Re: [-empyre-] meta view

[Mitchell Whitelaw <mitchell.whitelaw@canberra.edu.au>]

On 16/11/2004, at 3:55 PM, Paul Brown wrote:

> maybe the only way to get a
> handle on alife "art" was to create an alife "art critic" and that 
> maybe
> only automata could appreciate automaton-created artworks.
>
> This is an interesting take on your concept of "going beyond".

This is not a silly idea, in fact some people working with artificial 
evolution have discussed the idea of a population of artificial 
"critics" which also evolve, and in fact co-evolve with the artwork. 
Image breeder Steven Rooke (apprently offline now) was one of these... 
Steven's work has always been concerned with a quite metaphysical idea 
of "beyond".

Not silly either is the question as to whether we can hope to recognise 
"good" a-life art... the concept of an artwork constitutes a frame in 
itself (despite a long history of avant-gardist efforts to bust open 
that frame (dada, fluxus, conceptual art, etc)). If what we want from 
a-life art is the other, and the beyond, then if we were to _really_ 
achieve that, why would the resulting work fit in our category of 
"art"? If it was sufficiently adaptive it wouldn't be hanging around on 
a plinth letting people gawk at it. In other words, there's a tension 
here between the known and the alien, the desires for alterity and 
familiarity.

As Edward Shanken argues in a Leonardo article (can trace the ref)... 
life is only ever "life as we know it" - how can it be anything else?

Yet like Melinda, I find that evolved hardware etc etc., contains some 
whiff of the alien which is really thrilling...

Mitchell