[-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change

[Julian Oliver]

..on Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 01:23:34PM +0100, Saul Albert wrote:
> 
> Your description of the workshop in Lima, Julian, sounds like you're
> taking a critical artistic approach to your materials in context. An Art
> and Language workshop might have performed a similar auto-exegesis.

There wasn't a lot of art-thinking involved at all really, rather getting down
to the technics and engineering guts of what makes a network work. From the
physical layer of metal and cable, through the link-layer of hardware
addressing, raw ethernet frames etc, and up to the networking layer (IPv4,
routes, subnets etc).

Only once understood could the network be read as itself, on its own terms, and
the relationship between network topology and corporate control structure was
clear. You don't need art or its critical devices to get you there. Some of the
18 members of the workshop had no background (or seeming interest) in art let
alone crit theory at all. All were creative and critically concerned folk
however..

Infrastructure and our dependence on it is a leveler like that, common
dependence. Art can only interpret and fork where engineering is (in this case)
already the active, creative language.

> Having started a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
> 'Critical Engineering' sounds like an exciting oxymoron to me.

Hehe perfect. We also like it for its provocative oscillations in that regard.

Cheers,

-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com