[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 110, Issue 17

[curt at lab404.com]

Hi all,

 Sorry for entering the dialogue so late in the (my) week. I wish I could say that I was doing an experiment to see how little human to human "interaction" could occur on the list during its turn toward HCI week, but I'm just slack/busy.

I will muddy the waters further (but hopefully productively) by obliquely responding to Daniel's essay ( http://nooart.org/post/73353953758/temkin-glitchhumancomputerinteraction ). some of these responses intersect with earlier comments from the month:

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1.
a. 
To visit and think about "interactivity" as it happens a bit earlier along the _artist > artwork > audience_ continuum. NOT interactivity that happens in/during the artwork (painting, happening, sensors, second life, or what/whenever). but interactivity that happens in the prduction process, in the studio, between the artist and her materials.

This examination would pick up on an 0bject0riented0ntology and affect thread. So what about a kind of affective dialogue with materials? delanda gets into this (via deleuze) when he talks about metalurgy. materials are (always already) deeply and contingently embedded/entangled in a (heideggerean) world. Materials already "know" things, have a relationship to human culture, to each other, have state threshholds, have their own kind of thingy agency. So all process art is always already "interactive" art. So then all painting is interactive art (in its production phase).

This approach might serve, if not exactly to "dematerialize" bodies/selves, then at least to more fine-grainedly sift them. The focus moves away from human brain neurology and all that (alluring as it is), and outward into entangled material systems (engrossing as they are). So art that LESS investigates (solipsistic human) phenomenology and MORE investigates entangled being-in-the-world.

b.
So then what is the difference between "materials" and "systems?" because systems aren't properly "materials" or we wouldn't distinguish between the two. Whitehead would call them all "entities" -- the meta-systems that related "entities" with each other are still themselves "entities" and thus relate back to the "entities" they themselves contain. When Lewitt or flux_folks or oulipians "interact" with their own constraint_systems, it seems those systems have agency similiar to materials ("materials" being light, acrylic paint, language, an ensemble of happeners, an army of interns [Koons], or whatever your materials happen to be).

regarding artists dialoguing with systems during the creative process:
cf: 
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/eno.html .
http://thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/collateral-damage-mark-fell
http://www.volny.cz/horvitz/burnham/aesth-sys.pdf (this one suggested by edward shanken)

c.
Beating the dead horse of deleuzean topologies (becaue i love analog patch cords!), do materials + systems = machines?

2.
To visit and think about "interactivity" as it happens a bit later along the_artist > artwork > audience_ continuum. NOT artist-orchestrated sensor "interactivity" between  artwork and audience (which still happens in/during the artwork proper), but something like "reflective" interactivity, after the orchestrated event or performance, when the "audience member" is contemplating the art. I am going to invoke Ranciere here (so sorry). He posits a kind of courteous, generous, emancipating/ennobling, non-colonizing form of "interactivity," where the artist doesn't "invite" (read "enforce") the user to jump through "interactive" hoops, but instead just presents a work (like a painting) and lets the user (ranciere would say "spectator") "interact" with the work on her own terms and in her own time. Maybe this could be thought of as slow interactivity -- a kind of "interactivity" that invites contemplation and reflection. I'm no great fan of "painting," so I'm not advocating a return to that. We can still use sensors. Just slow sensors.

#2 is like an ethical, anti-spectacular provocation. Just because your art is haptic, touch-centric, responsive, and de-visual; it doesn't necessarily mean you have overcome the spectacle.

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OK GO! I welcome examples, clarifications, cries of "foul craven" or "banal craven," etc.

Best,
Curt





> Hi all,
> 
> I'm psyched to co-host the discussion on "Glitch as HCI Conversation" this week with Curt Cloninger. Please continue the ongoing discussion, but I wanted to offer an intro to the next. 
> 
> Earlier this week, I released a short piece on this subject for NOOART, which might serve as a jumping off point for discussion. It can be read here: http://nooart.org/post/73353953758/temkin-glitchhumancomputerinteraction. It looks at glitch as "a study of the dialogue between us and the machine - how we relate to logical systems, and what happens in the breakdown between human thought and computer logic." It also looks at glitch as an algorithmic art, using repurposed algorithms to manufacture noisier, more chaotic data patterns.
> 
> A few related projects of mine: I make collaborations with the machine such as Glitchometry [1] [2]  and Dither Studies. In Glitchometry, I begin with simple shapes, altering them using a tool with its own agenda, often ending in strange hallucinatory landscapes. In Dither Studies, I provoke the machine into generating seemingly irrational patterns that walk the line between order and disorder. My programming language Entropy addresses the compulsive side of programming by allowing the programmer to write functional code, but with data that slowly decays, giving the coder a short window to get an idea across. I rewrote the classic chatbot Eliza in Entropy and created Drunk Eliza.
> 
> I'm on the road much of today, but will follow the conversation as it develops.
> 
> Thanks!
> -Daniel