(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.

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 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 2

CURSOR: On art and social networks

Paul McLean

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

INTRODUCTION

CONDITIONS

Reference: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=66566

First, let’s examine the phenomenon of technological innovation in artistic representation, as evidenced in the innovative practices of painter Eakins and Muybridge, whose sequential (4D) photographs mapped the parameters of future development in the field, up to and including the introduction of imaging software for computers.

The rhizome is a fundamental visualization for web technical and social movement.

[See Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1988)]

QUESTIONS:

1.     What is a web ring?

2.     What was MOSAIC?

3.     What is the Internet?

CONSIDERATIONS

With the emergence of the soft sciences, the user must ask, “Who is watching me?” and “What do they want to know?” and “What will they do with that information?” This is because psychology, anthropology and sociology (etc.), due to their methodological utility, have (been) folded into globalist “free market” economics – and the governments controlled or in symbiosis with those organs.

To understand the value of user profiles and interests, and their relationship to dimensional, consumer-focused developments on the web and the global economy, one only has to investigate terms like data mining and cookie and the success of companies like Oracle and WalMart. The implications are political, as indicated by the measures taken by the Bush administration to implicate telecoms (multinational communication corporations) in broadly mandated programs to compile huge databases on American citizens. The cultural effects of these developments are not widely known or understood, outside the labs. Certainly, the consolidation of media is linked to these phenomena. Google dimensional database. In cinematic science fiction, a simple representation occurs in Minority Report, when the action takes place in a retail environment. The key is sequencing or patterns, viewable from multiple perspectives over time.

Generally, data mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is one of a number of analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases.  - From http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm)

OPPOSITION

Disruption of the matrix requires:

·      Destabilizing or disabling the grid

·      Unexpected behaviors, as in an anomaly

·      Confrontation and revelation

CLASS DISCUSSION

Why would Rupert Murdoch purchase, then begin to – in effect – dismantle MySpace? What is Google, and why is it so valuable?

Relate this discussion to issues of privacy and property.

Examples:

·      Who should own my interests, or patterns of economic consumption?

·      Who is responsible for protecting my data (meta-, combinative, dimensional, etc.)?

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?