Re: [-empyre-] a few questions

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

The Voices in my Head tell me that on 11/6/04 1:21 PM, Paul Brown at
paul@paul-brown.com wrote:

> So the whole concept of authorship, in that sense, is (and always
> has been) meaningless. So this is nothing to do with metacreation.
> To quote Biederman - art is about the evolution of visual knowledge.
> It's not about buying and selling names.

This is a very problematic statement for me, on a number of levels.

I'll detail each after:

First, I would submit that the concept of authorship in ALife art is NOT
meaningless, merely decentered and/or convolved.

Second, saying "art is about the evolution of visual knowledge" is only true
to a very narrow sense of what art is or can be, and has a number of
political and economic relations bound into it that I feel are unwarranted
as I believe it is a completely inadequate and disuseful definition.

Third, saying that art is not about buying and selling names speaks to
platonic notions of knowledge that I find ahistoric and inadequate, and
directly at odds with transparent relations of production and distribution
in the work relative to how art exists in our society. As it relates to
ALife art, it points to the inadequacy of the first notion regarding
authorship.

Uh oh- a minor emergency just came up (nothing desperate - just requiring
attention) and I'll finish this tomorrow. I'll send this off first, though,
so the ideas will be out there, and can be used in other conversations, and
I can reply to myself to "flesh out" my arguments.

gotta go.

HW