curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
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DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: considering abstraction in digital art?


I don't know.

jim wrote:
Interesting. So when did it all begin and when is it all going to end?

ja?

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: considering abstraction in digital art?


Hi Pall,

What you are saying makes sense. Except I wouldn't say "little me."
I'm me, which is no small thing. But then I don't think we're
drifting billions of years from the beginning of existence and
billions of years from the end of it, and I don't think we're here by
accident. Not that any of that makes my take on beauty "right." But
it emboldens me to to explore with passion and purpose.

For the record, I don't think Cage and Pollock were cynical at all in
their dance with chance. It was a celebration of existence and an
opportunity to collaborate with the sublime.

peace,
curt

At 10:11 PM -0400 4/22/06, Pall Thayer wrote:

>Who am I to decide what is beautiful and meaningful? Who am I to
>decide what is worth looking at for the sake of looking at it?
>Little me. One of a kagillion entities capable of creating something
>that appeals to the human aesthetic senses. I'm not out to show what
>I think is beautiful and meaningful. I'm searching for beauty and
>meaning. If the computer and the Internet can help the artist to
>transcend his or her own subjectivity in the process of creating
>art, I can't understand why anyone would _not_ take that path. But
>then again, that's my own, subjective opinion.
>
>Pall

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: considering abstraction in digital art?


curt:
>With >generative software art, the human coder is the choreographer of >instructions for a chance dance. The software as it runs is now the >improvisational dancer, and the abstract visual art that results shows >evidence of the software's collaborative dance with chance.

nad:
No -I think not allways. I would agree only if you use
an element of randomness in your software. A lot of generative
art pieces are deterministic. In that case there is no dance with
chance.

curt:
Sorry about that. It's semantics. When I say "generative" I mean "auto-generative." Generative art to me means there is a chance element programmed in. I use the term "reactive" art to mean that the "random" element enters in via user "interaction" (a term so vague it should really disappear from the dialogue, but there you are).

curt:
>The abstract visuals that result are less central to the "art" of it >all. http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/ focuses on the >code >and the performative run of the code. You're free to take a >screen shot >of the abstract visuals that result, but that's not where >the "action" of >the exhibit is.>

nad:
Yes Christiane Paul put an emphasis on that and I think she
is very right to put a stress on that aspect in the arts
world. However last not least I think the visuals were
very important too (also if this is kept rather hidden).
In order to do the above pieces, you need to know BOTH:
the programming and the visuals. And some other things too actually,
like interactivity paradigms etc...
It is this interdisciplinarity which is important for the art pieces.

Or in short: I could imagine that some of the code on that
page (hoo I dont know!!) looks actually
very UGLY to a professional programmer and that some
of the visuals look terrible to a graphic designer (hooo
I dont know either...:-))....the great part of the
art is how the things a brought together.

Or even shorter: Why would Casey Reas study Armin Hofmann?

curt:
I see your point. There is a segment of the generative art community (represented in the above exhibition) that is very concerned with the aesthetics of the output (and the relationship between output aesthetics and code aesthetics). cf:

http://www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics/

http://www.afsnitp.dk/onoff/Texts/napiertheaesthet.html

But there is another thread of generative art, in the Tristan Tzara/John Cage/Sol Lewitt/Brion Gysin tradition, that doesn't care about the aesthetics of the output at all (at least ostensibly, conceptually) cf:

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations/index.cgi

http://www.mteww.com/RAM/

http://www.mccoyspace.com/201/

Which kind of returns to Pall's original question -- from whence the abstraction? If randomness plays *the* major role in generating something that the user/patron reads as abstract, but the artist is not intending to "abstract" anything at all, can this really be called abstraction, or is it just some sort of accidental rorschach test for the user? At its most cynical, randomly generated art that intentionally disregards output aesthetics can act as a conceptual critique of anyone claiming to have found truth and beauty in art and reality. "You found meaning in the output of my art, but it actually has no intrinsic meaning. Just like everything else." But this kind of conceptual rhetoric is faulty. Building a car that looks like it will move but actually fails to move doesn't prove that it's impossible to build a car that moves.

This is why I started with Klee. He built a car that moves. Abstraction rightly understood isn't about non-figuration or work that "appears" abstract (whatever that means). It's about some sort of intentional process of ab-stracting stuff into other stuff. The best generative art intentionally engages in this process. Abstraction is different than representation or even simulation. Abstraction intentionally injects something subjective into the translation between existence and art.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: considering abstraction in digital art?


Hi Nad,

I'm no Ritchie expert, so I may be wrong. Maybe he's not talking sub-atomically and galactically. Maybe he's just talking about how changing your perspective on a recognizable, figurative human form can tweak it into something that reads as abstract.

best,
curt

Nad Wrote:

Yes I was fearing that he meant that. but this seems to me an extremely
strange and rather narrow view of abstract art. But may be I am just badly informed. ?

For me the image of an atom is figurative. And if I see
a helium atom than i wouldnt guess that it is the abstraction
of lets say - Curt.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: considering abstraction in digital art?


Hi Pall,

I keep reintroducing this snippet in different contexts, but it seems related to what you're talking about below, particularly regarding Pollock:
http://lab404.com/ghost/defense.html

We can understand Pollock as an improvisational dancer. The paint showed evidence of his collaborative dance with chance. With generative software art, the human coder is the choreographer of instructions for a chance dance. The software as it runs is now the improvisational dancer, and the abstract visual art that results shows evidence of the software's collaborative dance with chance. With Pollock, the "action" of the art lay at the intersection between Pollock and the canvas (an intersection that the paint itself bridged). With generative software art, the "action" of the art lies at the intersection between the coder and the sofware's "run/performance" of the dance. The abstract visuals that result are less central to the "art" of it all. http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/ focuses on the code and the performative run of the code. You're free to take a screen shot of the abstract visuals that result, but that's not where the "action" of the exhibit is. Pollock removed the focal point of the art from the object to the performative action. Generative art removes the focal point of the art one step further, from the performative action to the coded choreography (literally "script writing") of the performative action. Pollock sold his paintings. Casey Reas sells CD-ROMs of his code (and archival ink prints of screencaptures of select performative software runs to "patrons" who still don't get it).

Regarding the circle drawing program, I think if you wrote a circle-drawing program that used the vaule of Pi, and the output was drawn on a plotter printer where the arm literally transcribed the vector arc, then the computer would "remember/know" the nature of a circle more than if you simply told it to plot a series of discrete x,y coordinates in bitmapped screen space. A strange thing for me to say since I've no faith in "AI," but maybe you know what I mean.

best,
curt

++++++++++++++

Pall wrote:

But I also want to get back to the issue of abstraction because
there's something I've been thinking about lately that I didn't
mention in previous posts. That is that if a digital piece is based
on programming that essentially produces the artwork itself, I feel
that, regardless of the subject matter shown, the piece becomes
inherently abstract because the 'entity' producing it isn't conscious
of its content. And I feel that this relates in a way to Jackson
Pollock's method of handing some control over to the medium itself,
allowing the properties of paint to control certain aspects of the
'image' to heighten the sense of abstraction. Paint isn't capable of
conscious representation but humans have to truly fight to escape it
(that is, assuming that they even can - look at some of the work of
Andre Masson and Kandinsky). In the same way, computers aren't
capable of conscious representation so even if the image they produce
looks like a tree, it's still abstract because a computer can't
consciously know what a tree is.

I did a little experiment recently where I decided to teach my
computer, in its own terms, how to draw a circle. So instead of
simply using something like 'g.drawEllipse(10, 10, 100, 100);', I
wrote out an algorithm to make it plot each point of a circle. Then I
turned it into an animated applet and let it run. As I sat and
watched the computer trace this circle over and over again, I asked
myself, "OK, does my computer now know what a circle is?" Well, it
must because I'm watching it draw it. I could've made the algorithm
into a function called draw_a_circle and then I could just tell the
computer to draw_a_circle and it would. But is the computer conscious
of what a circle is? If I show a child how to draw a circle, chances
are that if I then show that child an image of a circle, the child
will recognize it. So, after teaching my computer to draw a circle,
will I be able to present the computer with an image of a circle and
have it recognize it? No. Of course not. I know, this isn't ground-
breaking stuff. When presented, it's blatantly obvious. But from an
artistic standpoint it's definitely something to think about.

Pall