Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Discussions (847) Opportunities (2) Events (14) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Call for Proposals at Readme 100 Software Art Factory


> jim.
> so good to restart
> (off topic: the cows -- not ours -- but those of the cow parade -- are
> all around sao paulo! a moooo for you)

a moooo to you too, giselle. by the way, our cows have recently been allowed
to travel to the USA (without passports). I think the general recognition is
that there are mad cows on both sides of the border, at this point. please
give one of the sao paulo cows a pet for me.

> btw:
> technoshamanism: (Sorry for the "x". it's portuenglish....)

i think i prefer "tecnoxamanism". but what is it?

> this is the hype. the trend and i can't stand trendies and trendism.
> following them, you "receive" your "to_do list".
> give me a break. i don't. i work too hard and i do not receive
> anything and because of this i can not just tell someone to do this
> and that for tomorrow. i think machines are real participants, i
> believe (in) error messages, i trust computers and their indifference
> to my targets and passions.
> so tecnoshamanism, the global cortex, the cyberthing does not make
> sense for me (and for my senses)

very interesting. so you do not seek to control or stifle the agency of
others--or the computer--but are interested in what happens in a more open
philosophy. that is wise and applicable to many things from art to relations
with people--and computers.

ja

> in what concerns the other question, i will quote Flusser again and
> agree with you:
> we are conditioned by our apparatus.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Call for Proposals at Readme 100 Software Art Factory


> come on, lee, do you think that the mouse is just another kind of brush?
> i'm sure you don't.
> so let's put this way:
> it is impossible to talk about digital art without understanding that
> *it is digital* and this means: to be conscious that we work not just
> with code -- what is a too broad term and not a concept -- but with
> programming languages.
> and language is a virus (ins't it?)
> the idea that you can always hire someone to do the "boring part" of
> the work is a romantic idea. inspiration does not match with media
> creation. otherwise we will bet on tecnoxamanism...

well said, giselle.

could you please expand on your last sentence? why is it that "otherwise we
will bet on" technoshamanism? what is it and why do we otherwise bet on it?

"inspiration does not match with media creation". in writing, much changes
in the process of writing. the most boring things to write (and read) are
pre-configured ideas that you simply write out. same with working in other
arts. Because so much happens in the act of writing or painting, ie, working
through the ideas and implications and previously unrealized associations
and consequences of the initial impetus. through the process of
creation/writing/whatever. in my experience, this is also true of writing
computer programs as works of art.

some programmers who work for artists treat the artist like any other sort
of client, ie, give them what they want, don't be too critical, they're
paying the bill. usually this results in bad art. or it doesn't 'work for
me', anyway. then again, i'm out of work!

very interesting to read in this thread some thoughts and feelings on the
tensions of this relation. hopefully it allows both artist and
programmer--and programmer-artist--to see personal situations reflected in
general shapes that affect art and life--and jobs, working relations--and
the notion of an art of programming beyond Knuth's conception of it.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Re: PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART


> you were relating amounts of information as contained within a
> binary system to amounts of information as contained within
> textual messages
> to suggest that seemingly (?) random text messages may actually
> contain more
> information.

yes, that's right. in shannon's information theory, 'information' is not to
be confused with 'meaning'. in his paper at
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html , shannon says
"....Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are
correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual
entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the
engineering problem." In his theory, 'information' is measured basically by
how big a file is after it has been compressed. Which has very little, if
anything, to do with the 'meaning' of the message. It happens that totally
random messages contain more 'information', in the shannonian sense, than
patterned messages.

> That's what is happening a lot: the ease with which we transcode
> mathematical usefull constructs to the field of human interaction, to the
> point of reducing meaning to what is calculable. I'm not saying
> that meaning
> finally can't be made calculable or trying to rescue the artistic from the
> scrutiny of science or (whatever) that it would be a bad thing if
> that were
> so, I'm just trying to stress the fact that any calculation implies a
> reduction because it takes time: a calculation is also an event
> in the same
> continuum of informed matter and, furthermore, that we tend to
> forget what
> fiction our calculations are based on, where the human factor is decisive
> for the validation of calculated results.
>
> So I took the liberty of using the information that is likewise
> allegorically compressed in the word 'compression' to include 'any kind of
> algorhytmic optimising of a message for transmitting that message
> in a given
> system', hence my use of 'compressions of compressions'.
>
> Even if you generate your words at random from a dictionary, the fact that
> text messages get read (or could get read) enhances the information
> contained within them in a natural way because words _do_ things to each
> other while being positioned/read/sent/received. I don't see an
> easy way to
> beat the meaning out of words, not even if they are uncalled for
> like these
> messages.

Beat the meaning out of words? O don't get me started or I'll be building a
weird machine to do it. Whack them with a plank until the meanometer reaches
0. Clips of Bush using his favorite words such as 'democracy' and 'freedom'
might do it.

> And the generating of meaning includes a surplus of information
> that should be accounted for in the calcul of that information.

I agree that 'meaning' is 'information', in an important sense, but it isn't
'information' in the shannonian sense. information theory is not at all
concerned with semantics. though semantics is of course a fascinating
subject. one that we seemingly haven't mathematized in any usefully deep
theory. one that does not seem amenable to such vast generalizations, as you
say.

information theory sort of treats the materiality of language, or aspects of
the materiality of language. language as information. information as data
stream or string. language or letters as entities/material processed by
machines. concerned with transmission and reception (being able to send and
receive messages) but not concerned with the meaning at all. not saying word
one about meaning.

so how does shannonian information theory relate to 'meaning'? it doesn't.
at all, really. it doesn't say anything about it. that, apparently, is up to
people, not machines. so far, anyway. so far, so good. AI is still without
grand semantic theories (as far as I know, which isn't far) or, as
Wittgenstein said, "Meaning is what an explanation of meaning explains."

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Re: PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART


> 4. because only then can you disregard the amount of information
> that could
> be and mostly is present in compressions of compressions (of ...) as not
> contradicting the thesis because in such cases a more compressed
> message can
> easily be shown to trigger a higher amount of information to be
> sent (e. g.
> exactly a million zeros could be the key to understand a tonload of
> information encrypted a bit further on (algorhitmic encryption
> being the key
> to compression) or, a better example perhaps, more in the spirit of true
> calculation, the case of a few 1's at exactly those locations where in the
> receiving end or in decompressioning it it would contain more information
> than a similarly diversified message, similarly near to the limit of
> absolute diversification, because it would recursively decompress the
> compressions it contains.

Sorry, Dirk, I'm not really following you, but I do know that if you
compress a compressed message, you will get something that is much the same
size as the compressed message.

> To come back to the matter at hand, however, this particular chain of
> message events: in 'The Fold', Gilles Deleuze devotes special attention to
> the Leibniz idea that souls ('monads' in his terms) who are damned are,
> however pitifull for them, the condition for other souls to be able to
> increase their zones of clarity. In the Leibniz system this can be so
> because every monad contains the whole of the universe inside its 'folds'
> but it only has a limited zone of clarity and a vast region of what is
> called a 'fuscum subnegrum', its dark zone. A damned soul is eternally
> damned because it continually choses for the one thing that is
> its greatest
> point of desire:its whole universe is directed, pointed to its hatred of
> God. This ultimate obsession is the only thing that constitutes
> this soul's
> zone of clarity and because of the eternal divide of the constant
> amount of
> information that is the case in the Leibniz system, these poor souls leave
> other souls more 'room' for expansion of their zones of clarity.

Cool. Leibniz rules, eh? Newton was white bread compared with Leibniz.

> ps: received work from turkey's ozcan turkmen the other day. he is a
> programmer-poet. he is working out a notion of "entropic poetry". very
> interestin stuff.
>
> -----
> Would you have an URL on him, decompressable to less Turkish and more
> English than what Google shows?

I do, but I'm not sure it's public yet. I'll check.

Such is the thrill of the Internet: to receive notions of entropic poetry
from a poet-programmer from Istanbul! Borges might smile.

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART


> >is something meaningless when its information measure is
> maximal, which is
> >to say, when it's completely random?
>
>
> No, because random information can be useful. Meaningful means
> useful; meaning is related to and capable of changing aspects of your
> personal reality. That someone is now eating a sardine in Papua New
> Guinia is probably not meaningful to me, except in so far as I can
> use it as an example. It's information but meaningless to me.
> Meaning is always related to someone to whom it has meaning.
> Miklos Legrady

Sounds reasonable. I wonder if the term 'meaning' is used with any precision
in AI study of natural language or in contemporary linguistics? It's such a
loose goose in common parlance. It has all sorts of meanings. That which is
significant. Or useful, as you say. Or that which is under semantic
interpretation. Or that which is intended. Or that which was not intended
but is nonetheless signified or consequent. There are at least two types of
meaning (denotative and connotative).

It seems that part of the difficulty of semantics is that meaning is not
solely something that arises from interpretation but that texts, for
instance, can imply or necessitate some meanings yet be interpretable
concerning others.

'enigma n' is an anagram of 'meaning'.

ja
http://vispo.com/animisms/enigman