Rob Myers
Since 2003
Works in United States of America

ARTBASE (3)
PORTFOLIO (2)
BIO
Rob Myers is an artist and hacker based in the UK.

I have been creating images of the contemporary social and cultural environment through programming, design software and visual remixing since the early 1990s. My work is influenced by popular culture and high art in equal measures. My interest in remixing and sampling has led to my involvement in the Free Culture movement. I have been involved in the public consultation regarding the Creative Commons 2.0 and CC-UK licenses. All my visual art is available under a Creative Commons license.

My interest in programming has led to my involvement with the Free Software movement. I developed the Macintosh version of the Gwydion Dylan programming language compiler. All my software is available under the GNU GPL.
Discussions (509) Opportunities (1) Events (0) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: regarding the On Colaboration reblog on


Quoting Steve OR Steven Read <steveread@mindspring.com>:

> 'hacking' can also mean "to hack away". Meaning something akin to
> this 'exporatory' process, as opposed to actual hacking in the
> reverse-engineering or security sense.

This, traditional, sense is the one I intended in my comment on exploratory
coding. I wouldn't call the modern mis-use of the word as a sysnonym for
"cracking" the *actual* sense, but sadly it is the one that most people know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy

Happy hacking! ;-)

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: regarding the On Colaboration reblog on the Rhiz front page


Quoting Pall Thayer <p_thay@alcor.concordia.ca>:

> But I think one of the problems with the more traditional approach to
> programming (and I'm just basing this on books and tutorials that
> I've seen) is, for instance, the idea that you have to have a fully
> formed idea about how the program is going to function before you
> begin to write it. I don't agree. I think it's entirely possible to
> build up a framework around an idea that you intend to explore
> further once the program gets to a stage where you can run something.
> But that's where it tends to get messy. Change a little here,
> something over there, this breaks, fix it by changing this thing
> here, etc. I think, from an artistic standpoint, that it's also
> important to maintain a certain degree of flexibility during the
> process of creating the program. Of course, the!
> more the artist uses programming, the more they will come to know
> and appreciate certain standards. But I think it's perfectly all
> right to let it happen over time and even through personal discovery.

Oh definitely. One problem for art computing is that people tend to use
Java or
C++. These are statically typed, compiled languages that you do need to design
programs for using all that boring software design methodology before
you start
coding otherwise you will quickly get lost. They are also brittle when you
change things, and unforgiving when they fail. Even Processing inherits
some of
these problems, being based on Java.

A more hackerish way of coding is called "exploratory programming". This is
where you start writing code, see where it goes, then extend the program to
follow your ideas. It's much easier to do this style of programming in a
dynamically typed, interpreted or interactive language like the scripting
languages or the Lisp family. It's like using oil paint rather than tempera.
;-)

If you've ever seen Livecoding those guys tend to use Perl or another
scripting
language in an interactive interpreter. That gets you close to the code in
realtime.

So for a more fliud way of pursuing ideas in code I do recommend dynamic
languages and exploratory programming.

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Mail Art


Quoting "Gere, Charlie" <c.gere@lancaster.ac.uk>:

> This begs a number of ontological questions that I don't think Rob's
> post fully embraces

Ontology? Right... [cracks knuckles]

> Where does the 'artness' of mail art reside, as opposed to its
> 'mailness'?

In the genetic character of the objects under consideration that cannot be
accounted for by their status as mailed artefacts. Or that uses their
status as
mailed artefacts as an index.

> Is it really to be found in the moment it is circulating in
> the postal system, at which point it is either more or less invisible,
> except possibly to postal operatives, or at best only visible to the
> sender at one point or the recipient at another? More to the point would
> mail art actually be art if it never left the postal circuit (which
> includes the sender and recipient) and never entered the museum? I
> suggest not.

Mail art that has not ended up in musums is still "mail art". Apart from the
fact that mail art is the *name* for a kind of activity and product (MailArt)
as well as a *description*, art that has been mailed and that reflects this
fact cannot by definition be validated by the museum. If the museum says "I
recognise this as mail art" and we are to believe that without this
institutional declaration mail art is not mail art, the museum becomes the
eviscerated God of intelligent design, a slave to the bleedin' obvious. If the
museum says "I recognise this as art", it is ontologically incompetent. If the
museum says "I recognise this as mail" then I fear for its collection.

If MailArt is not Mail Art until the museum gets out its rubber stamp, it will
exist in a Schrodinger's cat-like state of aesthetic indeterminacy, stuck
between two words -er- statuses ("mail" and "art"). Mail Art may be minor but
it is still art, it is art by virtue of its own relations and its own genetic
character. It has a voice, albeit a small one.

> I suggest that it would simply be... mail. It is only when
> it enters the museum or more generally the system of art discourse, that
> it becomes art,

Objects can emerge from as well as enter into "art discourse". Mail Art is a
good example of this.

> and in fact this is absolutely understood by mail
> artists. Ray Johnson, possibly the greatest mail artist and the founder
> of the New York Correspondance [sic] School used to send letters to
> MOMA, knowing that though they were unlikely to purchase his work as
> art, they were obliged to keep and archive any letters from artists;
> thus he could say that he had work in MOMA

FedEx a canvas to MOMA and they won't keep it. Send them mail and they
have to.
If this doesn't prove that mail art affords different possibilities to museum
art and that it affords a critique of artworld relations for at least some of
its practitioners I don't know what does. ;-)

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Mail Art


Quoting "Gere, Charlie" <c.gere@lancaster.ac.uk>:

> A further point about mail art that just occurred to me over
> breakfast (marmite

From a jar or a squeezy bottle?

> on sourdough, black colombian coffee, freshly ground, if you must
> know). Even though mail art can only exist in a museum or art world
> context it is sustained by a kind of creation myth of its existence
> before it got coopted, of some pure moment of praxis that precedes
> museumification or commodification, but in fact never really exists,
> literally in that before it gets museumified or whatever it just
> isn't, yet, art, and if it doesn't will never become art. It is a bit
> like a kind of freudian trauma reaction that only exists in
> repetition. After all nobody has ever seen any mail art other than
> after it has been recognised as art; they couldn't have, by definition

Nobody has ever seen any art before it has been recognised as art, except for
those who used or cleaned the urinal before Duchamp got hold of it or
those who
prayed to icons before they were regarded as aesthetic rather than spiritual.
Then there's the Salon des Refuses. Actually lots of people have seen art
before it has been recognised as art. The institutional theory breaks
itself if
it is ever actually used.

When I was at art school I was given a mail art address list, and other people
were sending and receiving mail art from bedsits rather than museums without
hitting the problem of institutional validation. They were artists and
believed
that what they were doing was artistic and was art, if minor. This is an art
world context but not The Art World Context. I got the impression that
the idea
in part was to create a non-gallery context and a non-heroic art. It was a
hang-over from radical conceptualism.

My point is not that mail art needs institutional validation. Mail art exists
quite happily as mail art, as something you get with the bills, and this is a
context that it loses when institutions decide that they need to get involved.

This mail art context, which is interesting not so much for its
unimportance as
for its casualness, is different from a gallery context, and creates a
different experience of art, offering different possibilities. Mail art don't
need no steenkin' museum to validate it, and I'm not sure museums need
mail art
to validate them.

What neither mail art nor museums need is "museum mail art". Mail art is
ephemeral and incidental. Museum art is heroic and important. Something has to
give, and the end result is not even the artistic equivalent of
corporate punk.
Mail art seen after the fact in a museum is interesting. Art a mail artist has
made for a museum that is informed by their mail art practice is interesting.
Museum-sized bundles of felt UPS-ed to the gallery with the label on
display as
they are hung aren't.

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: regarding the On Colaboration reblog on the Rhiz front page


Steve OR Steven Read wrote:
> I don't see all that much difference between artists and scientists/engineers/slash/slash.

"Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an enquiry into the
laws of nature. Why, then, should not landscape painting be considered
as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the
experiments?" - John Constable.

"Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory." - Feynman

- Rob.