RE: [-empyre-] Modern Antiques, a drone repeating the obvious, perhaps

["Dirk Vekemans" <dv@vilt.net>]

 G.H.Hovagimyan wrote
> Obviously, this may be overly simple but I?d rather discuss 
> art than philosophy. I also believe in elevating art rather 
> than debasing it or subsuming it to some other discipline 
> such as philosophy or science or politics.
> As for art and politics, I really believe that being an 
> artist is a political act in and of itself. It is an 
> engagement is a high level discourse with the 
> political/social arena. It is similar to the dialog/discourse 
> between sculpture and archtecture.
> 

Sorry for being so slow and obstinate in my foolishness and reducing your
message to what is obvious and simple to most, skipping the inspiring part
that others have taken up, but :

- given the self-inflating turn each discussion of 'art' and modernity seems
to bring about
- acknowledging that i too would rather discuss art and the question before
us on its own terms although i wouldn't know how to do so

how does one go about avoiding the philosophical/ontological if you notice
that time and again the arty discussion of art and the art-immanent
discussion of the modern paradigma starts eating itself, generating nothing?

Now i don't know if what i produce is art, i prefer not to bother myself
with the question, calling it nAârt to further the presumptious and imposing
analogy with Schwitters work and his idea of Merz, but i do think there are
basically 2 ways out of the dilemma that would IMHO not debase art nor
elevate it ( i do have a problem with thinking in 'levels'). Now these two
ways are by no means my invention, i think i'm only trying to name events
that are already and very obviously taking place as we speak. So:

1. take up the challenge and try to incorporate the art praxis in a broader
philosophical framework leading to a multiplicity of practices that engage
our societies in as many ways as where the particular framework seems
applicable. This is the 'hard way' i have been describing, of which i hope
that others may be more succesful in the future then the meagre steps of
initiation that i have to show for and some of the people here have already
made more telling accomplishments in this way.
 A bit paradoxical, i think it's important to stress the primate of
authorship (along with a transhuman notion of humbleness) here in order to
avoid holism, sollipsism and any urge to accredit power to any framework,
since they all serve but the pragmatic end of engaging our societies in an
attempt to help steering the actual in a positive direction fully
acknowledging the absence of any finality. In any case this way isn't any
way out at all if you don't launch, simultaneously

0. a multidisciplinary, transvergent scientific research incorporating art
in its programmability. Here i need to refrain myself further because my
knowledge on this terrain is more zilch than the next-to-nada in way#1, but
i 'd like to point my little trembling finger to how generative art is
quickly establishing itself as a discipline that is related to art by the
fact that we can only perceive it as art, but that from a point of view
that, again, i can only identify as philosophical, might be better of with a
more 'telling' name. Now i do not see it this way, but the zero here could
be interpreted as a reduction of art, but only in the sense that art is
approached as a process that involves algorhytmically definable steps that
can be taken to generative systems (hence the programmability). 

Now, coming back to the question that initiated this discussion and its
flight into the technological, i would like to add two more points, of which
the second i think is extremely important:

1. our 20th century experience with the Modern may turn out to be an
exceptionally rich resource for finding algorhytms that contribute in way
#0, because of course the artists involved witnessed, co-engineered and
commented its possibility

2. the same experience might stand out as a warning not to attempt to
humanise the machine because that only leads to further mechanise it and
alienate us from it, but instead to continually try to further machinise the
machine, allowing it its own plane of consistency that is co-incidental with
our own. Here i think is where i find the reason for my rather intuitive
avoidance of thinking in levels, because thinking in levels here instead of
acknowledging that the human plane and the machine plane are one and the
same, would make the seeming paradox (i have that straight from Deleuze's
Fold along with the mechanical-machinical distinction) into a real
contradiction and lead us nowhere but to further episodes of beau-drilled
Matrices with its doomishly attractive futuristic human-machine wars
comfortly averting our eyes from the real and present war victimising real
people every day.

[drone,drone]
dv