Re: [-empyre-] poetics...

[Kenneth Newby <knewby@sfu.ca>]

Hi Jim,

Well... it was obvious to me, and the others in our group I think, that 
the idea of a computational aesthetics was not an appropriate 
description for the approaches to digital media we wanted to research, 
the genealogical precedents we were interested in (as Aleksandra has 
begun to articulate) and the kind of work we wanted ourselves to make 
coming out of these explorations.  This, largely because of the deep 
tap-root of meaning in the word aesthetics itself which grounds it 
firmly in perception and most commonly visual perception at that.  It 
later modulated in Kant and Baumgarten into a sense of taste and its 
criticism then further into art as form etc..  This focus on the 
perceptual, sensitive/sensual and abstract tends towards a devaluing of 
the role of art as a mode of knowing the world.

The preference of poetics in place of aesthetics arose from a 
revisiting of Aristotle's Poetics.  A couple of brief quote might help 
illuminate this.  Here he is discussing the difference between various 
genres of poetics such as comedy and tradedy:

"imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain 
magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, 
the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play"

"Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine 
its quality- namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, 
Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the 
manner, and three the objects of imitation. And these complete the 
fist. These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a 
man; in fact, every play contains Spectacular elements as well as 
Character, Plot, Diction, Song, and Thought."

	from: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt

Note that Aristotle's use of even the word poetry here is in no way 
limited to simply an oral verbal articulation much less a strictly a 
written one.  In particular Thought and Spectacle are of interest here 
as they point simultaneously towards what we otherwise might consider 
the performative aspects of a life and its grasp of the world.  Any 
time-based artform, of which we consider computational media 
performance to an exemplar, is at its core an image of thought and, in 
its performative nature a spectacular undertaking.  Aristotle's 
characterization of a poetic form, such as tragedy, looks like a 
layered complex of elements of which the verbal is only one aspect of 
the textual nature of the whole.  This model of a time-based form of 
expression fits very nicely with the notions of a processual braiding 
that have emerged from years of practice in computational media 
performance.  Even the construction of simple musical process involves 
this layering of several processes inscribed in the text of the 
algorithm that generates the behavior.  When you add a sensing system 
that facilitates interaction with a human agent (performer or 
participant) the poetics of the system become nicely complex.

So, in short, poetics is a more appropriate way of describing our 
interests in its fundamental engagement with performance and the flow 
of time, therefore consciousness/thought.  Its about doing rather than 
being and the opening to public-private ritual that occurs when 
performance is engaged in and cultural meaning is 
created/transmitted/reinforced/transformed in action.

It's interesting... I've known myself as a musician as long as I've 
known myself.  Media art, its theory and practice, is a later 
development but performance was always understood as a fundamental 
given.  Throughout my early education I never "got" poetry.  It seemed 
a dry, abstract experience found in books, trying to extract something 
of a satisfying experience from the printed page.  I only "got" poetry 
after I found myself living next door to a poet while living in San 
Francisco.  Robert used to regularly treat me to readings of his past 
or latest efforts.  It was in these temporal unfoldings of the embodied 
word, with all its paralinguistic nuances and multiple meanings and 
various associations that the penny finally dropped.  I got it... and 
realized clearly what we've lost as a consequence of the loss of 
performance and ritual in our contemporary world.  That's what I'd like 
to recuperate in my own approach to computational media performance.  
That's the source of the desire to nurture the embodied skill of the 
human performer in this work... to avoid the devaluing of the knowledge 
and skill of the hand, the voice, arm, the ear, the eye, etc. etc.  To 
not capitulate to the machine and its speed and accuracy and memory, 
but to use those powers to, hopefully, augment the qualities of the 
first list and allow us to become more skillful, not less.

That's the short, intuitive answer to your question.  Hope it makes 
some sort of sense.

Kenneth.


Art as a mode of knowing.

On 6-Jan-06, at 4:51 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:

> hi kenneth,
>
> i could be wrong, but people may not be connecting the term 
> 'computational
> poetics' very well with what your group is doing, which seems 
> relatively
> specialized within an area not often associated with 'poetics'--though 
> I
> agree the term 'poetics' need be broad enough to comprehend it.
>
> how would you describe the poetics the group is addressing? poetics of
> embodied performance in which computation is...what?
>
> also, how do you understand the term 'poetics'? why that term in what 
> your
> group is doing?
>
> ja
> http://subtle.net/empyre
> http://vispo.com
>
>
>
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