[-empyre-] Re: Art Stops for the Second Life tour

[Adam Nash <adam@yamanakanash.net>]

Hi All,
I'm so sorry I couldn't make it to the pony tour last night, my net  
connection went down about 9.30pm. I hope it all went well and  
everyone had a good time.

I was very much hoping to be there to discuss the works, so I thought  
I'd just jot down a couple of points now my connection is back up.

I've noticed that my work is being referred to as 'sound works' and  
I'm keen to not have it ghettoised into 'sound art' or any single  
medium for that matter. I consider my work, and the work of many  
others in SL, to be post-convergent, that is, it contains a range of  
media-elements (sound, vision, architecture, data-response/creation,  
code, network, socialisation etc) working in a symbiotic relationship  
with each other and with the user to create a greater post-convergent  
whole. It approaches the medium (ie, realtime 3d multi-user virtual  
environments, of which SL is just one example) on its own terms.  
Clearly there are precedents, practices and lessons from all the  
discrete media forms involved, and these are synthesised into new  
relationships.

In such a medium, it is inevitable that formalism will play a role,  
and the degree to which this is true is part of the decision making  
process of the artist. Architecture, sound, data, networks, coding  
and socialisation all have rich precedents to draw on in this area.  
Indeed music itself can be seen as a formalist structure based  
entirely on engineering restrictions. Similarly, architecture, data,  
networks, and coding.

Sound is intrinsically important to my work, and indeed the formalist  
conventions of music and sound art are very helpful in designing post- 
convergent works. Interestingly, though, since it is a digital  
medium, it is possible to move away from the engineering restrictions  
of the Western well-tempered scales, and create rational scales of  
any form (this is confusingly known as Just Intonation in music  
theory), which is what I have done in all my works in SL. They all  
use scales of my own devising based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz  
(subjectively, the most pleasing-yet-disturbing tone in all the  
physical world :) proceeding then in ratios of sevens. This is an  
example of the "engineer" designing a system that allows the "artist"  
to move away from forms restricted by "engineering" for hundreds of  
years. Note, though, that I find the distinction between "engineer"  
and "artist" meaningless in post-convergent work.

Coding is also enormously important to my work, as it is the elastic  
glue that orchestrates the relationships of all the media-elements.  
Indeed the majority of time spent on each work is usually time spent  
coding. While it isn't "code art" the practice of coding is amazingly  
artistically fulfilling and reminds me in many ways of the process of  
composing music, only better. It's a shame that many people have the  
idea that coding is the act of typing commands into a computer. Just  
as writers and composers spend far more time thinking than actually  
typing out the words or notes (it's the ideas and relationships that  
are important), so it is with coding. You can do it anywhere and  
often you don't even need a pencil and paper.

The next ten years are going to be so interesting in the development  
of post-convergent media and art. The last ten years have been a  
drag, but it was worth the effort :)

Apologies for the length of the mail, I really wanted to discuss this  
live on the Pony tour last night, but my medium let me down :) Will  
also post this to the list when it re-emerges.

Adam Nash (Adam Ramona)