[-empyre-] RE: empyre Digest, Vol 33, Issue 17

["Chris Dodds" <chris@iconinc.com.au>]

G.H. comments:

Or let me put it another way, I am an artist, I disagree with the engineers
notion of art and creativity. When you allow an engineer to dictate how you
are creative and what form that takes than you have given up your artistic
freedom.  This is the case in SL.

christo responds:

A Nikon camera is engineered - does this mean photographers have given up
their artistic freedom? A Sony video camera is engineered - does this negate
all video art? The Web is engineered by an extremely limited language - does
this negate web art? Even paint is engineered to a point but no-one
complains that you can't animate it in real-time.

Artists have been disassembling engineered tools for ever - be they paint,
concrete, audio or pixels. By questioning the medium (commercial or
otherwise) and pushing it to an extreme, they have helped us understand it
as a phenomenon. It's possible these engineered interfaces will be the
remote communication tool of a generation. XYers are certainly using them as
creative tools given they've grown up with video games as a dominant medium.
Check out www.selectparks.net to see what artists have been up to with
games. And for an excellent overview by Cannon, go here:
http://www.selectparks.net/rebecca/rcannon_introduction_to_gameart.pdf

Voice, smoke, horse, mail, telegraph, morse, telephone, fax, email, msn,
MUVEs, etc. SL is a tool - social, commercial, sexual, artistic, whatever.
It will rise and fall with the advent of some other tool, and the artists
who feel at home in both "real" and "virtual" space (they're the same) can
help us understand where we're heading and inform us through propositional,
sensory experiences.