularly devastating to all life may present a tipping point. In such cases, I would suggest doing a crossword in today’s paper or catching a summer popcorn fare at your local multiplex.  I would not suggest one do as Japanese artist Sadamichi Hirasawa did, and, masquerading as a public official, visit your local bank branch to disseminate cyanide to the employees and customers (see Thesis).

>

Please consider the agenda for the Allied Social Science Associations conference (January 3-5, 2009), as a possible answer to the question about NEH guidelines above regarding social science:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:3pvXUsE1—IJ:www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/Annual_Meeting/ASSA09_prelim_program.pdf+%22yucaipa+companies%22+%22claremont+graduate+university%22&cd=19&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

>

Finally, let us consider the artist’s signature on a painting. Although the practice of signing artwork predates Democracy, how has the signature evolved since the American Democracy was established? What is a digital signature?

CURSOR 9

CURSOR9: 21C Artists

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

INTRODUCTION

When I composed my NEH digital humanities proposal, I titled it “21C Artists.” I thought, “Oh yeah! Great title! Very catchy!” Then I Googled 21C and found this:

http://www.21cmuseumhotel.com/overview/default.aspx

My initial reaction was, “D*****! They beat me to it!” A collector/developer couple in Louisville, employing a highly skilled web designer or design team, and an excellent PR strategy and/or team, had imprinted their ownership on a project that in some significant aspects addressed the same issues I am taking on. Here is the overview of the 21C Museum, from the website:

21c Museum is dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the very best work of living artists from all over the world. With over 9,000 square feet of exhibition space, as well as a dedicated video lounge, the museum features dynamic group and solo exhibitions, as well as permanent, commissioned installations. The exhibitions in the reception area gallery and in the lower atrium gallery will change approximately every six months, and will feature artworks from the International Contemporary Art Foundation, from the collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, and from artists, museums, and other private and public collections.

In early 2008, the 21c Museum Foundation changed its name to the International Contemporary Art Foundation in order to solidify its position in the nonprofit community and to further denote its separation from the for-profit hotel. This has been a change in name only; all operating procedures will remain the same. The founders felt it was important for the foundation that operates the 21c Museum to have the distinction of being nonprofit, a fact that was unclear under the old name. With this change, we hope to become a more prominent member in the local and national community, promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of contemporary art for all audiences- and to encourage open, creative expression of all art forms.

About ten years ago, I produced a gallery project (Destination Gallery) in a downtown Nashville high-rise office building owned by TIAA CREF and managed by CB Richard Ellis. The project conceptually was very similar to the 21C “museum hotel” in Louisville. The idea was to install a dedicated art space on the ground floor of the skyscraper, and to install a permanent collection of artwork throughout the building. We would present exhibits every six weeks or so in the gallery, featuring artists from elsewhere, a niche that at that time was underserviced. Destination Gallery at First Union Tower operated for a couple of years. The owner negotiated for me to present the shows for free the first year, and promised that if I met some goals we agreed upon, we would implement the program of permanent installation. That never happened. The building was sold, First Union changed hands, and most of the original parties moved on, including me, with Destination Gallery. When I say the two concepts were similar, I am referring to the establishment of culture anchors for cities, or as painter Richard Haas (not to be confused with Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations) describes them, “urban icons.” (I don’t think Richard invented that term. We discussed it thoroughly on my Nashville art radio program though.) Perhaps a well-funded boutique hotel housing a contemporary art museum and a diverse multidisciplinary presentation agenda and a gallery/collection in an office high-rise seem dissimilar. When I suggested they aren’t, it is because they share fundamental characteristics: architecture; privately owned and/or consigned collections of quality art; a progressive social or community agenda; concept marketing to benefit an attached and not-arts-related business.

Two nights ago I posted this quote from my Thesis: “Globalist corporate ownership – of property, the means of production and the shaping of identity – is the greatest threat to art.” If that sounds extreme to you, consider this item from today’s New York Times:

“And Now, an Exhibition From Our Sponsor; For Some Museums, a Corporation Can Also Be a Curator” (By ROBIN POGREBIN, Published: August 21, 2009 )

Given the economic downturn, more small and midsize art institutions may be increasingly open to ready-made shows by corporations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/arts/design/23pogr.html?ref=arts

This is possibly the most troubling newspaper article about fine arts that I’ve read in over 25 years. If ever a need existed to not redefine art in American Democratic society, it is now. My Thesis discusses the trends that have brought us to this point, so I won’t pursue this course in detail here. However, I will suggest that the urgency for cultural reform of the sort we are exploring in this course on the Digital Humanities is absolutely essential to the survival of the nation and an art system with integrity.

>

Here is the outline for my NEH proposal:

MISSION

To establish an international collective to support, document and nourish the visual arts by showing how valuable art and artists are to society.

VISION

We will build a community serving artists, using methods that maximize available arts infrastructure. These will include:

·      A web nexus founded on the principles and practices of Digital Humanities, applied through dimensional methodologies in a transparent, inclusive, high-performing sequence of actions

·      Exhibitions sited across the globe produced by the collective, facilitated by our web network

·      An oral history archive representing artists in their own words (Talking Artist)

·      A photographic artist portrait gallery (Portraits of the Artist in the 21^st Century)

·      A historical database to educate today’s artist about her roots

·      A commercial store for distributing the collective’s artwork and services, providing artists with income

·      An information clearinghouse containing data on support services for artists

·      Partnerships with existing institutions, foundations, organizations, governments and businesses

o   To establish protocols for best practices for artists, and for the society that cares about art

o   To promote and enhance coordination among online and traditional (brick and mortar) libraries, collections and databases helpful for artist research

o   To enhance access to artist resources for the purposes of research and continued education

o   To encourage educational authorship by artists for artists and arts educational programs (K-12, Undergraduate, Graduate, Post-Graduate)

o   To develop governmental programs promoting visual arts and artists

o   To foster media (TV, Radio, Film, Literary) programs focused on visual arts and artists

o   To create a worldwide network of exchange for art, artist and arts education, such as exhibitions, seminars, conferences, workshops and residencies

o   To secure life-care for artists

o   To promote the preservation of art and a sustainable community of artists through public policy

·      A major study on the effectiveness of artist education programs that rely primarily or exclusively on critique, rather than demonstration

·      A web-accessible database project to facilitate and preserve the artist-to-artist craft traditions, containing

o   A digital archive of artist studio/shop demonstrations (video)

o   How-to procedures (audio or text)

·      A comprehensive listing of fine artist support services by region and specialty

·      A sequence of surveys asking participants key questions, such as

o   How has America failed its artists?

o   What art is relevant to people and their communities?

o   Why are no books published about bad art?

o   Who is an artist?

o   What is art?

·      A vibrant and dynamic discourse among art professionals and the communities they serve about art’s meaning, definition, purpose and value

>

Unfortunately, I won’t have time before Tuesday’s presentation to use the CURSOR text as an opportunity to bind the many threads together underpinning my assertion that the Digital Humanities can satisfy an immediate need for modeling a powerful response to environmental oppression on the arts in our society. It is my hope that we will together be able to establish a good point of origination for such a discourse during the brief. I encourage all, however, to at your convenience, scan The End of Organization Man & the Epistemological Age. It contains a treatise on the ethics of vision, some documentation of Founder views on art and culture, a revelatory argument against Management as a Liberal Art (it is a design domain), corrections of Drucker’s misperceptions (to be kind) and a systems analysis of corporate viral effects and disease, especially as they pertain to visual arts in a sustainable civilization. In the remainder of CURSOR, I will be essentially adding a postscript to that narrative, since the dimensional analysis in both cases leads to the same outcome, a further proof that the form is effective, with repeatable outcomes.

>

At this point, I would like to incorporate an excerpt by contemporary French philosopher, Elie During, whose work was brought to my attention today by an Art for Humans collaborator, sculptor Anna Julien. During is wrestling with issues central to 4D production here and elsewhere, and although he isn’t explicitly describing the 4D art method, he might as well be.

What an ‘Anti-Positivist’ Epistemology Means

By contrast, the meaning of an anti-positivist epistemology appears more clearly. It is a stance that must first be evaluated according to its strategic effects on certain interpretative and constructive practices. Canguilhem writes : ‘To take as one’s object of inquiry nothing other than sources, inventions, influences, priorities, simultaneities, and successions is at bottom to fail to distinguish between science and other aspects of culture.’ (Canguilhem 1988:3). It is interesting that this indictment of positivist historiographical practices should be couched in quasi-Bergsonian terms.

‘Sources’ and ‘influences’ point to the ‘retrospective illusion’; ‘simultaneities’ and ‘successions’ are reminiscent of the spatial conception of the historical timeline. Canguilhem says elsewhere that ‘A history of results can never be anything more than a chronicle. The history of science concerns an axiological activity, the search for truth. This axiological activity appears only at the level of questions, methods and concepts, and nowhere else.’ (Canguilhem 1994:30). How this bears on the question of historicity itself, and how ‘the history of the relation of intelligence to truth generates its own sense of time’ (Canguilhem 1994:31), is another question, but it is a Bergsonian question as well.

It seems that we are now in a position to formulate the general principle of anti-positivism: it consists in the belief that epistemology is not concerned with facts (neither scientific facts, nor historical facts uncovered by the history of science), but with concepts. This means that its objects are always projects, and in the case of the history of sciences, ‘the object of historical discourse is, in effect, the historicity of scientific discourse.’ (Canguilhem 1994:26).

Yet again, the real problem with positivism is not so much that it strives at some kind of immediate contact with the real : it is rather that this attitude implies a very naive idea of what a concept is, in general. Hence the problem is not so much to replace facts by concepts as the proper objects of inquiry, but to reach an adequate understanding of the formation and functioning of concepts in the first place. Whether the substitute for positivism is found in dialectics or intuition, what is being criticized is always an abstract view of concepts which considers them apart from their theoretical setting, the network or system of notions to which they belong, their vital connections in the web of thought (Canguilhem 1994:50-51).

In his study on the formation of the concept of reflex movement in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century, Canguilhem emphasizes the necessity of studying conceptual filiations rather than the succession of theories (Canguilhem 1994:181). Bachelard develops a similar line of argument concerning Fizeau’s experiment: we do not know what we are talking about before ‘the object of knowledge is replaced in a problematic, situated in a discursive process of instruction.’ (Bachelard 1949:55). On this construal, the object becomes ‘more than a historical fact, more than a fact resulting from observation: it solves a problem.’ (Bachelard 1949:53)

Briefly stated, the kind of ‘positivism’ that is being discarded by the French epistemological tradition under consideration is essentially one which considers concepts in isolation from their variation in a problematic configuration, one which proves incapable of engaging in what Canguilhem calls the ‘working of a concept’ (‘Dialectique et philosophie du Non chez Gaston Bachelard,’ in Canguilhem 1970:206).

Anti-positivism thus reverts the ordinary direction of thought: instead of going from theories (and facts) to concepts, it goes from concepts to theories (and problems), because to define a concept is to formulate a problem. Through the succession of theories, one must realize that a problem endures, even within the solutions devised for solving it. Problems must be tracked, identified, properly recast and posed, even where scientists and thinkers themselves were not in a position to do so, or believed they could do without it by simply stating the solutions. To quote Bachelard once more: “Above all one must know how to state problems. Whatever one may say, in scientific life, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this sense of problems which is the distinctive mark of a genuine scientific mind. For a scientific mind, every piece of knowledge is an answer to a question. If there is no question, there cannot be any scientific knowledge. Nothing is granted. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed” (Bachelard 1938:14).

And elsewhere: ‘Scientific research does not need the bravado of universal doubt, but the constitution of a problematic. It takes its departure in a problem, even if this problem is badly stated.’ (Bachelard 1949:51).

Needless to say, according to Bachelard, this sense of problems is a requisite for the history of sciences, and a fortiori for any rigorous philosophy of science. These considerations bring us one step further in the understanding of what an ‘anti-postivist’ epistemological stance should imply. For it seems now that the proper object of an anti-positivist epistemology is not so much facts, theories or even concepts themselves. Rigorously speaking, ‘the perpetual revision of contents by deeper investigation and by erasure’ is only a symptom of the constant recasting of a problem in various theoretical fields. So the real objects of an anti-positivist epistemology are problems, along with the conditions under which problems are formulated, posed, and sometimes solved. The positivist image of truth is overturned only when one realizes that thought does not primarily strive at knowing what reality really is, but deals with its own problems as immanent, genetic functions.

(From During’s “’A History of Problems’: Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition” - Article publié dans le Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol.35, n°1, janvier 2004, posted 2005 on the Centre International d’Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine website at http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=65)

>

Let’s for a moment reboot our comparison of old versus new media.

To begin the discussion, one can frame the comparison with a timeline and a frequency/ratio analysis. Such an analytic configuration of type yields much more information about cultural exchange that is art-centric than information about the nature of the conveyance. Yet, there is value - even if latent - for inter-linked transduction, contained in an artwork, whether digitally fabricated or manually crafted with preset materials.  To put it more simply, art represents, and representation is an exchange of sentience. Choice saturates the action, and as of the mid-20^th Century, so does the freed outcome. Jackson Pollack is the Hinge. Art by definition recognizably exists in the parameters the society agrees upon. Art is reflexive dimensionally, perceptually animating for the artist or the person experiencing the art, a sensory phenomenon.

The more interesting conjecture involves studying the space that separates the two forms, or considering how each succeeds, or what each is best for, and optimizing environments in which they might appear and positioning them in relation to one another effectively.

COMPARISON

Oil painting for instance has for centuries been proven as an artist’s medium. Western Civilization has produced thousands of examples of excellent verifications of oil paint, as a medium for expression that works and works well for representation of human experience. Many books have been produced categorizing the classes or types of painters and paintings made with oil-based pigments. Many books have been published documenting the processes by which the paint is made and canvas prepared and so on. Many studies of artist lives and motivations have been presented. In studios and lecture halls, experts have instructed new practitioners on methods and applications for oil painting, and elaborated on the conceptual underpinnings and strategies employed by artists and their cultural interpreters. Still, the medium, in spite of periodic claims to the contrary, is vital and continues to yield remarkable artworks by artists working across a diverse spectrum of idioms and schematics, exploring an expanding range of subject matter and culturally relevant material. Oil has longevity in both the technical and aesthetic sense. However, the number of people who can prepare and execute an oil painting and present it properly - maximizing the medium in terms of the ancient craft tradition that has relied on oil for expressive cultural conveyance for centuries - constitutes a tiny fraction of the population…

On the other hand, the digital medium is in a nascent stage (less than a century old), and compared to oil painting, is very young in its trajectory as an artist’s tool. Many of the attendant cultural apparatuses and social topology attached to oil paint, described in the paragraph above, barely attach to digital art. The number of art historians who have undertaken to focus on computer-based art is fairly small, for example. Also on this other hand, the computer and software programs like Photoshop are being used to make and manipulate images by millions of people…

>

Perhaps comparison isn’t the best way to gauge the value of digital art. In my own practice, I have found it very helpful to try to come to grips with how computer-based creative processes and organic or traditional processes push each other. Art media are constantly staking out territory in competition for the artist’s imagination. Of course, personifying an artist medium with a statement like that is a bit awkward, but bear with me. I’m moving into a discussion of sentience that may prove helpful for understanding how a computer, a tool for computations, became a significant artist tool, at least for the moment, eclipsing the others in social currency (if not real, monetary currency)…

Let’s take a preliminary look at how oil painting and digital art are similar. Both as descriptive terms are identically generic. Oil paintings by Rembrandt bear little resemblance to Albers’. Computers can be used to generate still images, movies, sculptures, and many other forms of expression that don’t even exist as 3D objects in the spatial world. Until very recently, art historians had hardly managed to generate even a moderately useful organizational structure for the archiving of computer art. This task is made more problematic because of problems like the lack of common protocols among platforms and durability of the component materials…

>

Or, as During’s text suggests, it might just be better to place the object next to the projection and thereby activate the idea that binds the two together. This is what we’ll do on Tuesday.

CURSOR8

CURSOR8: Origination (PT. 1); Moving interpolations to filmic dimensional transportation systems (Internal and Environmental); in spite of non-conducive business models

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

INTRODUCTION: A NEW DIMENSIONAL FORMAT AND STRUCTURE

As a precursor to effective action, verifying a need for digital humanities projects in the context of a significant reformation of infrastructure for cultural production is sensible. Cultural production is a Marxian euphemism that encompasses creative activities in old and new media. “Cultural production” as a working term is problematic in its breadth. For the purposes of CURSOR, we are focused centrally on the visual arts as our prime subject, because visual, and more specifically, fine art is indicative in the overarching net/framework of a society’s valuation of free speech, as it applies in the political, economic and social sectors. In short, how we treat art and artists shows how much we care about expressive liberty. As we will see, the state of free expression in a state will reveal the state’s capacity for sustainable growth and provide a fair measure of equitable quality of life. Further, we will recognize the intricate connections between art (free speech/freedom) and the characteristics of government (representation/accountability) in relation to business and community responsiveness or efficacy, as presupposed in cultural fluency.

From an Arts and Humanities perspective, it is imperative that environmental support systems necessary to sustain the infrastructure for the “Arts” side to be addressed. In short, we must consider that artists make art in real time. In a dimensional framework, the role of the artist, at least from my POV, is to demonstrate, for all, the combinative procedures (and humanitarian benefits) in operation on a 4D project.

As we approach a terminal point for our discussion of old and new media, it is worthwhile to profile a functional modern society. One assumes agreement that the Arts and Humanities would be motivated by definition to contribute to the functionality of modern society, perhaps especially in the area of cultural wellness. One should also be able to assume that rest of a society’s knowledge pool, namely the sciences in their variegated permutations, would also be allied with this motivation, to improve society. Even the econ/business sector, which one could argue in our modern society has for several hundred years been the prime beneficiary of the advances in Arts & Humanities/Sciences (Math), would identify its main justification for existence as service to the betterment of people in society. At least that was Peter Drucker’s stated motivation, ultimately. (I would argue that the business sector allows the jury to be out, on this particular point, poising its mission substantively in the space between communal and individual satisfaction of needs, to use the Druckerist schema.) Let us for the sake of argument assume, at least in the beginning, that all three legs of the academic stool prop up a shared platform, a motivation to improve society, and the lives of people and the general functionality of civilization. Certainly the disciplines diverge in their applications and specialities.

With this as our premise, perhaps it is helpful to engage in some spot check analysis of the state of the state of the art. Hopefully, this will help us to generate a justification for an innovative alliance between old methods and new technology, or old technology and new sensibilities, or old values and new dimensional potential.

>

MEDIATION IN THE ART BUSINESS

[Note: The following introduction (to CURSOR8 discussion) is excerpted from The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, “Organization of Arts and Entertainment Industries,” Section 2.4 (Agents and matchmakers)]

The artist-gatekeeper relationship frequently involves an agent who mediates between artists and the enterprises that realize the market value of their creations. These intermediaries perform several services, depending on the creative sector. One is matchmaking between artists with heterogeneous talents and creative enterprises with diverse capabilities and input needs. Another is negotiating terms between artist and gatekeeper. As a third, the agent himself functions as gatekeeper when he selects artists to represent.

The service ostensibly provided by the agent is to represent the artist (author, say) to enterprises that might bring her work to market (publishers). This representation function is governed by an incentive contract that compensates the agent with a share (traditionally 10 percent but with upward perturbations) of the artist’s gross earnings. This contract (including the 10 percent figure) was established in the nineteenth century at the inception of the agency business, quickly displacing a fee-for-services contract because of authorial poverty as well as the incentive value [Hepburn (1968)]. Besides representation, however, the agent performs a gatekeeping service that would otherwise fall entirely on the publisher. The agent can profitably undertake to represent an author only if the time (effort) devoted to seeking an outlet for her work is expected to reap sufficient compensation from the resulting royalties. The agent may also invest time (effort) in editing and improving the author’s work, to the point where a publishing-house editor can appreciate its potential. Now consider the dealings that occur between the established agent and editors employed by publishing houses. They interact repeatedly, which increases the editor’s credence in an agent’s pitch on its/his author’s behalf. The agent will suffer a pecuniary loss from devoting effort to an author of indifferent promise – a substantial up-front opportunity cost with poor long-run prospects for compensation. For the publisher, relying on agents’ representations (their gatekeeping skills and quality signals) substitutes dependence on what can be picked from the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. That is likely less efficient matchmaking procedure because the publisher pondering an unchaperoned manuscript lacks the information that the agent draws from personal contact with the author.

While the agent’s gatekeeping and representation functions benefit the publisher, the agent’s skill at negotiating on the author’s behalf is adversary. Publishers offer somewhat differentiated bundles of services, but none capable of generating substantial rents. The author’s unique manuscript is the one input into the publication venture with rent-yielding potential. Thus over the years the publisher’s one-time share of subsidiary rights for paperback, cinema film, and other such derivative products has eroded, as the agent representing the author came to pre-empt the publisher and take over the auctioning of subsidiary rights. The publisher’s gains from the agent’s gatekeeping function thus trade against the publisher’s reduced share of rents from subsidiary rights.

Akin to the gatekeeping role of agents is the function of certifiers who possess or invest in skills at making fine judgments on the quality of artists or their works. Theoretical research has recently turned to characterizing the market for certifiers’ services, including vertical differentiation of their services [Hvide and Heifetz (2001)]. The critic’s economic function in creative industries has not been much studied, but on casual evidence seems to possess some analytically interesting features. Major acquisitions of visual art excepted, the individual’s decision to consume a creative good is too small a transaction to warrant a large outlay on an advisor’s services. So critical opinion is commonly bundled into magazines or newspapers along with complementary sorts of information. The amount of criticism supplied then depends on its marginal attraction to consumers of the bundle relative to their marginal valuations of other content. Critical services seem subject to vertical differentiation parallel to the differentiated involvement of consumers in various arts and entertainment industries. That is, the utility one gets from consuming creative goods increases with one’s accumulated “cultural consumption capital” – built up from previous experience and both specialized and general training [Stigler and Becker (1977)]. Individuals vary in both aptitude and desire for building such stocks of consumption capital. As a result they tend to distribute themselves between the poles of “buff” and “casual” in their involvement. The judgments offered by critics and certifiers tend to display a parallel vertical differentiation, with reasoned and contextualized evaluations provided for the buffs, while the critic servicing the casuals tends to internalize their standards and opine whether or not they will like the work.

>

QUESTIONS

How does the digital humanities approach, as indicated by so-called Web 2.0 open source software platforms, serving networked computer-based communities, displace the arrangements among players described above? In the DH format, who are the agents, artists, publishers and critics, and most importantly, the audience? What role does software play?

>

The headline from the New York Times digital edition at 7:02 ET, today (August 20, 2009):

A-List Stars Flailing at the Box Office

By BROOKS BARNES 14 minutes ago (at the time it was copied – PJM)

Studios aren’t giving up on stars but they are trying to pay them less or looking for cheaper alternatives.

>

In the section directly above, we glimpse two media domains that are in crisis: the daily printed newspaper, and the Hollywood star vehicle (or the blockbuster cinema studio system). Both are part and parcel of the American vision of itself. Who can forget Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane? Of course, in the trajectory of the arts in history, that is a loaded question. We have after all been exploring the qualities of timelines. Forgetfulness is the ever-present opposition to the creative action. With this in mind, I will project a dimensional proposition: that Citizen Kane presciently describes as a panoramic or dimensional morality tale the arc of the American newspaper and movie industries, as embodied in the lead character’s tragic downfall.

>

We haven’t discussed cinema much in CURSOR, but at this stage of our exploration, putting movies on the table is helpful, for several reasons. First is the traditional production structure of filmmaking. Generally, making a film is a very collaborative process. Within the collaborative framework, the directors and actors are assigned a high degree of artistry or authorship, usually more than the rest of the cast and crew (possibly excepting writers). Still, the celebration of quality work in all facets of film production is what makes the Oscars so lengthy. Clearly, in the culture of Hollywood, stardom is a flat or horizontal effect.

This lateral cultural phenomenon is pervasive. In the past century the moving image camera has informed positively or negatively all media exchanges, and arguably the global human sense of itself. “Movie magic” is the term, and the glorification of cinema’s capacity for shaping the inner and exterior environment, transfixing and transporting the imagination, and opening portals to other realities, is the stuff of many a waxing cinephile’s lyric: the stuff of dreams.

Even if our discussion didn’t address cinema directly, it did however explore the mechanics of cinema fairly comprehensively. We looked at Muybridge, Eakins and Gilbreth, who popularized the sequential image, which is the armature for film. We traced the evolution of the pictorial dimension, from Socrates’ complaint through the Baroque, to the digital present. Most significantly, in dimensional considerations, we explored the timeline.

As a representation of history, the cinematic timeline is a starting point for a great discussion of the space between. In cinematic film, the movie presents the sequence of images on a vertical plane and a horizontal linear timeline. It is the speed of presentation of the horizontal, linear image progression that fools the human eye into accepting film’s illusionistic movement. Suspension of disbelief, camera POV, the edge of the projection, the separation between the viewer and the action, 3D film and many other phenomena put cinema directly on our dimensional table, which we will say is now is the cutting table. Editing is the key to bridging film and digital media for cinema.

How has the computer and digital video technology expanded film? For one thing, it dissolved the space between, and it added the features of 4D interventions and trans-polations to what was essentially a cut-and-splice, linear, or 2D process. Until the introduction of the computer-based editing suite, the director and the cinematographer collaborated with the actors to simulate the multiplicity of perspective to calculate a narrative omniscience, whereby the filmmaker or his cinematic proxy (and the viewer, by extension), could experience the action dimensionally. After the digital editor entered the scene, the manipulation of perspective to encompass all-overness emerged as an integral tool in the cinematic toolbox. Once the flatness of the film screen had been so transfigured, even if the animation was in fact unchanged (still flat), the movie could unfold in multiple directions simultaneously. In short order, the capacities of the digital format, its infinite possibilities to reduce or expand in all directions for the purpose of editing content, inspired filmmakers to imagine worlds in which film was situated as a medium, worlds that themselves could expand and contract infinitely. Context and content began to function as connected animations.

The influence of 20^th century painters on this phenomenon cannot be underestimated. Those we have cited previously in CURSOR occupy leadership positions on the list of contributors to film’s dimensional expansion. That said the bigger picture is bigger than Mondrian, Pollack and the filmic innovators, counterparts like Stan Brackage. What our investigation has revealed is the connection between today’s cinema and thousands of years of technical progression, not to fool the eye (trompe l’oeil), but to expand perception dimensionally beyond the wall of the “real.”

CURSOR 7

CURSOR7: Towards a Resolution

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

CYCLE (WAVEFORM)

Let’s briefly summarize the trajectory of this essay sequence. We started with web design. I concluded the first CURSOR article with this question: “What does the computer, electric-based medium do best, and what does it not replace?”

Using new brushes from the Smashing website I executed a small suite of “pure” digital paintings. At this point these images only exist on my computer and in the various publishing forums I maintain online. The digi-paintings have not been output in a “hard copy” format.

For my presentation in Humanities 340, I will bring to class an acrylic painting on canvas, which we will compare to digital representations of the same painting, via projection and on the desktops of your web-connected laptops and other portable computing devices. The painting that I’ll be exhibiting in class (“Accomplishment and the Artist/Critic in 4 Iterations Over a 14-Year Timeline (Nashville/Austin/California x2) to Answer Question C” – see http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=809) will be accompanied by the extensive blog-published procedural explanations and documentations, as an accompaniment. I have demonstrated the multidimensional “life” of this painting, in its several iterations, and refer to the exhibition record as proofs. You will be able to learn a great deal about my aesthetics, studio painting strategies and methods, several nodes in the “art world,” and the nature of object migration (from concept or pre-object state to realization to presentation to exchange to documentation) through the “art world” nodes, such as galleries, institutions, projects and many web formats. The painting will serve as a prime example of the facets and components that contribute to an artwork (and the artist’s) dimensional identity over a timeline as a virtual not-thing and actual thing.

To add another layer to the perspective on the painting-as-meme, I’ll introduce those “pure” digital paintings for comparison.

The URLs of the  digipaintings (on the AFH Blog) are:

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=864

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=865

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=867

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=868

>

In CURSOR2 we looked at the rhizomic nature of web navigation and the consequent features of social manufacture, as in linked interests characterized by networks that are metaphorically referred to as trees or webs. In the CONSIDERATIONS section I suggested the related questions of surveillance and control, after citing Eakins and Muybridge in the CONDITIONS section (for a good treatment of these issues, by way of linkage among artists Eakins and Muybridge to applications for photography as a tool for managing worker productive [Taylor, Gilbreth], see American Photography: A Century of Images by Vicki Goldberg and Robert Bruce Silberman). We will return to this point shortly. In CURSOR2 we continued on to examine some of the weaknesses/social dangers (see discussion of data mining) inherent in the digital medium.

>

In CURSOR3 we continued our exploration of data mining, and the language of dimensional behaviors in that usage of new media. The question of artistic choice was raised early in the discussion to confront the exterior pressure brought to bear on the contemporary artist’s creative process by a multi-dimensional conglomerate of social, economic and political forces, especially over the past century. We began to trace the connection between old and new art media, as a migration or reasonable response to those external pressures and forces, in addition to inferring that the embrace of digital media by traditional artists might also be a simple function of curiosity about the New, and, further, a function of communal perceptual evolution. The framing of the discussion in terms of expanding hierarchies and sequences also comes into play here, as a revolutionary trumping of dualism, especially the epistemological versus the technical.

>

In CURSOR4 we continued examining the dualistic construct (old v. new), acknowledged its lack of pertinence, then asymmetrically rendered it meaningful, using comparison as a vehicle for discourse on the intervening qualities of new media on direct experience. With the aid of an anecdotal illustration, we began to examine the ethics of vision, attaching the implications of mediation. In referring to linked sources, I endeavored to induce immediacy upon the unfolding narrative…

»

Axiom: Summarizing is a subtle way of rewriting history.

>

The digital medium is form of summary, in many of its applications, such as the JPEG. Compression is the medium of the digital summary.

This is helpful for formulating visual art strategies for the digital medium. It is important for the digital artist to study compression in the medium. Compression followed by expansion of digital image files produces pixilation, for instance. Print professionals have considered pixilation to be ugly. Resolution is the issue. This is also true in moving image media. The human eye receives visual data at a very high resolution. Cameras in the film media record visual data at a diminished resolution, compared to the human eye. Translating visual data to film (light impressions on chemicals) entails subsequent processing to produce an artifact. Depending on the scale of the film, the output may require expansion (“blowing up” an image). The image will evidence the artifacts of expansion. Photography people call the resulting artifacts “noise.”

The digital artist has the option to view these artifacts as other than ugly. Using software, the digital artist can develop strategies for enhancing artifacts, creating forms of digital texture. Filter and composite layering effects can serve this purpose.

But the bigger question is how does the quality of compression define the medium? Compression methods were invented as practical responses to limitations of bandwidth, memory and computing/processor power. Practitioners called the decision of what was enough resolution versus compression/image breakdown for the end user “optimization.” Reducing one’s palette to a small number of choices was one way a designer could optimize a visual data file.

What does digital compression have in common with, say, oil painting, or camera arts? First of all, one must recognize that these are issues of representation. A segment of the creative field focuses on exactitude in representation of a subject/object. Verisimilitude is a catchword. Representational painting is a medium that memorializes a moment on a timeline, ostensibly. On closer analysis, however, we can see this not really the case. My favorite example is David’s Napoleon. Here is the Wikipedia page:

http://fy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofbyld:David_napoleon.jpg

Note: Compare the “other versions,” especially the orthogonal version.

There are two. This is the enhanced version, which indicates a mapping process for painting that is relevant also to 4D practices.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/9/90/20070520185326!David_schema_orthogonal.jpg

Also, compare the color variations among the four examples, and the image quality, relative to resolution.

QUESTIONS, CONSIDERATIONS, EXERCISES: Do all these images represent the same painting? Consider them (each of them) as independent agents. What are the actual painting dimensions? Imagine the JPEG next to the painting. Print each of the images.

>

Now, consider this documentary movie about Clayton Patterson.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa56l8_captured_shortfilms?from=feedblitz_523284_2302379

The scenes of Patterson’s archives for me are most telling. They contain thousands of hours of video and tens of thousands of images. Think of this relative to the span of time the artifacts encompass. The movie itself compresses the creative life of the artist into a document tens of minutes long. The ratios are probably similar.

>

Now we can enter another domain, the digital humanities, and the question of history. Referring to David’s Napoleon: did this moment actually occur? The terms idealization and mediation are immediately relevant. The question of comparison of intent becomes relevant, for now we are focusing on the ethics of seeing. In the dualistic construct of Classical Western Civilization, this space is parsed over the CWC timeline and defined in many ways by many people. The term “humanist” arises in one era as a schema to proffer on the interpretive aspects of vision a set of guiding principles. Romanticism and Realism (or “pragmatism”) are two other schema, or schools. The artist and historian are in this respect in the same boat. As Patterson pointed out after and during the LES riots he documented notoriously, what’s at stake is Truth, at least the presentation of it, in the social medium (political, economic).

>

What now of Jason Coulston’s observation, his concern, that his fellow witnesses on the beach were too busy documenting the beautiful scene to be in it? Here our comparison of old and new media is getting interesting, and pointing towards a dimensional solution. Namely, we are approaching the phenomenon of mapping, and the opportunity it suggests with regards optimizing or maximizing the activity of witnessing or determining truth, or at least a surface form of it.

Here is the axiom: The greater the number of witnesses, viewing an object in a spherical (360 degrees) or radial formation, the greater the likelihood that visual veracity can be obtained. In order to perpetrate illusion in dimensionally observed conditions, the illusionist will have to radically step up his game. So, we have Criss Angel (www.crissangel.com).

>

It is no longer enough to paint something just like it looks. Here is what Socrates had to say on the subject, and this misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what painting is and does has plagued artists ever since:

Then consider this very point: at what does painting aim in each case? To imitate what is as it is? Or what appears as it appears? Is it an imitation of an illusion, or of truth?

What a jerk!

>

…Which isn’t exactly right. Fundamentally, as explored significantly in my Thesis, what’s at stake here is the primacy of the intellect (Episteme) over the creative (Techne). We have been touching on the Timeline as a construct. Now is the time to employ it for effect.

What Socrates failed to realize in the immediacy of his analysis, great though it may be, is that the human perceptual evolution as it relates to vision, representation and accountability or integrity (or verisimilitude), is that the arc of the timeline he’s positing against is huge – to use a 3D term. To illustrate, along that arc – between Socrates and us, today - is trompe l’oeil. We can find great examples dating to the 1400’s. For a richer exploration of the genre, again, let’s look at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l%27%C5%93il

According to the entry, the term dates to the Baroque period (which is illuminating, considering our discussion of Stella’s pictorial theory in Working Space). The relationship between pictorial realism and illusion as an architectural device provides a bridge for our discourse. In trompe l’oeil we see skilled artists building portals where there are none, or expanding space. This practice is inherently dimensional. As craft and technology have progressed, human perceptual capacity to envision space beyond 3D has improved. What Socrates dismissed as imitation is in fact a procedural step in expanding material parameters – what is real, or not real.

>

At this point, we can see why comparing a digital print to an oil painting is an exercise of very limited value. The question should be much bigger than whether x is better than y in conclusive, epistemological terms. The questions perhaps should be: What space are you designing for, what are you trying to represent, how much time do you have to execute your production? …And so on.

>

Maybe most importantly, the question, “With what Truth are you concerned, and to what degree do you wish to represent it?” If this seems to beg the question, “What is your audience?” that is because it most certainly does. Or to refine the question/search further, “Who is your community?” and “What do you need to be working on, in order to survive, or better yet, serve?”

This last question is central to ethics of vision.

CURSOR 6.2

CURSOR6.2: On comparing media continued (Cyclops and other Hybrids)

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

I’ve prepared several examples of old/new media hybrids and an illustration of digital translation affecting creative output.

GOLEM

The first example is a small acrylic on canvas painting entitled “Golem.” I sampled some “classical” fragments from memory. The disembodied face is inspired by Goya, and the knight/golem is inspired by Renaissance paintings, like “The Battle of Zama,” by Giulio Romano ((1492-1546), Collection of the Pushkin Museum. See the foot soldier in the center left front with the red tunic. The stylization is typical.

Here are some digital representations of the painting by Romano. It’s interesting to note the color variations among the digi-images. Also worth noting are the source pages, demonstrative of digi-exchange portals for reproductions of original oil paintings.

http://fotobank.ru/image/BR01-2686.html

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/655514/73494/Battle-of-Zama-painting-attributed-to-Giulio-Romano-1521-in

http://www.bridgemanartondemand.com/art/78349/The_Battle_of_Zama_202_BC_1570-80

>

The second iteration of the golem is an overpainting that “depicts” a disembodied Cyclops head, an abstract (mixed media) ceramic sculpture positioned on an unorthodox pedestal, and a disc. I used glazes for a sexy antique layer effect (opacity/composite - umber). There are references to Surrealist auto-visual arrangement and dimensionist “white cube” installation strategies.

>

The third iteration combines the first two in Photoshop. In my computer the file exists in a print-ready format. The web-ready versions are on view through both AFH Blogs, on Flickr and via Twitter. The AFH Flickr photoset includes raw digital photos of the painting(s) in the first two phases.

Here are the three iterations (so far) of my golem.

http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/golem1.jpg

http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/golem2.jpg

http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/golem7.jpg

CYCLOPS AND DAD

We can take the process further. The first iteration of the next painting is called “Dad.” The second is called “Cyclops and Dad.” Instead of mashing the two iterations for a third immediately, I built an animation (“I Love You, Monster 2”) using the second version of the painting, with visually related paintings from the series added to the animation mix for texture and to broaden the data pool/thematic reach/visual material.  I built the audio from a CD entitled “Daytime Nighttime,” recorded in 1988 by my friends of PAR3 (Jim, Tim, Joe Keyes; Scott O’Grady). I did the cover art 20 years ago.

A note on timelines: In any sort of collaborative production work, it’s typical for old and new concepts and work to organically recycle through an ongoing project. I mention the dates and details to illustrate this. For a richer backstory on the Cyclops figure, for example, see my blogpost for Question C of the European Graduate School application. It’s helpful here, with regards the interplay between old and new media, to mention that, at least in my work, animation is an extension dimensional painting practice. At this point in the “I Love You, Monster” production, the various timelines are connected to the center like anemone tentacles. The layer we’re most concerned about in CURSOR probably is the published – what might be thought of as the surface – cross-section of the overall production trajectory. What should at this point be obvious is that the transparency of that surface, the access it seems to provide to the creative component of the production, and the manufacturing sequence, is in reality a function of fluid dynamics, to borrow and reassign a term from an ancient Western science.

An example of this quality of dimensional production dynamics would be the intraplay of the new paintings in light and dark environments. “Cyclops” is the marker piece in the production sequence for this particular technical advance. The technical “problem” (a painting’s relationship to external light sources) is one I’ve explored for over twenty years. Whole bodies of work, including those pertaining to internal illumination versus light reflection as metaphysical qualifications of art, have been devoted to this study, which is fundamental to dimensional art presentation (see “Inside>Outside,” 2000, DDDD exhibit at the Parthenon Museum in Nashville, especially the lightboxes, and the handheld/-energized activation tools). In the “I Love You, Monster” series, I applied fluorescent and luminescent paints to the canvas in layers of varying exposure (some covered by matte paint, some on the surface) to build paintings that “read” one way when lighted and entirely differently in a darkened room. The relevance of sampling music from “Daytime Nighttime,” therefore, is clarified. In the course of an actual production, however, there is often not enough time in the deadline timeline to allow one to elucidate on such technical aspects in detail, and often finding someone interested in the technicalities is a chore, or rare. In today’s art environment, many “qualified” viewers are interested only in concepts that require no other investment beyond simple intellectual math (a+b=c). An open source platforms requires the dimensional artist to provide the viewer with maximum production transparency, even if that requires of the viewer intellectual geometry, algebra or calculus. This is after all what makes the medium, as well as the artwork, more “realistic.”

A note on the visual components of the broader concept narrative: both “Golem” and the Dad/Cyclops paintings emerged (the Cyclops, to make the point finer, re-emerged, and that can also be said of “Dad,” who is also a previous portrait subject) during a new collective project featuring Jim and Tim Keyes, my old college pals. We reconnected via email/phone. The production is called “I Love You, Monster,” a quote from Jim’s 3 year-old son Christian, who said that to me, just before he gave me a hug. Some pre-production drawings were executed in my father’s hospital and rehab rooms in West Virginia in June. I mention these facts, because the narrative is not a simple conceptual construct. It is in fact, combinative, containing thematic (in the more traditional sense) threads that course through the many facets of the production. However, it should be clear by the above examples and others in CURSOR that the dimensional process combines anecdotes/elements from “Real Life” that are introduced in “Real Time” throughout both the development processes and exhibition or presentation. The strategies are not necessarily new, but some of the tactics certainly are. The new media encourage timeliness. The old media objectified the striving for timelessness. The PAR3 song used in the animation is titled “In Real Life.”

The Golem narrative evolved from my Thesis project, in the discussion of corporate personhood and AI. In some ways the two narratives intersect (Thesis and new project). In the actual production, the conceptual lines or divisions are blurring. In each Golem facet of the art production, the narrative is conveyed as the articulation of independent agency. Conceptually, the Golem is tracing the manifestation of corporate intelligence throughout the social and corporate systems.

The second half of the animation demonstrates some 4D effects involving symmetry and layer effects. The audio is several-layered and effected, with the song slowed to 79% of the original (used by permission, of course). I’m including (as a linked notation below; the first and second animations, it should be noted are simply the first two increments in the much longer “I Love You, Monster” movie, one of several that will be exhibited ultimately as part of the whole) the first “I Love You, Monster” animation, which incorporates “Dad” and “The Golem #1” into a syncopated repetitive sequence with screengrabs from the game “Call of Duty.” I ran one of those screengrabs through the Photoshop mill, to produce a narrative image, depicting the Golem at the end of a long workday on his Santa Fe adobe abode. The audio was recorded on a digital recorder through headphones. The game’s software had frozen, and the soundtrack was frozen in a loop, as you hear it. Finally, I mashed up iterations one and two. The “glitch” is the point here. Within the context of dimensional production, a “mistake” or a “technical failure” is as valuable as a perfectly executed artistic move, and is in fact identical to one, if it correctly demonstrates the nature of the medium that produces the effect.

The paintings are here:

http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/dad.jpg

http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/Dad_cy.jpg

http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/Dad_cy2.jpg

The animations are here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XxbkNyJEBs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpSNlqtIuaQ

TRANSLATION

The third example is a short story from the ZEELIO cycle of texts. It is written with the unarticulated subtext, “Zeelio has been reading Cormac McCarthy again.” I subjected the short story to online translation (from English to French, French to German, German back to English). The results are interesting. One deduction potentially drawn from the exercise is, “Without human intervention/correction, mechanical translation is usually inadequate.” However, this deduction would ignore the effect on the text caused by its migration through the several languages. There are others, with respect to the generative or creative, even aesthetic qualities or features of digital interpretation. In short, as it translates, the software reorganizes and alters, but does its output qualify as creation?

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=854

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=855

http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=856

CURSOR 6

CURSOR6: On comparing media continued (The girl and the window)

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

INTRODUCTION

Over the weekend I took a few paintings to a place where a group of friends were meeting to show them my new work. Previously I has spoken with one of them, and asked her what kind of painting she preferred. She replied, approximately, “landscapes with a hidden valley, like purple mountain majesty; children playing on a beach; and the girl looking out a window – you’re wondering: ‘what is she thinking?”

When I presented the fairly abstract landscape paintings I had brought with me to this particular friend, she turned away from them almost immediately, and tried to explain, to communicate a refined vision of what her painting preference is. Again, approximately, she said, “For landscapes, I like prints, photographs. With paintings, I like still images. Remember I told you about the kids on the beach, the girl looking out the window? You’re wondering: ‘what is she thinking?”

It took a good night’s sleep to digest what my friend was telling me, and to translate that information, so it would be helpful in a dimensional framework. Here are some interesting, important and valuable deductions that arose from that exchange:

1.     Painting as a format for perceptual exchange is mobile. Mobility, or transportability, is valuable with regards vehicles for the transfer or stimulation of sentience. Paintings at one time were embedded objects, and Frank Stella has written and lectured about this, from a painter’s perspective. This is a seminal paragraph from Stella’s book on the subject, Working Space (1986):

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live. This is what painting has always been about. Sadly, however, the current prospects for abstraction seem terribly narrowed; its sense of space appears shallow and constricted. This seems ironic when we remember that painting had to work so hard to create its own space, or perhaps more accurately, had to work so hard to free itself from architecture. This latter effort is, in effect, the drama that began to play itself out in the sixteenth century; it began with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and ended with Caravaggio’s Calling St. Matthew. By becoming more of an artist than a craftsman, more of an individual professional – what we now call self-employed – the Renaissance artist began to direct himself away from decoration and illustration, away from altarpieces and fresco cycles, toward his newfound responsibility: the creation of his own space. This is the task to which Caravaggio addressed himself with amazing success.

NOTATIONS

To extrapolate from Stella’s argument, for the purposes of our dimensional discussion of old and new media: the mobilization of painting as a medium for perceptual exchange, or social networking, was a consequence of technical and logistical advances in painting, innovations in painting formats and exchange. Painting, findings suggest, therefore might be thought of as Western Civilization’s first mobile (visual media) communication tool, an early ancestor of the iPhone, if you will, intricately related to developments in linguistic transmission methods and devices.

The touring exhibition descends through this progression. Tours of paintings and collected artworks emerged, as productions of immense popularity, shaping Western ideas of entertainments, in intervening centuries. Artworks and exhibits to the present have packed (as in the current concept of packaging cultural or educational data for sale or other purposes) tremendous social import and impact. To angle the subject, the touring exhibition was Western Civilization’s first modern social network tool. The production could be formatted for private or public presentation. Picasso’s “Guernica” is a good 20^th Century example. To trace the painting’s movements and effects is highly illustrative of the medium’s potential cultural force and value. Also worthwhile to consider is “Guernica” in relation to the town, historical events, ancillary works and reproductions, and political ramifications, throughout the painting’s lifespan through to the present. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting) for a helpful documentation, set of links.

The phenomenal evolution in painting space Stella describes as a duo-dimensional construct (I would argue for great complexity) provided the dimensional foundation for these advances. The connections Stella makes between Leonardo/Caravaggio and Mondrian/Newman are correct, and point to dimensional phenomena (the “window” or plane and its peculiar pictorial/perceptual qualities and the animation of space through the use of color in shaped or 3D planes in space). To understand Stella’s theoretical associations and discoveries is to witness his own artistic progression, as in sequences and patterns evolving over time.

Another significant consequence of the mobile medium - as a multidimensional, multi-faceted progression evolutionary in nature (waveform, more specifically, and wovenform) - is the emergence of Western Civilization’s art market. Stella’s argument focuses on players (artists of note) who demonstrated what are recently termed best practices. Therefore, Stella’s argument skews the discussion towards the technical, and away from the economics of productivity that a dimensional study would address.

The European art markets first blossomed in a timeframe that contains both Leonardo and Caravaggio, and has with some interruptions continued to flourish through the present, beyond Mondrian and Newman. The reader might return to Cursor 5 for a refresher on Mondrian’s “second life,” as represented in the links I provided. Today, the art market is undergoing a major transformation, as these links evidence, which to some degree will obviate the structural realities that facilitated the initial and subsequent flowerings of the European art market. For one thing, the field of play is now as global as the telecommunications structure, or even further, as global as the satellite array in the space enveloping Earth. However, to divorce the relationship between the art (in all its facets) to which Stella refers, from the phenomena we are witnessing (and participating in) today, is wrong, or at least incorrect. To fail to attribute the success of today’s innovations to those successes is simply disingenuous as it is consequential, which is not to say that there are not forces who endeavor to do just that.

During the timeframe to which Stella refers initially (Leonardo/Caravaggio, the art auction takes form. Complex job descriptions, parameters and affiliations for art, artists and their representatives develop, including guilds, dealerships and the regulation of the exchange of artworks. (See “The History of Art Markets,” Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, especially Section 6). Trade in paintings necessitates a very sophisticated system of transport, navigation and negotiation.

To argue that the contemporary phenomenon of iTunes is unrelated to these developments would be specious. In fact, art has pushed all aspects of modern perceptual technology and social economy from the time art migrated off the altar and into the rest of the community (in material form). The real problems confronting stakeholders in the old versus new media conundrum really impact the corporations that have occurred, especially since the early 1800’s. These modern corporations have managed to glean significant percentages of profits from almost all social activities, including those defined as artistic or creative. Copyright law has reinforced this corporate hegemony, since the 1920’s. To suggest that the obstacles posed to perceptual progress by corporate control of media are prodigious is to understate.

2.     The camera has displaced the traditional documentary function of the artist’s eye/hand/technique. The hinge is “Manifest Destiny landscape painting,” which was displaced by photographers like Anselm Adams and Curtis. I won’t spend more time here on this rich topic, but would suggest the reader Google “Manifest Destiny landscape painting,” Anselm Adams and Edward G. Curtis. One thing I would add is a suggestion to consider the Panorama.

3.     My friend’s attraction to “The Girl Looking Out the Window painting” is buttressed by a Google search. Granted, the prowess of a painter could be metered in his ability to render 3D/light effects on canvas in paint, and the girl gazing out the window is as good as any subject as a test of painterly representational skill. The icing on this cake, the difference between an “A” or “A+” would be whether the painting/painter could get the viewer to wonder what the girl was thinking. The genius of Leonardo and his “Mona Lisa” is revealed by his reconfiguration of this normative formula. Leonardo established the picture surface plane as the window and the viewer as the object of the subject’s thoughts, a magical accomplishment of artistic animation. This dimensional rotation changed the pictorial world. To comprehend the advances of Caravaggio (color animating movement of 3D form within pictorial space), Mondrian (infinite lines, configurations, modular formations, color combinations, etc. existing beyond the canvas edge, so the window reveals a “snapshot”), and Newman (color fields animating architecture) is to recognize how art helped everyone imagine worlds and technologies that did not exist when the painting was executed by the artist.

CURSOR 5

CURSOR5: On comparing media (Continued)

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

INTRODUCTION: MUSHROOMS VERSUS PEYOTE

Comparing old and new entails timeframing. To timeframe, one has to posit a timeline. Dimensional analysis allows one to build multiple timelines for trans-reference for complex comparisons. We’ll use this approach as a platform for a comparison of old and new media, media in this case referring to artist tools.

In my dimensional analysis on vision, I introduced the notion of sentience as something that can be infused by the maker into the made thing. The object example was the Samurai sword.

I also discussed the computer, not as a “moron,” which is how Peter Drucker regarded computers – but as a vehicle and receptacle for human sentience. The computer essentially is now a collaborator with the artist in some very sophisticated creative operations.

To characterize the role of a computer in new media as collaborative touches re-introduces AI in the discourse. Rather than define the functional relationship of role to machine as one of intelligence, and skewing the exploration to the epistemic perspective, I prefer to paint the issue as one of sentience. For the dimensional analysis, the second approach is more successful and comprehensive.

Art in traditional 2D formats is directional, linear and optic. Sculpture adds a spatial dimension (sculpture, meaning “plop art” that the viewer can walk around). The computer provides a context, a 4D, because it adds a virtual space within which an “object” may be situated. Recognizing that “life” was the 4D in traditional formats, we can begin to comprehend the “second life” that can exist in the digital format.

>

Comparison is an epistemological, dualistic action. The symbolic structure is this versus that, or <a v. b>, as a notation. “Like” and “unlike” are generally folded into a subsequent qualitative assumption, which can provide material for the construction of horizontal or vertical hierarchies or lists, or classes.

>

Sentience is not dualistic, and is not epistemological, and does not adhere to linearity in relation to time, or if it does, it does so paranormally, as in a metaphysical perceptual complex that attaches nicely to vision.

I would offer the psychotropic mushroom and peyote plants as examples of this assumption. For this example to be useful, one must view the discussion through the lens of the indigenous. In other words, one has to accept the idea that mushrooms and peyote are sentient beings.

The lifespan of a mushroom is brief – about 18 hours. The lifespan of a peyote button is long – in the hundreds of years potentially. Let’s presume one mushroom and one peyote button contain an equal dose of sentience. The intensity of sentience in the two plants therefore is dispersed disparately. For a mushroom sentience occurs with great compression. For peyote sentience unfolds over centuries. “Occur” and “unfold” are admittedly problematic, but let’s be practical.

A human being’s lifespan on average is much longer than a mushroom’s and much shorter than a mature peyote plant. If a person ingests the mushroom, in an exchange of sentience that might be partially described by the idea of consumption-for-effect, he may experience and alteration of his senses that could be described as intensifying his sentience to attune to the lifespan of a mushroom, with the perceptual qualities of a mushroom’s experience of “life;” same thing for the peyote. In both cases, the person ingesting the plants characterizes the resultant alteration of perception as “vision.”

COMPARISONS (exercise)

·      http://www.electricboogiewoogie.com (Net art by Rafaël Rozendaal)

·      http://www.amazon.com/Broadway-Boogie-Woogie-Mondrian-Poster/dp/B000MYKFIQ (“Broadway Boogie Woogie” poster on Amazon.com)

·      http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78682 (MoMA catalog entry online, with helpful multimedia, including audio commentary; when I checked it out, the image wasn’t available)

·      http://www.artchive.com/viewer/z.html (“Broadway Boogie Woogie” in the simpatico artchive.com viewer)

·      http://www.flickr.com/photos/rutke/723456919/ (One of many candid photographic/snapshot portraits of “Broadway Boogie Woogie” available on the web, since MoMA permitted cameras in the museum – in most collections; for a more involved discussion on this topic, see the following bullet)

·      http://www.nysun.com/arts/surreptitious-snapshots/48077/ (New York Sun article, “Surreptitious Snapshots” by Ruth Graham)

·      http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art/index.html (For a comparison of the subject matter from a divergent analytic framework – “Art and Synesthesia: in search of the synesthetic experience” by Dr. Hugo Heyrman)

·      http://www.stephen.com/mondrimat/ (“The MONDRIMAT is a simple system which lets you experiment with space, color and visual rhythm in accordance with the theories of Piet Mondrian.” – from the website)

·      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fmiKOOvLUo (Animation by UnterEumel; paintings by Mondrian, music by Phillip Glass – which bring us full circle to the work by Rafaël Rozendaal, which I think seems to complete this video)

QUESTIONS

·      How have the camera and computer re-contextualized the artwork “Broadway Boogie Woogie?”

·      How has the technology intervened in the viewer’s experiential transaction with the object, or altered the museum visit as an action or operation, in terms of primary or secondary (etc.) experience; what effect does this have on viewer memory of the art object (keep in mind the NY Sun article, with its description of reproduction for home use

·      Consider “property” in terms of the issues raised by the Sun article, and its relevance to seeing, expanding from the limited parameters of art to the world external to the museum (a very complex move, introducing the notion of the museum architecture creating a “life” separate from “real life,” or the museum as medium)

CONSIDERATIONS

We are beginning to encounter underpinning narratives linked to art, seeing, and old v. new media. Consider the fact that copyright laws pertained to artwork after 1923 (one timeline). What portions of an artwork can be owned, or protected by copyright? This is not only a legal supposition, and new media is splitting the seams of this ownership contention, as demonstrated in the material above.

Having visited MoMA many times, and viewed Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” in that shifting context (several timelines in play), and having studied Mondrian through texts, including autobiographical passages and theoretical work, and having walked Broadway in Manhattan many times, and listened to much jazz – I have a very complex and rich relationship with this oil painting. I must consider that millions of other people have encountered “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” too.  Some of them, like I have, applied their encounter with the painting in the creation of secondary artworks, or applied concepts and/or techniques Mondrian utilized in the making of “Broadway Boogie Woogie” in conceptual or technical progressions or productions of their own. This painting has profound “reach.”

Consider how the onset of computer- and camera-based technologies have expanded the painting’s reach, and re-organized it. Consider how the painting exists as a painting, a reproduction, or a set of pixels in millions of unique or shared binary code files. Which of these iterations of “Broadway Boogie Woogie” is real? Finally, consider the relationship of Piet Mondrian to the painting. Piet Mondrian died in 1944. Mondrian executed “Broadway Boogie Woogie” 1942-43. It was one of his final major actions as an artist.

>

ENDNOTE

Art is a “drug” with similar behaviors to other perception-affecting agents (see mushroom v. peyote discussion above), especially with respect to time. This assumption will be helpful as we continue to explore the relationship of new to old media, and contextualize the epistemological, comparative analysis to the dimensional analysis employing the notion of sentience.

“Mondrian was never freer and more colorful, and closer to the city spectacle in its double aspect of the architectural as an endless construction of repeated regular units and of the random in the perpetual movement of people, traffic, and flashing lights.” Meyer Schapiro, Mondrian - On the Humanity of Abstract Painting

CURSOR 4

CURSOR4: On comparing media

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

INTRODUCTION

Comparative juxtaposition of new media to “old” is worth doing.  Such a comparison suggests points of departure or origination for an enlightening dimensional analysis. Really, the old/new media opposition is an apples-to-oranges fallacy, but don’t tell that to the art world! You would be depriving art mediators of a rich supply of canon fodder.

Western art is rooted in a dualistic system, primarily epistemological. How old and new (fill in the blank) comport is typically the stuff of lectures and essays by experts. One job of the art expert is to populate the walls of the museum or gallery with justifications. To get a picture of the status quo on our topic, Google “old versus new media art.” As a point of departure for dimensional analysis, the relevance of the topic is made clear: This isn’t just a problem for artists.

As my friend Jason Coulston put it, in the context of discussion about my recent 4D landscape series and an experience he recently had on a beach near his Costa Mesa home: “Captured data has become more important than raw data. If you can paint that, I’d love to see it.” (http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=833)

Earlier this evening I spoke with my former apprentice Shane Kennedy about research he’s doing on Twitter. Recently Twitter was hacked, Shane said, and the company’s internal memos were published on the web. What struck Shane was the Twitter people don’t really know what they’ve created or what its effects on people will be. I suggested that tweeters are being trained to translate complex thought into an extremely reductive format, which requires an inventive operation of personalized or learned linguistic coding, and the real-time numerical adjudication necessitated by the 140 character limit. As for the consequences, I’ve already noticed that critique as a practice is being impacted. The phenomenon began with MySpace commentary, likely was refined significantly by texters, then found its nexus in Twitter. Twitter started in 2006 as a side project and as of February 2009 hosts more than 7 million users (although their retention rate is less than fifty percent, according to Neilson). Art historian Shelley Esaak (who blogs at About.com), Ruth Jamieson of The Guardian, and others have commented on visual art identified with or reliant upon Twitter. Some genius has coined a name for visual art that is Twitter-specific: twart; which is possibly one of the most lamentable titles for an art genre ever invented.

Digital art is, as Twitter demonstrates, contributing tools to the artist toolbox at an astounding pace. Although suggesting that twart is art requires bending or busting the traditional definition of art (painting, sculpture), other new media tools for artists, like Twitter in its upgraded iteration, don’t even rely upon computers for production. Witness SteveJohn’s iPhone artworks (published on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/frommystudio/). The following paragraphs derive from the artist’s statement in his Flickr profile:

I created my very first artworks back in November 2008 with iPhone apps on a 1st generation iPod Touch. Things have moved on quite a bit since then both in the development of my work and in app development. I now use an iPhone 3G and an iPod Touch 2G. The iPhone has allowed me to use Photography in my work and the improving quality and range of creative apps has led to higher quality Artwork.

I feel it is important to emphasise that I create all of my Artworks solely on an iPhone with apps from the App Store. Any modifications to photographs that I take on my iPhone or Paintings are done inPhone. My work is Never! processed pre/post production with any other desktop software and never goes anywhere near a computer accept when I store them in iPhoto etc.

>

Today, I tutored my friend David Mix in Photoshop. He’s a musician who needs the imaging software to design flyers and invitations for gigs. My pal is also a digital photographer. His father is Walter Mix, an outstanding painter who instructed students at Mt. Sac and CGU for decades and is recognized as a prominent figure in the area’s most famous generation of artists, which includes Walter Benjamin and others, known as the California Hard Edge Abstractionists. In the Walters’ era, the art teacher taught craft as a discipline inseparable from art. The definitions of art and artist in the intervening years have expanded exponentially. Today, a person may self-identify as an artist (take SteveJohn as an example), based on very different criteria.

QUESTION:

Do you think this is a good or bad thing? Why?

CURSOR 3

CURSOR: On art and social networks (continued)

Paul McLean

For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)

ART

What does artistic choice mean in the digital medium? Referencing data mining practices and nomenclature is helpful to the dimensional artist exploring meaningful options in his work. Almost any digital application for artistic purposes will require migration into the dimensional domain by the practitioner. Some artists in this transitional era desire to expand their toolset from traditional artist tools (like painting in oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, etc.; sculpting in hard or soft natural or artificial materials; drawing in pencil, charcoal, pastel, ink, etc.; and so on) to include digital tools for expression or articulation. Some artists (usually, though not exclusively, younger artists) opt to focus solely on digital tools for creative fulfillment, but seek to participate in the Western Art tradition or lineage, which is interlinked with the traditional media.

At present, in the post-Critical Discourse, artistic choice is afforded an expanded significance. Now, choice is parsed and de-constructed, and pre-observed (locally or remotely, in fact or abstractly), and has for decades been argued over, in essence establishing – whether correctly or not – “choice” as its own medium, with a set of caveats, predeterminations, qualifications, corrections pre-applied to its expression. The modern battles over the nature of choice and choice’s relationship to artistic motivations and outcomes are not neutral. That is to say, these efforts to pertain psychology, Marxist politics in various iterations, culture studies, gender studies, conservative ideology, religious perspectives, corporate economic “realities” and so on to artistic choice are dictations of intent, which may or may not have anything to do with art.

So, what is an artist to do? A blank canvas, a color preference, a content selection, a brush gesture or key-punch now is no longer simply an opportunity for creative action, or so the critic would argue, and never was. The attachment of critique in the dominant position collectively constitutes for the artist a conditional layer composited on the artwork, and the making of it, in part and whole, which the artist ignores at the risk of being critically shunned.

As should be obvious, this hierarchy is fundamentally not technical, but epistemological. It does, however, produce technical effects. It also certainly produces cultural and political consequences. If the artist is beholden to the critic in this system, then the artist’s creative freedom is vulnerable to the critic’s agenda-based approval.

To understand the artistic value of horizontal social networks, at least in their emergent stages, is to recognize the cleverness of artists in developing freedom-enhancing response systems. When confronted with oppressive force(s), arrayed in vertical topologies, artists will tend to move fluidly and laterally, rather than engaging directly. History explains this tendency, in terms of survival response, attuned to the maintenance of productivity levels. If upward progress is retarded, artists will engage modal responses that involve reflexivity (such as inward-looking exercises, as in the personal narrative), superficial documentation (such as surface representation), metaphysical lyric (such as hyperbolic illustration of moral maxims), and nonsense (such as lists of things). This is by no means an exhaustive account.

I would argue that the transmigration to dimensional practice began as a modal response, but developed into a systemic phenomenon, fundamentally reorganizing and reasserting perception. One manifestation, or precursor, or pre-condition of the phenomenon is mechanical symmetry.  In dimensional analysis, the spectrum of pertinence and descriptive/applicable values of symmetry are so instrumental as to be structurally ubiquitous. Precedents can be found in many systems of decorative design. Symmetry is in creative production trans-cultural and –historical. Symmetry is, in one sense, the materialized anti-timeline.  It should not be surprising that symmetrical form is routinely attached to architectures that house spiritual elevation practices, especially the visionary sort. It should also not be surprising that symmetry is plentiful in societies of significant technical achievement that for whatever reasons have determined to highly restrict figuration for artistic representation.

Understanding horizontal social networks on the web with respect to artist applications and communications requires a comprehension of lateral modal movement by artists in response to oppressive vertical hierarchies. To do such an analysis, one must recognize that art is not only a visual medium, but an oral medium as well.

Study of apprentice relationships among artisanal traditions is helpful. Engagement in one is even more helpful, for elucidation of art’s dependence on language for survival. As educators know, some students learning best by watching processes and observing outcomes. Others progress through hands-on engagement. Still other students, probably most, are best served by a hybrid of observational and hands-on illustration of technique. The “why” of art is attached to the “what” and “how” of art by means of communication from teacher to student, student to teacher (in the form of query or comment), and peer to peer. Transmission of art from generation to generation is therefore a complex procedure combining fabrication, observation and linguistic transmission.

EXERCISE

Using “Technology Note prepared for Management 274A; Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA; Bill Palace, Spring 1996 (http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/index.htm), let’s explore social networks on the web dimensionally.

QUESTIONS:

·      Describe how artists are organized into groups

o   In society

o   In the academy or school

o   In associations

o   Demographically

o   Other ways, especially as demonstrative of reactive organizational behaviors among artists, especially those that might be characteristic of identity choices

·      Integrate Palace’s definitions of classes, clusters, associations and sequential patterns into your considerations.

·      Scan Palace’s “five major elements” of data mining. If you were attempting to describe artists instead of data, how might Palace’s process-elements be redefined to “paint a (dimensional) picture” of the artist and art? What are the effects of associations? What kinds of artist relationships yield the most productive artist output? What are the variances?

·      As you begin to build a profile, link analysis and transactions, especially with regards art and artist as type, object or subject of desire or expressive value, and potential “reach” of transmission.

·      What do you learn about the recent trends towards artists working in collectives, both virtual and “actual?” What kinds of architectures are developing to serve the needs of such associations? What kinds of impacts does collective association have on individual artistic performance?

Moving forward with Palace’s summary, consider his rules of analysis. Consider the terminology. There are important clues to dimensional practice to be found here.

Asymmetry, non-linearity, prediction, teachable “resembling biological neural networks in structure”…

Optimization (as in genetics), combination, mutation (unpredicted or unpredictable outcomes of combinations), selection (based on “survival of the fittest”)…

Decision Trees, “representing sets of decisions” for the purposes ultimately of predicting outcomes based on rules…

Nearest Neighbor, positing similar into combinative average sameness…

If-then rules…

(Finally) Data visualization: The visual interpretation of complex relationships in multidimensional data. Graphics tools are used to illustrate data relationships.

CONSIDERATIONS

As a cursory scan of the various elements introduced in the above text might suggest, dimensional analysis is currently applied in many directions all at once: by business interests, artists, scientists (computational and biological, to list two, not to mention the “soft” scientists) and so on. Palace continues by asking, “What technological infrastructure is required?” I would suggest we might continue by asking, what sort of society will emerge from dimensional analysis? In my thesis I addressed effects of Management as a discipline on the fabric of human society. The results of that inquiry were in some aspects exceedingly grim. The motivations of the data miner are as important as the size of the database and the query complexity, if one introduces a moral component into the analysis. Introducing a political component is similarly important, if one considers that power and the enforcement of power is a realistic concern, when the query broadens, as by the question, “What will be done with the data mined?”