[Realism Now!]  [Perf Art MAIN page]

The Performance Art/ Technology

See also: [(art) concepts] [Art MovementsPerformed Text] [Dada] [Dadaism] (an art "ism") [Performance frank: Realism Now!] [Fluxus] [Street Art] [Interventionist Art] [T.A.Z.] (Association for Ontological Anarchy) (Hakim Bey, chief janitor) [Frank's stuff] [Sampler: Art X Science]

The Performance Art / Technology

On this page: {Intro} {Basic} {Literacy} text messaging, instant messaging, and jargon... {The Two Cultures} {} {stuff}

Intro

The idea of merging the Arts and Technology (at least as i have been trained to understand it) takes into account the ideas that originated from the investigation as to what the various creative differeneces are in the scientific and artistic endeavors. The physicist/author Lilian Lieber (who studied with Albert Einstein) wrote several books for explaining scinece to the lay public. Chief among these was her "The Educuation of T.C. Mits" - where "T.C. Mits" is in fact "The Celebrated Man In The Street" - of everyman, everywoman, everynether, everychild, everydolphin, etc. She had the idea of a unified approach to science and art in what she called "SAM": Science, Art, Maths. A triad that she unified by using a model of the platonic regular solids and different levels of abstraction. Part of this succes was not just her brilliance as a physicist, but i would like to think the fact that she was married to Hugh Lieber who was an abstract artist. If there was ever a person (other than in classical times; eg, DaVinci, Goethe, etc - when it was not only possible but desirable to learn all about our world) that embodied the Aristotelian unities of mind and body it was certainly that grand old lady of physics. I feel (as i do often with certain authors) as if i knew her personally (other than Asimov), i never had the opportunity to correspond with any of "the great writers" - that is the people who actually create ideas. That has always been much of my world, as i have often said, "If in the mind you dewell, there-in you will find a world." Regardless, but what ever odd quirks of fate and such, i find myself once again on the same path that i started on many, many years ago -- but, this time "on the other side of the fence"; ie, an artist rather than a scientist, a poet rather than a scholar. And yet oddly enough (mostly due to the pressures of being raised during the "cold war") that was what i strived most for: Recognition, Genius, The Great Discovery, The Nobel Prize, and such. Of course, all of that time (and still), i simply lack the hardware to do it - the old 3-pound comptuer access port (CAP) is rated at an IQ of 142 which is pleasing numerically, but just frustratingly dull enough to keep many things that i can *almost* understand out of my reach, and of course the "great discoveries" will never come. But, on i go: Tryng - in what the philosopher/writer Jean-Paul Sartre called "in good faith" - to understand and bring some new ideas to the thing called liff.

Basic Concepts

From one POV (point of view) the two methods of approaching things from the art and the technological (rational/emotional, right-/left-brain, etc) seem frought with problems and indeed they are. In one sense, the mathematical approach tends to lead to only one possible answer for a given problem - or at the very least, a definite set of answers with the confines of the problem. In the artistic sense the number of possible answers are literally infinite. Thus, the dynamics of not only what approaches to take to solve a problem - but the very nature of the problems to "solve" are radically different. Let's look at something like the texture to be created in a video game or a V/R (vitual/reality) environment for a rock or something. Now on the one hand the "look and feel" of the game is pretty much everything. So, a rock that doesn't look like a rock - or worse yet it looks *exactly* the rock in Scene 23. From an art point of view, we know hot to make rocks look the same or different. If we needed exactly the same rocks we'd make a cast moulding of one rock and then mass produce them - pretty much the old "allographic" problem in printmaking. Of coures only the original rock is the "autographic" one. Now, this is important since this is exactly one of the problems that DOESN'T occur in the TECH world. That is: The way that the same object (a rock, a grain of rice on a stalk, even a picture of Marylin Monroe) are presented and whether they are the same or not has a different aesthetic value in the two domains. If an artist works for several months to create as many rice stalks as possible for a "field of rice" display then *ideeally* all of the grains of rice WOULD be identical. In some cases, the artist might choose to purchase two or three hundred objects of identical form. But, in the case of the TECH world, we all know the real world is non-uniform or repetitive (for the most part) and as such, each of the "rocks" should be different and hence more real. The art work depends on the fact that it is installed into a gallery and thus, can in no way be real and the fact that the rice stalks are all but identical is NOT the point. But, in the immersive world of V/R the fact that things are not arranged into patterns IS the point. This problem is similar to the problem of painting vs photography. As the printmaker/photographer Karen Davenport who has said: In painting, you start with nothing and have to add everythig. In photography, you start with everything and have to take away everything. That is the two directions (and indeed the two starting points) are at odds with each other.

Literacy

The time has come to speak of many things of cabages and kings. -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (or so i recall the Carpenter saying) Instant Messaging, Text Messaging, and the like - Jargon should be handled separately, methinks. Argggh, reef the mainsail and trim the the balast. This is section is to be read as being NEITHER an attack on language variants (such as the notorious evil tongue known as "Ebonics") nor as a defence and appolologie of "The King's English"). First we state as read: Whose language is it anyway? I have almost never heard the King's English spoken in any thing other than print - and carefully edited print i would suppose; albeit some practictioners such as Edwin Newman (newscaster/author "Strictly Speaking") who apparently (as with many professors of language or linguistics in general) have a natural fluency in language and its exact application. And we take it as further read that for the most part we all use a familiar and less formal version of our language - regardless of which one is it. Consider: Student A: Whadjuh get? Student B: A "c". Now consider intonation: Student A: ..(disgruntled) Whad T'JU get? Student B: ..(happily suprised) A "c" !!!!! All that need be said has been said by the use of human vocalisation patterns that we as native spearkers acquire almost effortlessly. Now. Text messaging. Bane or boon? First a rather classical discussion of the "codes" that we use in language - both informal and formal. Excerpts are from Jane Healy's "Endangered Minds - Why our children can't think." -[
Complex speech]- (in literature directory) We may take as read that we know *several* different sets of codes: a public set based on our culture, immediate enviroment and community a public, but different set that we use when we go to a store that we frequent, the clothes cleaners, or that sort of thing a technical set based on our profession, very crypic and often called "jargon" and of course a set of very private codes that we and our close friends or family use. And of course each of these is dependent on the CONTEXT within which they are spoken. Just a seconds thought is required as to how difficult it is to take DATA in one context and "translate" it for another. The checker at the food store is a long time acquintence, but when i try to describe a new art project the time involved simply is longer than the "access window" that i have while checking out. On the other hand, one of the stockers (a quite burly woman who is also a welder) has no trouble visualising my descriptions of installation pieces. Same locale; but different contexts. Thus, we do speak with many "tongues". The point here is also, to note that the appropriate use of language, its codes, level of complexity, etc are totally tied into the "verbal" setting that we are trying to accomplish. Thus, one can take text messaging to this stage: SCENE: Students Ariana, Beth, and Chandra (A, B, C) are all taking Professor Rinder's class in Relativity phyics. Via text messaging: A: Yes, but that would mean the mass must increase as well. And of course the tidal forces would tear it appart. B: Not if it's degenerate. C: Yes, but then Hawking radiation wouldn't be an issue. What is the "audience" to think of that? Hopefully: Stirs some thinking, n'est pas? --franklin twine - gotta get back to the dreaded readings for class ;( (isn't it amazing where a little thinking will take you!?)

The Two Cultures

The Conflicts

-[
Discourse from UH.edu]- -[Science Policy colorado.edu]- In 1988, Alan Sokal et al published papers as part of a hoax to illustrate how poorly edited/reviewed humanities journals were - thus, re-opening the old wound of "us vs. them" in the sciences vs the humanities. -[Humaniteis hoax by Alan Sokal]- Mish mash links... http://aussiethule.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html