[-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Simon Biggs]

On 19/1/09 01:00, Julian Oliver wrote:

> (to these ends some friends and i are planning a workshop on object-oriented
> programming for artists without a single computer in the room..)

Julian

Your comment above suggests you agree with me ­ the digital does not require
a computer. It is an idea, an abstraction, before it is anything else ­ an
idea concerned with language and communication.

Some artists chose to reject the artefact as the basis for art many years
ago. They sought to produce an immaterial art that might not be commodified
or fetishised as object. They probably failed in their objective, but this
was the logic they (and I) pursued. What originally attracted me to
computing as a medium was its immaterial character ­ it was just numbers,
abstract signifiers. You could make them do anything and there was no
requirement to fix them in relation to a signified. The relationships you
were creating could remain fluid and playful. This remains (for me) the
compelling characteristic of computers.

When I taught introductory classes in Ocomputer art¹ (back in the 1980¹s) my
first class used the approach you are proposing. I would ask the students to
sit in a circle. We would then develop some simple rules focused on how they
related to the actions of individuals in the circle and how those actions
would then modify the actions of others. We would then Orun¹ the system we
created. It was important that the students understood, from the outset of
the course, that computation was not dependent on what they (we) commonly
understood to be computers; that they understood computing as an activity
where language became externalised, potentially distinct from intent and
utterance. My hope was that they would get a sense of the ontological
problems they were engaging when seeking to make a self-sustaining (and
abstracted) system.

I am not going to get into an argument about whether Ocomputer¹ or Odigital¹
is the better term to use in this context. In some respects they are
interchangeable terms, if by computer we mean to signify the computational
(rather than any particular configuration of hardware ­ or even a specific
notion of software) and if by digital we mean to refer to the basic stuff of
computation (the most reduced form of differentiation possible, a binary
difference). As has been shown in the past, there is little to be gained
from such arguments. The question is whether we agree (or disagree) that
there is something particular about an art that employs computation as
fundamental to its raison d¹etre (by which I mean the process of computation
is the art ­ not any secondary artefact associated with it).

regards

Simon


Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


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