(AFH) CURSOR

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.

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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?”

CURSOR 1

CURSOR: Some thoughts on web design

Paul McLean

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

·      Model: http://www.artforhumans.com

INTRODUCTION

The AFH web nexus is a 4D proof. As such it is a layered and multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary object, concept, tool and document, all rolled into one animated phenomenon.

Seven basic, introductory accessions and ruminations relevant to the novice or veteran player, interested in web design (enough to start a worthwhile conversation):

·      The Front Page graphic describes visually the entirety of the model and trans-thesis at play in the rest of the website. The 4D package is conferred freely on the visitor immediately. If he or she goes no further, but stays long enough for the graphic to load, he or she will have received the intended transmission fully. Everything beyond this initial viewer experience is additive. This is profoundly old school.

·      The website contains some acknowledgement of virtually every trend in the Internet evolution, somewhere in its depths, or through explicit or inferred links to outside sources, and in iterations of the AFH web-evolution existing either as documentation or “echoes.” An example would be the original AFH Blog, which is still operational, but which is not directly accessible through the current iteration, except through deeply buried links.

·      On occasion, the web site has been projected into exhibitions as either a vehicle for artwork, a portal or as a standalone artwork, functioning simultaneously as a device in a separate but connected dimension.

·      Content is a key term in the discussion of “What is a website?” Another is (Others are) design or (and) style. These two terms are not identical. However, they can be congruent. To put it differently, style and design are powerful and complex chunks of cultural directive or direction. They can answer questions and pose them, to both viewer and media manager or content creator. They are problematic terms for Epistemology, but not Dimensionism.  Another key term is use, and all its derivatives.

·      Context is a key universal term that considers the environment for the website, content, and activities of the media manager or content creator. This key explains the Internet, points to its fundamental procedures and usages, and suggests the origination of the web’s magical veneer.

·      Contact - This is where the human and the robot/cyborg/AI, etc. function in convergence, then trans-vergence. On one side of the “distance” or “separation” or “space” is the sender, and on the other is the receiver. If only it were that simple. Communication via the Internet has redefined humans and their relationship with “Machines.” A related key term is Sentience. Peter Drucker: “The computer is a moron.” As it turns out, it’s Drucker who’s the moron, in this instance.

·      The remaining key terms frame the discourse as a Dimensional one. The Timeline is comprehensive in its references to history: (events in time and space); the reconfiguration of history; the seamlessness of pixels, as opposed to the evidence of distress due to “real” conditions; the proposition of linearity as narrative imprimatur is unhinged; and so on. Also necessary for the purposes of this introduction are the terms virtual and real.

In the art business, I have found that the bottom line is: what does the computer, electric-based medium do best, and what does it not replace?