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

[Julian Oliver]

..on Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 09:33:27AM +0000, Simon Biggs wrote:
> 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.

hehe sadly no. the digital involves digital processes on hardware designed to
perform them. the point of this workshop is to separate object oriented
programming from the digital computer and affirm it as a technology of thought,
a way of thinking. formal languages like C/Perl/Lua/Python - as you well know -
were invented as an interface for humans to work with computers but can live, as
a kind of literature and logical abstraction, outside of the domain of the
digital.

> 
> 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.

yes, i can relate to this primary attraction very much.

> 
> 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).
> 

i agree with this in essence. sadly though a huge proportion of audiences,
archivists and curators have no idea how any of this stuff works: 

archivists are backing up software files of 'digital artworks' only to find that
it was dependent on PPC architecture and needed a certain proprietary player or
codec no longer available for current generation hardware; there are 'digital
art' curators that think the hard-disk is an icon on their desktop and that the
CPU is the case of a tower computer; that think Open-Source software is simply
any software free of copyright; 'new media' curators that insist RFID is a
locative technology, akin to GPS.. (etc).

as parts get smaller, techniques and technologies more sophisticated, i think
it's time for terms to tend toward the specific, not the general! 

critical thought and language surrounding painting, music and sculpture took
well over a thousand years to develop in the west.  the electronic arts have had
less than 50 years to develop a voice and those that represent the field in the
public interest seem to know very little about the craft and/or tools in use.. 

how long can electronic artists live in romance as wizards, magicians, while the
actual contributions to the /craft/ and technical culture of the field
(code-as-literature, great feats of engineering and problem-solving, ingenuity)
go unnoticed and/or un-heard?

i agree with G.H. Hovagimyan: curators need to understand the basics, at the
very least, before representing computer and/or electronic art for its cultural
merit and/or significance (if at all).

cheers and good to read you,

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Madrid, Spain
currently: Madrid, Spain 
about: http://julianoliver.com