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.
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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.
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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.
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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
