On Oct 6, 2004, at 2:30 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> This is untrue in one very important way: art that is about ideas
> tends to the illustrative or unartistic. Art that generates or is
> steeped in ideas (aesthetics) is quite a different proposition. As you
> say it can make provocative arguments. These may remain provocative
> decades or centuries after they are first shown.

I absolutely agree (except for the part about art about ideas tending
towards the unartistic). I'm not suggesting that art must be *about*
ideas (although there's plenty of good work that's about ideas), but
that art should at least *have* ideas or at least be the product of
intellectual pursuit.

> Pollock's work isn't about paint any more than Kruger's is about
> feminist semiotics or Cezanne's is about apples and crockery.

This business, I'm not so sure about...

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 2:29 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> Manovich's proposed solution is *not* to make artistic visualizations
> more accurately/sceintifically representative of their data sources.
> Instead, he seems to recommend the injection of personal subjectivity
> into the mapping process -- not an abandonment of abstraction
> altogether, but the pursuit of a more intentional/resonant/subjective
> abstraction.

mosDef. I would never argue that art needs to have any
[representational/scientific/scrutable/"accurate"] aspects, but if you
are going to deal with abstraction, you must do it with an
understanding of the hystorical threads of abstraction (so that you are
aware of the references you will make) and the hystorical threads of
newMedia (for the same reasons). Then, if the work doesn't speak for
itself, you have to be prepared to discuss the connexions you made.

To this viewer, it's not enough to say "it's abstract, you know, its
all graphic designy and shit. You like graphic design, right?"
Especially when this is accompanied with the implication that
graphicDsign is somehow apolitical and purely formal.

This particular [viewer/listener] is not likely to be profoundly moved
by abstraction ever in his lifetime, and whatever your excuses for
making art are, the goal of every artist is to make a powerful
statement. So if there are ideas to back up this FlashFormalism,
they're going to have to be way more convincing that "TMI"

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 1:52 PM, Pall Thayer wrote:

> There's a lot of work being done by seasoned artists that deliver
> intruiging concepts related to the data being used.

EXACTLY. There must be a [challenging/intriguing/upsetting] conceptual
element for anyone to take interest.

> Sunday at the Grande Jatte, it's all about the method. The
> "technology". OK, it's a wonderfull painting, there's something about
> it, but according to the books that wasn't Seurat's priority. Method
> does involve ideas and a couple of centuries down the road there's
> going to be "important" work from today where the "method" has become
> an "idea".

I totally agree -- Seurat's method was a vehicle for his socially
radical concepts, addressing (as many Impressionists did) Science and
Progress as oppressive, particularly as weapons against the "lower"
class. It's also a good example to bring up, because Seurat developed
his own idiosyncratic [process/methodology] -- I can guarantee that if
Seurat were alive today, he wouldn't be working in FlashMX. Flash makes
you far to complicit to make a statement as radical as Seurat's;
Macromedia loves when people create pretty pictures in Flash.

So the point is that abstraction fueled by data is not automatically
interesting; there need to be, as you say "intriguing concepts related
to the data being used," and a method that "involve[s] ideas."

Ideas: 1
FlashFormalism: 0

BUSTED.

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 3:27 PM, ryan griffis wrote:

> What is this "real criticalDiscourse" that you feel is lacking in the
> art world? i'm not being antagonistic to "art about ideas" - what
> isn't about ideas?

Well, I think all art is about ideas, regardless of its creators
intentions, just as I think all art tells a political story as well.
The issue I'm raising is whether this FlashFormalism is about the ideas
we find interesting, and if the discussion around it is critical
enough. You put me in a tricky position; I don't want to call anyone
out individually, because it's not about individual artworks, it's
about the tone of the discussion.

One problem with this kind of work is that by masking or disavowing its
[ideas/politics], it becomes susceptible to projection. So people like
me will look at it and say "wow, in a time of war, in a US election
year, with a shadowGov (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1850236.stm ) doing
gawdKnowsWhat, with corporations worldWide gaining power and influence
at alarming rates, with oppressive software patent policies threatening
developers, with an artWorld eagerly looking to us for the
nextBigThing, THIS person has decided to generate random colors based
on mouse location in FlashMX, to the delight of Macromedia. Sounds like
a gigantic THUMBS UP to the status quo."

Granted, I'm an ass. That doesn't change the fact that "no statement"
is in fact one of the most telling.

> But i'm reading this looking for the stakes - what's (y)our investment
> in any of this?

My investment is a decade of engaging with the web. I'd like to see
newMedia thrive, and to do that we need to breed our own critical
voices rather than wait for the artWorld to supply them. The discourse
I do see isn't very critical. I see a lot of show+tell.

> If you're saying that ReadMe, Rhizome, etc are where this
> work/activity is being done, is your criticism about larger inclusion?
> What is it you think people should be talking/writing about that they
> aren't?

No, we have enough inclusion. There are no barriers beyond the
digitalDivide that prevent anyone from engagingWith && contributingTo
newMedia. The problem is that as a community, we don't understand where
we came from, and we're not very concerned with where we're going.

> But this talk about "the current moment" sounds an awful lot like the
> telecommunications industry.

Interesting -- what would you prefer?

> If Koons was producing his paintings via cell phone or bluetooth
> enabled art, would he be more relevant to the discussion?

At the moment, according to this crowd, unfortunately yes -- but if we
were a little more critical, I would think it would be a resounding NO.

- ben

GoodDay,

> curt:
> I agree with Rob and Pall here. There is a way to critically discuss
> abstraction that may involve engaging in formalistic/graphic design
> aesthetics that seem outmoded to you. So we can't discuss them
> because such critical discourse is not currently en vogue? But aren't
> we the ones (critics, artists, curators) who shape where the critical
> dialogue is going?

Yes, and that's exactly the point. So if you find aesthetic discussions
titillating ("ooh, more brown!" ... "too many boxes!"), by all means,
keepOnRawxin'InTheFreeWorld. I'm just trying to publicly raise the
issue of whether this is how we want to let newMedia come to be
defined. If it nM does become pigeon-holed as nice-looking clickable
data pictures, I won't be a part of it, and neither will a lot of
people who are currently engaged with this discussion. It's great that
you bring up graphicDsign, because one needs only to look at your local
graphicDsign [college/department] to see the Jihad that's being waged
on ideas there. Kids arrive in graphicDsign classes expecting to
receive training in industry-standard applications and be kept
up-to-date on industry design trends, so that they may graduate with
sufficient "mastery" to be employable as designers directly out of
college. The expectation is that you can be trained as a Dsigner just
like you can be trained as a XeroxMechanic. Given the radical artistic,
conceptual and social hystorical hyperthreads that make up the
area-of-activity we delineate (for economic reasons) as "graphicDsign,"
I find myself dismayed that the graduates of these programs are more
excited about software upgrades than the ideas they're working with.

And this is your model for how you want to talk about nM? Does anyone
else have a problem with this?

> If things on the net are becoming more hodge-podged and interbred with
> pop culture, what's to keep art critics from approaching such pieces
> as rock music critics or graphic design aesthetes?

You miss the point that this interbreeding affects the critics as well,
so that our artCritics can approach work not from "defined"
perspectives (like that of a rock-onlyCritic, art-onlyCritic,
Dsign-only enthusiast), but from a perspective that realizes how much
everything bleeds together. So an artCritic approaching a piece as a
rockCritic is simply being fatuous in [his/her] disregard for the
dynamics which come to form creative "pieces" in our world.

> Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his
> instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level.

Sure, but Casey's praxis is grounded in broader artEducational and
artwarePopulism concepts, and is anything but design for design's sake.

> None of this seems intellectually bereft to me, nor does it seem out
> of bounds or culturally irrelevant. If one current artistic mode is
> the remix, then we can expect to see earlier aspects of the "art
> tapestry" show up in the mix as well (whether consciously or
> unconsciously).

Of course -- to be flip, that's all part of the blender we call life.
In liken, the system I put in place on criticalartware.net, those
partially digested chunks present themselves as part of hyperConnextive
informationSuperTrails. The piece I'm missing is how to understand this
pureFormalist newMedia in relation to those hyperChunks. Pall gave us
the "TMI" model, but I don't think that's adequate to fuel or sustain
this much discussion. If there is more intellectual life to
FlashFormalism, someone please fill me in!

> curt:
> But is the sum of the worth of their art the fact that they were
> remembered for it? Had they not been remembered, would their art
> still have value as art? Can it still be appreciated out of the
> context of its production? There are plenty of artists who have
> gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a
> pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists,
> craftspeople in local artisan subcultures.

Yeah, and they all weave their own beautiful life narratives. However,
out of convenience, we don't attempt to talk about Every Single Artist
Who Ever Lived, so we tend to focus on the ones who ignited our
imaginations by doing things differently, and challenging the
assumptions of the day. Those are the people we remember and discuss.
No one wants to downplay the importance of an artisan who lived in 1825
and passed the traditional weaving style from one generation to
another. However, it's facetious to suggest that [he/she] individually
deserves the same amount of time in our discussion as Sol LeWitt, for
example.

Further, I take special exception to your implication that
pre-Impressionist artists (ie, ALL art before the 19th century?) didn't
"pioneer" anything of note, and are remembered for their "craft and
invention." In reality, pre-Impressionist art is chock full of
conceptualism, scandals, controversy and vigorous intellectual debate.
They may all just look like Jesus paintings to you, but back then, even
small formal differences were considered astonishing. Perspective was a
ground-shakingly radical idea at one point. Paintings and sculptures
had the raw visceral power that movies tend to claim today; they moved
women to faint, men to kill, and artists to be ex-communicated. The
idea that you would lump this group with craftspeople and artisans
demonstrates a ghastly mischaracterization of artHystory.

> curt:
> So you assert. Here are some contrary voices:

Have you ever heard of "anti-marketing marketing?" This is the strategy
where you position yourself as against the system in order to catch the
anti-marketing demographic in your audience. Take for example the
Sprite ad campaigns of the past few years, which for the most part
position themselves as beyond the hype -- the message is "drink
whatever you want to! Just obey your thirst!"

Same deal here. After (and during) the 1960s, people were growing tired
of an art world crowded with "hippies," over-expressiveness,
politicization and didactics. Minimalism was a knee-jerk reaction to
that time, and many artists saw themselves as antiConcept, antiArt,
antiCriticism. How embarrassing it must have been for them to be so
hungrily swallowed and digested by the conceptual artCriticism machine
they seemed to dislike so much.

I won't bother to address each artist, as this could go on forever, but
each of the artists you mention raised important questions and sparked
immense debate, even if their work did most of the speaking. It's
ludicrous to suggest they weren't engaged in the intellectual
discussions of their times.

> Challenging by whose criteria? As Pall points out, abstraction of
> data flows can be particularly challenging from several angles beyond
> just pure abstraction. Here are a few pieces to consider:

Okay, lets consider them.

> http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)

This is a fantastic tongue-in-cheek piece from my perspective, but it
is absolutely not abstract, nonConceptual, or formalist. This work
engages with many debates, from ontological cartography and the
problems with attempting to map concepts, to the struggle for
interfaces to navigate such a multiVerse of meaning. criticalartware
has a somewhat similar navigational system that allows a fixed-2D
mapping of the relationships between all of our nodes:
http://www.criticalartware.net/lib/liken/interfaces/nodemap/

> http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic
> angle)

And you present yet another [navigational/cartographic] interface work
which is neither abstract, nonConceptual or formalist. "The Shape of
Song" is a fascinating way to [visualize/navigate] the patterns of
music, and clearly has much to say.

> http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)

All of Radical Software Group's work, or Carnivore in particular?
Carnivore is a particularly bad choice for you to hold up as an
[abstract/nonConceptual/formalist] posterChild. Carnivore as a
[project/platform] has a clear political and conceptual message about
government and surveillance, and as it does nothing on its own, is
indeed almost 100% conceptual -- before you can see or hear anything,
you have to use a "client" to interpret the network data. These clients
range from the conceptual to the pure formalist, but I'm not sure you
can pin that on RSG -- after all, Carnivore is a complete conceptual
artWork even without any clients, but the clients depend completely on
Carnivore both conceptually and technically.

> curt:
> I'm not sure which critics you're talking about and which artists your
> talking about here. Anyway, is it the artist's role to give critics
> "interesting" fodder?

Are you joking or not? Regardless, its the artist's role to make work
which she is interested in, but it is her peer's role to provide
criticism, discussion, debate, community and inspiration. I'd like to
see more criticism and debate happening in our community.

> Sweet prose. Well played.

Thank my mother the Buddhist CyberRhetorician. ;)

> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/

I can only play amateurCritic to your URIs for so long, Cloninger! :)
Briefly looking at the above URI, I can't discern whether or not the
authors of a couple of these pieces are being ironically retarditaire
or if they are straightforward creative expressions. A few of them are
fully situated in an artWorld context, some are by well-known artists.
Clearly all of them draw from the globalVisualCultureMashup, and none
of them are "outsiders."

> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/

Some (well, really all) of these pieces are strikingly beautiful, but
like candy bars, after the sweet taste, I'm left hungry for substance.
None of the works [upset/surprised/confused/challenged] me sufficiently
for me to remember them. That's my personal experience, but I'm
suggesting that there are others who are unsatisfied with this
FlashFormalism.

> I totally agree. But then some work doesn't lend itself well to
> contemporary critical dicussion. Is the problem with the work, or
> with contemporary modes of critical discussion?

You keep suggesting that contemporary critical discussion is somehow at
fault for not "getting" the real work happening, when in reality, this
is contemporary critical discourse right here on this list. If the
people on this list respond to the work in silence, I would suggest
that they aren't significantly affected by it, and I think that is
indeed a problem with the work.

> If all you can say of work like http://www.complexification.net is
> that it's FlashFormalism [insert silence], then I don't know where we
> go from there.

It may be a fine distinction, but while I love the complexification.net
work as astonishingly gorgeous [images/applets], I would hesitate to
discuss the pieces in an art context. They are unmistakably powerful
demonstrations of the power of a systemsApproach to artMaking, so
certain people may find them shocking, and perhaps that's enough to
entertain some discussion of them in an art context. Maybe they're
inspirational enough that we don't need to even question their
relevance. However, I can't imagine anybody from this list being very
intellectually stimulated by these works; anyone with a passing
familiarity with newMedia (or computerHystory) has seen bales full of
work like this (albeit not always as beautiful).

If it isn't FlashFormalism, what does it have to say? Lets compare it
to some very similar works. What about Doug James' animation of 3,600
chairs stacked up and then colliding and deforming when knocked down? (
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/play.html?pg=3 and
http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/bdtree/etheater/ ) Here is a
rule-based system that is producing a jaw-dropping and aesthetically
astonishing feat, to the service of nothing but itself, just like
complexification.net. What about Massive, Weta Digital's crowd
simulation software ( http://www.massivesoftware.com/ )?

I pose the question back to this community: if you're bored enough to
be reading so far, is the complexification.net work intellectually
stimulating? If it isn't, should we bother talking about it, and if so,
why exactly?

> Agreed (and so pithily expressed!) Indeed, art is the one realm of
> human activity where abstraction and formalism can *speak* into the
> cultural "dialogue." But now it's time to muzzle them and move toward
> a more didactic coceptualism because... ?

Wake up -- no one's muzzling them -- they just have nothing to say! I
just want everyone to realize the path that newMedia is on, namely the
screensaverization of our field. If anyone here is interested in real
ideas, we need to get criticality back, and start raising a ruckus
about all this technoPositivism and intellectually bankrupt
abstraction!

- ben