Re: [-empyre-] experience Vs commerce

[John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>]

Melinda Rackham wrote:
> 
> auriea wrote:
> 
> > unaccessable... one cannot hold onto any of it too tightly but use
> > each project as a stepping stone to something else....
> > the concepts are what you get to hold onto but not the code, perhaps....
> 
> yes i agree that the only way to deal with it is to see net.art as
> ephermeral performative transitory work, as maybe a lot of artists do..

i refuse to accept this notion that net art is to be seen only in terms
of the ephemeral, performative, and transitory, and i'll also insist
that one holds onto both concept *and* code as the code is simply the
language of concept delivery.  i think this is particularly true in
regards to 3d work by the very nature of its language.  specific plugins
and api's may come and go but the basic underlying structure of how a 3d
rendered scene functions is more or less the same regardless of the
specific renderer/dev environment (unless you use something so high
level and abstracted it bears no resemblence to what lies below). a
quaternion is a quaternion, a matrix is a matrix, a transform is a
transform. the cartesian coordinate system isnt going to become
incompatible with IE ver 99.8.

the artist simply needs to be willing to maintain their codebase as the
years go by.  the easiest way to do this is to NOT rely on the obscure
high level abstracted authoring tools but bite the bullet and learn how
its done on the lower level. i'm no rocket scientist, i'm an artist, i
figured it out, so can you.  and there are a lot of really smart people
out there who love to show you how. i've played around with a dozen
different scenegraph api's and every time i look at a new one, it is
easier to grok than the last. porting from one api to another is not
trivial, but it is not even remotely as much work as it is writing the
thing in the first place.

maintaining the codebase also offers the artist the possibility to enjoy
"royalties" from sold work as time goes by.  i fully expect work that i
have sold to cease functioning in the future, and if the owner of that
work wants to see it continue to function, i expect they'll give me a
call. it is in my mind, a way to make up for the fact that the art
market cant yet bear the price for my work equivalent to the work
involved to creating it in the first place. in ten years or so, i expect
i'll get a few calls.

the ultimate solution to the dillema resides in open source renderers,
where in theory i have access to the actual "plugin" code and can modify
and port it from one platfor to the next. in other words, the solution
is to own the tools.

best,
j