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

[Julian Oliver]

..on Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 04:28:53PM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote:
> The Critical Engineer seems to be doing reverse engineering, a form of
> technical deconstruction. It's what most interesting artists who work with
> technology tend to do in their work, opening the black box to analysis. In
> that sense the term critical engineer seems to be a synonym for media artist
> ;)

Media Artists need not reverse engineer at all to be artists working with
'media'. I know many that use Flash on a Mac and have been successful as media
artists doing so. They couldn't tell you what a threaded process is, let alone
a kernel.  Many other Media Artists simply pay engineers to work on projects,
not being able to solder or write a line of code themselves. This is the
traditional 'Visionary and the Hired Hand' class-like separation endemic to
Fine Art. 

I've been called a Media Artist for years and frankly am pretty happy to get
away from the term. I've always thought the term Media Artist was so vague that
Culture Jammer would be a better fit! 

> Mario Biagioli writes on black boxing rendering ideas and paradigms opaque
> and unto the apparatus of industrialised culture. The challenge is to
> reverse engineer such constructs so they become (again) problematic. Once
> deconstructed they are open to re-use.

Indeed. I really like this way of framing it, especially in that it expresses
two forms of use, the un-boxed form being in knowledge through understanding
the object of study as a field of interesting problems.

Cheers,

Julian
> 
> 
> On 19/07/2011 15:18, "Julian Oliver" <julian at julianoliver.com> wrote:
> 
> > The Critical Engineer takes black-box technology and infrastructure as
> > something that must be pared back, cracked open and or re-purposed before both
> > the object and its engineering effects upon the user can be fully understood.
> 
> 
> Simon Biggs | simon at littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk
> 
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk
> 
> 
> 
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
> 
> 
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-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com