[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[gh hovagimyan]

Hey Simon, That sounds like a really interesting art project!  Very  
early internet practice before high speed internet and web browsers  
involved electronic bulletin boards and also MUD's & MOO's.  Those  
sort of morphed into artists websites/lists and second life.  Early   
BBS (bulletin board services) had a lot of emotion. Among artists it  
was like belonging to a secret club that only a select few knew  
about.  Most of the art world neither knew nor cared about computers  
and the internet. It was a lot of fun then because of the freedom and  
the anarchy.  There are some people who are trying to do facebook art  
but it's not very potent. facebook ties into a soft marketing  
information system.   What was most interesting about early internet  
art practices was that the software and code were very primitive.  
most of the actual content and structure was left up to the  
imagination.  It is still possible to set up an alternative system on  
the internet that uses the same structure as facebook and iTunes.  
Just off the top of my head I'd say you could use RSS (XML) or maybe  
some PHP.  My colleagues in France Peter Sinclair and Jerome Joy are  
designing sound systems that have people around the world put up  
microphones connected to the internet. The sound become the material  
for art works.  I like the idea of working in partially physical and  
partially virtual worlds.  It's a way to disrupt or open up the way  
we socialize, make art and communicate. Here's the link for those works;
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http://locusonus.org/
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Here's a recent piece of mine using a seesaw as a movie controller.  
Talk about social sculpture!
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http://youtu.be/2E76h201_5Y
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On Jul 8, 2010, at 6:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:

> This begs the question why nobody has setup a Facebook-like system  
> based on
> actual human characteristics and behaviour, reflecting how we socially
> interact in practice? Such a model would require an open and  
> generative
> approach to what characteristics and modes of engagement are  
> possible, with
> constantly emerging dynamics and modes. Hate, love, tolerance,  
> boredom and
> distaste would be only a few of the states that connections between  
> people
> could be set to. People might choose to determine these states  
> themselves or
> the system could heuristically do this on their behalf. That could be
> fun...and revealing.