[-empyre-] from 'unfinishedness' to 'Game Off'

[Julian Oliver]

..on or around Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 11:21:58PM -0800, Christina McPhee said:
> "So I still didn’t finish the thought on “unfinishedness,” but do 
> others have thoughts on whether it is necessary for a project to be 
> unfinished or to be immaterial (different but related concepts) for it to 
> be participatory? This is a huge discourse now from Nicolas Bourriaud to 
> Claire Bishop to Jacques Ranciere. But we wonder what art, design, and 
> media creators really think and practice?"

sometimes a /finished/ project can present itself as closed, in the
sense of an artefact sufficiently immutable that it is ready for
interpretation and distribution as a singular cultural object. this is a
legacy from the Fine Arts which traditionally positions the artefact as
a common reference object for purposes of discussion.

in the context of participation - invited or otherwise - an /unfinshed/
project often presents itself as open to participation, to continued
design and/or development. this i see in various open-source tool
development communities quite regularly: in the rare event a 'final
version' is released the tool almost immediately loses cultural value. 

i've been involved in, or have initiated, a few free-software projects
that while being art-oriented also seem to benefit from this productive
bias: if the project was declared 'finished' it would be seen to have
less cultural value, it would be denying the possibility of improvement
and thus the potential of its user-base to innovate upon (or simply
influence) the existant.

in other words, a project that declares itself as a process rather than
an artefact defers completion as an affirmation that there is always
room for growth.

furthermore a 'project' is just an idea, it is always immaterial. a
project is suspended between the expectations of people, their belief in
a supposedly common goal and their work toward that goal. 

a finished project is past tense. i like to think of 'project' in the
sense of projecting or projection: casting an object toward a target or
surface. 

cheers,

-- 
julian oliver
http://julianoliver.com
http://selectparks.net
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