a file structure for the complex the changing and the indeterminate theodore h nelson the new media reader noah wardrip fruin i began this work in 1960 with no help from anybody its purpose was to create techniques for handling personal file systems and manuscripts in progress these two purposes are closely related and not sharply distinct many writers and research professionals have files or collections of notes which are tied to manuscripts in progress indeed often personal files shade into manuscripts and the assembly of textual notes becomes the writing of text without a sharp break p 135 my intent was not merely to computerize these tasks but to think out and eventually program the dream file the file system that would have every feature a novelist or absent minded professor could want holding everything he wanted in just the complicated way he wanted it held and handling notes and manuscripts in as subtle and complex ways as he wanted them handled p 135 surely half the time spent in writing is spent physically rearranging words and paper and trying to find things already written if 95 of this time could be saved it would only take half as long to write something p 135 the problems of writing are little understood even by writers systems analysis in this area is scant as elsewhere the best doers may not understand what they do although there is considerable anecdote and lore about the different physical manuscript and file techniques of different authors literary tradition demerits any concern with technical systems as detracting from creativity conversely technical people do not always appreciate the difficulty of organizing text since in technical writing much of the organization and phraseology is given or appears to be but in the computer sciences we are profoundly aware of the importance of systems details and of the variety of consequences for both quality and quantity of work that result from different systems p 136 if a writer is really to be helped by an automated system it ought to do more than retype and transpose it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion when his ideas are scraps fragments phrases and contradictory overall designs and it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid making the fragments easy to find and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing p 136 7 as computer based systems grow in capability and diversity of uses they tend to become more and more cluttered with niggling complications hidden passageways and lurking detailed interlocks restrictions sepcializations provisos these should be foresworn if possible in the system under discussion so that it might be attractive to laymen including artists and writers who feel unkindly disposed toward computers it should readily adapt to their own styles of handling things imposing few conventions or methods of use how could this imposition be avoided the answer i think you see is to choose a very simple structure that can be used and compounded in many different ways the basic arrangement chosen for these purposes is an information structure i will refer to as zippered lists we might call it permutation invariant one for one inter list entry linking but that is not necessary there are only three kinds of things in the zippered list elf with no predetermined relations among them no hierarchies machine based features or trick exceptions the elf has three element entries lists and links an entry is a discrete unit of information designated by the user a list is an ordered set of entries designated by the user a given entry may be in any number of lists a link is a connector designated by the user between two particular entries which are in different lists figure 11 1 an entry in one list may be linked to only one entry in another list on the left we see two zippered lists between the entries of list a and those of b are dashed lines representing the links between the two lists on the right is the table of links as it might look to a machine the machine can read this table from right to left or left to right finding entries in b that correspond to given entries in a or vice versa a change in the sequence of either list or additions to either list will not change the links that stand between them changes in the link structure will occur only if the user specifically changes the links or if he destroys entries which are linked to others to be technical then two lists are zippered if there are any pairwise links between their respective elements it is not required that the two lists be of the same length or even if they are that all entries have a link to the other list p 138 the elf may be thought of as a place not a machine but a piece of stationary or office equipment with many little locations which may be rearranged with regard to one another p 139 the elf may be an aid to the mind in creative tasks allowing the user to compare arrangements and alternatives with some prior ideal this is helpful in planning nonlinear assemblages museum exhibits casting for a play or linear constructions of any kind such linear constructions include not only written texts they can be any complicated sequence of things such as motion pictures in the editing stage and computer programs p 141 the natural shape of information too may call for the elf for instance sections of information often arrange themselves naturally in a lattice structure whose strands need to be separately examined pondered or tested such lattices include pert networks programmed instruction sequences history books and genealogical records the elf can handle genealogical source documentation and its original text as well indeed any informational networks that require storage handling and consideration will fit the elf a feature that could have applications in plant layout social psychology contingency planning circuit design and itineraries the elf may through its mutability its expansibility and its self documentation features aid in the integration understanding and channeling of ideas and problems that will not yield to ordinary analysis or customary reductions for instance the contingencies of planning which are only partially boolean often the reason for a so called grand strategy in a setting is that we cannot keep track of the interrelations of particular contingencies the elf could help us understand the interrelations of possibilities consequences and strategic options p 141 2 ideally neither the length of entries the number of lists or any other parameter of a file is restricted by anything but the absolute size of all memory this is a difficult requirement for the programmer routinely however the system should be able to accept entries thousands of characters long accept hundreds of entries to a list and accept hundreds of lists in the file otherwise extraneous consideration by the user of whether there's room to add material or try out an offshoot begins to interfere with the system's use p 143 systems of paper have grave limitations for either organizing or presenting ideas a book is never perfectly suited to the reader one reader is bored another confused by the same pages no system of paper book or programmed text can adapt very far to the interests or needs of a particular reader or student p 143 let me introduce the word hypertext to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper it may contain summaries or maps of its contents and their interrelations it may contain annotations additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it let me suggest that such an object and system properly designed and administered could have great potential for education increasing the student's range of choices his sense of freedom his motivation and his intellectual grasp such a system could grow indefinitely gradually including more and more of the world's written knowledge however its internal file structure would have to be built to accept growth change and complex informational arrangements the elf is such a file structure p 144 films sound recordings and video recordings are also linear strings basically for mechanical reasons p 144 rarely does the original outline predict well what headings and sequence will create the effects desired the balance of emphasis sequence of interrelating points texture of insight rhythm etc we may better call the outlining process inductive certain interrelations appear to the author in the material itself some at the outset and some as he works he can only decide which to emphasize which to use as unifying ideas and principles and which to slight or delete by trying between the inspirations then and during the sitting the task of writing is one of rearrangement and reprocessing and the real outline develops slowly the original crude or fragmentary texts created at the outset generally undergo many revision processes before they are finished intellectually they are pondered juxtaposed compared adapted transposed and judged mechanically they are copied overwritten with revision markings rearranged and copied again this cycle may be repeated many times the whole grows by trial and error in the processes of arrangement comparison and retrenchment by examining and mentally noting many different versions some whole but most fragmentary the intertwining and organizing of the final written work gradually takes place p 136 the physical universe is not all that decays so do abstractions and categories human ideas science scholarship and language are constantly collapsing and unfolding any field and the corpus of all fields is a bundle of relationships subject to all kinds of twists inversions involutions and rearrangement these changes are frequent but unpredictable while the disappearance and up ending of categories and subjects may be erratic it never stops and the meaning of this for information retrieval should be clear last week's categories perhaps last night's field may be gone today to the extent that information retrieval is concerned with seeking true or ideal or permanent codes and categories and even the most sophisticated role indicator syntaxes are a form of this endeavor to this extent information retrieval seems to me to be fundamentally mistaken the categories are chimerical or temporal and our categorization systems must evolve as they do informational systems must have built in the capacity to accept the new categorization systems as they evolve from or outside the framework of the old not just the new material but the capacity for new arrangements and indefinite rearrangements of the old must be possible i believe that such a system as the elf actually ties in better than anything previously used with the actual processes by which thought is progressively organized whether into stories or hypertext or library categories thus it may help integrate for human understanding bodies of material so diversely connected that they could not be untangled by the unaided mind for both logistic and psychological reasons it should be an important adjunct to imaginative integrating and creative enterprises it is useful where relationships are unclear where contingencies and tasks are undefined and unpredictable where the structures or final outcome it must represent are not yet fully known where we do not know the file's ultimate arrangement where we do not know what parts of the file are most important or where things are in permanent and unpredictable flux perhaps this includes more places than we think and perhaps here as in biology the only ultimate structure is change itself p 144 cryptonomicon neal stephenson lawrence pritchard waterhouse is plugged into the universe in a way that exceeds even what bletchley park has to offer the center of this particular universe is the safe from u 553 and its axis passes up through the center of the dial and now waterhouse has his hand on it with experimentation some patterns begin to show through and eventually he works out the following combination 23 right 37 left 7 right 31 left 13 right and then there's a really meaty click and he knows in his marrow that he can take off the headphones he hauls the door up his feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing to do with the contents of the safe he is disappointed because he has solved the problem and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing something that inherently needs to be done like picking a lock or breaking a code p 279 they are building i have helped them build a machine called colossus i thought i saw your hand in it it is built from old ideas ideas we talked about in new jersey years ago alan says brisk and dismissive in his tone gloomy in his face he is hugging the rca radio tube manual to himself under one arm doodling in a notebook with the other waterhouse thinks that really the rca radio tube manual is like a ball and chain holding alan back if he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought as it happens alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world the underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in he blows smoke into the air to make the light visible he sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes and in their surges and eddies capturing something of what is going on in his own brain turing is neither a mortal nor a god he is antaeus that he bridges the mathematical and physical words is his strength and his weakness p 423 the low sun shines flatly across the sand grazing the chaos and creating a knife sharp terminator at the crest of each dunelet the curves flirt and osculate with one another in some pattern that is waterhouse guesses deeply fascinating and significant but too challenging for his tired mind to attack some areas have been stomped level by seagulls the sand at the surf line has been washed flat a small child's footprints wander across it splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts the sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it then small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water those swirls in turn carve the sand the ocean is a turing machine the sand is its tape the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks plodding through the surf waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean eventually the ocean erases them but in the process its state has been changed the pattern of its swirls has been altered waterhouse imagines the disturbance might somehow propagate across the pacific and into some super secret nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves nip listeners would know that waterhouse had walked that way in turn the water swirling around waterhouse's feet carries information about nipropeller design and the deployment of their fleets if only he had the wit to read it the chaos of the waves gravid with encrypted data mocks him p 551 2 okay randy says so obviously where you're going with this is that there must be some universal pattern of events that when filtered through the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive superstitious people always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as gods heroes etc yes and these can be recognized across cultures in the same way that two persons with root reps in their mind might recognize me by comparing notes so enoch you want me to believe that these gods which aren't really gods but it's a nice concise word all share certain things in common precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and universal across cultures p 1002 a personal matter kenzaburo oe his wife asked are you the responsible brave type if he had ever been to war bird had thought often he would have been able to say definitely whether he was a brave type this had occurred to him before fights and before his entrance examinations even before his marriage and always he had regretted not having a definite answer even his longing to test himself in the wilds of africa which opposed the ordinary was excited by his feeling that he might discover in the process his own private war but at the moment bird had a feeling he knew without having to consider war or travel to africa that he was not to be relied on a craven type p 129 the artist as mad scientist salon june 22 2006 the intellectual and emotional storm that is jeremijenko's life p 9 finding the woman behind the artist though can be exhausting ask her what's personal about her art and she will say my thesis is nothing can't be autobiographical the idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something i can't understand or subscribe to p 4 spend enough time with jeremijenko and the woman in her art does come into view you see an artist with a frightening drive dark passionate and joyful motivations it's just that like her art she requires translation p 4 i remark that the bird installation seems less successful and represents a significant problem with conceptual art that its effects often remain locked in the artist's head jeremijenko bristles in terms of conceptual art i'm a populist she responds perfectly serious my strategies of representation are supposed to be questions what are those perches they're not supposed to be hammering you on the head as some kind of didactic science lesson p 5 6 well she has to admit that a lesson given by birds on the evils of land ownership is didactic if not anthropomorphic there's nothing wrong with being anthropomorphic she says sounding as peeved as one of her talking birds that's how we understand the world contemporary science doesn't pretend we're not human and have a solely objective view of things we only have certain tools to understand the world so i'm not scared of anthropomorphism at all when science becomes unbelievable is when it pretends it's coming from nowhere that it's a universal description of everything that doesn't make sense anymore and too often in our culture she says when empirical science rules activism fails i don't think there's a scientist anywhere in the world in any discipline that has the kind of power to make as much of a difference as an interested engaged diverse community she pauses and grins her wry humor having returned besides walk through the rest of the whitney and ask me again if i'm not a populist p 6 letting go by ian allen c magazine toronto issue 58 the suicide box is a work by the bureau of inverse technology bit which was included in the 1997 whitney biennial the thirteen minute video is a proposal for computer assisted video surveillance of san francisco's golden gate bridge a locale that has offered a tempting if slightly unreliable exit from the woes of this world for some 997 documented jumpers the means of surveillance are disarmingly straightforward a video camera set below the bridge records when sensors detect a falling object falling bodies are interspersed with the inadvertently poetic false starts of seagull triggered footage the attempt to correct this technical problem to refine the parameters of documentation becomes a metaphor for misplaced social effort as a device that is incapable of more than recorded observation of desperate private acts the suicide box has an eerie neutrality and for many a discomfiting element of voyeurism but bit's use of the tactics and aesthetics of advanced technology of what are fast becoming the instruments of social management in fact highlights the compassion of the piece by bringing an insistent witness to the community's failure to sustain the living by videotaping self destruction bit uses the means of institutional regulation of public space to press past it by surveillance not of property or of worker productivity but the real disorder of human despair the suicide box is not tied to security or profit the work deliberately moves into a social blind spot it speaks of the ingenious ways we ask machines to stand in for us when we devise technological solutions allowing the compilation of data to displace ameliorative action joseph beuys carolyn tisdall 1979 for beuys it fluxus was of great importance because it brought him into contact with a group of people dedicated to breaking through the boundaries between art and life and between the various arts p 84 there was the use of sound as a sculptural material to enlarge the whole understanding of sculpture from the point of view of using materials therefore not only solid materials like metal clay stone but also sound noise melody using language all become the material for sculpture and all acquire their form through thought so thought too is taken as a sculptural means this is an extreme position the real transcendental position of production in general p 86 this is an image and should be seen as such only in emergency or for didactic reasons does one reach out for interpretations p 92 my own introduction of the anti art concept was a methodical attempt to express the general problem in order to effect something within fluxus that could extend to the whole art as far as i am concerned the anti refers to the redundant concept of art and its retreat into over specialist isolation otherwise it would be meaningless just as the other pairs of concepts i often mention mathematics and anti mathematics physics anti physics etc represent only limited sections of these fields but both poles are necessary if wider concepts are to be achieved p 92 such a performance always has a theory behind it a partium or score which gives information w o information acoustically its like using just the carrier wave without loading it with semantic information the wave is unformed semantics would give it form theory of sculpture my presence there in the felt was like that of a carrier wave attempting to switch off my own species' range of semantics it was a parallel to the old initiation of the coffin a form of mock death it takes a lot of discipline to avoid panicking in such a condition floating empty and devoid of emotion and with specific feelings of claustrophobia or pain for nine hours in the same position such an action and indeed every action changes me radically in a way it's a death a real action and not an interpretation theme how does one become a revolutionary that's the problem p 95 this relates to medicine or what people call alchemy or shamanism though that should not be overstressed for me it meant the continuation of threads in my biography that had led me to scientific and biological experiments at rhindern now through art this was brought to a higher level of application out of it came the theory of sculpture by that i mean that i saw the relationship between the chaos i had experienced and a sculptural analogy chaos can have a healing character coupled with the idea of open movement which channels the warmth of chaotic energy into order or form objects like crystal came before the theory but now i began to see how structures can be created which relate to every kind of life and work shamanism at a serious level it is a reminder of a human consent without which we would be drastically impoverished the need to come into intense physical and psychological contact with the material world to understand and feel its energetic substance rather than skim over the surface of experience without this the process of life is perilously abstract when people say that shamanistic practice is atavistic and irrational one might answer that the attitude of contemporary scientists is equally old fashioned and atavistic because we should by now be at another stage of development in our relationship to material so when i appear as a kind of shamanistic figure or allude to it i do it to stress my belief in other priorities and the need to come up with a completely different plan for working with substances my personal history is of interest in so far as i have attempted to use my life and person as tools the object is intended as a transmitter radiating ideas from a deep background in time through an accretion of layers of meaning and biography functioning like a faraday cage in which the power is retained through a kind of grid the object transmits while the text demonstrates the outward appearance of every object i make is the equivalent of some aspect of inner human life it is certainly an equivalent of the pathological state mentioned before and expresses the need to create a space in the mind from which all disturbances were removed an empty insulated space within this empty space investigations can take place and from this concentration new experiences can emerge this is a prerequisite for every experiment i found i had very little in common with the art world in general perhaps this was still the after effect of my studies in natural science but i felt that art was at its richest when the laboratory spirit of research scientific results and a clear theoretical structure was there to extend it to a wider understanding by this time i did actually have some results of my research to show so it was probably the right moment to bring them into the open the reason i became known so quickly after this had perhaps to do with the density of material that had been worked over for so long it worked like the accumulated charge of a battery honey pump 254 with honey pump i am expressing the principle of the free international university working in the bloodstream of society flowing in and out of the heart organ the steel honey container are the main arteries through which the honey is pumped out of the engine room with a pulsing sound circulates round the free university area and returns to the heart the whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows and where the bee's head is to be found in the coiled loops of tubing with its two iron feelers will power in the chaotic energy of the double engine churning the heap of fat feeling in the heart and bloodstream of honey flowing throughout the whole thinking powers in the eurasian staff the head of which rises from the engine room right up to the skylight of the museum and then points down again anti illusion procedure materials whitney 1969 it is important for le va as well once he knows how various substances interact he can then use the elements as they act with and on each other after he has in a sense given himself to them for a period of apprenticeship he must empathize with their cycle as well as with their materiality as the scientist must with his microorganisms le va views his discoveries objectively and unlike the traditional painter or sculptor has little interest in manipulating those materials in order to produce a series of works based on a single set of confluences le va like many of the other artists in this exhibition willfully changes the circumstances in which he works the moment the possibility of extending those circumstances ceases to exist p 9 the fact that so many artists were willing to risk challenging the terms within which they have operated in the past in so direct a manner became one of the primary reasons for holding the exhibition one of the most conservative or traditional properties of modern art is its reliance on style the signature of virtually every modern painter and sculptor has been his style or series of styles style replaced illusion while at the same moment it gave the individual artist the area within which he could develop his art most of the artists in this exhibition have chosen to slip around style it's difficult to ignore or defeat by concentrating on their individual acts one could properly ask how an artist eludes style if one of his art acts follows another one sure fire method is by constantly changing materials or even media another is to conceive each work in terms of the freedoms and limitations of a particular time and place p 13 since it can be argued with some effectiveness that artists are of necessity extremely practical people whose adjustment to their living conditions is often audacious the following remarks are perhaps pertinent artists particularly sculptors are faced with enormous problems such as procurement and storage of materials storage of unsold works transportation costs not to mention the time and cost of completing large works the most obvious way to develop is by working through as many problems as ambition time and money will allow p 13 one of the most interesting characteristics of post war american art is the speed with which it reveals itself one becomes acutely aware of time as an independent element as one becomes aware of human energy as an element of time a revelation of art energy made visible in a short period of time seems to be the very basis upon which major post war american art rests illusion is a key factor in arresting or slowing the energy flow from the art object to the onlooker the instant response wherein the spectator must of necessity be arrested by the aesthetic experience for a moment is given over to examination and perhaps delectation most major post war american art rigorously denies that particular kind of delectation time to the viewer by treating illusion in a very measured way the rigor with which these artists and others deny a viewing of their works outside the non illusionistic limits they have prescribed leads directly to the anti illusionist paintings and sculptures in the present exhibition p 16 the very tough logic underlying the best post war american abstract art combined with a kind of art systems analysis brilliantly conceived by claes oldenburg seems to account for at least a portion of the history behind these artists' works oldenburg's superior rationalism in dealing with sculptural form his carrying over of form from one material to the next his environmental concerns all contributed to a kind of climate of open possibilities p 17 it becomes apparent as one walks through the exhibition that each of the artists presumes very little about the procedures or materials with which he makes art factors such as material disintegration or physical change are integrally contained within a number of objects taken singly or in combination the procedural factors alone seriously call into question how art should be seen what should be done with it and finally what is an art experience p 17 this does not mean that the elements employed have no relationship to each other but rather that such relationships are of a new kind they do not evolve from a preconception of order which the artist is trying to express but from the activity of making a work and from the dictates of the materials used a relational logic has been replaced by a functional one p 27 still another possible function of this kind of art is as robbe grillet has indicated not to illustrate a truth or even an interrogation known in advance but to bring into the world certain interrogations and also perhaps in time certain answers not yet known as such to themselves from notes for a new novel 1965 robbe grille p 32 a disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion it is part of the works refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end p 39 interested in physical decision making processes p 41 desc joel shapiro william pope l bessire 1 30 2005 for pope l if it is the powerful who rule make the laws and define the limits of society then it must be the mission of the powerless to question and transgress p 22 and with pope l the message is multifaceted bottom line the friendliest black artist in america has suggested artists don't make art they make conversations they make things happen they change the world p 22 pope l suggested that our consumer society promises power and wealth simply by owning certain objects which harks back to primitive magic and voodoo i figured if i also eat it just imagine how much power i can drain from this fetishized object p 25 as the son of robert ryman it is my job to walk in his footsteps to the front door of the family mansion and burn it to the ground then claim that the conflagration is not so much a rejection or celebration but a negotiation worth having which must be lived consciously in the space between contradictions in this sense there is no such thing as contradiction only the fire that burns amidst the networks made up of them p 39 i could never see myself throwing that much white weight around he must think he's some kind of super hero who only eats white food and only helps white people by making only white culture h is was a sociology of painting whether he was hip to it or not p 39 in the end his work is a form of revenge against the abuses that society supports without however appearing to break any laws as lenny bruce once noted satire is tragedy plus time p 40 william pope l has had over the years a shopping cart full of consumer items he uses them to create an everyday art best defined by claes oldenburg's manifesto of 1961 an art that can be put on and taken off like pants which develops holes like socks which is eaten like a piece of pie or abandoned with great contempt like a piece of shit p 55 lss are you happy with the term performance for what you do wp l not always lss if not what would you call it wp l i like the idea that the term performance references doing masquerade duration and ritual that it connects to history that it connects to the heightened experience of the proscenium stage as well as veering off into the moment action and event of everyday i think if i were to call what i do anything else i'd call it a practice like i'm always preparing for something because i have to in order to better myself or some thing or some other or solve some problem also that the goal of my repetition is always in the future multiple goals multiple timelines always deferred by the reality of imperfection i like the idea that practice aims to make by implication something perfect though also by implication this drive contains its own impossibility which is good and perhaps allows us to do other things that really matter like petting the cat or having a conversation with your uncle levert practice runs like the water p 65 hole theory parts 4 5 p 76 nothing that s where the hole beings and ends like a big fat s eating its tail i'm suspicious of things that make sense maybe i'm afraid of it false security whereas contradiction does make sense to me when i was able to accept that something could be true and not true i felt at home p 45 aesthetic experience in the art of joseph beuys a comment on hans dieter huber's the artwork as a system and its aesthetic experience by jean baeck the reality of ideas for beuys drawings for joseph beuys were perhaps the most critical area of his production speaking of kadmon 1948 9 beuys states for me these drawings are closer to reality than are other forms of so called reality this meant that ideas given form in his work were not symbolic but real paj a journal of performance and art 24 3 2002 68 72 america's friendliest black artist william pope l interviewed by chris thompson mobilizing media ranging from pop tarts and mayonnaise to his own body in a capeless superman suit combining humor with trenchant social critique artist and bates college professor william pope l has for twenty five years been grappling with economic gender class racial and cultural differences with the contradictions of american culture in an attempt to spark his viewers to feel deeply and think critically jean luc godard once wrote what is really at stake is one's image of oneself in his performances installations and critical writings pope l has placed himself in the uneasy high stakes space between our spectral images of ourselves and others and the palpable realities and inequities that produce and sustain them you have mentioned that you consider yourself to be giving voice to the nea since the nea chooses not to speak it has chosen me to speak i think that the nea is my friend i don't love it but i do respect its reach i think that the nea in a sense is an underachiever i think it can do much better than it does i'm not going to come out in heavy criticism of it i want only to say that i end page 68 think its action goes against certain democratic principles we live with the notion that from very early on in american history americans have tended not to do things in the official way and the spirit of my work is very much about that my job in a way is to remind americans about what self image they want of themselves do we want an image of fear and compliance or of adventure and democracy the national coalition against censorship recently issued the following statement with respect to the nea's response to your work a brief look into art history would prove that the most controversial art has been the one to open new avenues for aesthetic thinking this art will of course appear with or without government support but in a country where free inquiry and innovation are founding values it is a shame to have the leading national art agency shudder at the sight of anything that might trouble the most conservative of congressional representatives that's right do you have a specific strategy for this voice giving process i think that this is already occurring by creating a space in which they don't speak they have created a space in which i can as a strategy their silence is supposed to render the artist mute but i think that it is working in reverse it is only encouraging language the nea has chosen not to put anything in language's place and i appreciate that in many ways it's ironic by withholding something something else gets released a lot of my work is about trying to deal in this space where marking contradiction isn't enough we all know that contemporary life has contradictions this has become a cliche but finding yourself in the maelstrom of contradiction how do you deal with it in the absence of institutional direction how does an individual pursue his or her goals if the nea is signaling that they're not interested in supporting radical work it is perhaps the responsibility of artists to find their own support this forces artists to be more clever and more energetic and more radical about finding homes for what they do but on the other hand this is a double edged sword i find it unfortunate that our government cannot take a more adventurous stand in creating the self image of our people should we speak about your great white way project at the 2002 whitney biennial the great white way project is a five year performance it will begin at the statue of liberty and end at university heights bridge not far from where my mother lives first the performance is a crawl military style on my belly i have been planning it for two or more years the strategizing of it began before the whitney biennial and will extend beyond it the important thing in relation to the nea and the issue of being refused their support is that i had already constructed this project as an idea i had already gestated it whether or not i get support i will continue the work there may be moments when i need support and i won't hesitate to ask for it and if you aren't interested in giving it i'll still continue on with the work as president bush once said there may be actions we will take that no one will know anything about one of the pressures of media attention is that it can sometimes dull one's end page 69 begin page 71 desire or ability to be more aggressive in one's approach money can put the fear in your action i'm not putting down the whitney or even the nea i'm simply saying that i'm going to carry on my practice regardless of what institutions do your work deals with relationships between society's haves and have nots i come from a working class family for working class people there is always this hunger for what you don't have part of that is factual it comes out of your life some is imposed by society which tells you that you should have things which you do not this takes other forms black people thinking that they ought to be white poor people thinking they need to be rich interestingly enough i think that in order to move up the ladder one has to move wearing a mask that is not one's own face i'm going to come from a black ghetto and enter a conservative white school then go into the enterprise that is the art world it puts pressure on me to assimilate to be a black person in white clothing i'm interested in what happens to this person how does this person operate how do have nots operate in a system of a presence of plenitude it's almost like being drunk how do you appear sober looking even though you're in an inebriated environment and so the act of crawling which is based on horizontality refers to those who have not in western society we are given examples of the vertical the rocket the skyscraper reagan's and bush's star wars system it's all about up i want to contest and challenge that in the crawl pieces like great white way i'm suggesting that just because a person is lying on the sidewalk doesn't mean they've given up their humanity that verticality isn't what it's pumped up to be and the capeless superman suit 9 11 was a very interesting event it was scary and it revealed a secret about the united states that everybody knew and nobody would say or they'd say it loudly yelling so that everybody would hear the volume and not the secret itself which is that fear is at our heart the fear that we may indeed have too much and that it may be taken away 9 11 made this patently obvious we are afraid so here in great white way superman cannot fly anymore just like the rest of us trying to make it through the day here the heroic act is to give up his verticality to submit to life as it is the anthropologist michael taussig has made this point in his recent book defacement in which he argues that social survival depends upon knowing what not to know i do know taussig's work yes in a way in our country we've been taught that there's nothing we can do about anything and at the same time that we can do anything so what can you do i think you have to attempt something that's the way to enter between the two you attempt to do things you're not going to make any claims about lofty goals simply about your commitment to collaboration the question is how do you collaborate with the world without telling it what to do the act of crawling is about an individual trying to tie together the disparateness of the end page 71 american character without pretensions to total success the individual knows that this isn't possible but wishes nevertheless to try it to do it in a committed way to make that commitment to the community i may ask for help this idea of american entropy is interesting it seems to go back to people like the late nineteenth century american historian henry adams who held that we cannot change the outcome of history and yet lived a life of wealth and privilege whatever will happen will happen and you can't do anything about it but at the same time you can do anything you wish if you look at current news programming you see the news media showing both sides as if there are only two they pose clear boundaries around choices but they're diametrically opposed so it's tough to enter the debate yet if i try to do everything i can't do anything as a have nation we've constructed a way to excuse ourselves from doing anything you don't have to do anything because you can't do anything someone else is taking care of it so don't worry that sort of thing some think it's idealistic doing some little thing like this crawl if you can't be idealistic then what can you be for me this goes back to our oldest ideas of democracy idealism is what gets you out of bed once you're out of bed you need to find something more than idealism but you have to get out of bed having studied with fluxus performer geoffrey hendricks do you consider there to be direct connections between your work and that of other fluxus artists among the principal concerns of fluxus is the relation between art and life for fluxus the boundary between them isn't a contradiction in that art and life feed into each other i'm also interested in this idea of the false boundaries between things such as the opposition between the vertical and horizontal or what have you which could be likened to a fluxus strategy in your use of everyday materials in extraordinary ways like the regurgitated wall street journal there seems to be a connection with contemporary artists like huang yong ping who years ago put two books one a history of western art the other a history of chinese art into a washing machine together for two minutes and then displayed the pulpy results hou hanrou referred to huang's indigestible object as an example of entropy with your regurgitated wall street journal there seems also to be a direct linkage with joseph beuys's i like america and america likes me action which included a stack of wall street journal newspapers which the wild coyote living with him pissed upon there are a number of artists like beuys huang and adrian piper that i feel an affinity with i find that these artists can be seen to have three concurrent elements operating in their work they work with basic materials while at the same time they are highly intellectual about the work and yet they try to construct the work so that it is fairly accessible they try to take a direct action there is a clear intellectual intent but often the work itself is very beautifully roughly constructed that's how i think of myself and my work in connection to theirs there is at once the tactility of statement and yet also the intellectual rigor of the intention clusterfuck esthetics by jerry saltz as sol lewitt generated drawings via language kelley has created a remarkable machine that generates art from yearbooks although kelley has risen to new heights of ambition he's not using this machine to take him or us to new realms g r swenson what is pop art part i art news november 1963 p 26 andy warhol someone said that brecht wanted everybody to think alike i want everybody to think alike but brecht wanted to do it through communism in a way russia is doing it under government it's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government so if it's working without trying why can't it work without being communist everybody looks alike and acts alike and we're getting more and more that way i think everybody should be a machine i think everybody should like everybody is that what pop art is all about yes it's liking things and liking things is like being a machine yes because you do the same thing every time you do it over and over again and you approve of that yes because it's all fantasy it's hard to be creative and it's also hard not to think what you do is creative or hard not to be called creative because everybody is always talking about that and individuality everbody's always being creative and it's so funny when you say things aren't like the shoe i would draw for an advertisement was called a creation but the drawing of it was not but i guess i believe in both ways all these people who aren't very good should be really good everybody is too good now really and how many painters are there millions of painters and all pretty good i think the artists who aren't very good should become like everybody else so that people would like things that aren't very good i think that would be so great to be able to change styles and i think that's what's going to happen that's going to be the whole new scene that's probably one reason i'm using silk screens now i think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me i haven't been able to make every image clear and simple and the same as the first one i think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else's it would turn art history upside down yes is that your aim no the reason i'm painting this way is that i want to be a machine and i feel that whatever i do and do machine like is what i want to do was commercial art more machine like no it wasn't i was getting paid for it and did anything they told me to do if they told me to draw a shoe i'd do it and if they told me to correct it i would i'd do anything they told me to do correct it and do it right i'd have to invent and now i don't after all that correction those commercial drawings would have feelings they would have a style the attitude of those who hired me had feeling or something to it they knew what they wanted they insisted sometimes they got very emotional the process of doing work in commercial art was machine like but the attitude had feeling to it beech d 1997 keith tyson art monthly 207 38 9 anthony reynolds gallery london april 25 to may 31 keith tyson has created a system of decision making which combines anything in the universe with anything else what is more this is done with complete authorial indifference this system is called the artmachine and it churns out promiscuous instructions for tyson to execute as best he can ironically it is precisely the marginalization of his own intellectual input which singles out tyson as one of the most thoughtful of artists unfortunately this is not easy to spot among his wacky and idle works the artmachine has previously instructed tyson to cast the entire contents of the kentucky fried chicken menu in lead and to feed paint into a taxi until the pressure becomes so great that the vehicle explodes he hasn't got round to doing that one yet now after undergoing a few adjustments the artmachine has become a painter its turn to painting however is not a return to familiar disciplines the artmachine does not know what a painting is made up according to its mutant logic of four elements a surface an action subject matter and some paint its paintings are curious things none more so than the piece which dominated his recent show in paris this room sized folly looked more like a crazy golf hole than what you might expect of a painting and yet it had all the requisite elements paint and support a large papier mache head spewed gallons of paint into curly wooden channels the old paint tins were distributed around the space via tubes communicating between them and the daft head oh and a few doughnuts hang around on the end of sticks a painting perhaps but not exactly a fiona rae the show at anthony reynolds looks comparatively conservative these works actually resemble paintings indeed one the prodigy' 1996 is a painting with a conventional format acrylic on mdf it depicts a big grey head on a little pink body accompanied by a still life painting on a braque kieferesque wooden floor in front of a stripy wall the largest work give us this day in the life' 1996 97 is made up of 366 breadboards which have been painted with a calculated anarchy of techniques genres styles and subjects each has its own unhinged artmachine title such as deformed genius kid with big arm contemplates life in a turkish bath' mount fudge because it's there my name is butch and i am different' individual breadboards might tickle your fancy such as the cyclopean smiley face or the group of nude 70 s hippies shadowed by a placard and encircled with the phrase yet another protest hijacked by the ubiquitous swp' but these are not individual works only elements of a single painting to recognize this is to put the emphasis back on the artmachine an emphasis which is already made by the wall drawing which links all the breadboards together like a string of beads unlike the standard return to painting scam tyson's artmachine paintings do not cash in on the false haven of common humanity the artmachine is too cold and dumb for that this is its greatest strength but it is also its achilles' heel the artmachine's representations have no fluency because it doesn't have any understanding of what it is doing so like the dog that seems to bark the word sausages' its meanings are always fortuitous and its use of signs never takes account of their significance perhaps this is a small matter given that the value of tyson's art is not reducible to the significance of his artworks instead the choices both of form and content are left to the operations of the artmachine if this means that tyson's art lacks subjectivity and culturally shared meanings it also means that it doesn't operate according to the routine injunctions of artistic responsibility since the early 60 s these have been set by the reconstitution of a modernist formalist agenda following a version of the maxim that what an artwork depicts be subsumed under considerations of how it is made tyson's artmachine transfers the locus of artistic responsibility away from questions of how' to the decision making structures on which they are based other artists have claimed indifference notably duchamp and warhol but none that i am aware of have elaborated a process which apparently eliminates the artist's own involvement in the work the artmachine takes responsibility not for the choices surrounding an individual artwork but by choosing how to choose doesn't this make tyson the most thorough artist who ever lived eat art joseph beuys dieter roth sonja allthuser october 5 through december 15 2001 at the busch reisinger museum at documenta 6 beuys's grand metaphor for this process of developing social awareness was a seminal installation called honigpumpe am arbeitsplatz honey pump in the workplace consisting of a motor that ground up fat and pipes that carried honey throughout the exhibition building honey pump was a metaphorical thinking machine a symbol of the movement of ideas through institutions beuys also made smaller sculptures as multiples editioned works to illustrate and disperse his thoughts in concrete form these were mementos products of rather than fuel for the engine of the grand machine from the machine room 1978 consists of a canning jar of fat and a tin can of honey and give me honey 1979 produced in an edition of twelve is a larger tin container of honey these honey pump mementos along with economic value strained honey 1979 also produced in a edition of twelve are displayed on the exhibition shelves butterfly stories william t vollmann he put on his underwear and went to the door it was the boy who believed in praxis he stood there for awhile in his underwear and then he began to feel that he needed to justify being alive so that the boy who believed in praxis wouldn't feel that he'd come for nothing i decided to flip a coin he said heads would be life and tails would be the other i went and flipped the coin and it came up tails but i figured i'd released it sooner than i meant to so i flipped it again and it came up tails i decided to try one more time i flipped it and it came up tails so i decided the coin was wrong p 28 the husband did not illuminate himself in the same harsh checkpoint light that other minds would have cast oh he deprecated himself all right but only for the highest reasons his somberness was sometimes misunderstood they thought him harder on himself than he actually was to his thinking the sin now fortunately no more present than an echo had been the vacillation between two wives it had reflected badly on his self knowledge impaired his efficiency and worst of all made the opposed women into playthings not even his playthings since he wasn't in command of himself but the playthings of his impulses which in turn were controlled by random happenings p 185 in case any of you readers happens to be a member of the public that mysterious organization that rules the world through shadow terrors i beg you not to pull censorious strings merely because this book like one or two others of mine is partly about that most honest form of love called prostitution a subject which the righteous might think exhausted with a single thought or better yet no thought at all but the truth is that there are at least thirteen times as many different sorts of whores as there are members of the public and i think you know what i mean by members shall we pause to admire them all the adults i mean the ones with the ambitiously long tubed mouthparts looking under the trees i spy billions of species most of whom fly only during the night unlike the insects after whom they're named the pupa stage is often enclosed in a cocoon of brightly colored silk and yet some are alive and some are dead and some find money to be the least of their worries oh my prismatic nymphalidae my cross veined pyschidae my sesiidae with the delicious anal veins how could cruelly unimaginative lepidopterists have pinned you to a common corkboard of classification when after all the world is so shadily large i'll not commit that crime so fear repetition not there remain many seas of blood and cream to be traversed if this advertisement be not sufficient i can only protrude my worklike tendrils of apology craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows and since i know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where i dabble your friend william t vollmann butterfly picture william t vollmann an interview with barry mccaffrey review of contemporary fiction p 12 wv metaphorphosis is one of the main activities of human beings we're always trying to transform ourselves into things that we are not yet and may not ever become we do this either because we're bored or unhappy with what we are or because we're satiated or because we want to improve ourselves but whatever underlying motivations are behind this transformation is a central activity a lot of creation myths probably all creation myths deal with this in a way history is basically a description of metamorphosis as p 12 even though i like most individuals i meet i have a pretty low opinion of people in general so if i were to write for people in general i would have to drastically lower my estimation of the intelligence of my reader rather than doing that i write the way it seems the book has to appear i don't think that's egotistic there are often things i would like to include in my books things about me personally and other materials that i feel i have to leave out because they aren't relevant to the book i'm fairly ruthless along those lines because i try to let nothing come in the way of what's best for the book if that means that the book won't sell or that a publisher won't buy it then that's my problem i'll suffer for that but i won't let the book suffer for it p 14 the reason i wanted to write the rainbow stories after angels was partly a matter of my wanting to create these discrete artifacts as opposed to something like angels which used a sort of writing by the yard approach and could easily have been ten thousand pages longer p 15 my current thinking is that literature isn't enough to bring people together to produce real understanding some sort of action is required but right now i don't know what that action might be or how it would work in fact i'm pretty sure that it'll never be any better than it is now given that all anyone can ever hope to do is either change a few specific things in a few specific ways which will probably change again after you finish tinkering with them or else help yourself and other people accept the fundamental viciousness and intertia of things religion does that for example literature can too p 17 overall i'd say my influences are pretty spread out right now for instance it seems like i've learned a lot from mishima kawabata and tolstoy danilo kis's a tomb for boris davidovich was a significant influence it was built up out of these incredible crisp bitingly comic or heartrending vignettes that finally add up to short stories that add up to a novel i don't exactly to this sort of thing but my work tends to be composed of building blocks that aren't exactly self sufficient but are at least individually cast and machined p 20 lm one of the things that's usually associated with postmodernism is something you seem to do very naturally or intuitively that is the way you problematize all sorts of distinctions that people used to make between fiction and autobiography or between realism and fantasy or science fiction you seem very comfortable with the notion that all these different worlds or perspectives coexist and provide windows onto each other and in fact it seems to me that your generation takes a lot of this for granted in ways that say the sixties generation of experimental writers couldn't wv at this point what you're describing is probably true throughout the culture not just in the arts you see it in advertising in televisions in shop windows anything the gain from that is obvious greater freedom in every way more available options the loss is a sense of disorientation plus when it's done sloppily the way it often is there's not thought given to context i honestly believe that most people nowadays including writers know less of the body of facts and aesthetics the basic core of information about the work and culture and so forth that makes up our heritage than people did earlier that's very unfortunate because it makes it impossible to place these new options or combinations within any context that means anything cildo meireles phaidon press 1999 no when i speak of the formal aspects i am speaking above all of an idea by this i mean not only the materialization of the work but the formalization of the concept itself i search for formal elegance in the concept of a work as much as in its physical manifestation p 12 in much of my work there is an interpenetration between the artwork and everyday life and this affects the choice of material i am interested in materials which are ambiguous which can simultaneously be symbol and raw substance achieving a status as paradigmatic objects materials which can carry this ambiguity range from matches to coca cola bottles from coins and banknotes to a broom as in la bruja they are in the everyday world close to their origin yet impregnated with meaning p 17 the virtual spaces corners are almost didactic immediately identifiable the issue is developed through abstraction but the physical and sensorial relationship emerges almost instantly one of the qualities of artworks is that they permit extreme freedom with regard to time if you want to relate to a book you must read it from the first word to the last although of course you have a general idea after reading a few pages in literature there is a kind of slavery to time as an exception to this rule i would mention a brazilian concrete poem of the early 1960 s by ferreira gullar lembra consists of a cube resting on a base when you lift the cube you read the word lembra remember normally however time is the fundamental issue this is also vital in film where everything happens in time maybe time is the only reality in the visual arts you have to be seduced and involved in a second then maybe you will look longer and begin to understand but in those same seconds you may move on to the next thing or leave p 19 concepts notations software art by florian cramer march 23 rd 2002 a computer program is a blueprint and its execution at the same time like a pianola roll it is a score performing itself the artistic fascination of computer programming and the perhaps ecstatic revelation of any first time programmer is the equivalence of architecture and building the instant gratification given once the concept has been finished computer programming collapses as it seems the second and third of the three steps of concept concept notation and execution if software is generally defined as executable formal instructions logical scores then the concept of software is by no means limited to formal instructions for computers concept art as an art of which the material is concepts as the material of for ex music is sound' and software art as an art whose material is formal instruction code seem to have at least two things in common the collapsing of concept notation and execution into one piece the use of language instructions in software art concepts in concept art flynt observes since concepts' are closely bound up with language concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language' while the composition 1961 is a concept notation creating an artwork that itself exists only as a concept mentally lewitt's plan for a concept art book' only is a concept notation of a material graphic artwork unlike the concept art of which the material is concepts' lewitt's piece belongs to a concept art that rather should be called a concept notation art or blueprint art' an art whose material is graphics and objects but which was instead realized in the form of a score by thus reducing its own material complexity the artwork appears to be minimalist' rather than rigorously conceptualist two years before burnham's software' exhibition the computer scientist donald e knuth published the first volume of his famous textbook on computer programming the art of computer programming' knuth's wording has adopted in what steven levy calls the hacker credo that you can create art and beauty with computers' it is telling that hackers otherwise an avant garde of a broad cultural understanding of digital technology rehash a late 18 th century classicist notion of art as beauty rewriting it into a concept of digital art as inner beauty and elegance of code but such aesthetic conservativism is widespread in engineering and hard science cultures fractal graphics are just one example of neo pythagorean digital kitsch they promote as a contemporary art the aesthetics of software art includes ugliness and monstrosity just as much as beauty not to mention plain dysfunctionality pretension and political incorrectness since personal computers and the internet became popular software code in addition to data has come to circulate in abundance one thus could say that contemporary software art operates in a postmodern condition in which it takes pre existing software as material reflecting manipulating and recontextualizing it dario robleto flash art international ed 37 117 18 n d 2004 the second part of a trilogy san antonian dario robleto's southern bacteria is an installation of 15 intricately designed and crafted mixed media works that explore the ravages of war and the power of healing at first sight the pieces appear to be battered dusty and sepia toned artifacts but closer inspection reveals that these are not simply your grandfather's military boots they are in fact recreations of historical objects using a bizarre juxtaposition of found and created substances robleto samples materials such as civil war era dolls and world war i pulp mixing them with a virtual witch doctor's pharmacy of ingredients dust from every bone in the body root and flower oils and various metals the culmination of which is as indicative of the artist's theme of regeneration and recovery as the completed works themselves the most beguiling piece a defeated soldier wishes to walk his daughter down the wedding aisle 2004 depicts a pair of world war i cavalry boots with legs made from the melted vinyl of the shirelles' soldier boy and skeeter davis' the end of the world along with brass rust and battlefield dirt cast in a mold from the wooden and iron leg of a wounded civil war soldier the works are displayed in a non linear non chronological fashion and without the benefit of any guiding text they engage viewers to fill in the blanks and ultimately construct their own stories dario robleto artforum sept 2001 by barry schwabsky robleto both indulges in sentimentality and maintains a critical distance from it such a sensibility has something to do with camp in the classic sontagian sense of an attitude that confounds seriousness and frivolity dignity and failure while camp delights in the flamboyant the operatic the exaggerated robleto produces understated handmade readymades in the robert gober tradition the work's melancholy arises from an aesthetic in tension with the camp love of the too much of the too little not to mention the too late many of the newer works here add bits of fossil to the vinyl which takes on the character of preserved traces of ancient sounds your moonlight is in danger of shining for the wrong one 2000 01 is a match carved from prehistoric fossilized mammoth ivory and melted and powderized vinyl record of billie holiday's what a little moonlight can do as with robleto's other works your moonlight's fetish value arises from the legend that accompanies it and is all the more poignant for the incommensurability between the object and its idea sometimes unheard melodies really are sweetest fucking idiot dario robleto southern bacteria acme artlies issue 44 malik gaines this destabilizing of history has been the source of its discredit as well as the opportunity for alternative narratives to become legitimized people of color for example have been able to take hold of history's looser rules in order to incorporate themselves into a decentered world just as that lack of center has been equated with the absence of meaning as others have amply pointed out these simultaneous movements out of more than just philosophical coincidence mean that once black people get their hands on it it's not worth anything anymore a decentered history is agency for he who was peripheral trash to he who previously held the center robleto's unwillingness to cede the authority of his jumbled mass of times and places makes him a wizard of his own empowerment when i use empowerment in this context i certainly don't mean an oprah ish sense of self worth but rather the ancient powers of the physical universe full of natural determining elements which pre date the nineteenth century in epochs we can still barely fathom so if you tilt your head and squint your eyes you can almost believe in the display robleto sets out in the context of our current wars and the media that represent them one magic spell seems to be as good a stand in for the truth as any other the problem is disneyland can create an antique radio or ouija board without all of the esoterica and arcana and it would look as reliable as robleto's versions despite movements away from the autonomous object for a visual artist appearances still matter most though the elements of this show are extremely good looking robleto makes work that is much more complicated than it needs to be while this serves his process brilliantly it may have little effect on the viewer who isn't party to his love affair with the past deleuze and guattari quotes expelled from eden a william t vollmann reader william t vollmann is however above all a man of letters a meticulous even obsessive researcher and the most widely and deeply read person i've ever met vollmann is an old fashioned humanist who sincerely believes that reading and writing profoundly matter not merely because they supply us with insights and information about the world but because they can change it intro p xxx some thoughts on neglected water taps p 29 in his way painter ben was perfect like weather beaten blonde megan who had once been the beauty queen of georgia whom i had a crush on so one very cold new year's eve in berkeley i was doing everything i could to get megan to go to bed with me like a magnetic flux line desiring to encircle the sweetest electric current and my friend seth wished me luck and megan spent hours cleaning her room and primping herself for her great date with me and my heart pounded ba boom ba boom with excitement at the thought that i would most certainly screw megan who had just graduated with honors from her safe sex seminar p 45 honesty from four essays p 63 every joy which i have ever experienced even the most physiological ultimately reaches me as aesthetic whether writing is knowing or whether it is singing the love remains the joy the daring the exaltedness when one approaches at however far a remove perfection shake the greatest art ever and dross will come out but honest effort for its own sake is beauty if the writer is talented and lucky enough then the result may be beautiful too p 307 how could i possibly have the effrontery to say that any of this is significant to you when i go into a museum i see the clusters of tender avid or dutiful faces around the fad pieces of the moment and then at unpredictable intervals an unknown work will catch somebody's soul and surrounding these hang the crucified legions of the unregarded what category will the books i write be placed in how can i know and how does it depend on me does what i write seem beautiful to me that is all that i can know and count on and it is enough but if it is beautiful to you too i am grateful i like to please people i like to be as ticket collectors say validated i like to make a living but i'm beginning to wonder whether someday i ought to prove my love de sade proved his in prison homes with bookshelves people who don't mind le mot juste but will settle for the all correct approximation readers without enough time to finish a short story these signs of the times like the pain in my wrists which at the moment nibbles at my palms all remind me that my days are numbered how long will this world continue to support my easy life i believe in my sincerity i believe that i am willing to suffer for the sake of the world but the pain in my hands is only a promise not a demonstration like de sade ranting and masturbating behind the prison door refusing to renounce his terrifying lusts or hans and sophie scholl going to the scaffold for writing anti nazi pamphlets or joan of arc eloquently defying the inquisitors who will burn her how can i prove myself how can i love more for now the answer is to keep writing whatever happens to try to do better to go where i must listening to joy de sade the scholls and jan didn't choose to be afflicted and i hope never to be tested as they were i know that i love what i do i hope that my life for which i give thanks glides on and on and that like a good prostitute i can continue to convert joy into cash p 308 9 in researching this book i've read all the relevant primary sources visited all the important sites mentioned in the story read a great number of secondary sources and corrected my text with the vigilant aid of two foremost anthropologists and i've also drawn on my imagination but my imagination appropriately filtered and disciplined p 314 5 whores for gloria is in my belief of the same quality as let us now praise famous men and the grapes of wrath i realize that many people who admire the latter two books will hate whores for gloria by reason of the book's subject which is street prostitution all three of these books are about the dignity and beauty of being human even when a member of a despised or outcast class reading about the mutually inflicted suffering of jimmy and the prostitutes in whores for gloria is often repulsive and that inspires resentment and disgust love and compassion which i believe that my book has is not enough a book must also be informed by knowledge and unflinching honesty when stephen crane wrote his prostitute book maggie a girl of the streets he failed because he did not take his subject far enough whores for gloria bears full witness it is a documentary in the form of a novel all of the prostitutes in the book are real people most of the incidents and dialogue are genuine p 317 we must take care not to be like them how can we best do this by knowing them by understanding without approving or hating by empathizing how best to do that the glorious ice cream bar through art a rhapsody of desserts art takes us inside other minds like a space capsule swooping down across jupiter while the passengers can see strangeness and newness through the portholes meanwhile enjoying all the comforts of standard temperature and pressure of all the arts although photography presents best painting and music convey best and sculpture looms best i believe that literature articulates best the prescription we need writing with a sense of purpose p 330 1 in the twenty first century marxism will be replaced by an equally fiery ism the best thing which can happen to do gooders between twenty and forty is that they retain and even deepen their desire to benefit the world while at the same time developing a realistic understanding of the ethics of ends and means godel escher bach eternal golden braid douglass hoffstedder in face godel's work was just part of a long attempt by mathematicians to explicate for themselves what proofs are the important thing to keep in mind is that proofs are demonstrations within fixed systems of propositions p 18 although i have tried to catch you off guard and surprise you a little this lesson about how to interpret symbols by words may not seem terribly difficult once you have the hang of it in fact it is not and yet it is one of the deepest lessons of all of nineteenth century mathematics it all begins with euclid who around 300 b c compiled and systematized all of what was known about plane and solid geometry in his day the resulting work euclid's elements was so solid that it was virtually a bible of geometry for over two thousand years one of the most enduring works of all time why was this so the principal reason was that euclid was the founder of rigor in mathematics the elements began with very simple concepts definitions and so forth and gradually built up a vast body of results organized in such a way that any given result depended only on foregoing results thus there was a definite plan to the work an architecture which made it strong and sturdy p 88 herbert m 2001 human mind mapper art review 52 i e 53 58 9 a visit to keith tyson's studio creates an uncommon feeling of anticipation after all tyson became famous in the 1990 s for making art based on ideas pumped out by his mysterious artmachine' a machine that has rarely been seen but it's not here instead there are copies of scientific american a plethora of lists and some new large scale works produced without the artmachine which he is showing in his ambitious show at the south london gallery so what happened to the machine i got to the point where i thought people were misreading that project he says i was becoming like an organ grinder turning the handle and out were coming these things for me it was only ever one piece of work one philosophical proposition i decided to spend several years making other works that are also maybe scientific in nature but which offset the earlier work so that when i return to artmachine it'll feel like one project from a field of activity he remains best known for the artmachine although it need not have been when he began showing in the mid 1990 s tyson had 12 or 14 ideas for long term projects after working as a shipbuilder he had gone to art school discovered roland barthes's theory of the death of the author and then he recalls had to marry that with my own idiosyncrasies science is only one of them but my work has a lot to do with the idea that there's this infinite and complex world that people have to navigate then there's my particular interest in making things plus my fetish for gambling the artmachine was the most elegant solution i could find at the time the first version was a humble chart of ideas for possible works of art at which he would throw a dart exhibiting the finished work alongside the dart and chart though he found that everyone ignored the work and looked at the method and so tyson returned to his youthful hobby of writing computer codes and began the process of constructing a machine its early ideas always seemed to involve a coca cola can but the machine has since been refined and now features programmes written in a language used for artificial intelligence and some visual basic programmes for information randomizers tyson's hacks are integrated with the reams of paper that comprise the machine's major component but how does it work it comes up with a mathematical equation which says variable a bonded with variable d in methodology 58 using this and doing that basically you can have hundreds of those take one off the piles and then imbue it with more variables so you can see it's going to be say a sculpture the final stage is to make an iteration sheet which gives a full detailed description of what to do then you make the piece of work or you don't remembering the chart and the dart he never exhibited the artmachine but instead executed and showed a number perhaps 0 001 of the ideas it suggested to make a painting on a breadboard every day for a year for example this was an analysis of results says tyson how do you read something when the claim made for it is that it doesn't have an aesthetic or psychological reason for being there something of a workaholic he used the machine a lot i made 5 000 equations 1 000 iteration sheets published and made maybe 300 400 works from a pistachio nut to a massive 50 foot wide video installations and i was prolific i worked every day and i made it all myself yet he was making other kinds of work too at one point in response to having made shows that were simply crammed with art he cast spells which were of course invisible like his machinemade works they hinged on the notion of belief for instance for the british art show 5 in edinburgh he performed a spell that was meant to render all the other works in the exhibition half as interesting as before he also made a series entitled the seven wonders of the world one of which featured a cube of bronze that had been melted down made into numerous different forms and then returned to the form of a cube again around 1999 tyson stopped using the artmachine altogether but his work since has continued to explore randomization and the infinite amount of information in the world albeit with more subjectivity supercollider itself is a massive nine part drawing covered in short texts like mini haikus describing vast and tiny moments from all across history they set off visual triggers in the viewer's head processing them all is close to impossible how do you make social change theater 31 3 2001 william pope l beyond the proscenium the issue at hand the social function of theater is unsettling for me i do not know how to be right about it after chewing on the subject for a bit i found that the only way to be right is to cease to be an artist at this time i cannot accept that conclusion for me not being an artist is not only a conclusion but an ending you see i've always wanted to be a socially committed artist i was raised to be a socially committed artist my models inherited from my family were black writers like nikki giovanni langston hughes and richard wright comedians dick gregory lenny bruce and richard pryor black musicians john coltrane miles davis jimi hendrix stevie wonder and billie holliday martin luther king and malcolm x represented the political models my most personal and local model was my family and this is where my conflict concerning the worth of social commitment began churns and still resides my family bequeathed to me a ton of beauty but it also gifted me with a distrust of the group this may seem a handicap to most folks when they consider the collaborative spirit that's involved in doing socially committed work to an extent i'd agree with them but i've struggled long and hard with the challenges i inherited from my family a group of folks bent on destroying themselves while perpetuating a love of life a hatred of injustice and a drive for jumping off the end of a syringe of heroin initially i believed that my doubts about creating change within a group were black marks on my character it took me many years to realize that this metaphor was not only racially unfortunate but untrue you see i've spent more than half my life collaborating on projects that had at their core some sort of social imperative i don't know why i pursued collaboration as a means of making culture different i don't even know what to call this ache inside me that shies away from social commitment even while craving it yeah i don't know what to call this ache but i know the ground of my understanding has been arrived at via humility risk and struggle yeah i believe my struggle with distrust has utility like computation or analytical problem solving emotions are a kind of intelligence especially conflicted or ambivalent emotion as a form of knowledge this material should not be kept at a distance and labeled suspect because it's not scientific or masculinist or politically hardcore enough instead it should be held firmly in the hand like a trowel or a miter saw or a reliquary end page 92 when i put my distrust to work for a cultural practice that embodies the belief that theater can change the world i move beyond the proscenium i move out into the streets where i have worked since the late 1970 s doing duration work and interventions i do these actions in the street for no money the people who happen by are the audience for that performance i create images and situations with my body to engage folks pique their curiosity provoke them make them laugh make them angry change them let them change me the only control i have is what the audience and my audacity allow me i don't ultimately believe that the proscenium is the problem for theater and when i say i want to change the world i don't mean some bulldozing grand idea i am interested in a large horizontal dispersed performance a risky idea i believe that for theater to become more truly social it may need to rethink the way it currently negotiates community i have a feeling the answer doesn't lie with either the subscription or the community audience but with both and neither of them theater may have to lose its audience to find it theater may have to disappear it may have to become something not theater it may have to lie cheat and murder it may have to charm and kiss a lot of ass kiss an extremely large amount of ass humiliation for a good cause is ritual i have a feeling that theater will have to do and be all these things in order to serve the little end to be change within the world so that the world can change around it william pope l is a maker of culture like his mother and grandmother before him he lives in lewiston maine between an abandoned textile mill and a predominantly white secondary school interface culture steve johnson 1997 this book is an extended attempt to think about the object world of technology as though it belonged to the world of culture or as though those two worlds were united for the truth is they have been united all along was the original cave painter an artist or an engineer you'd think the life of leonardo da vinci or thomas edison would be enough to convince us that the creative mind and the technical mind have long cohabited there's a funny thing about the fusion of technology and culture it has been a part of human experience since that first cave painter but we've had a hard time seeing it until now john brockman announces the existence of a third culture populated by complexity theorists and multimedia savants the explosion of media types in the twentieth century makes it possible for the first time to grasp the relationship of form to content medium to message engineering to artistry you can't measure a medium's influence without something to compare it with at no period in human culture have men understood the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and technology today it is the instant speed of electric information that for the first time permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development the entire world past and present now reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie electric speed is synonymous with light and with the understanding of causes marshall mcluhuan quoted from understanding media p 4 wandering through the banquet halls and grand staircases of the palace you can sense the staccato dialogue being dwarfed by the surroundings there's something wrong in the scale of the experience the most successful online communities to date have been text only affairs one domain that has successfully extended the original desktop metaphor into three dimensions is that of video games what catches the eye initially about these games is the visual rush the vertigo of moving through a textured onscreen space at high velocity the pleasure of these games is as much the pleasure of mastering a space learning to navigate through it as it is the pleasure of shooting things there is some kind of a movement of the creation and exchange of custom game levels for quake and other first person shooters the very nature of the exchange is telling these aren't baseball cards or gi joe dolls we're talking about these are little worlds little environments dreaming them up in the first place is a legitimate form of self expression even if it is constrained by the generic bloodlust of quake and doom and the idea of sharing these worlds with other gamers suggests a whole new model for community building where the exchange between individuals no longer simply takes place within a space the bartered game levels function like sentences in this peculiar conversation the back and forth of varied worldviews jostling for supremacy or approbation you want your quake level to impress your fellow gamers or seduce them the way the decor of your apartment or your office is designed to make an impression on any visitor the architecture of that virtual space doesn't frame the conversation it's a central component of it we're used to communicating with our friends and family by sending them snapshots or sketches or tape mixes but in the future we will reach out to those around us by sharing virtual environments p 73 4 how much does this level mod space exchange actually happen are people interested in this kind of creative involvement in the play what purpose can this exchange of spaces have watching one of these multiple player quake sessions doesn't exactly reinforce the conventional wisdom of the net bringing strangers closer together since what these strangers are doing is slaughtering one another and the only dialogue takes the form of schwarzenegger style taunts p 74 the primary dialogue is through action reaction and motion with your character what application would capitalize on this type of exchange perhaps a seemingly mindless video game will end up transforming our sense of information space the way the desktop metaphor did twenty years before p 75 meaning in labyrinths borges wrote i cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details just as our memory does anyone who has spent any time meandering through the suburbs of the infosphere will tell you that we too are awash in idle details and could use a little suppression p 90 bush's memex owner builds that trail of interest' as he explores the information space on his desk surfers as a rule follow trails of interest through links that have been assembled in advance by other folks and most important the trails endure they remain part of the memex's documentary record p 121 that accumulated record of past trails means that the device grows smarter or at least more associative the more you use it as the file system is laced together by thousands of associative trails you can create bookmarks of course but these are just momentary excerpts from a longer train of thought the journey itself the movement from thought to thought document to document is key here the memex was designed to organize information in the most intuitive way possible based on our usual habits of thinking following leads making connections building trails of thought bush wanted the memex to respond to the user's worldview the trails would wind their way through the documents in varied idiosyncratic ways threading through the information space at the user's discretion no two trails would be exactly alike most web browsers still dutifully follow the links that are served up to them without any means of creating their own associative trails in return the web should be a way of seeing new relationships connecting things that might have otherwise have been kept separate p 122 3 contents are defined through search specifications and automatically updated view a way of seeing as opposed to folder a permanent physical container if there is a genuine paradigm shift lurking somewhere in the mix it has to do with the idea of windows government by semantics and not by space ever since doug engelbart's revolutionary demo back in 1968 graphic interfaces have relied on spatial logic as a fundamental organizational principle there was something genuinely liberating about this new spatial imagination given the historical limitations of the command line regime and the innate human aptitude for visual memory but the revolution had its limits with thousands of files on our hard drives and countless more lurking just offscreen on the web organizing files by the old fashioned spatial method doesn't make sense any more p 169 70 why not organize the desktop around the illusion of meaning rather than space p 170 the sand man e t a hoffmann p 173 5 galatea 2 2 richard powers p 175 2001 hal stanley kubrick blade runner replicants ridley scott by this late date in literary history the automaton passing for human trope is as familiar to our collective storytelling habits as the mistaken identity tropes of the sitcom or the false endings of the whodunit every other sci fi flick toys seductively with cyber androgyny the blurring of human and machine p 175 but the anxiety surrounding human machine hybrids is more than just a literary device the eerie attraction of the mechanical doll in hoffmann's story the self doubt of blade runner's replicants hoffman wrote at the dawning of the industrial age at a time when europe seemed besieged by a new species of mechanical devices more dynamic more animated than anything before them it was almost impossible not to find something demonic in that automated movement and equally impossible not to be mesmerized by it which is why so many of the first visitors to manchester returned with a difficult mix of repugnance and admiration p 175 hoffmann's story is an attempt to translate that anxiety the push and pull of the organic machine into a creative medium blade runner and 2001 attempt the same with film these novels and movies and short stories are all attempts to make sense of the new hybrids of human and machine to translate that volatile mix into a creative form that is somehow less threatening that offers some catharsis or release to the audience p 175 6 jarod lanier an inventor of virtual reality and anti intelligent agent p 181 telescript p 184 in the long tradition of cyborg literature the hybrids of human and machine usually run into trouble when they get tangled up in human desire as long as our cyborgs restrict themselves to straightforward tasks our relationship to them remains relatively untroubled but once they infiltrate the murky psychological realm of taste and desire all hell breaks loose the human can't help but project those appetites and longings onto the machine and the machine invariably returns the favor or at least appears to the process is not unlike the transference and countertransference that freud described in psychoanalysis the lesson of most cyborg literature is that the commingling of human and machine in the life of the libido is inevitable and inevitably destructive p 187 amazons recommendations similar to patti maes' firefly web site p 194 collaborative filtering p 196 utilizes the transferability of taste people sharing some likes will have other interests in common p 196 pools preference data to predict things you might like collaborative preference driven mtv for instance feedback driven system as it turns out the problems wouldn't arise from people outside the system trying to commandeer its pattern landscapes the real problems would come from the internal volatility of the system that volatility is bound to provoke varying responses from the public experiencing it some will welcome it into the world the way the futurists embraced the blistering human machine hybrids of the race car and the howitzer p 200 corbis's leonard da vinci cd rom p 232 the spiritual resonance of interface design for me the most moving rendition of this theme comes almost as an aside in thomas pynchon's 1990 novel vineland if patterns of ones and zeroes were like patterns of human lives and deaths if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeroes then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths it would have to be up one level at least an angel a minor god something in a ufo it would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world interview with dario robleto latinart com miki garcia may 1 2003 yes i would say that 90 of the time i only start out with a title so the hours i put into the titles or words at the very least equals the time put into the object's construction this has also to do with my background in other fields like poetry literature and lyrics letting language dictate a form is an unusual way of going about making an object or for that matter letting a smell of a chemical or the particular frequency of a drum beat influence an object the borders i find between fields are usually tightly held such as ideas of purity which i find quite silly and constraining that kind of language for example is somehow a crutch or sign of weakness in the object's final presentation so i think that what appears as elliptical is in fact the way we comprehend the world already i don't know a world that isn't fragmented or existing on multi levels at every moment textually audibly visually etc how can all these things not be addressed in how you experience an art work what painting is james elkins it is a disappointing result this golden creature that turns out to be nothing but a clot of mould but it is also entirely in the spirit of alchemical and artistic experiment the alchemists were drawn to slag and refuse they loved the suspicious skins that thickened over their stews putrefaction with its latin name putrefactio is a nearly universal step in the alchemical work the clean substance has to degenerate into brackish mould before it produces anything worth examining p 69 contemporary artists are more inventive than their alchemical forbears in the search for the conjunction of the repulsive and the compelling but it was alchemy that made that compulsion into a principle for alchemists one of the great puzzles was how to being the work their purpose was nothing less than to make perfection itself and what artists imagines anything different and so they needed to think carefully about their raw ingredients some chose to begin with sulfur mercury and salt but to others that seemed too simpleminded and doomed to failure how could the perfect stone be made with such universally known substances and so they set out in search of the proper object from which to begin something not as obvious as sulfur or mercury something that would never occur to a literal mind or a superficial thinker that cloudy object was called the first substance materia prima p 71 artists cannot begin in antiseptic abstraction like philosophers with their notepads or theoretical physicists at their blackboards they have to begin in media res literally in the middle of things oil canvas squalor so it is the artist's task to discern somehow what is worth saving and what can be transformed and finally to crawl out of the morass p 72 it mercury quicksilver is a penetrating liquid they said it can seep into stones and find precious metals quicksilver is associated with fluids especially semen blood and the humid breath it is primordial humidity p 102 third of the alchemical trinity is salt until the middle of the eighteenth century salt was any solid soluble nonflammable substance with a salty taste a few alchemists such as blaise de vigenere thought hard about salt and wrote treatises dedicated to it vigenere says salt is biting acrid acidic incisive subtle penetrating pure and clean fragrant incombustible incorruptible crystalline and as transparent as air in a more prosaic sense salt was said to be whatever remains after evaporation or forms crystals salt is an earthly principle with power to coagulate and preserve it is a bounder a delimiter terminator of substances since it is itself the sterile end product of many reactions salt is the embalmer the agent that assures corporeal stability fn 10 13 p 104 105 congelation to the alchemists there were two fundamentally opposed states of matter the fixed and the volatile they were symbolized elegantly with two little pictures xx for fixed and xx for volatile p 122 circulation in circulation the collection tube curves down and re enters the vessel itself pouring its condensate back into the boiling mixture the vessel is filled with whatever substance needs to be circulated and then the glass is sealed so there is no way for the pressure to vent the airtight seal is very dangerous and it is the main reason explosions were so common in alchemical laboratories the alchemists called such vessels pelicans since that bird was supposed to nourish its young by pecking at its own breast and letting the blood spurt into the open mouths of its chicks p 133 4 circulation is all too familiar a feeling in painting it creeps in whenever the studio and the work seem to be hermetically sealed so that the only nourishment must come from the refuse of the painting itself nothing new enters the studio and nothing is wasted everything goes into the work and comes back out again usually that is a state of mind a kind of stifling end of the road feeling but it can also leave its marks in the painting francis bacon sometimes scraped up the layers of dried paint and dust from the floor of his studio and mashed them into pigments p 134 circulation is the esoteric discipline of recycling substances especially the body's products but also whatever is despised and overlooked including the dusty waste material of the studio p 136 circulation is a metaphor as well for recycling the waste products of the mind and somehow going on when nothing new can be found old discarded thoughts become new ones and the work starts again p 136 circulation is also a good name for one of samuel beckett's unnamable ideas what it means to inhabit a life lived in absolute stasis and isolation that somehow also muddles forward in a typical scenario in beckett nothing new has happened in years there have been no new events no inspirations nothing unexpected or even entertaining yet somehow it is necessary to keep working and find some use for the awful leftovers of the life that has been lived so many times over in the same room the unnamable ends you must say words as long as there are any i don't know i'll never know in the silence you don't know you must go on i can't go on i'll go on p 136 7 shit is not the only excretion that paint recalls and the alchemists were right to stress that ultimately it is blood an artist who is mired in a suffocating cycle of unsuccessful strategies is in the pelican but it is the virtue of alchemy to point out that self immolation is also self nourishment and the alchemists valued circulation as a strengthening agent each time the substance is boiled away it is returned to itself in a purer state they thought that the very act of distillation would enhance the substance never mind that modern science would say nothing changes in the pelican in the same way wonderful things can be accomplished in the studio when it is shut off from the outside world working again and again with the same wretched pigments the same frowzy brushes the same paint stained walls can be exactly what is needed to bring something worthwhile to life the british painter frank auerbach has worked in a single room for decades for the most part without dusting or rearranging anything imagine the resonance that every stain and particle must finally accrue p 137 caput mortuum is a tiny emblematic skull circle with three dots p 141 alchemists did not keep clear of the death's head but sought it out whenever they could the object was to achieve as thorough a death as possible and still be able to resurrect the ashes because the result would be something even stronger p 142 alchemists and artists have a way of ruining what they make and starting over again nearly from scratch painting is deeply involved in self destruction making art is also constantly destroying art and at times that ongoing destruction can reach such a heartbreaking pitch that a lifetime of work is repudiated or ruined painters have a maxim that if there is one really wonderful passage in a painting it will have to be sacrificed to take the painting forward that moment of self sacrifice brings with it a certain generative power that can affect every other passage p 143 there is no end to the strangeness of metamorphosis in alchemy there is an experiment attributed to a medieval monk that tells how to make gold by the unnatural offspring of two male chickens the monk theophilus tells his readers to construct a subterranean house all out of stone with two tiny openings through each opening they are to put one cock and throw in enough food to keep them alive eventually when they have become fatted from the heat of their fatness they will mate and lay eggs at that point the alchemist is to remove the cocks and put in toads to keep the eggs warm the assumption is that male chickens can't roost but toads can when the eggs hatch they look at first like normal chickens but in a few days they grow serpents' tails if the house weren't stone theophilus says they would tunnel into the earth and escape they are to be put in brass vessels with copper doors and the vessels are to be buried for six months the monsters inside are basilisks and they spend that time eating the fine earth that filters in through the copper covers after half a year has passed the alchemist is to dig up the vessels and burn them with the basilisks inside when they are cool they are pulverized and the alchemist adds the dried blood of a red haired man hominis rufi and mixes the powders with sharp vinegar if the resulting paste is painted onto copper plates it will soak in and the plates will become gold p 146 sooner or later every one of a painter's possessions will get stained the last object to be stained is often the living room couch the one place where it is possible to relax in comfort and forget the studio when the couch is stained the painter has become a different creature from ordinary people and there is no turning back p 148 there are recipes for urine philosophical urine the salt of urine the oil of urine and the mercury and sulfur of urine theophilus the same who called for the blood of a red haired man thought the urine of a small red haired boy was best for tempering iron p 150 there is an entire library worth of manuscripts devoted to the distillation of human blood and there are texts calling for the blood of snakes vultures and bloody plants such as beets those oddities and perversions routinely lead toward greater transgressions always tempting actual madness p 150 the most famous such recipe is for the homunculus the intelligent embryo born in a test tube goethe made the experiment famous in faust where an adept grows a little homunculus in a bottle but it is extremely rare in the alchemical literature aureolus phillippus theophrastus bobast of hohenheim known as paracelsus has become identified with the recipe though the idea goes back much farther in the recipe the alchemist puts human sperm into a vial the shape of a gourd zucca seals the vial sets in a bed of horse dung and lets it putrefy for forty days or until the sperm begins to move at that point it should have the form of a body but transparent and incorporeal from then on it needs to be fed every day with what paracelsus calls the arcano of human blood presumably blood that has been distilled and purified nine months later paracelsus says the patient alchemist will produce a baby boy exactly equal to those produced by women but much smaller he adds that the young homunculus will be eager to learn and must be provided with a good education p 150 1 spit was also a common ingredient the eighteenth century alchemist johan gottfried tugel tells about an experiment that turns spit into a corrosive salt able to open that is dissolve gold the final product could dissolve silver and gold and turn them into glass p 151 there are many of these oddities but they are mild in comparison to the more serious ideas that lie beneath them in particular alchemy joyously rescinds the incest taboo a book called the hermetic triumph is the most sadean in its exuberant directions open your mother's breast it urges rummage in her entrails and penetrate her womb michael maier says we should confidently join brother and sister ergo lubens conjunge hand them the cup of love and let them be man and wife alchemy might have brought some people to try incest if only because alchemical operations are sometimes said to be best when they are performed in tandem by the alchemist and his mystical sister some sisters were wives but the phrase still applied as in any sensational subject the actual transgressions were probably rare what makes the incestuous doctrines pernicious and brings them dangerously close to insanity is that incest was routinely expanded into a general principle of all alchemical work alchemy identifies heat with passion but then it identifies passion with incest to insinuate that every union is an incestuous one is either to say that thoughts of incest are hidden in every union and this is the interpretation that jung favors or else and this is what leads to madness that union is incest p 152 he jung argued that the alchemists realized on an unconscious level that christianity is incomplete and that christ requires a bride alchemy provided what jung calls the hermaphroditic psychopomp meaning the hermaphroditic guide for souls and as the ultimate guide of souls and the ultimate referent of the ubiquitous metaphors of resurrection christ is the inevitable counterpart and companion for the hermaphrodite the unconscious hermaphroditic bride of christ is a fascinating idea one of jung's most bizarre claims from a believer's point of view the very idea that christ might have a hermaphroditic alchemical bride with whom he might sometimes be identified would be not only doctrinally heretical as jung knew but also an open road to madness it is a crazy idea designed by jung perhaps unconsciously to be so unsettling that it opens the ground beneath sure knowledge it is like a signpost leading toward what jung and freud called a psychotic break the hermaphrodite acts as an embodiment of psychosis in a conceptual field that is attracted by madness no one working with these symbols could have entirely ignored their potentially schismatic meanings it is likely that many sensed the strangeness even the danger of their pursuits alchemy is at home in depression uncertainty and melancholy and the pathos of solitary labor and wasted time p 154 5 alchemy had a strange effect on jung or rather it accompanied and deepened a strange period in his life rather than keeping up with his profession jung sequestered himself for nearly a decade reading alchemical texts that everyone thought were worthless he took seriously the alchemical injunction to balance the male and female sides of the soul more seriously i might say than the glib spokesmen for the men's movement do he followed the female spirit the anima which he saw as an untrustworthy melusina a siren who might save the soul or lead it toward disaster the result of his solitary work was several lectures two long books psychology and alchemy and mysterium coniunctionis and a secret diary full of visions and invented characters that is what i find most admirable about jung's encounter with alchemy its absolute immersion and the tremendous risk of thinking directly about incest the hermaphrodite and its uncanny similarity to christ p 155 6 like meditative alchemy sexual alchemy tends to do away with laboratory equipment it conflates spiritual meditation with bodily enactment and what is more remarkable it also conflates laboratory apparatus with bodily parts everything that normally takes place in the laboratory whether literally so in practical alchemy or metaphorically in spiritual alchemy is moved into the body itself the bodies of sexual alchemists heat distill conjoin and putrefy and when they produce the stone a fluid rather than a metallic product it is not merely a metaphor for their minds or bodies it is also contained within and born from their bodies p 163 the fusion or conjunction of the alchemical texts which was often imagined as a kind of sexual fusion whether it was between brother and sister or king and queen is made into an actual lovemaking session p 163 in ordinary western alchemy menstruum is any fluid that dissolves solid matter the alchemists were aware of the anatomical meaning of the word but they did not always make it explicit according to one dictionary of alchemy menstruum is the fluid proper to animals just as plants have rain water and minerals have quicksilver in general menstruum just meant solvent with overtones of sexuality and generation p 163 alchemical experience is ordinarily balanced between theory and practice substance and allegories observation and empathy sexual alchemy is a conceptually extreme practice and shows what happens when those distinctions collapse even in the most purely meditative alchemy there is a parallelism that provides an indispensable structure to alchemical thought on the one hand is the chemical apparatus and on the other is the alchemist whose mental state follows and mirrors the metamorphoses of the materials sexual alchemy breaks that barrier and insists on the radical impossibility of distinguishing observer from observed subject from object p 164 5 one of the crucial traits of alchemy that makes it an apposite metaphor for artistic creation is the involvement of the observer in the process active alchemical thinking has been compared to heisenberg's uncertainty principle in alchemy as in quantum mechanics observation is intervention and there is no neutral hands off description alchemists have long insisted on the inseparability of the object and its observer but sexual alchemy goes further and actually conflates the substance with the agent sexual alchemy declines allegory completely or rather inverts it where laboratory processes are to be understood as imperfect versions of what happens in the body p 165 sexual alchemy is the most epistemologically chaotic doctrine i know the sexual alchemist initiates an experiment by beginning a sexual session but from that point onward he or she becomes the prima materia the doctor philosophiae and the athanor furnace all at once even when the process is complete the traditional dualism is not securely restored because the fluid that the alchemists inspect once the orgasm are over and the alchemists are somewhat detached from their labor is also manifested in and on their own bodies p 165 sexual alchemy is the nearest parallel in any field to the involvement of visual artists in their creation artists know the feeling that others can only weakly imagine of being so close to their work that they cannot distinguish themselves from it as students artists suffer from criticism when they do not have a clear awareness of the distance between themselves and what they have made in that state of mind there is no distinction between theory and practice observer and observed substance and allegory observation and empathy they are their work an artist may not be sure of any categories there is no clear difference between the artist and the half formed work neither is in control neither clearly makes the other the experiment of art changes the experimenter and there is no hope of understanding what happens because there is no i that can absorb and control concepts in this domain nothing is secure the alchemical or artistic work is strangely inside and the human mind that directs it is also partly its inner substrate what was once the agent of conceptual control over the work has become the bricks of its furnace the weave of its canvas the furnace produces a product that is the furnace and the mind tries to watch a process that is the mind sexual alchemy is a form of the same disease both propose a treacherous anarchy of unreason p 165 6 this kind of mutual influence effect of observation and intervention lack of conceptual control destabilizes the creative process and makes it impossible to maintain any sort of experimental control the setup of this system destabilizes any rigorous rational investigation this softness at the core might be partly responsible for the arbitrariness etc of the art creation above all alchemy is the record of serious sustained attempts to understand what substances are and how they carry meaning and for that reason it is the best voice for artists who wrestle every day with materials they do not comprehend and methods they can never entirely master science has closed off almost every unsystematic encounter with the world alchemy and painting are two of the last remaining paths into the deliriously beautiful world of unnamed substances p 199 kafka towards a minor literature gilles deleuze and felix guattari translation by dana polan theory and history of literature volume 30 the question is what makes kafka plan for a novel and renouncing it abandon it or try to close it up in the form of a story or on the other hand say to himself that maybe a story can be a starting point for a novel even if it will also be abandoned we could propose the following sort of rule of course it doesn't always apply it works only in some cases 1 when a text deals essentially with a becoming animal it cannot be developed into a novel 2 a text that deals with a becoming animal cannot be thought to be developable into a novel except if it also includes sufficient machinic indexes that go beyond the animal and that in this way are the seeds for a novel 3 a text that can be the seed of a novel will be abandoned if kafka imagines an animal escape that allows him to finish with it 4 a novel doesn't become a novel even if it is unfinished even and especially if it is interminable unless the machinic indices organize themselves into a real assemblage that is self sufficient 5 on the other hand a text that includes an explicit machine will not develop unless it succeeds in plugging into a concrete sociopolitical assemblage since a pure machine is only a blueprint that forms neither a story nor a novel kafka thus has many reasons to abandon a text either because it stops short or because it is interminable but kafka's criteria are of an entirely new sort and apply only to him from one genre of text to another there are interactions reinvestments exchanges and so on each failure is a masterpiece a branch of the rhizome p 38 9 essays on the blurring of art and life alan kaprow method becomes a discipline by which experience is shaped and interpreted it is a pragmatic version of the creative act meaning emerges not from the enactment of high drama but from the low drama of enactment not from the content in art but from the art in content carry enough cinderblocks follow the plan and meaning will emerge that is the common faith kaprow has intro p xxiii if dewey's influence upon kaprow can be reduced to a single phrase it would be that doing is knowing intro p xxiv kaprow sees language as a means to understand the barriers of mind that segregate esthetic from everyday experience not for the sake of philosophy or for the life of the mind alone but to facilitate meaningful actions in life p xxv xxvi keith tyson art review axel lapp 2003 however each of these works is the result of the teleological accelerator in the main gallery a five metre wide wall installation consisting of two intersecting discs in a heavy metal frame the disc on the left is concentrically inscribed with terms of cultural significance summarizing the endeavors of mankind from ancient philosophy to popular music drawn from several encyclopedias these terms stand as an abbreviation of human knowledge five metal digits with small magnifying glasses attached can be utilized to make a selection of these terms the other disc contains graph paper that repeats the structure of the inscriptions and that is used to record the digits' selection teleological accelerator is a continuation of tyson's art machine that produced precise instructions for the creation of artworks by taking recourse to the internet and a set of preset rules driven by a growing frustration with the negation of artistic input and that machine's banal arbitrariness tyson is now restricting the inspirational influx to a select canon of human knowledge permitting himself to merge the randomly chosen concepts and to determine the direction in which each combination is to be taken teleological accelerator is based on the notion that all future developments are already founded in existing concepts and that for progress it is simply necessary to find the right combination which is more likely to be found if the combinations are random and not based on the limitations of an individual's capacity to invent it sees art as an evolutionary system of knowledge that extends beyond the art gallery and then it contradicts itself as tyson juggles with the notions of authorial development that has long dominated art history his own doubts about this project are recorded in some of the wall drawings exhibited alongside the accelerator which work as an extended diary of his concerns and occupations while the drawing of 6 may 2003 records that he is about to make art history with a teleological accelerator yet the song remains the same he is drowning in a teleological labyrinth on 7 august 2003 it's a labyrinth that is now left to the viewers to untangle why has critique run out of steam from matters of fact to matters of concern bruno latour what i am going to argue is that the critical mind if it is to renew itself and be relevant again is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude to speak like william james but a realism dealing with what i will call matters of concern not matters of fact see below the mistake we made the mistake i made was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one's attention toward the conditions that made them possible but this meant accepting much too uncritically what matters of fact were this was remaining too faithful to the unfortunate solution inherited from the philosophy of immanuel kant critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore scratching reality is not defined by matters of fact matters of fact are not all that is given in experience matters of fact are only very partial and i would argue very polemical very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs it is this second empiricism this return to the realist attitude that i'd like to offer as the next task for the critically minded the mistake would be to believe that we too have given a social explanation of scientific facts no even though it is true that we have at first tried like good critics trained in the good schools to use the armaments handed to us by our betters and elders to crack open one of their favorite expressions meaning to destroy religion power discourse hegemony but fortunately yes fortunately one after the other we witnessed that the black boxes of science remained closed and that it was rather the tools that laid in the dust of our workshop disjointed and broken put simply critique was useless against objects of some solidity you can try the miserable projective game on ufos or exotic divinities but don't try it on neurotransmitters on gravitation on monte carlo calculations but critique is also useless when it begins to use the results of one science uncritically be it sociology itself or economics or postimperialism to account for the behavior of people you can try to play this miserable game of explaining aggression by invoking the genetic makeup of violent people but try to do that while dragging at the same time the many controversies in genetics evolutionary theories in which geneticists find themselves so thoroughly embroiled on both accounts matters of concern never occupy the two positions left for them by critical barbarity objects are much too strong to be treated as fetishes and much too weak to be treated as undisputable causal explanations of some unconscious action and this is not true of scientific states of affairs only this is our great discovery what made science studies commit such a felicitous mistake such a felix culpa once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained then you realize too that the so called weak objects those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism were never mere projections on an empty screen either 21 they too act they too do things they too make you do things it is not only the objects of science that resist but all the others as well those who were supposed to have been ground to dust by the powerful teeth of automated reflex action deconstructors to accuse something of being a fetish is the ultimate gratuitous disrespectful insane and barbarian gesture what set whitehead completely apart and straight on our path is that he considered matters of fact to be a very poor rendering of what is given in experience and something that muddles entirely the question what is there with the question how do we know it as isabelle stengers has shown recently in a major book about whitehead's philosophy 24 those who now mock his philosophy don't understand that they have resigned themselves to what he called the bifurcation of nature they have entirely forgotten what it would require if we were to take this incredible sentence seriously for natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature we may not pick up and choose for us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon here turing too cannot avoid mentioning god's creative power when talking of this most mastered machine the computer that he has invented well that's precisely his point in the whole paper the computer is in for many surprises you get out of it much more than you put into it in the most dramatic way turing's paper demonstrates once again that all objects are born things all matters of fact require in order to exist a bewildering variety of matters of concern 33 this is just this surprising result why we don't master what we ourselves have fabricated the object of this definition of critique 34 let us return for a moment to lady lovelace's objection which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do one could say that a man can inject an idea into the machine and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence like a piano string struck by a hammer another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away if however the size of the pile is sufficiently increased the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds and is there one for machines there does seem to be one for the human mind the majority of them seem to be sub critical i e to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub critical size an idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply a smallish proportion are super critical an idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole theory consisting of secondary tertiary and more remote ideas animals minds seem to be very definitely sub critical adhering to this analogy we ask can a machine be made to be super critical we all know subcritical minds that's for sure what would critique do if it could be associated with more not with less with multiplication not subtraction critical theory died away long ago can we become critical again in the sense here offered by turing that is generating more ideas than we have received inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away or dropping into quiescence like a piano no longer struck this would require that all entities including computers cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things mediating assembling gathering many more folds than the united four if this were possible then we could let the critics come ever closer to the matters of concern we cherish and then at last we could tell them yes please touch them explain them deploy them then we would have gone for good beyond iconoclasm the left hand of darkness ursula le guin you can read this book and a lot of other science fiction as a thought experiment thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment intro p 1 2 the purpose of a thought experiment as the term was used by schrodinger and other physicists is not to predict the future but to describe reality the present world intro p 2 fiction writers at least in their braver moments do desire the truth to know it speak it serve it but they go about it in a peculiar and devious way which consists in inventing persons places and events which never did and never will exist or occur and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies they say there that's the truth intro p 3 they may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies this weight of verifiable place event phenomenon behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region the author's mind intro p 3 i talk about the gods i am an atheist but i am an artist too and therefore a liar distrust everything i say i am telling the truth intro p 4 yes indeed the people in it this book are androgynous but that doesn't mean that i'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous or announcing that i think we damned well ought to be androgynous i'm merely observing in the peculiar devious and thought experimental manner proper to science fiction that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers we already are i am not predicting or prescribing i am describing i am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies intro p 5 leaves of grass chandler facsimile edition of the 1 st edition intro by richard bridgman whitman's laziness was really a measure of his distinctiveness it was not a defect of character but rather a sign of incomplete engagement especially did it testify to the high price he put upon his personal independence and his own judgment of what was important intro p viii the whitmans had nine children eight of whom lived four in misery the eldest jesse suffered recurring violent attacks of insanity probably caused by a syphilitic infection until in 1864 walt himself was obliged to commit his brother to the kings county lunatic asylum hannah walt's favorite sister married a vermont landscape painter whom she then harrowed for the rest of her life with her shrewery andy whitman was a longtime drunkard who died at thirty six of tuberculosis of the throat finally edward youngest of the family was born a mental defective and a cripple unable ever to care for himself intro p x whitman was a slow developer unresponsive to the spurs of material greed and conventional ambition his irresolution puzzled even him as he tried to understand what it was he wanted from life the time of my boyhood he said was a very restless and unhappy one i did not know what to do intro p xi because the nation lacked a stable society he emerson was equally sure that the poet would turn inward taking himself as a subject as the only subject while at the same time he would construct vast insubstantial cosmologies unconvincing perhaps but necessary in the absence of any sustaining traditional philosophy intro p xiii he whitman was an earnest feature writer and editorialist whose styles were molded by the occasion intro p xiii the only characteristic of leaves of grass visible in the writing of this period is its radical flexibility intro p xiii whitman in short was a talented student of his times readily adaptable and capable of turning out material shaped to the demands of the market intro p xiv briefly whitman devoted his full energies to journalism during a circulation drive he candidly revealed the importance the newspaper then had for him we really feel a desire to talk on many subjects to all the people of brooklyn intro p xvi everything was in flux for him then the opportunity to address the public daily on matters of public concern had not satisfied him intro p xvii lacking a cause into which he could throw his full energies whitman worked at half speed meditating watching for the sign of reality intro p xvii in this casual situation all the voices whitman had absorbed so far came bubbling to the surface while his deeper consciousness listened intro p xviii one may reasonably regard whitman's sudden departure from brooklyn and casual work in the south as evidence of the initial stirrings of his dissatisfaction with the course of a career stirring which would eventually lead to a radical internal regrouping intro p xix his effort is ever to reconcile opposites to bring together the genuine antitheses of american belief intro p xxi whitman habitually thought in pairs intro p xxi whitman saw the possibility of reconciling his own contradictions by incorporating them and transcending them intro p xxii such fears that his confident claims for the order of the universe might be spurious long troubled him but his inclusion of such self doubts is in itself a mark of his excellence intro p xviii no matter how magnificent and original one's feelings may seem they require the clothing of utterance whitman had to learn not only to discover but then to trust the curious blend of his own idiom intro p xxviii later when whitman convinced himself of the actual identity of the body and soul he solemnly pledged himself to physical purity april 16 1861 three days after the civil war commenced he wrote i have this day this hour resolved to inaugurate for myself a pure perfect sweet clean blooded robust body by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk and all fat meats late suppers a great body a purged cleansed spiritualized invigorated body intro p xviii perceiving dualities everywhere and ever seeking to reconcile them without obliterating their contrariety whitman sees that the self contains the antithesis of pride and of sympathy and the one balances the other intro p xxxii whitman accepts a cyclical world of interlinked cause and effect rejoicing in its intricate clarity exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet but always his encouragement and support in the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science intro p xxxii over the course of the poem walt whitman not only expands before our eyes but he is also involved dynamically in actions which change and deepen him intro p xxxvi the plot is one of education through trial of difficult challenges successfully met intro p xxxvi the americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature the united states themselves are essentially the greatest poem from walt whitman's intro the language of new media manovich lev 2001 vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers and artists still have to learn how to merge database and narrative into a new form p 12 if the human computer interface hci is an interface to computer data and a book is an interface to text cinema can be thought of as an interface to events taking place in 3 d space just as painting before it cinema present us with familiar images of visible reality arranged within a rectangular frame p 20 acknowledgments rochelle feinstein who served as my muse the translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers the result is new media that have become computable they comprise simply another set of computer data p 20 as roland barthes put it language is as it were that which divides reality for instance the continuous spectrum of the colors is verbally reduced to a series of discontinuous terms p 28 9 beginning in the nineteenth century modern society developed technologies that automated media creation these technologies allowed us over the course of 150 years to accumulate an unprecedented amount of media materials this led to the need for new technologies to store organize and efficiently access these materials thus automation of access became the next logical stage of the process that had been put into motion when the first photograph was taken this is the second stage of a media society concerned as much with accessing and reusing existing media objects as with creating new ones p 35 6 due to the acceptance of interface as a basic aspect of it media experience we are able to separate the levels of content' and interface for new media objects p 37 on stephen mamber's representation of hitchcock's the birds mamber's software generates a still for every shot of the film and then automatically combines all the stills into a rectangular matrix one shot per cell as a result time is spatialized spatializing the film allows us to study its different temporal structures which would be hard to observe otherwise p 40 all classical and even more so modern art is interactive' in a number of ways ellipses in literary narration missing details of objects in visual art and other representational shortcuts' require the user to fill in missing information theater and painting also rely on techniques of staging and composition to orchestrate the viewer's attention over time requiring her to focus on different parts of the display with sculpture and architecture the viewer has to move her whole body to experience the spatial structure p 56 see footnote ref to gombrich's analysis of the beholder's share in decoding the missing information in visual images in art and illusion a study in the psychology of pictorial representation in the late 1980 s vr pioneer jason lanier similarly saw vr technology as capable of completely objectifying or transparently merging with mental processes his description of vrs capabilities did not distinguish between internal mental functions events and processes and externally presented images p 58 you can play back your memory through time and classify your memories in various ways you'd be able to run back through the experiential places you've been in order to be able to find people tools find ref to research on full time wearable camera pendant prosthetic visual memory aid lanier also claimed that vr will lead to the age of post symbolic communication' without language or any other symbols here the fantasy of objectifying and augmenting consciousness extending the powers of reason goes hand in hand with the desire to see in technology a return to the primitive happy age of pre language pre misunderstanding p 58 9 postulation such an opposition content form or content medium assumes that the artwork's content is independent of its medium in an art historical sense or its code in a semiotic sense situated in some idealized medium free realm content is assumed to exist before its material expression these assumptions are correct in the case of the visualization of quantified data and in classical art with its well defined iconographic motives and representational conventions but just as modern thinkers from whorf to derrida insisted on the nontransparency of the code' idea modern artists assumed that content and form can not be separated in fact from the abstraction' of the 1910 s to the process' of the 1960 s artists have continued to invent concepts and procedures to assure the impossibility of painting some preexistent content p 66 this leaves us with an interesting paradox many new media artworks have what can be called an informational dimension which includes retrieving looking and thinking about quantified data at the same time new media artworks have more traditional experiential' or aesthetic dimensions which justify their status as art rather than information design these dimensions include a particular configuration of space time and surface articulated in the work p 66 does john maeda's work for instance deny this medium specific communication already in the 1960 s researchers were thinking about making the sum total of human written production books encyclopedias technical articles works of fiction and so on available online ted nelson's xanadu project p 73 these shapes called filmobjects' correspond to documentary footage recorded in the city to create each shape the original footage is digitized and the frames are stacked one after another in depth with the original camera parameters determining the exact shape the user can view the footage by clicking on the first frame as the frames are displayed one after another the shape becomes correspondingly thinner p 87 describing the invisible shape of things past by joachim sauter and dirk lusenbrink of berlin based art com principle of transcoding encoded in algorithms and implemented as software commands operations exist independently of the media data to which they can be applied peter eisenman his projects use different operations provided by cad programs as the basis of the design of a building's form eisenman systematically utilizes the full range of computer operations available extrusion twisting extension displacement morphing warping shifting scaling rotation and so on p 121 ersnt gombrich and roland barthes among others have critiqued the romantic ideal of the artist creating totally from scratch pulling images directly from his own imagination or inventing new ways to see the world all on his own according to gombrich the realist artist can only represent nature by relying on already established representational schemes' which are evolve over many generations of artists in the death of the author' barthes offers an even more radical criticism of the idea of the author as solitary inventor alone responsible for the work's content as barthes puts it the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture even though a modern artist may only be reproducing or at best combining preexisting texts idioms and schemas in new ways the actual material process of art making nevertheless supports the romantic ideal an artist operates like god creating the universe she starts with an empty canvas or a blank page gradually filling in the details she brings a new world into existence p 125 in compositing different spaces are combined into a single seamless virtual space a good example of the alternative aesthetics of continuity compositing aims to blend different elements into a seamless whole a single gestalt p 144 montage aims to create visual stylistic semantic and emotional dissonance between different elements p 144 stylistic montage artists such as picasso braque picabia and max ernst were creating similar juxtaposition of elements in different media in still images already before the world war ii p 159 attempts by some artists from the 1960 s onward to substitute a traditionally defined aesthetic object with other concepts such as process practice and concept' only hilight the stronghold of the traditional concept on our cultural imagination the concept of an aesthetic object as an object that is a self contained structure limited in space and or time is fundamental to all modern thinking about aesthetics p 163 telepresence can be though of as one example of representational technologies used to enable action to allow the viewer to manipulate reality through representations other examples of these action enabling technologies are maps architectural drawings and x rays all of them allow their users to act at a distance p 165 philosopher and sociologist bruno latour proposes that certain kinds of images have always functioned as instruments of control and power power being defined as the ability to mobilize and manipulate resources across space and time p 167 one example of such image instruments analyzed by latour are perspectival images perspective establishes the precise and reciprocal relationship between objects and their signs any representation that systematically captures some features of reality can be used as an instrument in fact most types of representations that do not fit into the history of illusionism diagrams and charts maps and x rays infrared and radar images belong to the second history that of representations as instruments of action p 168 for instance a computer database is quite different from a traditional collection of documents it allows one to quickly access sort and reorganize millions of records p 214 supposedly pure psychological immersion' objects as riven and unreal have a strong information processing' dimension this dimension makes playing these games more like reading a detective story or playing chess than being engaged with traditional literary and film fictional narrative gathering clues and treasures constantly updating a mental map of the universe of the game all this aligns playing a computer game with other information processing' tasks typical of computer culture like searching the internet scanning news groups pulling records from a database using a spreadsheet or data mining large data stores p 216 observations many new media objects do not tell stories they do not have a beginning or end in fact they do not have any development thematically formally or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence instead they are collections of individual items with every item possessing the same significance as any other p 218 new media objects may or may not employ these highly structured database models however from the point of view of the user's experience a large proportion of them are databases in a more basic sense they appear as collections of items on which the user can perform various operations view navigate search the user's experience of such computerized collections is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating and architectural site similarly a literary or cinematic narrative an architectural plan and a database each present a different model of what a world is like it is this sense of database as a cultural form of its own that i want to address here p 219 the open nature of the web as a medium web pages are computer files that can always be edited means that web sites never have to be complete they always grow new links are continually added to what is already there it is as easy to add new elements to the end of a list as it is to insert them anywhere in it all this further contributes to the anti narrative logic of the web if new elements are being added over time the result is a collection not a story indeed how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing p 220 1 of course not all new media objects are explicitly databases computer games for instance are experienced by their players as narratives in a game the player is given a well defined task it is this task that makes the player experience the game as a narrative everything that happens to her in a game all the characters and objects she encounters either take her closer to achieving the goal or further away from it thus in contrast to a cd rom and web database which always appear arbitrary because the user knows additional material could have been added without modifying the logic in a game from the user's point of view all the elements are motivated i e their presence is justified p 221 2 or in a different formulation of the legendary author of sim games will wright playing the game is a continuous loop between the user viewing the outcomes and inputting decisions and the computer calculating outcomes and displaying them back to the user the user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model p 223 the rise of the web this gigantic and always changing data corpus gave millions of people a new hobby or profession data indexing p 225 the design of any new media object begins with assembling a database of possible elements to be used the narrative is constructed by linking elements of this database in a particular order that is by designing a trajectory leading from one element to another on the material level a narrative is just a set of links the elements themselves remain stored in the database thus the narrative is virtual while the database exists materially p 231 for centuries a spatialized narrative in which all images appear simultaneously dominated european visual culture in the twentieth century it was relegated to minor' cultural forms such as comics or technical illustrations p 232 in an article that appeared in the 1991 anthology cyberspace first steps marcos novak still defined cyberspace as a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems in the first part of the 1990 s this vision has survived among the original designers of vrml in designing the language they aimed to create a unified conceptualization of space spanning the entire internet a spatial equivalent of www they saw vrml as a natural stage in the evolution of the net from an abstract data network towards a perceptualized internet where the data has been sensualized that is represented in three dimensions p 250 the space medium pavel florensky russian philosopher and art historian in the 1920 s the space medium is objects mapped onto space we have seen the inseparability of things and space and the impossibility of representing things and space by themselves this understanding of space also characterizes a particular tradition of modern painting that stretches from seurat to giacometti and de kooning these painters tried to eliminate the notions of a distinct object and empty space as such instead they depicted a dense field that occasionally hardens into something that we can read as an object it can be said that modern painters belonging to this tradition worked to articulate a particular philosophical concept in their painting that of space medium this concept is something mainstream computer graphics still has to discover p 255 to construct this program the mit team drove through aspen in a car taking pictures every three meters because the images were taken every three meters the result was an interesting sampling of three dimensional space p 259 60 legrady's installation begins to explore one element in the vocabulary' of the navigable space alphabet' the transition from one state to another other potential elements of this alphabet include the character of a trajectory the pattern of the user's movement for instance rapid geometric movement in doom versus wandering in myst possible interactions between the user and the space and of course the architecture of space itself p 263 4 modern painters who belong to what i call the space medium tradition' elaborated the concept of space as a homogeneous dense field where everything is made from the same stuff' in contrast to architects who always have to work with the basic dichotomy between built structure and empty space p 265 the reaction of the viewer during her movement through the installation is the main concern of the designer the loss of the viewer's attention is the end of the installation ilya kabakov on the total installation p 267 although they are composed with the vocabularies of established languages those of television newspapers supermarkets of established sequences and although they remain subordinated to prescribed syntactical forms temporal modes of schedules paradigmatic orders of spaces etc the trajectories trace out the rules of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the system in which they develop de certau the practice of everyday life p 268 the data dandy does have a dress code of his own this look was popular with new media artists of the 1990 s no labels no distinct design no bright colors or extravagant shapes a non identity that is nevertheless paraded as style and in fact carefully constructed p 271 a database form can be seen as an expression of a database complex an irrational desire to preserve and store everything p 274 if the subject of modern society looked for refuge from the chaos of the real world in the stability and balance of the static composition of a painting and later in the cinematic image the subject of the information society finds peace in the knowledge that she can slide over endless fields of data locating any morsel of information with the click of a button zooming through file systems and networks she is comforted not by an equilibrium of shapes and colors but by the variety of data manipulation operations at her control p 274 5 probably the ultimate in non place architecture is the one million square meter euralille project which redefined the city of lille france as the transit zone between the continent and london p 281 in principle given enough time and money one can create what will be the ultimate digital film 129 600 frames ninety minutes completely painted by hand from scratch but indistinguishable in appearance from live photography p 305 therefore in akvaario a computer program can weave' an endless narrative by choosing from a database of different shots what gives the resulting narrative' a sufficient continuity is that almost all the shots show the same character p 319 a computer program breaks a task into a series of elemental operations to be executed one at a time cinema followed this logic of industrial production as well it replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential narrative an assembly line of shots that appear on the screen one at a time this type of narrative turned out to be particularly incompatible with the spatial narrative that had played a prominent role in european visual culture for centuries artists presented a multitude of separate events within a single space whether the fictional space of a painting or the physical space that can be taken in by the viewer all at once p 322 art historian svetlana alpers claims that italian renaissance painting is primarily concerned with narration whereas dutch painting of the seventeenth century is focused on description while functioning as a window into an illusionary space the dutch painting is also a loving catalog of different objects material surfaces and light effects pained in minute detail p 327 maurizio catalan the phaidon book small edition n 6923 c 37 m 38 2003 ucsd library c not necessarily i really just take advantage of the exhibition situation because i don t have a studio i use shows as a means to get work produced every commitment to exhibit becomes a challenge for me p 12 c i'm not really sure satire is the key to my work comedians manipulate and make fun of reality whereas i sactually think that reality is far more provocative than my art you should walk on the street and see real beggars not my fake ones you should witness a real skinhead rally i just take it i'm always borrowing pieces crumbs really of everyday reality if you think my work is very provocative it means that reality is extremely provocative and we just don't react to it maybe we no longer pay attention to the way we live in the world we are increasingly how do you say don't feel any pain we are anesthetized p 17 rejecting as obsolete the egocentric position of the conventional artist in search of a masterpiece he believed he had to justify his artistic role like any other professional cattelan surfaced in a relatively safe contemporary arena his projects were structured as experiments increasingly utilizing the strategies of the advertising world presenting the idea of a work to a test group of the public before deciding whether to produce it and which form it should take he believed that artistic ideas should not be autonomous rather to be effective an artwork should activate the social and cultural structures surrounding it in an urban environment p 49 boetti contributed the phrase never write bullshit affirming both his anarchic attitude shared by cattelan and his moral stance a source of both fascination and insecurity for the younger artists who wished to emulate him while in boetti's work morality and anarchism combined to bolster its integrity for cattelan these same elements produced an internal struggle that led to a nervous creative energy on one hand and enervation and entropy on the other shaping different qualities in his work p 49 had cattelan become the enemy he had once mocked it is a doubt that weakens some of his interventions while strengthening the formal aspect of his work the weakness is revealed when the ancient spirit of the outsider is still seaerching for a lost freedom the capacity to be an iconoclast cattelan is now an artist who is telling a story storytellers do not make revolutions but they can easily inspire them p 84 out of order out of sight volume 1 artists writings adrian piper 1996 i am presently interested in the construction of finite systems that is systems that serve to contain an idea within certain formal limits and to exhaust the possibilities of the idea set by those limits this appears to me to be the best way of preventing the potentialities of an idea from extending into infinity thus presenting me with the conflicting choices of either attempting to satisfy my curiosity about the idea by pursuing it for an indefinite amount of time or else discovering when i'd get bored or else ignoring the infinite aspect of the idea completely and feeling uncomfortable all the while i am working with it p 5 it's difficult to adequately clarify my terminology when talking about things like this but in decreasing order of vagueness and increasing order of tangibility i see intuition idea method system not necessarily logical actualized piece p 4 it seems to me now that the writings in these two volumes are best understood as evolving expressions of a coerced reflective interiority that develops in response to my increasing grasp of that point that i am not after all entitled simply to externalize my creative impulses in unreflective action or products because being merely a foreign guest in the private club in which i entertain my self confident attempts at objective communication with my audience would be permanently garbled censored ridiculed or ignored were it not for a critical and discursive matrix that i with effort eventually supply p xxxix digital art christine paul 2003 nam june paik random access 1963 p 14 alexander apostol residente pulido royal copenhague 2001 residente pulido rosenthal 2001 p 39 perry hoberman cathartic user interface 1995 2000 p 90 golan levine p 133 john maeda's aesthetics and computation group benjamin fry valence 1999 p 177 please make more things with such an uncritical unselfconscious unselfreflective attitude toward technology another wide area of ai research is that of man machine communication which is based on speech recognition systems the best known artificial intelligence are eliza and alice software programs you can talk to also known as chatbots chat robots p 146 perform or else jon mckenzie with three rather than two performance paradigms on our unstable table we can perhaps avoid building a reading machine out of binary oppositions while unfolding performance in other ways as well p 12 modern knowledge fully emerged in industrial societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and legitimated itself upon what lyotard calls grand narratives epic stories of history even highly specialized knowledges were socially legitimated by arguments that their truths served the progress of humanity the revolution of the working class and or the liberation of historically oppressed groups postmodern knowledge by contrast legitimates itself by optimizing the system's performance efficiency its emergence marks the decline of grand narratives within academic and public discourse and the growing hegemony of computer technologies significantly lyotard names this postmodern legitimation performativity p 14 like the term performance lecture machine is polyvalent within the passages of our text it will come to frame and embody a series of case studies introduced later in the book performances that all involve lectures and scenes of instruction the term lecture machine gathers divergent senses and i will touch upon a few of the most important here first at a relatively simple level lecture machine designates a lectern the piece of furniture commonly found standing or in truncated form sitting atop a table in lecture halls and classrooms as lectern the lecture machine supports a body and a script and perhaps such props as a pen a glass of water a microphone a small reading lamp or the remote control of a projection device through its installation within various institutions the lectern has become an emblem of knowledge and power a symbol standing upright between lecturer and audience separating the one presumed to know and thus empowered to speak the truth from those presumed not to know and thus empowered to seek the truth we move now to a second broader sense of lecture machine one indicated by derrida who once lectured that the entire academic institution forms a une puissante machine de lecture a powerful reading or lecture machine lecture machine thus also designates the university itself with its books its desks for reading and writing its libraries and catalogues its logocentric protocols of research and teaching beyond the obvious synechdochal relation the lecture has been the dominant performance of modern pedagogics one might think here of specific lectures that have impacted one's own life a disciplinary field or an entire period of intellectual history i'm thinking of a high school chemistry lecture woolf's lecture on oxbridge which formed the basis of a room of one's own and kojeve's influential lectures on hegel but other readers would certainly cite other lectures and there are lots to cite from room to room institution to institution nation to nation in short from one locality to all corners of the university's universe lectures are not only a popular and powerful pedagogical performance they stand as a crucial educational norm there is an even broader sense of lecture machine that i will make use of here in addition to lectern and university i will also use lecture machine to refer to any system that processes discourses and practices any assemblage that binds together words and acts or alternatively that works to disentigrate their bonds and erode their forms and functions pulpits podiums indeed any desktop actual or screenal operates as a lecture machine as do the institutions in which they are installed schools of thought research paradigms and disciplines can likewise be understood as reading machines as sociotechnical systems that join together and break apart specific practices and discourses performance studies performance management techno performance these are all highly specialized finely tuned machines that connect up specific infrastructures and seek to discover invent analyze measure interpret evaluate and produce certain acts and certain words as performance finally we can understand the lecture machine in terms of the performance stratum itself and here its most profound reading occurs with the emergence of this formation there has been a radical transformation of our reading machines an epochal shift in the citational network of discourses and practices the global emergence of technological media television tape recorders satellites copy machines faxes beepers and most profoundly interconnecting and overwriting them all information technologies such as digital computers and electronic networks the emergence of the hypermediating media affects all cultures all organizations all technologies for the digitalization of discourses and practices enables them to be recorded edited and played back in new and uncanny ways highly localized ensembles of words and gestures can now be broken apart recombined and hyperlinked to different ensembles in ways unlike anything in the past at speeds incredible from all perspectives except those of the future perform or else' constitutes a lecture machine iteself one that engages and disengages diverse readers and scanners its mission in part lies in reading the ways discourses and practices have been joined together to become different kinds of performance because the object is both interdisciplinary and multiparadigmatic the different performances it theorizes may not be familiar to many readers and thus we will to put it mildly do a bit of reading the task is to generate some sense of performance as it has been invented by different researchers over the past half century to trace the ways it has become caught up in different processes of generalization we shall come to attempt this by studying the performance of challenger lecture machine p 21 2 this transformance of performative efficacy has been discussed many times often in reference to the differences between modern and postmodern performance art in presence and resistance philip auslander describes postmodern performance as involving a shift from transgression to resistance which can be understood here as two different strategies of performative efficacy transgressive efficacy posits itself as a presence outside an alientating power taking its position in opposition to dominant social structures and forms by contrast resistant efficacy arises from within necessarily inscribed within the very forces of power whose arrangement of presence and absence it seeks to challenge p 43 instead of providing resistant political messages or representations as did the political performances of the 1960 s postmodern performance provides resistance precisely not by offering messages positive or negative that fit comfortably into popular representations of political thought but by challenging the processes of representation itself even though it must carry out this project by means of representation p 43 feedback is a specific performance that can affect the direction of overall performance thus feedback loops can be read as mise en abime as a part that represents the whole and thus puts into abyss an entire performance process whether it be that of an individual or an organization a performance about performance feedback is thus a self referential metamodel for the performance management model p 90 from a cultural performance perspective the most significant transformation introduced here is the inclusion of both human and computer actors in the realm of aesthetic experience coherency of action and the resulting cathartic pleasure define the criteria of any human computer interaction significantly she also suggest that in the future some interactions might lead to experiences found in ritual contexts i think we can someday have dionysian experiences in virtual reality and that they will be experiences of the most intimate and powerful kind but to do so we must breather life into our tools our creative force must be manifest not as an artifact but as a collaborator an extension of ourselves embodied in our systems p 127 another affinity between performance studies performance management and techno performance may be surprising at first but upon reflection understandable all three paradigms valorize the testing and contesting of norms performance studies scholars have come to privilege those cultural performances that transgress and or resist the dominant norms of a given social situation this has become the defining trait of liminality performance management theorists and managers while using very different discourse likewise stress the continual overcoming of organizational limitations thus they use terms such as managing creativity affirming diversity and thinking outside the box for their part engineers and scientists of techno performance design and produce highly experimental phenomena in both their laboratories and the field in order to test the limits of materials and systems thus the terms cutting edge and risk taking are commonly used to describe these technological performances p 132 obviously the norms tested and contested within each paradigm are not only quite divergent the different testings would no doubt be subject to very different evaluations within the other performance paradigms from the very perspective of performance studies thinking outside the box might be deemed normative because of its institutional inscription some techno performance researchers might also scoff at thinking outside the box especially when it impacts the funding or organization of their own research while also finding liminality to be either merely entertaining or irrelevant or both alternatively some performance management researchers might agree with this evaluation of liminality while also dismissing cutting edge technologies as unnecessarily wasteful or costly on the other hand certain performance researchers might sense and affirm the mutational forces operating in all three paradigms and seek to explore ways to connect and extend them p 132 3 there is a strange loop connecting the metamodels of rites of passage feedback and missiles and through it the paradigms of performance studies performance management and techno performance and their respective challenges of efficacy efficiency and effectiveness this loop defines the twisted and broken trajectory our metamodelization will take from here on out p 135 our mission is to relaunch the general theory again our passage involves what is called a strange loop in certain eccentric circles strange loops are distinguished from feedback loops in that they violate system boundaries while feedback loops respect such limits and norms douglass hofstdter provides some direction here the strange loop' phenomenon occurs whenever by moving upwards or downwards through the levels of some hierarchical system we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started the path we trace passes through a tangle hierarchy of performance an unstable system with interconnected levels of performative specificity and generality it is an odd hierarchy one marked by iterative patterns of order and chaos by blind flights and queer characters and by a number of dramatic surprises a tangled hierarchy occurs when what you presume are clean hierarchical levels take you by surprise and fold back in a hierarchy violating way the surprise element is important it is the reason i call strange loops strange p 135 martin heidegger's 18 november 1955 lecture in the main auditorium of the technische hochschule in munich the question concerning technology p 155 following zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance robert pirsig 20050202 left science for something better asked basic questions reconsidering the obvious author's note what follows is based on actual occurrences although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes it must be regarded in its essence as fact however it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox zen buddhist practice it's not very factual on motorcycles either and what is good phaedrus and what is not good need we ask anyone to tell us these things i would like to talk in some depth about things that seem important what is in mind is a sort of chautauqua like the traveling tent show chautauquas that used to move across america an old time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer p 15 6 i step inside and an avalanche of memory loosened by the jolt of the print begins to come down that door leads to sarah's office sarah she came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors going from the corridor to her office and she said i hope you are teaching quality to your students this in a la de da singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants that was the moment it all started that was the seed crystal seed crystal a powerful fragment of memory comes back now the laboratory organic chemistry he was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened a supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point at which no more material will dissolve has been exceeded this can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased when you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution the material sometimes doesn't crystallize out because the molecules don't know how they require something to get them started a seed crystal or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass he walked to the water to cool the solution but never got there before his eyes as he walked he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel he saw it grow where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out the one sentence i hope you are teaching quality to your students was said to him and within a matter of a few months growing so fast you could almost see it grow came an enormous intricate highly structured mass of thought formed as if by magic p 180 1 i want to talk now about phaedrus' exploration into the meaning of the term quality an exploration which he saw as a route through the mountains of the spirit as best i can puzzle it out there were two distinct phases in the first phase he made no attempt at a rigid systematic definition of what he was talking about this was a happy fulfilling and creative phase it lasted most of the time he taught at the school back in the valley behind us the second phase emerged as a result of normal intellectual criticism of his lack off definition of what he was talking about in this phase he made systematic rigid statements about what quality is and worked out an enormous hierarchic structure of thought to support them he literally had to move heaven and earth to arrive at this systematic understanding and when he was done felt he'd achieved an explanation of existence and our consciousness of it better than any that had existed before p 188 phaedrus' second metaphysical phase was a total disaster before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible money property children even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court all he had left was his one crazy lone dream of quality a map of a route across the mountain for which he had sacrificed everything then after the electrodes were attached he lost that p 189 what was phaedrus trying to do anyway this question became more and more imperative as he went on the answer that had seemed right when he started now made less and less sense he had wanted his students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good writing instead of asking him all the time the real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves the only place they would ever get a really right answer but now this made no sense if they already knew what was good and bad there was no reason for them to take the course in the first place the fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad that was his job as instructor to tell them what was good or bad the whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the university he'd heard that reed college in oregon withheld grades until graduation and during the summer vacation he went there but was told the faculty was divided on the value of withholding grades and that no one was tremendously happy about the system during the rest of the summer his mood became depressed and lazy he and his wife camped a lot in those mountains she asked why he was so silent all the time but he couldn't say why he was just stopped waiting for that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything p 201 2 how the hell do you justify in terms of reason a refusal to define something definitions are the foundation of reason you can't reason without them he could hold off the attack for a while with fancy dialectical footwork and insults about competence and incompetence but sooner or later he had to come up with something more substantial than that his attempt to come up with something substantial led to further crystallization beyond the traditional limits of rhetoric and into the domain of philosophy p 214 i was talking about the first wave of crystallization outside of rhetoric that resulted from phaedrus' refusal to define quality he had to answer the question if you can't define it what makes you think it exists his answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism a thing exists he said if a world without it can't function normally if we can show that a world without quality functions abnormally then we have shown that quality exists whether it's defined or not he thereupon proceeded to subtract quality from a description of the world as we know it p 215 the wave of crystallization rolled ahead he was seeing two worlds simultaneously on the intellectual side the square side he saw now that quality was a cleavage term what every intellectual analyst looks for you can take your analytic knife put the point directly on the term quality and just tap not hard gently and the whole world splits cleaves right in two hip and square classic and romantic technological and humanistic and the split is clean there's no mess no slop no little items that could be one way or the other not just a skilled break but a very lucky break sometimes the best analysts working with the most obvious lines of cleavage can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash and yet here was quality a tiny almost unnoticeable fault line a line of illogic in our concept of the universe and you tapped it and the whole universe came apart so neatly it was almost unbelievable he wished kant were alive kant would have appreciated it that master diamond cutter he would see hold quality undefined that was the secret phaedrus wrote with some beginning awareness that he was involved in a strange kind of intellectual suicide squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined that is before it gets all chopped up into words we have proved that quality though undefined exists its existence can be seen empirically in the classroom and can be demonstrated logically by showing that a world without it cannot exist as we know it what remains to be seen the thing to be analyzed is not quality but those peculiar habits of thought called squareness' that sometimes prevent us from seeing it thus did he seek to turn the attack the subject for analysis the patient on the table was no longer quality but analysis itself quality was healthy and in good shape analysis however seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious p 218 9 i'm making a big thing out of all this these classical romantic differences but phaedrus didn't he wasn't really interested in any kind of fusion of differences between these two worlds he was after something else his ghost in the pursuit of this ghost he went on to wider meanings of quality which drew him further and further to his end i differ from him in that i've no intention of going on to that end he just passed through this territory and opened it up i intend to stay and cultivate it and see if i can get something to grow p 223 time to get on with the chautauqua and the second wave of crystallization the metaphysical one this was brought about in response to phaedrus' wild meanderings about quality when the english faculty at bozeman informed of their squareness presented him with a reasonable question does this undefined quality' of yours exist in the things we observe they asked or is it subjective existing only in the observer it was a simple normal enough question and there was no hurry for an answer what phaedrus had been presented with by the faculty of the english department of montana state college was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma a dilemma which is greek for two premises has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull a third alternative to the dilemma and the best one in my opinion was to refuse to enter the arena phaedrus could simply have said the attempt to classify quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it i have already said it is undefinable and left it at that i believe deweese actually counseled him to do this at the time why he chose to disregard this advice and chose to respond to this dilemma logically and dialectically rather than take the easy escape of mysticism i don't know but i can guess i think first of all that he felt the whole church of reason was irreversibly in the arena of logic that when one put oneself outside logical disputation one put oneself outside any academic consideration whatsoever philosophical mysticism the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means has been with us since the beginning of history it's the basis of zen practice but it's not an academic subject the academy the church of reason is concerned exclusively with those things that can be defined and if one wants to be a mystic his place is in a monastery not a university universities are places where things should be spelled out i think a second reason for his decision to enter the arena was an egoistic one he knew himself to be a pretty sharp logical and dialectician took pride in this and looked upon this present dilemma as a challenge to his skill i think now that traces of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles p 230 1 he knew the metaphysical trinity of subject object and quality would sooner or later have to be interrelated but he was in no hurry about it it was just so satisfying sic to be beyond the danger of those horns that he relaxed and enjoyed it as long as he could eventually however he examined it more closely although there's no logical objection to a metaphysical trinity a three headed reality such trinities are not common or popular the metaphysician normally seeks either a monism such as god which explains the nature of the world as a manifestation of one single thing or he seeks a dualism such as mind matter which explains it as two things or he leaves it as a pluralism which explains it as a manifestation of an indefinite number of things but three is an awkward number right away you want to know why three what's the relationship among them p 238 9 i suppose what i ought to do in the chautauqua is just point out in summary form the direction phaedrus went without evaluation and then get on with my own thing believe me when the world is seen not as a duality of mind and matter but as a trinity of quality mind and matter then the art of motorcycle maintenance and other arts take on a dimension of meaning they never had perhaps he would have gone in the directions i'm now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization the metaphysical wave had finally grounded out where i'll be grounding it out that is in the everyday world i think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it but unfortunately for him it didn't ground out it went into a third mystical wave of crystallization from which he never recovered p 246 7 that is why it is called elusive meet it and you do not see its face follow it and you do not see its back he who holds fast to the quality of old is able to know the primeval beginnings which are the continuity of quality phaedrus read on through line after line verse after verse of this watched them match fit slip into place exactly this was what he meant this was what he'd been saying all along only poorly mechanistically there was nothing vague or inexact about this book it was as precise and definite as it could be it was what he had been saying only in a different language with different roots and origins he was from another valley seeing what was in this valley not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from he was seeing it all he had broken the code he read on line after line page after page not a discrepancy what he had been talking about all the time as quality was here the tao the great central generating force of all religions oriental and occidental past and present all knowledge everything then his mind's eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and i don't know what really happened but now the slippage that phaedrus had felt earlier the internal parting of his mind suddenly gathered momentum as do the rocks at the top of a mountain before he could stop it the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grown into an avalanche of thought and awareness out of control with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more and then hundreds of times that on and on wider and broader until there was nothing left to stand no more anything it all gave way from under him p 254 no poincare concluded a scientist does not choose at random the facts he observes he seeks to condense much experience and much thought into a slender volume and that's why a little book on physics contains so many past experiences and a thousand times as many possible experiences whose result is known beforehand then poincare illustrated how a fact is discovered he had described generally how scientists arrive at facts and theories but now he penetrated narrowly into his own personal experience with the mathematical functions that established his early fame for fifteen days he said he strove to prove that there couldn't be any such functions every day he seated himself at his work table stayed an hour or two tried a great number of combinations and reached no results then one evening contrary to his custom he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep ideas arose in crowds he felt them collide until pairs interlocked so to speak making a stable combination the next morning he had only to write out the results a wave of crystallization had taken place he described how a second wave of crystallization guided by analogies to established mathematics produced what he later named the theta fuschian series he was about to enter the bus and at the moment when he put his foot on the step the idea came to him without anything in his former thoughts having paved the way for it a later discovery occurred while he was walking by a seaside bluff it came to him with just the same characteristics of brevity suddenness and immediate certainty another major discovery occurred while he was walking down a street others eulogized this process as the mysterious workings of genius but poincare was not content with such a shallow explanation he tried to fathom more deeply what had happened mathematics he said isn't merely a question of applying rules any more than science it doesn't merely make the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws the combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous useless and cumbersome the true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones or rather to avoid the trouble of making them and teh rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate it's almost impossible to state them precisely they must be felt rather than formulated poincare then hypothesized that this selection is made by what he called the subliminal self an entity that corresponds exactly with what phaedrus called preintellectual awareness the subliminal self poincare said looks at a large number of solutions to a problem but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of mathematical beauty of the harmony of numbers and forms of geometric elegance this is a true esthetic feeling which all mathematicians know poincare said but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile but it is this harmony this beauty that is at the center of it all poincare made it clear that he was not speaking of romantic beauty the beauty of appearances which strikes the senses he meant classic beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp which gives structure to romantic beauty it is the quest of this special classic beauty the sense of harmony of the cosmos which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony it is not the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective of reality poincare's contemporaries refused to acknowledge that facts are preselected because they thought that to do so would destroy the validity of scientific method they presumed that preselected facts meant that truth is whatever you like and called his ideas conventionalism they vigorously ignored the truth that their own principle of objectivity is not itself an observable fact and therefore by their own criteria should be put in a state of suspended animation p 266 9 rauschenberg combines nytimes 2005 12 23 i really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or coke bottles are ugly because they're surrounded by things like that all day long and it must make them miserable he has said bringing to mind whitman's remark i do not doubt there is far more in trivialities insects vulgar persons slaves dwarfs weeds rejected refuse than i have supposed whitman counseled veterans in hospitals during the civil war and poetic symmetry mr rauschenberg did the same for draftees and soldiers with acute combat psychoses during world war ii this he told the art writer calvin tomkins years ago was when he learned how little difference there is between sanity and insanity and realized that a combination is essential which isn't a bad starting point for describing the combines reflections on the state of criticism leo steinberg if the artist went wrong who decides which lobe of his manichean brain was responsible the bright half whence pure design is distilled or that darker side where the will to expressiveness lurks p 9 reducing the range of reference has always been the appointed task of formalist thought but there has been much hard serious thinking in it given the complexity and infinite resonance of works of art the stripping down of artistic value to the single determinant of formal organization was once in the nineteenth century a remarkable cultural achievement the attempt was to discipline art criticism in the manner of scientific experiment through the isolation of a single variable p 9 even as abstract expressionism was celebrating its triumphs he proposed the flatbed or work surface picture plane as the foundation of an artistic language that would deal with a different order of experience the earliest work rauschenberg which admits into his canon white painting with numbers was painted around 1949 in a life class at the art students league the young painter turning his back on the model rauschenberg's picture with its cryptic meander of lines and numbers is a work surface that cannot be construed into anything else you cannot read it as masonry not as a system of chains or quois and the written cyphers read every way scratched into wet paint the picture ends up as a verification of its own opaque surface p 29 to hold all this together rauschenberg's picture plane had to become a surface to which anything reachable thinkable would adhere it had to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is and everything a projection screen is with further affinities for anything that is flat and worked over palimpsest canceled plate printer's proof trial blank chart map aerial view any flat documentary surface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue of his picture plane radically different from the transparent projection plane with its optical correspondence to man's visual field p 30 and it seemed at times that rauschenberg's work surface stood for the mind itself dump reservoir switching center abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal monologue the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field p 32 gerhardt richter 40 years michele leight the cityreview com richter is the author of pictures so different from one another that at first glance they seem to be by different hands he has defined a vast pictorial and conceptual territory for himself and has given it specific dimensions in canvases that vary from photo realist figuration to total abstraction from snapshot and postcard banality to transcendence and from serene or pyrotechnic beauty to brooding austerity approaching this maze of paintings can be confusing at first but the more one looks and the more the overt contradictions and subtle continuities of richter's oeuvre take on substance the more enlightening the experience becomes the first clue to understanding his work is the blurred center in table 1962 san francisco museum of modern art on extended loan from a private collection which richter has designated as number one in his personal catalog raisonne it is a black and white copy of a picture clipped from the magazine domus in which he deliberately alters the objects proportions obliterates aesthetic lighting and eliminates photographic detail the blurry abstract cloud of paint obscures the table defining richter's obsession with the disruption of the illusionistic image at first glance richter's early paintings look like ghostly warhols with the pigment drained out of them and the emotional connection between these two artists persists throughout the show both employed different methods to mechanize their work warhol by silk screening richter by mechanical wiping and both borrowed freely from ready made images in newspapers magazines and photographs by force of circumstances richter was unable to express himself as wildly and exuberantly as warhol both artists assimilated the public's strange and horrible fascination with suffering and media exploitation of it richter is as immune to this fetish as he is to the constraints of fashion or the expectations of the avant garde elite both artists were obsessed with death and history as portrayed in the media turning ordinary human beings and everyday happenings into the modern equivalent of history painting richter admits that he likes warhol's disaster paintings and provides the following interesting commentary in the catalogue's interview with him and mr storr i believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential the hyperrealists didn't do that they painting everything every detail that's why they were such a surprise but for me it was obvious that i had to wipe out the details i was happy to have a method that was rather mechanical in that regard i owe something to warhol he legitimized the mechanical he showed me how it is done it is a normal state of working to eliminate things but warhol showed me this modern way of letting details disappear or at least he validated its possibilities he did it with silkscreening and photography and i did it through mechanical wiping it was a very liberating act when richter was questioned by storr why in the midst of painting abstracts he suddenly began copying titian and creating romantic landscapes richter was candid the assertion of my freedom why shouldn't i paint like this and who could tell me not to and then the affirmation was naturally there the wish to paint paintings as beautiful as those by caspar david friedrich to claim that this time is not lost but possible that we need it and that it is good and it was a polemic against modern art against tin art against wild art and for freedom that i could do whatever i wanted to for a man who had been so constrained in his formative years the idea of not having the choice to do something made it the very thing he had to do unfortunately i am not a virtuoso and that has always been my flaw today there is almost nobody or only a few bad examples who has the virtuosity to draw something i depend on the photograph and mindlessly copy what i see i am clumsy in that regard even though i seem very skillful growing up under nazism followed by east german communism left richter deeply mistrustful of ideologies of all kinds as represented in the october 18 paintings his pictorial sources for the images were television footage and police and news photographs they are a painter's ode to the doomed revolutionary aspirations of the generation of the 1960 s and the tragic deaths of those who followed those hopes to self destructive extremes by repainting the documentary images in cold gray tones and then un painting them with brush and squeegee strokes that sometimes blur the images to the point of near total obscurity especially those of beautiful gudrun ennslin richter was re inventing the heroic genre of history painting in the image of photo mechanical technology as he does this he forces us to examine the truth telling properties we are used to ascribing to documentary media he has meshed old conventions and contemporary methods to tell a tragic story minus the heroes drawing began in earnest around the age of 15 and his decision to become an artist was made at the same time by sixteen richter was convinced it was his calling he fell in love at summer camp the same year in 1948 richter settled on his own in the town of zittau where he resided in a hostel for apprentices he avidly read nietzsche but also karl marx breaking with his parent's christian faith and renouncing religion by the age of 16 or 17 i was absolutely clear that there is no god an alarming discovery to me after my christian upbringing by that time my fundamental aversion to all beliefs and ideologies was fully developed richter had spent his entire lifetime up to this point surviving two regimes that had the power to extinguish his ability to make art and now he wished to extinguish his existing style and re invent himself after the shock of seeing the all out courage and freedom expressed in the works of lucio fontana and jackson pollock in 1960 rauschenberg and cy twombly were exhibited together at galerie 22 in dusseldorf owned by dealer jean pierre wilhelm who represented other artists associated with art informel including otto gotz this was wilhelm's last show marking the end of an era for his gallery but also signaling a change in the direction of contemporary art rauschenberg offered new technical solutions to the problems of image appropriation and image grafting at galerie 22 rauschenberg showed thirty four drawings for dante's inferno all of which had involved transferring newspaper and magazine images to another paper surface by soaking them in solutions and although richter had not yet arrived in dusseldorf when the rauschenberg twombly show went up the method rauschenberg used found application in richter's work two years later joseph beuys appears to have felt the same duality when it came to duchamp because he embraced readymades as he disowned duchamp declaring the silence of marcel duchamp is over rated richter's mish mash of diverse yet comprehensible material is refreshing and equally unsettling his often banal realism is a slap in the face just as duchamp's urinals must have been to postwar viewers and critics who were accustomed to elegantly muted galleries filled with nude ladies and gentlemen in scenes from famous myths legends and biblical tales painted by name brand artists i painted through the whole history of art toward abstraction i painted like crazy and i had some success with all that or gained some respect but then i burned the crap in some sort of action in the courtyard it was wonderful to make something and then destroy it i was doing something and i felt very free my first photo picture i was doing large pictures in gloss enamel influenced by winifred gaul one day a photograph of brigitte bardot fell into my hands and i painted it into one of these pictures in shades of gray i had had enough of bloody painting and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic thing that anyone could do the atlas panels 1962 67 200 black and white photographs of family memorabilia still lives and landscapes are a treasure trove of collected images many of which metamorphosed into the full blown paintings we now see in the exhibit the photograph which becomes toilet paper 1964 collection joshua mack and ron warren can be found in atlas panel 15 stadtische galerie im lenbachhaus munich and the newspaper clipping upon which eight student nurses is based can be found nestled in amongst bathing beauties in atlas panel 8 stadische galerie im lenbachhaus munich the collection of photos of family objects work and clippings from newspapers and magazines were all that remained of richter's dresden past spirited away in albums when he and his wife escaped to west germany later they became the atlas panels including juxtapositions as varied and unsettling upon close scrutiny as wild and domestic animals with the clipping that was to become kitchen chair 1965 press shots of hitler speaking to supporters preceded by views of mountains recalling the nazi cult of the alps a disjointed take on personal and everyday memorabilia guaranteed and intended according to mr storr to stymie interpretation based on conventional attitudes regarding intrinsic significance the now you see it now you don't message in the atlas panels marks the beginning of richter's pursuit of the ambiguities ambivalences and paradoxes underlying the images that most people save as historic or sentimental family memorabilia past work or which we see daily in newspapers magazines and on television most importantly the albums of photos which resulted in the catalogue raisonne following up on the albums of photos he brought with him from dresden is mr storr tells us less a literal history of his production than an empirical narrative construct internally adjusted to account for the importance paintings has for him after he had studied them in the context of others of their generation what is noticeable in the diversity of personal everyday faraway and newsworthy imagery that is atlas is the persistently reserved mood nothing screams out at you there are no horrific concentration campictures poverty pictures overtly sexual pictures or particularly happy family photos emotion is frozen like the instant the camera clicks photo realism became a bona fide movement in the 1970 s but richter distanced himself from it even though he was promoted in documenta 5 alongside photo realist representatives like chuck close richter was more concerned with the problematic reality of photographs than the reality photographs ostensibly recorded mr storr maintained and richter's experience as a photographer's assistant may well have caused lasting trauma the hundreds of photos he encountered were ordinary snapshots without aesthetic pretensions up to this point writes storr painting had meant subordinating vision to aesthetic principles things seen to pre determined formats and the uncertain truth of appearances to the authority of the artists will to style removing the filter of creative identity allowed the painter to recognize the disembodied objectivity of the camera image richter explains the photograph reproduces objects in a different way from the painted picture because the camera does not apprehend objects it sees them in freehand drawing the object is apprehended and when you don't know what you are making you don't know either what to alter or distort the influence of fluxus upon richter was profound his adage that the photograph is the most perfect picture absolved him of the struggle of reconciling his artistic tastes aspirations and abilities with an art world keen to extract originality and over determined meaning the defiance of his written 1966 statement i consider many amateur photographs better than the best cezanne has its roots in fluxus when he does speak it is with a humble self effacing anti subjective self evaluation with quiet humor i like everything that has no style dictionaries photographs nature myself and my paintings because style is violence and i am not violent for him violence was not only the distortion of reality to which modern art is prone but also the notion of imposing the self on things as they are or as they seem to be the famous lecture on nothing by john cage and his cheerful shrugging off of social moral and political imperatives echoed richter's own philosophy about art cage had high visibility in germany in the early 60 s and his i have nothing to say and i am saying it was much admired by richter who nevertheless retains a brooding dark quality and a moral edge in his work that deviates from cage's more optimistic position it was the freedom from the self that cage inspired in richter the right and freedom to do as he wished richter's said that he embraced photography not to use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography not that is to imitate photographs but to remake them in paint photographs freed him from conventional criteria associated with art style composition judgement and from personal experience it was pure picture that's all richter has often expressed the need to identify father figures 48 portraits is his attempt to establish a cultural paternity inextricably linked to the disasters of national socialism and stalinism and to his own ambivalence towards his own father whose portrait horst and his dog 1965 private collection new york shows an amiable drunk buffoon richter sets incredibly high standards for himself and is a harsh critic of himself and of the cliches present in his work he dismisses virtuosity and relies instead upon connoisseurship and rigorous editing his inability to reach his bar often results in violence aimed not at the image itself but at his inability to capture it in a recently painted portrait of his wife and baby moritz tender maternal images of mother and babe the delicate tints of the canvas are disturbingly skimmed or scored by a blade i really want to make beautiful paintings but i couldn't quite hold it they're not as beautiful as vermeer ever the elusive butterfly when it comes to pinning his opinions down and mischievously delighting in evasiveness richter admits to an affinity with giacometti and to a certain destructiveness that storr maintains is born out of a need to construct his wish to create a beautiful constructive painting often results in something that looks terrible then paradoxically after a piece by piece destruction the work starts to look good storr compares this to lucio fontana's cutting and puncturing of the canvas which was called destructive but the result of this attack was surprisingly elegant and beautiful richter's calm painterly style does not disguise his angst and it does not make his disillusion less acute he has not yet given himself the green light to relax rebellion is usually noisy and offensive but richter rebels quietly without judging it is his most endearing characteristic and one that haunts hours after the images of the show have been overtaken by life's daily round of chores and necessary rituals richter has never left his homeland he has not chosen to escape to a place free of germany's past associations that doggedly pursue him most important however is that richter in his dogged despair has allowed all of us to take a fresh optimistic look at modern germany and germans and he has done more to aerate invigorate and humanize the stifling fug as he eloquently puts it of his country's status quo than any german politician movie star or writer art has that much power robert rauschenberg breaking boundaries robert s mattison n 6537 r 27 m 37 2003 the artist views his works as continuous and related experiences he typically switches rapidly from one work to the next and often will repeat a successful motif in several works the extensive wall space allows him to hang an entire series at once and thus to relate all of the completed pieces to ones he is still executing these cross references between works are essential to understanding rauschenberg's art thus in this space all the ideas for a series are available visually at one time for the artist p 10 all series soon after completion are shipped off the island works not sold during an exhibition are stored in new york when asked about this practice the artist indicated that he found the past inhibiting he views his concentration on contemporary events his response to new materials and situations and his interest in instinctive responses as ways of avoiding repetition and conformity in the work and keeping the work alive to new occurrences rauschenberg is constantly redefining himself through his works and in relationship to new experiences his art does not plumb the depths of personality but instead responds to constantly changing exterior events p 10 traditionally rauschenberg has created art works that are complex in terms of numbers of materials as well as the constructive process required to assemble those materials simultaneously he emphasizes speedy intuitive realization of his projects the complicated assembly that many of his works require and the rapidity with which the artist feels he needs to work in order to keep fresh ideas flowing can counteract each other p 28 the strength of rauschenberg's working method is his ability to capture the surface of life in its constantly changing faceted character at the same time rauschenberg refuses to plumb the depths of thought to engage in processes of elimination and to make fine distinctions he does not seek to hypothesize and synthesize in order to reach conclusions and he is not interested in ordering information so as to categorize it the artist's world view is one of openness to change uncertainty and complexity and his work is meant to foster this sensibility p 29 lots of critics shared with the public a certain reaction they couldn't see the black as pigment they moved immediately into association with burned out tearing nihilism and destruction that began to bother me i'm never sure what the impulse is psychologically i don't mess around with my subconscious i try to keep wide awake if i see any superficial subconscious relationships that i'm familiar with cliches of associations i change the picture i always have a good reason for taking something out but never a good one for putting something in i don't want that because it means that the picture is pre digested p 32 i have various tricks to actually reach that solitary point of creativity one of them is pretending i have an idea but that trick doesn't survive very long because i don't really trust ideas especially good ones rather i put my trust in the materials that confront me because they put me in touch with the unknown it is then that i begin to work when i don't have the comfort of sureness and certainty sometimes jack daniel's helps too another good trick is fatigue i like to start working when it is almost too late when nothing else helps when my sense of efficiency is exhausted it is then that i find myself in another state quite outside myself and when that happens there's so much joy it's an incredibly high and things just start flowing and you have no idea of the source fn 27 p 33 from a conversation about art and roci robert rauschenberg and donald saff in rauschenberg overseas culture interchange exh cat washington dc national gallery of art 1991 p 156 7 the artist also believes in his own words that his most creative work may come out of my constructive insecurity if you have nothing to lose you can bring courage to your work naturally p 37 fn 34 saff interview with the author august 18 2000 structure and interpretation of computer programs 2 nd ed harold abelson geralde jay sussman wth julie sussman the language possesses unique features that make it an excellent medium for studying important programming constructs and data structures and for relating them to the linguistic features that support them the most significant of these features is the fact that lisp descriptions of processes called procedures can themselves be represented and manipulated as lisp data the importance of this is that there are powerful program design techniques that rely on the ability to blur the traditional distinction between passive data and active processes as we shall discover lisp's flexibility in handling procedures as data also makes lisp an excellent language for writing programs that must manipulate other programs as data such as interpreters and compilers that support computer languages p 4 a powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks the language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes thus when we describe a language we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas each powerful language has three mechanisms for accomplishing this primitive expressions which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with means of combination by which compound elements are built from simpler ones means of abstraction by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units in programming we deal with two kinds of elements procedures and data in formally data is stuff that we want to manipulate and procedures are descriptions of the rules for manipulating the data p 4 one easy way to get started at programming is to examine some typical interactions with an interpreter imagine that you are sitting at a computer terminal you type an expression and the interpreter responds by displaying the result of its evaluating the expression p 5 expressions formed by delimiting a list of expressions within parentheses in order to denote procedure application are called combinations the value of a combination is obtained by applying the procedure specified by the operator to the arguments that are the values of the operands p 6 a critical aspect of a programming language is the means it provides for using names to refer to computational objects we say that the name identifies a variable whose value is the object p 7 substitution model of evaluation to apply a compound procedure to arguments evaluate the body of the procedure with each formal parameter replaced by the corresponding argument p 14 in general when modeling phenomena in science and engineering we begin with simplified incomplete models as we examine things in greater detail these simple models become inadequate and must be replaced by more refined models the substitution model is no exception in particular when we address in chapter 3 the use of procedures with mutable data we will see that the substitution model breaks down and must be replaced by a more complicated model of procedure application p 15 the substitution model reveals a shape of expansion followed by contraction indicated by the arrow in figure 1 3 the expansion occurs as the process builds up a chain of deferred operations in this case a chain of multiplications the contraction occurs as the operations are actually performed this type of process characterized by a chain of deferred operations is called a recursive process carrying out this process requires that the interpreter keep track of the operations to be performed later on p 34 the second process does not grow and shrink an iterative process is one whose state can be summarized by a fixed number of state variables together with a fixed rule that describes how the state variables should be updated as the process moves from state to state and an optional end test that specifies conditions under which the process should terminate p 34 in general programming languages impose restrictions on the way in which computational elements can be manipulated elements with the fewest restrictions are said to have first class status some of the rights and privileges of first class elements are they may be named by variables they may be passed as arguments to procedures they may be returned as the results of procedures they may be included in data structures lisp unlike other common programming languages awards procedures full first class status this poses challenges for efficient implementation but the resulting gain in expressive power is enormous p 76 7 often the different data types are not completely independent and there may be ways by which objects of one type may be viewed as being of another type this process is called coercion p 195 in general we can implement this idea by designing coercion procedures that transform an object of one type into an equivalent object of another type p 195 when asked to apply an operation we first check whether the operation is defined for the arguments types if so we dispatch the procedure found in the operation and type table otherwise we try coercion we check the coercion table to see if objects of the first type can be coerced to the second type if so we coerce the first argument and try the operation again if objects of the first type cannot in general be coerced to the second type we try the coercion the other way around to see if there is a way to coerce the second argument to the type of the first argument finally if there is no known way to coerce either type to the other type we give up p 196 complex real rational integer figure 2 25 a tower of types p 197 what we actually have is a so called hierarchy of types in which for example integers are a subtype of rational numbers i e any operation that can be applied to a rational number can automatically be applied to an integer conversely we say that rational numbers form a supertype of integers the particular hierarchy we have here is of a very simple kind in which each type has at most one supertype and at most one subtype such a structure called a tower is illustrated in figure 2 25 p 197 inadequacies of hierarchies if the data types in our system can be naturally arranged in a tower this greatly simplifies the problems of dealing with generic operations on different types unfortunately this is not the case figure 2 26 illustrates a more complex arrangement of mixed types this one showing relations among different types of geometric figures we see that in general at type may have more than one subtype in addition a type may have more than one supertype this multiple supertypes issue is particularly thorny since it means that there is no unique way to raise a type in the hierarchy finding the correct supertype in which to apply an operation to an object may involve considerable searching through the entire type network on the part of a procedure since there generally are multiple subtypes for a type there is a similar problem in coercing a value down the type hierarchy p 198 9 3 1 2 the benefits of introducing assignment as we shall see introducing assignment into our programming language leads us into a thicket of difficult conceptual issues p 225 3 1 3 the costs of introducing assignment as we have seen the set operation enables us to model objects that have local state however this advantage comes at a price our programming language can no longer be interpreted in terms of the substitution model of procedure application moreover no simple model with nice mathematical properties can be an adequate framework for dealing with objects and assignment in programming languages p 229 so long as we do not use assignments two evaluations of the same procedure with the same arguments will produce the same result so that procedures can be viewed as computing mathematical functions programming without any use of assignments as we did throughout the first two chapters of this book is accordingly known as functional programming p 230 the trouble here is that substitution is based ultimately on the notion that the symbols in our language are essentially names for values but as soon as we introduce set and the idea that the value of a variable can change a variable can no longer be simply a name now a variable somehow refers to a place where a value can be stored and the value stored at this place can change in section 3 2 we will see how environments play this role of place in our computational model p 231 sameness and change the issue surface here is more profound than the mere breakdown of a particular model of computation as soon as we introduce change into our computational models many notions that were previously straightforward become problematical consider the concept of two things being the same p 232 a language that supports the concept that equals can be substituted for equals in an expression without changing the value of the expression is said to be referentially transparent referential transparency is violated when we include set in our computer language this makes it tricky to determine when we can simplify expressions by substituting equivalent expressions consequently reasoning about programs that use assignment becomes drastically more difficult once we forgo referential transparency the notion of what it means for computational objects to be the same becomes difficult to capture in a formal way indeed the meaning of same in the real world that our programs model is hardly clear in itself in general we can determine that two apparently identical objects are indeed the same one only by modifying one object and then observing whether to other object has changed in the same way but how can we tell if an objects has changed other than by observing the same object twice and seeing whether some property of the object differs from one observation to the next thus we cannot determine change without some a priori notion of sameness and we cannot determine sameness without observing the effects of change p 232 3 in contrast to functional programming programming that makes extensive use of assignment is known as imperative programming in addition to raising complications about computational models programs written in imperative style are susceptible to bugs that cannot occur in functional programs p 234 in general programming with assignment forces us to carefully consider the relative orders of the assignments to make sure that each statement is using the correct version of the variables that have been changed this issue simply does not arise in functional programs 1 p 235 3 2 the environment model of evaluation when we introduced compound procedures in chapter 1 we used the substitution model of evaluation section 1 1 5 to define what is meant by applying a procedure to arguments to apply a compound procedure to arguments evaluate the body of the procedure with each formal parameter replaced by the corresponding argument once we admit assignment into our programming language such a definition is no longer adequate in particular section 3 1 3 argued that in the presence of assignment a variable can longer be considered to be merely a name for a value rather a variable must somehow designate a place in which values can be stored in our new model of evaluation these places will be maintained in structures called environments an environment is a sequence of frames each frame is a table possibly empty of bindings which associate variable names with their corresponding values a single frame may contain at most one binding for any variable each frame also has a pointer to its enclosing environment unless for the purpose of discussion the frame is considered to be global the value of a variable with respect to an environment is the value given by the binding for that variable if no frame in the sequence specifies a binding for the variable then the variable is said to be unbound in the environment p 236 7 the environment is crucial to the evaluation process because it determines the context in which an expression should be evaluated indeed one could say that expressions in a programming language do not in themselves have any meaning rather an expression acquires a meaning only with respect to some environment in which it is evaluated p 237 we also specify that defining a symbol using define creates a binding in the current environment frame and assigns to the symbol the indicated value finally we specify the behavior of set the operation that forced us to introduce the environment model in the first place evaluating the expressions set variable value in some environment locates the binding of the variable in the environment and changes the binding to indicate the new value that is one finds the first frame in the environment that contains a binding for the variable and modifies that frame if the variable is unbound in the environment then set signals an error p 240 1 chapter 4 metalinguistic abstraction in our study of program design we have seen that expert programmers control the complexity of their designs with the same general techniques used by designers of all complex systems they combine primitive elements to form compound objects they abstract compound objects to form higher level building blocks and they preserve modularity by adopting appropriate large scale views of system structure in illustrating these techniques we have used lisp as a language for describing processes and for constructing computational data objects and processes to model complex phenomena in the real world however as we confront increasingly complex problems we will find that lisp or indeed any fixed programming language is not sufficient for our needs we must constantly turn to new languages in order to express our ideas more effectively establishing new languages is a powerful strategy for controlling complexity in engineering design we can often enhance our ability to deal with a complex problem by adopting a new language that enables us to describe and hence to think about the problem in a different way using primitives means of combination and means of abstraction that are particularly well suited to the problem at hand 2 programming is endowed with a multitude of languages there are physical languages such as the machine languages for particular computers these languages are concerned with the representation of data and control in terms of individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions the machine language programmer is concerned with using the given hardware to erect systems and utilities for the efficient implementation of resource limited computation high level languages erected on a machine language substrate hide concerns about the representation of data as collections of bits and the representation of programs as sequences of primitive instructions these languages have means of combination and abstraction such as procedure definition that are appropriate to the larger scale organization of systems metalinguistic abstraction establishing new languages plays an important role in all branches of engineering design it is particularly important to computer programming because in programming not only can we formulate new languages but we can also implement these languages by constructing evaluators an evaluator or interpreter for a programming language is a procedure that when applied to an expression of the language performs the actions required to evaluate the expression it is no exaggeration to regard this as the most fundamental idea in programming the evaluator which determines the meaning of expressions in a programming language is just another program to appreciate this point is to change our image of ourselves as programmers we come to see ourselves as designers of languages rather than only users of languages designed by others in fact we can regard almost any program as the evaluator for some language for instance the polynomial manipulation system of section 2 5 3 embodies the rules of polynomial arithmetic and implements them in terms of operations on list structured data if we augment this system with procedures to read and print polynomial expressions we have the core of a special purpose language for dealing with problems in symbolic mathematics the digital logic simulator of section 3 3 4 and the constraint propagator of section 3 3 5 are legitimate languages in their own right each with its own primitives means of combination and means of abstraction seen from this perspective the technology for coping with large scale computer systems merges with the technology for building new computer languages and computer science itself becomes no more and no less than the discipline of construction appropriate descriptive languages p 359 61 section 4 3 implements a more ambitious linguistic change whereby expressions have many values rather than just a single value in this language of nondeterministic computing it is natural to express processes that generate all possible values for expressions and then search for those values that satisfy certain constraints in terms of models of computation and time this is like having time branch into a set of possible futures and then searching the appropriate time lines with our nondeterministic evaluator keeping track of multiple values and performing searches are handled automatically by the underlying mechanisms of the language 3 1 in view of this it is ironic that introductory programming is most often taught in a highly imperative style this may be a vestige of the belief common throughout the 1960 s and 1970 s that programs that call procedures must inherently be lesless efficient than programs that perform assignments steele 1997 debunks this argument alternatively it may reflect a view that step by step assignment is easier for beginners to visualize than procedure call whatever the reason it often saddles beginning programmers with should i set this variable before or after that one concerns that can complicate programming and obscure the important ideas 2 the same idea is pervasive throughout all engineering for example electrical engineers use many different languages for describing circuits two of these are the language of electrical networks and the language of electrical systems seven dreams description of a project william t vollmann seven dreams is a work that lies in the grey zone between fiction and history i call it a symbolic history each of its seven volumes is a self contained work meant to beguile and entertain but also to instruct by presenting a poetically true interpretation of real events wtv p 447 my aim in seven dreams has been to create a symbolic history that is to say an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth did the norsemen for instance really come to the new world bearing ice in their hearts well of course they did not but if we look upon the vinland episode as a precursor of the infamies there of course they did here one walks the proverbial tightrope on one side of which lies slavish literalism on the other self indulgence p 448 something to die for william t vollmann no one is to blame for any of this in that strange labyrinth of offices which we call the business world products are sold to please and sustain if the product is not acceptable to the largest number of buyers it will be recalled and altered the mission of a work of literature is likewise to please and to sustain however precisely because of its uniqueness its status as a metonym of the author's mind and spirit it is not meant to be altered to please the crowd minds and spirits are not meant to do that of course we all succumb to that tendency in various degrees the baby becomes toilet trained to ingratiate itself with the family the schoolchild silently witnesses or participates in torture to gain the approval of playmates the lover primps to gain attractiveness in the gaze of the beloved and nationally and internationally it's all much worse and yet the people we respect the most are those who stand aloof enough to retain some integrity while at the same time being sensitive and compassionate my writing as such and my cotangent books as objects are attempts however flawed they may be to express my own thoughts and emotions following my own aesthetic method because it is difficult for one person to be equally proficient in literary composition physics forensics anthropology draftsmanship and bookbinding my work must be inevitably weak in places the hope is over the course of my lifetime i can continue to improve whenever i can i tune out the dictates of others if my work has value that value will shine out if not then not that is all that matters it is hard to say such things without sounding either boastful or defiant i am neither the world does not owe me a living people are free to dislike my books on their own demerits in which case i will go out of business of course people are free to do that anyway whether i follow my own path or someone else's why not follow my own path then a book need not be easy to read or difficult to be good it need not be anything but itself a good book is a companion a comfort and an inspiration to those good actions without which life is despicable spring snow yukio mishima the shouts coming from the direction of the athletics field indicated that rugby practice was still in full swing kiyoaki hated the idealistic cries that rose from those young throats his classmates' rough and ready relationships their untried humanism their constant jokes and puns their never faltering reverence for the talent of rodin and the perfection of cezanne they were no more than the modern equivalent of the old traditional shouts of kendo p 170 count ayakura's paralysis did have a sort of refinement although one could hardly deny that his chronic indecisiveness involved a certain skepticism about the value of any decision at all he was by no means a skeptic in the ordinary sense of the word even though he was plunged in meditation from morning to night he was loath to direct his immense emotional reserves toward a single conclusion p 294 meditation had a great deal in common with kemari the traditional sport of the ayakuras no matter how high one kicked the ball it would obviously come down to earth again at once even if his illustrious ancestor namba munetate could excite cries of admiration when he picked up the white deerskin ball by its thongs of purple leather and kicked it to such incredible heights that it topped the ninety foot roof of the imperial residence itself it must inevitably fall back again into the garden p 295 susan sontag ny times special section 29 dec 2004 in 1966 ms sontag published her first essay collection against interpretation that book's title essay in which she argued that art should be experienced viscerally rather than cerebrally helped cement her reputation as a champion of style over content out of her experience came illness as metaphor which examined the cultural mythologizing of disease tuberculosis as the illness of 19 th century romantics cancer a modern day scourge although it did not discuss her illness explicitly it condemned the often militaristic language around illness battling disease the war on cancer that ms sontag felt simultaneously marginalized the sick and held them responsible for their condition interviewed for the times article ms sontag defended her method all of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain she said i've used these sources and i've completely transformed them i have these books i've looked at these books there's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions in a 1992 interview with the times magazine ms sontag described the creative force that animated the volcano lover putting her finger on the sensibility that would inform all her work i don't want to express alienation it isn't what i feel i'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement all my work says be serious be passionate wake up some art aims directly at arousing the feelings some art appeals to the feeling through the route of the intelligence there is art that involves that creates empathy there is art that detaches that provokes reflection great reflective art is not frigid it can exalt the spectator it can present images that appall it can make him weep but its emotional power is mediated the pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance disinterestedness impartiality emotional involvement is always to a greater or lesser degree postponed terry winters paintings drawings prints 1994 2004 rachel teagle richard schiff something is being described through the work itself through a kind of manual imagination there are people who can make theoretical constructions but i'm painting pictures i can't step outside that process and construct an objective account of the pictures the paintings are projections they take me places p 19 hi application of manual imagination is more bodily intuition than technical know how p 19 they called the separate sections of their book plateaus rather than chapters to suggest not only boundlessness but also the possibility of reading the sections in any sequence here writing was mimicking living thought rather than stabilizing a process of thought by imposing an order which would be alien to a mind's meanders p 21 by his own account winters attempts to make his marks as directly as possible and often as speedily as possible he wanders with determination p 21 winters understood from the beginning of his career that art could never diverge from craft it evolved through a medium and the skillfully inventive even playful use of materials and tools the risks associated with artistic practice developed not only from the resolve to follow one's imagination but also from the fact that no amount of experience would prevent the materials and tools from continuing to assert their independent will i've created the image winters reports but at the same time i'm not in total control my approach is to build a series of improvisational responses a set of operating procedures a practice in fact de kooning's fame related both to his phenomenal manual control and to practices that would cause his skilled hand to slip as it met material resistance he intuited that materials are never to be mastered but rather to be engaged during the 1960 s he sometimes drew the human figure while keeping his eyes closed having manual imagination alone to guide him i feel my hand slip across the paper i have an image in mind but the results surprise me i always learn something new from this experience when i am slipping i say hey this is very interesting p 25 winters's fascination with information can be characterized by the term flatbed picture plane leo steinberg coined to describe any receptor surface on which objects are scattered on which data is entered on which information may be received printed impressed whether coherently or in confusion winters's work be it on paper or canvas adheres to this model of a receptor surface that records the information encoded in everything from the imagery depicted to the manner in which he laid down the paint steinberg went on to explain that the orientation of the flatbed is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes in his argument robert rauschenberg's flatbed marked a paradigm shift from nature to a postmodern dimension of culture winters reverses steinberg's trajectory back to nature albeit his is the nature of a techno scientific age that is nature as it is now visualized by scientists and engineers p 158 winters works directly from source material but does not illustrate the images to which his titles refer he describes his technique as an interactive transformation of existing forces informed as much by his choice of pencil or pen as by his selection of appropriated photograph or diagram his is a process of manipulation and mutation that produces evocative analogues p 159 winters's oeuvre with its fluctuating velocities of image and material meditates on deeply rooted traditions within the history of the medium while it also acknowledges as he calls it painting's low tech shape shifting capabilities and extremely wide bandwidth he has repeatedly experimented with forms of knowledge and means of manipulating materials computer graphics architecture and dance to name a few that expand the parameters of his practice in a postindustrial postmedium postmodern age winters extends the viability of his medium by exploring new possibilities for painting p 165 the artists body ed by tracey warr key to the happening was the elicitation of the chance effects that mould and shape our experience p 28 hans dieter huber the artwork as a system and its aesthetic experience remarks on the art of joseph beuys when we turn again to the art of joseph beuys we are able to describe the cognitive effects of his installations on the belief systems of different beholders the installation the capital space exhibits turned off machines and objects not in use but with a certain productive potential the whole system is potential capital for creation this character of potentiality is incorporated into the title because capital in its first function is a potential for production but the specific account of capital as it is embedded in the various elements is a very different one from that which we would normally associate with the concept of capital as beholders we have therefore to adapt and refine our categorical system of capital knowledge to understand this unaccustomed model thinking in itself is an invisible sculptural process which becomes visible by impression into material into form the material sculpture functions as a model or as a transmitter of these unobservable sculptural qualities of thinking for a human receiver who is able to apprehend the material model the physical substance as materialized thinking energy is able to trigger the perceptual and thinking capacities of another person a transmission takes place in this model a flow of sculptural energy from one point of the world to another through this epistemic mechanism the aesthetic perception is transformed step by step into new thoughts and questions about social interrelations the contemporary state of the social organism and the evolution of a future human society the installation functions as the transmission model of those thought energies honeypump at the working place executed in 1977 for the documenta 6 at kassel was conceived as a model for the energy stream of society with honeypump i am expressing the principle of the free international university working in the bloodstream of society flowing in and out of the heart organ the steel honey container are the main arteries through which the honey is pumped out of the engine room with a pulsing sound circulates round the free university area and returns to the heart the whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows and where the bee s head is to be found in the coiled loops of tubing with its iron feelers 16 in the sump of the engine room the three major principles of beuys theory of sculpture thinking feeling and will are represented in a seemingly scientific model beuys explains will power in the chaotic energy of the double engine churning the heap of fat feeling in the heart and bloodstream of honey flowing throughout the whole thinking powers in the eurasian staff the head of which rises from the engine room right up to the skylight of the museum and then points down again 17 unobservable elements of beuys theory of sculpture like will feeling thought bloodstream or society are represented by a model which takes as its elements industrial machinery like ship engines drive shafts plastic tubes fittings fuses switches low pressure pumps natural products like honey and margarine and three archaic clay pots standing besides but these objects are not taken for themselves but they refer to a complex theoretical conception of evolution and transformation of human creativity into future society the elements of the installation build up a system which because of its specific type of reference is a visual model it functions as a visual bridge between the theoretical concepts and the observational capacities of the beholder that we are in close touch with the thinking and the ideas of joseph beuys and do not deviate from his central premises is clearly indicated by the following statement which he published separately to the installation of the honeypump the natural product honey serves as the essential model substance for the flow of a positive thinking energy which is able to trigger and to support social transformation processes the body in pain the making and unmaking of the world elaine scarry 1985 a state of consciousness other than pain such as hunger or desire will if deprived of its object begin to approach the neighborhood of pain as in acute unsatisfied hunger or prolonged objectless longing conversely when such a state is given an object it is itself experienced as a pleasurable and self eliminating or more precisely pleasurable because self eliminating physical occurrence p 166 once the structures of torture and war have been exposed and compared it becomes clear that the human action of making entails two distinct phases making up mental imagining and making real endowing the mental object with a material or verbal form and that the appropriation and deconstruction of making occur sometimes at the first and sometimes at the second of these two sites p 21 the mental habit of recognizing pain in the weapon despite the fact that an inanimate object cannot have pain or any other sentient experience is both an ancient and enduring one thus home speaks of an arrow freighted with dark pains as though the heavy hurt the arrow will cause is already visibly contained in and carried by the object is palpably there as its weight and cargo the implications of the observation are extended in joseph beuys's small sculpture of a knife blade bound in gauze exhibited at the guggenheim in 1979 entitled when you cut your finger bandage the knife p 16 die goetzen dammerung twilight of the idols friedrich nietzsche 1895 text prepared from the original german and the translations by walter kaufmann and r j hollingdale skirmishes of an untimely man 8 toward a psychology of the artist if there is to be art if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing one physiological condition is indispensable frenzy frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine else there is no art all kinds of frenzy however diversely conditioned have the strength to accomplish this above all the frenzy of sexual excitement this most ancient and original form of frenzy also the frenzy that follows all great cravings all strong affects the frenzy of feasts contests feats of daring victory all extreme movement the frenzy of cruelty the frenzy in destruction the frenzy under certain meteorological influences as for example the frenzy of spring or under the influence of narcotics and finally the frenzy of will the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will what is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness out of this feeling one lends to things one forces them to accept from us one violates them this process is called idealizing let us get rid of a prejudice here idealizing does not consist as is commonly held in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential what is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process 9 in this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness whatever one sees whatever one wills is seen swelled taut strong overloaded with strength a man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power until they are reflections of his perfection this having to transform into perfection is art even everything that he is not yet becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself in art man enjoys himself as perfection it would be permissible to imagine an opposite state a specific anti artistry by instinct a mode of being which would impoverish all things making them thin and consumptive and as a matter of fact history is rich in such anti artists in such people who are starved by life and must of necessity grab things eat them out and make them more meager this is for example the case of the genuine christian of pascal for example a christian who would at the same time be an artist simply does not occur one should not be childish and object by naming raphael or some homeopathic christian of the nineteenth century raphael said yes raphael did yes consequently raphael was no christian ellen ullman close to the machine the project begins in the programmers mind with the beauty of a crystal i remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming when the knowledge i am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness for a time the world is a calm mathematical place human and machine seem attuned to a cut diamond like state of grace once in my life i tried methamphetamine that speed high is the only state that approximates the feel of a project at its inception yes i understand yes it can be done yes how straightforward oh yes i see then something happens as the months of coding go on the irregularities of human thinking start to emerge you write some code and suddenly there are dark unspecified areas all the pages of careful documents and still between the sentences something is missing human thinking can skip over a great deal leap over small misunderstandings can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind but the machine has no corners despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain the machine has no foreground or background it cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains unknown in the painstaking working out of the specification line by code line the programmer confronts all the hidden workings of human thinking now begins a process of frustration the programmer goes back to the analysts with questions the analysts to the users the users to their managers the managers back to the analysts the analysts to the programmers it turns out that some things are just not understood no one knows the answers to some questions or worse there are too many answers a long list of exceptional situations is revealed things that occur very rarely but occur all the same should these be programmed yes of course how else will the system do the work human beings need to accomplish details and exceptions accumulate soon the beautiful crystal must be recut this lovely edge and that one are gone the whole graceful structure loses coherence what began in a state of grace soon reveals itself to be a jumble p 21 3 the programmer who needs clarity who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations hunkers down into a low grade annoyance it is here that the stereotype of the programmer sitting in a dim room growling from behind coke cans has its origins the disorder of the desk the floor the yellow post it notes everywhere the whiteboards covered with scrawl all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought the messiness cannot go into the program it piles up around the programmer soon the programmer has no choice but to retreat into some private interior space closer to the machine where things can be accomplished the machine beings to seem friendlier than the analysts the users the managers the real world reflection of the program who cares anymore guide an x ray machine or target a missile print a budget or a dossier run a city subway or a disk drive read write arm it all begins to blur the system has crossed the membrane the great filter of logic instruction by instruction where it has been cleansed of its linkages to actual human life the goal now is not whatever all the analysts first set out to do the goal becomes the creation of the system itself any ethics or morals or second thoughts any questions or muddles or exceptions all dissolve into a junky nike mind just do it if i just site here and code you think i can make something run when the humans come back to talk changes i can just run the program show them here look at this see this is not just talk this runs whatever you might say whatever the consequences all you have are words and what i have is this this thing i've built this operational system talk all you want but this thing here it works p 23 4 i didn't really blame the director she had simply done something id seen too many times before she had succumbed to the fever of the system as a product manager once told me i've never seen anyone with two systems who didn't want us to hook them together p 85 id like to think that computers are neutral a tool like any other a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull but there is something in the system itself in the formal logic of programs and data that recreates the world in its own image like the rock and roll culture it forms an irresistible horizontal country that obliterates the long slow old cultures of place and custom law and social life we think we are creating the system for our own purposes we believe we are making it in our own image we call the microprocessor the brain we say the machine has memory but the computer is not really like us it is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves that portion devoted to logic order rule and clarity it is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence p 89 we place this small projection of ourselves all around us and we make ourselves reliant on it to keep information buy gas save money write a letter we cant live without it any longer the only problem is this the more we surround ourselves with a narrowed notion of existence the more narrow existence becomes we conform to the range of motion the system allows we must be more orderly more logical answer the question yes or no ok or cancel our accommodations begin simply with small workarounds just to avoid the bugs then slowly we incorporate the whole notion of systems p 90 so i never did hear the older one explain how you get used to it after a while how it becomes normal to discard your certainty and hunker down into the newest thing how it is no fun but there is a certain perverse satisfaction in reorienting your brain at a right angle to its previous position and there lost you go ahead anyway and there somehow you make it run p 107 a merry kind of hysteria took over the programmers the situation was impossible the deadline was ridiculous they should have been completely demoralized but somehow the absurdity of it all simply released them from the reality that was so depressing the rest of the company they played silly jokes on one another they stayed up late to see who could finish their code first the very impossibility of success seemed to make the process of building software only that much sweeter p 172 vehicles braitenberg 1984 i know what the philosophers will reply they will say that although this may look like free will in fact it is not what they have in mind when they use that term is the real power of decision a force outside any mechanical explanation an agent that is actually destroyed by the very attempt to put it into a physical frame to which i answer whoever made vehicles and men may have been satisfied like myself a creator of vehicles with something that for all intents and purposes looks like free will to anyone who deals with his creatures this at least rules out the possibility of petty exploitation of individuals by means of observation and prediction of their behavior furthermore the individuals will themselves be unable to predict quite what will happen in their brains in the next moment no doubt this will add to their pride and they will derive from this the feeling that their actions are without causal determination p 69 perhaps we would accept them more readily as partners if they gave more convincing evidence of their own desires and projects we notice that our fellow men usually seem to be after something when they go about their business or when we converse with them dealing with people is interesting because of the challenge their continuous internal scheming seems to provide the system of desires we suspect behind their scheming may be part of what we call the personality it may be the lack of just such projects that we notice in our vehicles we cannot help feeling that they are driven by necessity rather than drawn by goals in spite of all the efforts we put into them in spite of special mechanisms that are apt to abolish lowly forms of causality and in spite of the predictor that seems to draw motives from a future state of the world p 80 1 mckenzie wark a hacker manifesto ark mckenzie harvard university press 2004 in art in science in philosophy and culture in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered where information can be extracted from it and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced there are hackers hacking the new out of the old 004 hackers use their knowledge and their wits to maintain their autonomy some take the money and run we must live with our compromises some refuse to compromise we live as best we can all too often those of us who take one of these paths resent those who take the other one lot resents the prosperity it lacks the other resents the liberty it lacks to hack away at the world freely 005 to abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations to abstract is to express the virtuality of nature to make known some instance of its possibilities to actualize a relation out of infinite relationality to manifest the manifold 008 the production of new abstraction always takes place among those set apart by the act of hacking we others who have hacked new worlds out of old in the process become not merely strangers apart but a class apart while we recognize our distinctive experience as a group as programmers or artists or writers or scientists or musicians we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience 013 all abstractions are abstractions of nature abstractions release the potential of the material world and yet abstraction relies on the material worlds most curious quality information information can exist independently of a given material form but cannot exist without any material form it is at once material and immaterial the hack depends on the material qualities of nature and yet discovers something independent of a given material form it is at once material and immaterial it discovers the immaterial virtuality of the material its qualities of information 015 it is always the hack that creates a new abstraction with the emergence of a hacker class the rate at which new abstractions are produced accelerates the recognition of intellectual property as a form of property itself an abstraction a legal hack creates a class of intellectual property creators 020 to the hacker what is represented as being real is always partial limited perhaps even false to the hacker there is always a surplus of possibility expressed in what is actual the surplus of the virtual this is the inexhaustible domain of what is real but not actual what is not but which may become the domain where as massumi says what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt to hack is to release the virtual into the actual to express the difference of the real 074 any domain of nature may yield to the virtual by abstracting from nature hacking produces the possibility of another nature a second nature a third nature natures to infinity doubling and redoubling hacking discovers the nature of nature its productive and destructive powers this applies as much in physics as in sexuality in biology as in politics in computing as in art or philosophy the nature of any and every domain may be hacked it is the nature of hacking to discover freely to invent freely to create and produce freely but it is not in the nature of hacking itself to exploit the abstractions thus produced 075 through the application of ever new forms of abstraction the hacker class produces the possibility of production the possibility of making something of and with the world and of living off the surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature to any nature abstraction once it starts to be applied may seem strange unnatural and may bring radical changes in its wake if it persists it soon becomes taken for granted it becomes second nature through the production of new forms of abstraction the hacker class produces the possibility of the future of course not every abstraction yields a productive application to the world in practice few innovations ever do so yet it can rarely be known in advance which abstractions will mesh with nature in a productive way 077 the hack takes information that has been devalued into redundancy by repetition as communication and produces new information out of it again this gives the hacker class an interest in the free availability of information rather than in exclusive right the immaterial nature of information means that possession by one of information need not deprive another of it the fields of research are of a different order of abstraction to agricultural fields while exclusivity of property may be necessary with land it makes no sense whatsoever in science art philosophy cinema or music 080 the interest of the hacker class lies first and foremost in a free circulation of information this being the necessary condition for the renewed expression of the hack 081 having achieved creative and productive abstraction in so many other realms the hacker class has yet to produce itself as its own abstraction what is yet to be created as an abstract collective affirmative project is as ross says a hackers knowledge capable of penetrating existing systems of rationality that might otherwise seem infallible a hackers knowledge capable of reskilling and therefore rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies a hacker knowledge capable also of generating new popular romances around the alternative uses of human ingenuity 083 information exceed communication deleuze we do not lack communication on the contrary we have too much of it we lack creation we lack resistance to the present information is at once this resistance and what it resists its own dead form communication 130 there are compromises to be struck between the free flow of information and extracting a flow of revenue to fund its further development 134 information in itself is mere possibility it requires an active capacity to become productive but where knowledge is dominated by the education of the ruling classes it produces the capacity to use information for the purposes of producing and consuming within the limits of the commodity this produces a mounting desire for information that meets the apparent lack of meaning and purpose in life the vectoralist class fills this need with communication that offers these desires a mere representation and objectification of possibility 136 to the hacker nature is another name for the virtual it is another way of representing the unrepresentable multiplicity from which the hack expresses its ever renewable forms there is an interest that the hacker class has in nature but is not in a representation of natures harmony that nostalgia that may be comfortably indulged in overdeveloped world the hacker interest is in another nature altogether in a nature expressing the limitless multiplicity of things this is the nature from which each and every hack derives the hacker interest in nature is not in its scarcity but in its multiplicity 152 information appears as expression not just as representation as something produced in its difference from the world 156 hackers must calculate their interests not as owners but as producers for this is what distinguishes them from the vectoralist class hackers do not merely own and profit by owning information they produce new information and as producers need access to it free from the absolute domination of the commodity form if what defines the activity of hacking is that it is a free productivity and expression of the virtuality of nature then its subjection to private property and the commodity form is a fetter upon it when the meaning of a string of characters can be bought and locked into place this is the thermodynamics of language reduced to a single cryogenic chamber 195 do they now representation always mimics but is less than what it represents expression always differs from but exceeds the raw material of its production 207 even useless hacks may come perversely enough to be valued for the purity of their uselessness there is nothing that cant be valued as a representation there is nothing that cant be critiqued and thereby valued anyway by virtue of the attention paid to its properties the hack is driven into history by its condition of existence expression that calls for the renewal of difference 225 expression is an event traversing space and time and quickly finds that the vector of telesthesia affords an excellent expander and extender of the space and time within which expression can transform experience and release the virtual representation always lags behind the event at least at the start but soon produces the narratives and images with which to contain and conform the event to a mere representation denying to the event its singularity it is not that once something extra media is exposed to the media it turns into something else it is that once representation finally overtakes expression within the vector the event in its singularity is over whatever new space and time it hacked becomes a resource for future events in the endless festival of expression 228 extracting a surplus from information requires technologies capable of transporting information through space but also through time the storage of information may be as valuable as its transmission and the archive is a vector through time just as telesthesia is a vector through space 318 the vectoral class may commodify information stocks or flows as well as communication vectors a stock of information is an archive a body of information maintained through time that has enduring value a flow of information is the capacity to extract information of temporary value out of events and to distribute it widely and quickly a vector is the means of achieving either the temporal distribution of a stock or the spatial distribution of a flow of information 320 the irreversible abstraction of information comes at the point where vectors of telesthesia are hacked into being that free information from the velocity of movement of objects and subjects once information can move faster than people or things it becomes the means by which people and things are to be meshed together in the interests of productive activity in ever expanding envelopes 322 the great challenge to the hacker class is not just to create the abstractions by which the vector may develop but the forms of collective expression that may overcome the limits not just of commodification but of objectification in general of which commodification is just the most pernicious and one sided development 344 if the hack accelerates the development of the vector the vector accelerates the hack each is the multiplier of the potential of the other and of those territories within which this productivity is most developed 349 as difficult as it may be the hacker class can commit itself to the free alliance of productive classes everywhere and can make its modest contribution to overcoming the local and contingent interests that pit the productive classes everywhere against themselves this contribution may be technical or cultural objective or subjective but it can everywhere take the form of hacking out the virtuality that a free global abstraction would express as an alternative to the commodified subjection that both local and global domination by private property represents 386 in this tiresome age when even the air melts into airwaves where all that is profane is packaged as if it were profundity the possibility yet emerges to hack into mere appearances and make off with them there are other worlds and they are this one 389 art after appropriation essays on art in the 1990 s john c welchman appropriation has a contiguous relationship to the longstanding debate between originality and imitation consistently foregrounded in academic discussion of cultural practice from the greeks to the late nineteenth century p 4 thus realism can be interpreted as the appropriation the cutting out and unfolding of scenes of everyday life supplied with excessive or plenary detail that naturalises and guarantees the cut serial image making especially as practiced by claude monet in the 1890 s acts to minimize the originality of a painting cultivating a singular effect or impression as a residue of difference that monet understood as a substantial trace of the weather what is appropriated in such series is not simply the reality of a landscape but a climatological truth registered and set out in a sequence of atmospheric changes that effectively re order t he motif the cathedral facade or grainstack etc both realism and impressionism seriality are dependent on claims founded in appropriation for the production of their truth effects p 4 5 the dictionary becomes an antidote to but also a condition of the tumult of travel and travel writing the dizzy rate and the experience of being crushed and overwhelmed by the multitudes of the other the totalizing encyclopaedic drive to cover the field completely produces the dream of a completely made the completement fait that would gather up the whole domain of individual readymades and brandish them as evidence of the teeming mediocrity of western bourgeois culture over and against the babel confusion abandon and disease of the orient p 7 in the early years of the twentieth century before the institutional triumph of modernism the residue of the originality imitation controversy that had raged for two millennia is clearly apparent the term composition for example served the theory and practice of both henry matisse and the pioneer non iconic abstractionists piet mondrian and wassily kandinsky as a conceptual model for the contemporary drive for sustainable originality for all three artists the art of composition stood against the materialism mechanics and mundane deferrals of repeatable everyday culture it was a bulwark against the depredations of the ready made the cliche mass production or any of what were regarded as the dangerous collective reductions of commercial iterability p 7 it is apparent that the antagonism between originality and copy is rarely preset as an absolute antithesis and that there are gradients between the extremes they notate pure origin or absolute subjective invention on the one hand and absolute tradition perfect replication or frictionless coining on the other the interaction of these possibilities is clearly signaled in the development of visual surrealism as defined by andre breton in the first surrealist manifesto of 1924 the movement purportedly had as its highest aim the unfettered appropriation of unconscious psychic activity such energy would be transferred unedited and uncontaminated from the recesses of the mind to the quasi codified materials of visual textual representation chance and the automatic were the new names for appropriations latest cut it is important to note surrealism also elaborated a counter appropriative theory whose central propositions resemble crucial formulations within the long standing cult of originality and innovation there are several of these reversions to authenticity in surrealism p 7 8 the unity of the thought image is constructed by the surrealists as a replacement for that unity of disparate pictorial and subjective elements frequently conceived of by the pioneer abstractionists even by matisse as resolved into the universalizing sign machine of compositional order p 8 peter burger the automatic texts of surrealism should be read as guides to individual production but such production is not to be understood as artistic production but as part of a liberating life praxis this is what is meant by bretons demand that poetry be practiced practiquer la poesie beyond the coincidence of producer and recipient that this demand implies there is the fact that these concepts lose their meaning producers and recipients no longer exist all that remains is the individual who uses poetry as an instrument for living ones life as best as one can p 8 9 lawsons attempted redemption of certain painters in this tradition notably david salle rests on a number of suggestions in which he attempts to modify the concept of appropriation by situating it in a dialogue with photography and deconstruction he claims first that painting is virtually deceased that it has become almost as uninflected as mechanical forms of reproduction salles images are dead inert representations of the impossibility of passion in a culture that has institutionalized self expression secondly pictorial and photographic appropriations though strategically different art offered a recto verso imbrication based on a desperate negativity that sets them in a dependent relationship thirdly painting is transformed in lawsons account into a version of camouflage whose very hiddenness then emergence as painting is appropriated by itself is treated as a kind of deconstruction it is painting itself that last refuge of the mythology of individuality which can be seized to deconstruct the illusions of the present p 18 9 neidich's contribution was essentially to question and open the logic of the first wave of postmodern photo appropriation we thus encounter in his photo texts a disturbance of binary oppositions achieved in this case by pushing them to extremes and making them multiple that kruger despite arguments including my own the the contrary was developed most convincingly in her statements and writings p 22 even when held to criticize or undermine the codes and institutions of the big city art world exhibition practices masterpieces dominant masculinities cults of authenticity and expression the market system and its values the appropriation practiced in these venues is at the same time unthinkable without them as pierre bourdieu demonstrated of the modern art system in general gestures of taking quoting citing and the act of relocating that which is appropriated within the highly controlled context of an art world is clearly predicated on the power and prestige of a self affirming cultural nexus indeed the generic substitution of taking for making places a particular premium on the arbitrating mastery of the theft even perhaps especially when the scene of its re presentation is claimed as subversive or undecidable further the moment of appropriation must be associated with a wholesale return of vanguard art to the museum and gallery network a process to which bickerton referred as an aggressive assertion after a decade or so when the relatively uncommodifiable projects of earth art performance and conceptual art led the way back to interventions in the landscape time and audience oriented activities and the putatively immaterial domain of ideas p 23 4 instead of construing the avant garde as embarked on a mission of rational and utilitarian reconstruction groys points instead to its collective irrationality its surrender to ritual and its conception of artistic political change as driven by a kind of demiurgic will that is finally and triumphantly exterior to the work and its productive context p 25 groys suggestively contends that the measure of the west's desire to polarize and antagonize the avant garde 1920 s and the socialist realist 1930 s and 1940 s is founded on its privileging of the museum or gallery as the ultimate locus of meaning the west's attachment to what walter benjamin called the exhibition value of cultural work reveals a dependency on the object as irredeemably cordoned off from the real world from politics life and the everyday that is effectively antithetical to the total instrumental social efficacy of the always already politicized image it was this type of image that the avant garde theorized and desired p 25 6 soviet avant gardes especially constructivism productivism did not trade in the soft conceptual inventionless readymades of duchamp instead they attempted to reinvent the relationship between the worlds of art and production art was dissolved into intervention in the productive series its discrete functions eclipsed behind the blueprint and the product in a sense art was sublimated into cliches understood either as the reproduction of utilitarian objects or the circulation of useful propaganda and social messages the double bind of the invention originality debate was undone and art redefined as the directory of productions henceforth cultural practice was neither original nor unique p 26 collins and milazzo claim that appropriation itself perpetuates a romance by virtue of its self righteous refusal to engage with desire value and abstraction in the catalogue essay for pre popost appropriation we glimpse the beginnings of a neo humanist attack on critical and artistic self reflexivity which effectively terminates their enterprise in the act of delivering a content for post appropriation discourse that belongs to the unreflexive ontological instrumentality of the extended body p 32 the sense of obligation and permission lost or found suggested by raes not having to acknowledge and in browns simply taking his pick of the past is a not so subtle whisper from the institutional wings that clears the stage of critical responsibilities and ushers in a new cast of hip laddish art makers unencumbered by any referential duty beyond the cultivation of surface sensation and effect p 36 it was a prefabricated assumption among the generation of artists in sensation that the artifacts of todays mass culture constitute a field of almost self evident duchampian readymades the denouement of appropriation then is a kind of quotation without predicates a surrender to the ineffable thereness of signs remorselessly cut out and abstracted from their popular cultural contexts the disinterested idealism on which this aesthetic rests is of course as old as modernism itself art is conceived and viewed without an end independent of and ideally distanced from the immediacy of its own reception the defiantly unhindered immanentist yba art that arose around this new tabula rasa courts a special kind of provocation that we can view as an assertively vivid antithesis to the greyness of the contextual ghosts that haunt it p 37 or they are aligned with that ventriloquising of of the amateur and the incompetent that serves the ybas as a means of resisting and subverting what they see as the professionally overdetermined protocols of critical postmodernism but the new arts appropriation of amateurism results only in a collapse in the distinction between the aesthetic subject and the consumer of popular culture p 39 laid out on 32 folding tabletops according to their size and iconography and photographed against a ruler like archeological bones or shards the congregation of found homemade stuffed animals was reconfigured as material units and conferred with sculptural sheen the work took on the restoration of analytic order to objects whose culturally unconscious production modes had always tended to resist inquiry and dissolve into affect p 42 according to clinical psychologist dw winnicott transitional objects broker the sequence of events which starts with the new born infants fist in mouth activities and that leads eventually to an attachment to a teddy a doll or soft toy or to a hard toy like kelleys soiled playthings they are often dirty and smelly and may be left unwashed to preserve their associative and future symbolic values p 44 the decay and resurrection of kelleys folk cosmologies are always embodied not rationalized performed not taken experienced not proven and projected rather than encoded they thrive not in an abstract geometry of opinion but in that special arena he has made his own formed between mainstream and alternative popular cultures as they self consciously meddle in the production of art p 45 signs of the revitalization or reorientation of appropriation are also visible in other art worlds jeff gibson noted clear indications that ironic appropriation has been completely overtaken by a potentially expressive language of reconstructive sampling fn 157 i have argued that appropriation can only be understood as a set of historical reactions to the determining events of social industrial and political modernity that its shadow is cast well beyond duchamp and the ready made and that even this terminology which has dominated all others in the appropriation debate was not invented in the 1910 s p 48 consideration of the production institutional display and circulation of common art and documentary photographies in the late and immediately post soviet years reveals that western models of social criticality and avant garde experiment cannot adequately be mapped onto the representational regimes of either the declining socialist state or our still unfolding intimations of what is replacing it i suggest here that even when late soviet photographers looked explicitly at the discursive models available in the west when thy dared or it was permissible to do so their appropriation was never more that an allusion p 48 looking to recent events in the balkans in china and elsewhere i also suggest some of the ways in which political events and social protests both in the streets and on the world wide web have been informed by conceptual provocations and performances once associated with the art world and now appropriated back p 51 mcluhan by contrast interprets the face of the new info world as that of an artist not only will the procedures of automation suddenly threaten us with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self employment and imaginative participation in society but mass technologisation becomes a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society in a final gesture of de differentiation mcluhan imagines the simultaneous end and triumph of art in a universal artistic body whose being is a function of technological becoming p 267 in most of these projects the media world is short circuited by the grey scales of amateur production importantly it never functioned as it would unstoppably a decade and a half later as a vast arena of color allure and seduction conventional home product media were deployed as instruments and recoding devices of homemade episodes events and clipped narratives p 268 obsessed by the storage dissemination and definition of information the first conceptual generation chose as its dominant media modality the database or para informational system p 269 the image world exhibition put on at the whitney museum of american art new york in 1989 stands at the end of the quantifying tradition of the west's technological imagination this might have been the last moment when the impact of the media world could be thought of in the quasi perspectival terms of distance magnification and increased gradations of scale tinged with mcluhanite scaling the central message of image world appeals to a grand narrative of recombinant quanta to a promiscuous acceleration in the production of media objects which cascade down onto a passively receptive world with the frequency and palpability of raindrops the media image object thus saturates then inundates the adjacent worlds of everyday life with its overpowering presence filling up and displacing it with incessant unitary increments fn 26 the very title of marvin heiferman's catalogue essay everywhere all the time for everybody announces the ideal of a torrential unyielding displacement as the space time of the media image pursues the impossible dream of becoming co equivalent with all production and exchange p 269 70 1989 might also be thought of as the last moment in which the annexation appropriation and uncommentaried re presentation of media images could be counted as critical in 1989 it was still possible to believe indeed in avant garde circles in new york it was perhaps necessary to believe that the reorganization and retransmission of advertisements film stills tv serials even of reproductions of art works themselves could effectively change or denounce the social and economic power structures that supply the image world horkheimers absolute resistance has withered into contingent restructuring p 270 a number of consequences arise from this species of media bombardment theory first in addition to or more likely in place of its critique appropriation delivers a measure of the reflexive seduction of the media image its somatic perfections gloss sound bite sophistication and sensual or consumerist appeal secondly the assumed criticality of responses to the flood of media images must be secured within a faked communality there must be a shared or assumed oppositional utopia to answer to the flimsy dystopic extensions of media representation this consensus took the form of an under articulated socialism that conveniently forgot most of the activist logic underlying its own gestures it was in other words a kind of socialism without a referent thirdly critical media appropriation merely performed one version of the many consumptions precisely intended by the places of origin of the media image corporations ad agencies tv and media companies hollywood moguls p 270 in this move towards counter medialization the net becomes a rainbow and the rainbow a net as each is seen through the other and the lines of the net are dissolved in an astral mist the sovereign media that result from this vision are transrational like their global peers thrive on total decontrol enter into a secret pact with noise the father of all information and present themselves as spectra that are unnervingly switched on and off for no apparent reason p 274 white elephant art vs termite art 1962 negative space manny farber on the movies manny farber the idea of art as an expensive hunk of well regulated area both logical and magical sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter from motherwell to andy warhol the private voice of motherwell is inevitably ruined by having to spread these small pleasures into great contained works the special delight of each painting tycoon is usually squandered in pursuit of the continuity harmony involved in constructing a masterpiece the painting sculpture assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity fame ambition far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature now turned into mannerism by the padding lechery faking required to combine today's esthetics with the components of traditional great art p 135 good work usually arises where the creators seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything a peculiar fact about termite tapeworm fungus moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries and likely as not leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager industrious unkempt activity the most inclusive description of the art is that termite like it feels its way through walls of particularization with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement p 135 6 masterpiece art reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of tv and movies the three sins of white elephant art 1 frame the action with an all over pattern 2 install every event character situation in a frieze of continuities and 3 treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity p 137 package artist richardson has other boxing in ploys running scenes together as beautiful travelogue placing a cosmic symbol around the cross country running event the common denominator of these laborious ploys is actually the need of the director and writer to overfamiliarize the audience with the picture it's watching to blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion p 139 40 from the 400 blows onward his truffaut's films are bound in and embarrassed by his having made up his mind what the film is to be about this decisiveness converts the people and incidents into flat jiggling mannequins 400 blows mischief makers in a mickey mouse comic book which is animated by thumbing the pages rapidly this approach eliminates any stress or challenge most of all any sense of the film locating an independent shape p 140 the common quality or defect which unites apparently divergent artists like antonioni truffaut richardson is fear a fear of the potential life rudeness and outrageousness of a film coupled with their storage vault of self awareness and knowledge of film history this fear produces an incessant wakefulness p 142 the absurdity of la notte and l'avventura is that its director is an authentically interesting oddball who doesn't recognize the fact his talent is for small eccentric microscope studies like paul klee's of people and things pinned in their grotesquerie to an oppressive social backdrop unlike klee who stayed small and thus almost evaded affectation antonioni's aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance antonioni to keep his stories and events moving like great novels through significant material never stops throwing his sunday punch p 143 kurosawa's ikiru sums up much of what a termite art aims at buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim and over all concentration on nailing down on a moment without glamorizing it but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed the feeling that all is expendable that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin p 144 points about farber's work 4 extreme importance of the position from which he works like daniel boone he instinctively moves to new territory when too many people begin working near him 5 deep dish american ness aggressive use of contradictions his own the movie's the culture's 9 consequently analogic rather than binary thought a system which features complexity simultaneity and multiple positions p 350 william anastasi a retrospective there are 96 drawings one for each fugue and one for each prelude the drawings consist solely of dots the dots are placed all the more effectively when anastasi cannot see the surface when he is blind or to carry the meaning even further when he is ignorant or unconscious of his actions paradoxically enough the drawings that are made while blind look better to him according to the artist's formulation expressed in an interview or to put this in another way the controlling eye consciousness prefers the uncontrolled lines p 17 william t vollmann the art of fiction clxiii the paris review v 41 no 6 fall 2000 when i was writing the first few books what i would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences pack as much into them as i could so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping all this stuff in there to make the writing dense and beautiful for its density i still do that from time to time but i'm getting increasingly interested in taking things out as i write it's fun for me to try to write concise compact things it's a very good exercise for me and i think it's important to try to do different things change what i write about and also the way i write otherwise i'd just be repeating myself which wouldn't be good for me or fair to my readers p 262 the year of magical thinking national book award judges' citation the year of magical thinking is a masterpiece in two genres memoir and investigative journalism the subject of the memoir is the year after the sudden death of the writer's husband the target of the investigation though is the nature of folly and time the writer attends to details assembles a chronology and asks hard questions of the witnesses most notably herself but she imagines that the story she tells can be revised the world righted her husband returned alive what she offers is an unflinching journey into intimacy and grief the noun memoir has 2 meanings meaning 1 an account of the author's personal experiences meaning 2 an essay on a scientific or scholarly topic memoir pronunciation n 1 an account of the personal experiences of an author 2 an autobiography often used in the plural 3 a biography or biographical sketch 4 a report especially on a scientific or scholarly topic 5 memoirs the report of the proceedings of a learned society you bright and risen angels william t vollmann 20050102 this book was written by a traitor to his class it is dedicated to bigots everywhere ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts i call upon you to unite to strike with claws and kitchen pokers to burn the grub worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles william t vollmann karachi anatuvuk pass san francisco 1981 85 only the expert will realize that your exaggerations are really true kimon nicolaides the natural way to draw oh you bright and risen angels you are all in your graves i your author am lonely there is no one left in the world since i run things here half the time i am going to call you up for another of my meaningless judgments meaningless because you are all so eager and try so hard that i could never punish any of you no matter how villainous you might be i press the resurrection button and here you come as large as life alternate subroutine the damned keyboard stops for a second and i have a chance to input now in spite of a pounding headache and a feeling that it is a waste of time to try to beat big george or even argue with him nonetheless the fact is that i met sammy once at an electricians convention and after he got wired he told me the same spooky story about the blue globes but with one additional detail that when he crouched there in the sandy cave the chilly water running over his body and he shivered and looked around to see all the globes rolling in on him he also saw the silhouette of an individual neither tall nor short not fat and not thin that is to say quite average in general shape suspiciously so who was wearing big boots and a cowboy hat and cracked a whip and the blue globes moved in time to the whip beats dancing and rolling around sammy now faster now slower in perfect intelligent obedience to the whip no who could tat be i suggest but big george and who could he be but pure electrical consciousness itself insinuating itself everywhere drifting in and out of all stories and machines but in that case what was he doing in south america where presumably he would have had to carry a suitcase full of batteries p 111 reformatting the data preparation a message has just come over the terminal that the computer will have to go down in ten minutes for bridge reconnection when the electricity has died i will be able to push the switch which runs the teletype in manual mode and then a least even though this absurd history is now sealed into the program and will predetermine everything i may have some freedom in bringing bug and milly and wayne and parker into context the trouble is that a small current pulse will still be running through my machine p 132 a plea for increased wattage 1962 and now i sit a prisoner in the caves of the great beetle longing for an electrical outlet or just a little more light to see by to read by to construct a generator by out of toothpicks and tears for it is only electric power that will save me with it i can do anything i can drill through the walls or create a force field to give me surcease from my warders or even if all else fails set up little factories to while away my life down here more profitably p 136 dead end calculations well the computer is down big george is muffled or stifled and the keys yield to my fingers with only a faint blue tingling resistance which will hardly affect the picture so much as to destroy its information value will it now for at last i can see you again as i have made you my bright and risen angels p 137 he was lonely he had no lover no friend nor even the solace of an ideology or a friendly machine gun to make ideology with thought he vaguely sensed the importance of tools one day while browsing in a camera shop looking at a beautiful brochure for a motor drive the cover picture showed a leaping sparkling school of flying fish caught in mid air in the rain especially in late afternoons when the shiny streets smiled with their reflections of office windows and car lights the executive women passed him in their wet black raincoats hair cropped or free and their translucent umbrellas then one day he saw a wind come that shoved the umbrellas inside out whipped their skirts up when they raised their arms to protect their hair dos and showed their slips and underwear gusts blew them across the street shrieking they slipped and fell in their high heeled shoes when he saw how much power a little air and water could have he decided to become a revolutionary riding the streetcars in the morning he took to musing not of what was under the skirts that pressed against him but of maps campaigns skyscrapers and alleyways becoming for him mysterious and melancholy like the forest at summer camp echoing with weird promises the large cities ripe for terrorism and leadership p 194 5 so bug and frank went on designing perfect charts of the critical path to follow in attacking the society of daniels programmers by first altering subtle attributes of their member data sets in their wylbur proclibs so that their electrical jcls wouldn't work and the members of the proclibs would get steadily more and more screwed up until the programmers would be demoralized feeling as if some unknown read write mechanism were marking crows feet on their graves according to the superstition of the time p 257 i tried to get here early pudgy violet yawned but i just couldn't thats how it is said old taylor agreeably from his observation post beside the coffee machine he enjoyed witnessing the brown drops go tink tink into the flask p 490 502 just because they found parkers skull doesn't mean heshe's dead and just because parker is whanging his long green dick in your face is hardly a reason to take him seriously at all as a sentient being i find the author to have what i shall call a captain freiheit complex he will lead the troops onward ever onward to a victory perhaps incapable of conception even by him or other overnarrative tropes but it is important to maintain a calm underhanded attitude parker is nothing but a few yellow green fragments of skull and the anthropologist who digs him up creakety creak lets winch up another box of stinking gases for my salary will find little to remark upon it is my feeling as i broadcast this banner message over the amdahl network bridge that precisely as much as may be forgotten can be forgiven and to the extent that parker has decayed prior to exhumation we will be able to accept him when nothing is left of him but dust we will no doubt be quite satisfied with his behavior already we see him deteriorating thanks to the corrosive acids of love from a glorious serpent suitable for target practice into a being not much superior to a green rubber boot the author alone is to blame for this p 627 big bang keith tyson on cause and effect modern painters o 2005 p 74 9 martin herbert i first met keith tyson four years ago when he was working out of a studio a stone's throw from the modern painters office he talked expansively about probability and quantum mechanics as he is wont to do the universe is his bouncing ball synapse roasting speculative thought is catnip to him and the modest room seemed barely able to contain the concepts so freely unpacked there p 75 tyson became famous notorious for having the kind of work he made dictated to him by something called the artmachine' a shadowy entity that few people have ever seen and which after crunching disparate kinds of information spat out orders to say make a painting a day on breadboards for a year tyson stopped relying on it around the turn of the century but continued to make increasingly epic art that poeticized complexity in the service of wonder p 75 for a while tyson seemed to be emptying his head on a daily basis into his intricate but rowdy studio wall drawings dozens of which formed the bedrock of his display at 2001 s venice biennial and his turner prize show that are awash in diagrams ideas connections snapshots of a brain pinballing around and delighted at its own fecundity these were also it seemed attempts to produce a kind of directive visual overload p 76 the most recent and in some ways most intriguing upshot of tyson's interlacing of unbounded potential and restricted actuality has been his geno pheno works first seen last year in the form of a series of paintings some people felt duty bound to inform tyson that as in many of these works the paintings could have been done the other way around and to suggest that he always intended the toss' to come out heads recounting this the artist can barely contain his laughter that he says was the whole point to think through causality and authorship to query the idea that the buck stops with the artist and isn't as he says about an infinite lineage going back to the big bang' this conceptualizing of everything that exists as a product of an infinity of chance decisions is reality as tyson sees it and that's why he describes himself repeatedly as a very traditional artist' one responding to the world and modeling his art on it only in tyson's case what he models is what scientists understand of how the world works the fact that science furnishes us with partial knowledge rather than a complete picture is not lost on him at no point do tyson's artworks try to say they've got it right rather they spur the viewer to try and define themselves in relation to them p 76 7 when the graph lines created by different information coincided the machine took a photograph of the liquid in its current state and it is upon one such image that the right hand pheno' painting in which the bright and agitated waters figure as a richteresque abstraction is based if the left hand side is an explanation' for the right's sublime aesthetic qualities then it's not unlike douglas adams's machine in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy that spits out the number 42 as the meaning of life a potential satire on humankind's impossible need to understand and explain everything p 77 a few yards down the studio tyson demonstrates why people sometimes claim he's having my cake and eating it' a canvas is being produced by two different technicians both adhering to about 20 rules for its construction the right hand panel has turned out to have some very pleasing aesthetic qualities something that tyson's work with its obviating of subjectivity and desire has often seemed to dismiss would he tend to edit those out i ask no says tyson aesthetic qualities come up and that's okay i like aesthetics as much as everyone else all that means is the equilibrium of forces the desire to make something aesthetically pleasing won and that's allright p 77 the geno pheno sculptures have an anterior organizing structure that is as simple as the binary device of the diptych they all tyson says begin from the plinth the traditional support p 77 the plinth that supports the sculpture is decorated with flow charts that explain why the piece was made but did the plinth lead to the work or is the apparent causality a retrospective justification of an anamorphous object that is inherently inexplicable p 77 9 here you would have a man who can transform a lack of inspiration into inspiration and the reason he can do this tyson says is that he never gets attached to ideas once you let one go he continues you realizes that there are an infinite number of ideas out there but the only way to keep having them is always to let them go there is a hint of eastern philosophy about this notion as there is in much of tyson's meditation on emergence and interconnectedness and although he is perhaps nobody's idea of a sensei arguably there is a kind of zen lesson to be found in his work toss a coin to see whether i'm foolhardy enough to try and outline it it's heads i am ok so tyson's work is undeniably clever less often remarked upon is its reservoir of feeling the fact that it enfolds a potentially liberating pain of the type that you can feel for yourself anytime you spend too long looking in the bathroom mirror you could have been anyone anything but you're you and spinning that perhaps horrific thought into a warm fuzzy feeling is exactly the function of the go on an insignificant planet lost in the coldness of space it's not a particularly cheery visualization but on the other hand there's some kind of succor to be drawn from recognizing your own specificity and unimportance in the grand scheme escape from the prison of the self p 79 unquestionably that's in tyson's art from the devices he uses in order he says to push the oratorical artist off the mountainside from which he has so long declaimed to the plaintive feeling that the works are only the way they are as a result of being bounced around by the forces of chance and those forces are so much larger than the work he makes even at its most epic even when there's more information than one can possibly take in an error that some people seem to make with tyson's work is to mistake the trailer for the movie the grain of sand for the universe when even at its densest and the show at pace wildenstein may be as dense as anything he's done it is still only the merest fragment a radical pairing back of the plenitude of complexity and prior decisions to which it alludes and which hovers in the background waiting for you to come to terms with it which is where we return to my opening allusion to judd flavin et al i think of myself as a minimalist i really do says keith tyson p 79 supercollider keith tyson at south london gallery mark beasley tyson's governing system results in a series of genuinely bizarre manifestations as with the random tangler the work posits the idea that all parts are equal and that any result produced is the correct one it is possible to position the work of supercollider as a form of dadaist anti art a nod towards non sense reveling in the possibility of enforced relations of associations the moment the work starts to be truly active is the point at which polite investigation finishes and we inhale on free association keith tyson kleines helmhaus art monthly no 230 43 4 o 1999 michael archer in normal circumstances one could avoid enumerating a full list by giving the first few terms and then adding the words and so on' such a tactic is unlikely to work here given that each of the 50 or so elements are so radically different one from another what can be said is that they all fall into one of four categories physical elements abstract elements past nominations and future nominations they are all in addition placed at a specific distance from the nucleus although at any moment it might in reality be impossible to ascertain this precise location that is the constellation of materials forms processes events and ideas within the artwork itself is a constantly changing set of relationships and that they persist as the constituent parts of this work is due to the effectiveness of its operation as a mediator between the multiple real and possible states of its existence tyson describes molecular compound 4 as a boundary one of the pages of notes reproduced in the catalogue lists pairs of opposites black white alive dead input output true false and so on molecular compound 4 exists at the border between all of these polarities in its nature it is akin to duchamp's idea of the infrathin an infinitely extensive space of n dimensions separating two infinitely extensive spaces of n 1 dimensions within this space however it might appear in the gallery that is at its heart there is matter and material enough to overwhelm us all another ear bending keith tyson interview david beech talks to keith tyson everything 1998 david beech db do you think your work has any connection at all with the world cup kt probably because what i do includes everything it's all encompassing in some way eventually my potential body of work might include it kt i think i suffer to a certain extent from that phenomenon whereby if it doesn't look like conceptualism or it doesn't have the hallmarks of it then it's not considered as such because art still tends to be primarily understood in terms of what the americans call the eye' oh he's got a great eye' or a collector's developed a great eye' mine tend to be manifestations as opposed to representations it's about what brought them into being it's usually about all the complex things that occur before the work exists i've got nothing against the visual i don't believe the art exists outside the object the work's final manifestation is this object which is readable db so do you think of yourself as a conceptual artist kt definitely db but you are also an artist with an interest in the visual kt definitely i don't see any contradiction either that's the thing i see myself as coming from conceptual predecessors such as sol lewitt saying the idea precedes the work then again i don't see myself as political in the sense that conceptual art was about emancipating people from the formal aspect of the work i'm not hardcore like saying i am only conceptual' i'm as interested in a blob of paint as the next bod but not in terms of oh doesn't it go well with my sofa' db roy bhaskar the british philosopher has argued that our thinking about reality has to begin with non identity' and end with open unfinished totality' most philosophical mistakes he says derive from taking an insufficiently non anthropocentric differentiated stratified dynamic holistic or practical view of things' don't a lot of ideas about art make these mistakes i mean the idea that art is expressive or art is visual or art is whatever an artist says it is or art is a commodity aren't these daft simplifications of art and if they are don't we have to think about making art in ways that take account of this complexity kt i haven't read him yet but that sounds like a pretty accurate description of what i was trying to do with the artmachine which was to de anthropocentrise the notion of how art is and also to make something that embraced complexity instead of trying to simplify it i just cant believe that any one descriptive or philosophical or political model is complete im a great believer in incompleteness im absorbing that into the practice so that when you look at the work you don't ask what is the artist trying to say' the second part of the question i do have a problem with that modernist legacy of trying to simplify your practice down to a single significant form or a single significant issue or way of thinking historically it has a place but now i can't believe that any artist would still work through such an agenda and be painting five hundred identical yellow paintings i think thats an antiquated way of thinking about the work db you've been very secretive about the artmachine but as i understand it it's a means of churning out instructions for the artist to perform in order to make art this is reminiscent of process art' except that here it is not a case of the artist sending instructions to a curator or collector or technician in your case it is the artist who is receiving instructions who is being treated as a sort of technician or laborer does the artmachine really exist or is it a ruse for taking the heat off yourself when people ask you why you do such weird art is it just a way of reminding people about the so called death of the author' kt the artmachine came out of dealing with two specific theoretical concerns that i had which were i death of the author and ii chaos theory i was trying to embody those two models when i was at college instead of trying to illustrate them i wanted to embody them like a science fiction writer says let's assume that this hypothesis is true what follows' so i developed this system the question of whether it exists or not in the physical realm which it does is irrelevant to me even if taking the doubters point of view i'd invented a way of thinking to make work that looks like a machine made it because i'm going to do something similar to science fiction and put out the results from the hypotheses then that in and of itself is a mechanism it's like a sol lewitt mechanism but it isn't just intellectual i have it all written down on paper it's a proper flow chart db you are the artmachine's worker' or technician' but also its programmer' does this mean that you are both a slave to the machine and a godlike architect directing everything it does and can do is this a sort of self exploitation are you an artistic sadomasochist who ties himself up kt yes but that notion of the slave or master i don't see that it's a master slave relationship in any way i programme it using language and making structures and then it programmes me cos i make the work with my own hands which forces me to reprogram the machine but i'm not obeying some law it's more of a research project which is fascinating to be involved in and so in that way the whole state of the relationship between me and the machine is the work there's no priority there it's just a dynamic that i've set up and now is running its own course and i think that's interesting in its own right i'm neither db if the artmachine had been programmed to be an artist it would be a grandma moses type because it doesn't know' what art is it would be an outsider artist' because it hadn't been trained as an artist and this would explain why it makes so many weird choices the difference is that even grandma moses knows what a painting is whereas the artmachine doesn't know anything is that it's beauty or does the artmachines lack of knowledge mean that it is merely a caricature of an artist is that its beauty kt you're getting into a i artificial intelligence territory there because of the language and structure i use to programme it when it makes a random decision between painting and sculpture it's made a difference and therefore characterized it because there's a history to painting and a set of materials to a certain extent it does know what painting is maybe its not self conscious of what a painting is and its history but it definitely makes a decision that it wants that field of history to be involved what tends to happen a lot of the time cos random variables get thrown in in terms of distance and material or whatever something can be stretched to the point where it's no longer recognizable so going back to the model of science fiction how far in the future can you write about before it becomes unrecognizable because science fiction is always about now it's never about the future and in that sense when i've done a painting before and perhaps the canvas is in wales the paint is in north africa and the idea of what the painting's about is in four people's heads in a cafe in russia or something that still constitutes a painting in that way there's something beautiful about the way it gets things wrong but again thats a simplistic model of the avantgarde the novelty of how it gets it wrong which again isn't what its about i keep saying what it's not about and that's because i don't really know what it is about but i think that's a healthy thing to be involved in db has the role of the artist been made redundant in your practice you don't use assistants is that a personal decision you are a workaholic or do you think you are the only person in the world who is in a position to carry out the artmachine's instructions and while you're at it can you say whether it would be possible for someone else to programme it kt the role of the artist is definitely not redundant i'm required to programme it and build them and all my work comes down to the signature at the end of the day every artmachine piece is unified by a certificate which is signed the idea that they're made with my own hand that decision was made because i thought if you just pick random things and you get other people to make them that is the world it's not anything else but the world but this is much more to do with how far a single subject using a non subjective methodology can be expanded how far can my signature operate i remember walking round the richter show and everyone talking about the stylistic diversity and how wonderful it was and i was really excited about that at the time but i thought how far can just style be pushed so all those things about it being made with my own hands and to be fair the one assistant i do have who's nick who's good at carpentry won't do any of the actual form he won't actually make the work it's a research project on myself i'm seeing what are my limits but i'm viewing it as if i'm experimenting on a frog so no one else could program it because it is the end result of the totality of the way in which i can use a randomizing structure someone else could program their own machine someone could just have a coin and toss it whatever they wouldn't be able to program mine because my machine is my machine you wouldn't ask if anyone be picasso they could mimic picasso that need to always posit it in a founding singularity and say thats where it's coming from it's expansive it's a different complex notion i don't sit there defining its role and i don't sit there saying what is it about what's my role it's a tool in an empirical practice its very traditional in that it tries to reflect what it's like to be me at this time in this place and all the things i've said that i've got a polemic against it's only because i don't think they're valid at this time for what it's like to be at the end of the twentieth century after we've had modernism and we've had postmodernism and we've had theoretical illustration and all these things anyone who wants to pursue the modernist thing is sort of doing what you were saying they're stealing they're copying something and it's not about that that's about a romantic nostalgia for a simpler way of thinking about it that's only one facet of what constitutes an artist and they do come through an education an understanding of history understanding politics and all that but none of them have a dominant form so i'm just trying to define that pluralism kt well i'm glad you asked that dave what i'm trying to do now is that instead of becoming the organ grinder which is just turning the handle and out come these things it's no longer enough for me to say isn't it interesting that you have this chaotic its not random and its not subjective problematic methodology of making work' i want to make that in a much more psuedo scientific experimental practice keith tyson art monthly 207 38 9 1997 david beech the choices both of form and content are left to the operations of the artmachine if this means that tyson's art lacks subjectivity and culturally shared meanings it also means that it doesn't operate according to the routine injunctions of artistic responsibility since the early 60 s these have been set by the reconstitution of a modernist formalist agenda following a version of the maxim that what an artwork depicts be subsumed under considerations of how it is made tyson's artmachine transfers the locus of artistic responsibility away from questions of how' to the decision making structures on which they are based other artists have claimed indifference notably duchamp and warhol but none that i am aware of have elaborated a process which apparently eliminates the artist's own involvement in the work the artmachine takes responsibility not for the choices surrounding an individual artwork but by choosing how to choose doesn't this make tyson the most thorough artist who ever lived life the universe everything a hitchhiker's guide to keith tyson modern painters 14 4 26 9 2001 c darwent this for me is simply a traditional landscape painting like a picture of a tree or a cloud says keith tyson waving an appraising hand at the unfinished work on his studio wall like any landscape painter i'm using it to locate myself to find out where i am it's a very accurate figurative painting of a condition a way of being p 1 i did those drawings you saw in venice in a biennial piece called the thinker' after rodin just about every day and they were made according to my reaction to each day like everybody else i'm different organisms sometimes i'm very depressed sometimes happy i can be watching east enders at five and be completely absorbed then three hours later i can be a sexual organism sometimes i'm a drunken idiot sometimes sober sometimes i believe in art and sometimes i don't my work celebrates that unpredictability you don't ask for your parents your genetic background your talent' says tyson at one point my art is about seeing how far we can challenge the hand we are dealt the real logical flaw in making insistently anti autobiographical art is that it unavoidably turns the viewer into a biographer human mind mapper art review 52 i e 53 58 2001 m herbert after working as a shipbuilder he had gone to art school discovered roland barthes's theory of the death of the author and then he recalls had to marry that with my own idiosyncrasies science is only one of them but my work has a lot to do with the idea that there's this infinite and complex world that people have to navigate then there's my particular interest in making things plus my fetish for gambling the artmachine was the most elegant solution i could find at the time around 1999 tyson stopped using the artmachine altogether but his work since has continued to explore randomization and the infinite amount of information in the world albeit with more subjectivity keith tyson at south london gallery london artext 77 88 9 2002 j slyce i was initially captivated by supercollider 16 january 17 march 2002 not so much by its science as by the scope and scale of this enterprise to which tyson has clearly devoted himself given his considerable talents even the most skeptical cannot but succumb to the show's gravitational pull the eponymous supercollider 2001 is a massive nine part drawing derived from the action of four forces on 103 elements within four dimensions its palimpsest of divergent sources refers to the minutiae of everyday information and its hold on the imagination which not even occam's razor could cut through the work it seems is not so much about making sense of our world as about gaining a fuller appreciation of the very real question of how art can now be made in the midst of and out of such complex information genome phenome expander keith tyson interviewed by gavin wade tank magazine v 3 iss 1 gavin wade gavin wade what is a supercollider keith tyson its two things its the title of a drawing and its the name of the show but its also the slang name for the particle accelerator in geneva particle accelerators are where you speed up fundamental particles of matter to speeds approaching light speed and whack them into each other so that their combined energy is the same as it was in the early universe to see what kind of new particles were formed then its one of the most expensive bits of equipment on the planet and its there only to smash things into each other just to see what happens in the hope that we might learn something for ourselves and really thats a metaphor for the whole show at south london gallery which is basically me smashing things into each other or just experimenting in the hope that i might learn something about myself and that it has a benefit to the public architectural non memory replaced with psychic reality mike kelley first published in architecture new york no 15 1996 p 36 39 god family fun and friends john c welchman in conversation with mike kelley jw which you produced in ironically concrete terms in the form of an architectural model mk yes the educational complex is a model combining every school i ever attended with the parts i cannot remember left blank these forgotten areas are explained as repressed zones of abuse of course formally the model was composed according to principles learned in my undergraduate art school training specifically hans hofmann's push pull theory i defined such training itself as a form of abuse all of my academic training was a form of institutionalized abuse the entire project is a very mean spirited joke in which art education is viewed through conspiracy theories of organized mass child abuse jw how does the model relate to the other parts of educational complex because the model isn't the only part right mk no it isn't there are art works in various mediums related to it all of the associated art works the paintings for example are supposed to be the byproducts of my abusive training as part of this project i went back and studied paintings i made in undergraduate school and i began to paint in this regressive manner again i actually worked on some original paintings from that era so i could master my technique i also analyzed paintings by elementary students from a school where i taught while i was an undergraduate as part of a university course in art education i taught art in the public school system i looked at examples of children's works that i had saved and interpreted them using readings in art therapy primarily focusing on signs of emotional trauma that i found in the p 6 mk i don't know to me the term institutional critique has always been associated with work about the art system and i've never really thought about my work in that way though of course art works almost always question their own definition as art and thus address the defining bracket of the art world even if by default during the last decade my work has pretty much grown out of itself in response to broader social concerns rather than in response to art world issues since the educational complex i've been trying to understand the ramifications of the mythos that i have constructed one that's configured between the relationship of memory fantasy and desire to dominant victim culture i have also become more willing to work with my own biography which is something that i have always shied away from and not just through the filter of art education though i refuse to separate fictionalized biography from true biography the extracurricular activity projective reconstruction project of which day is done is a part is my attempt more overtly to address narrative issues related to these concerns they are narrative videotapes supposedly of recovered memories of the abuse that occurred in the forgotten sections of the educational complex however they are only screen memories false memories of common carnivalesque folk activities that shield the actual memories of abuse jw but day is done seems to take on big questions about certain foundational institutions of western culture obviously religion for example is key to the way that these are being played out at a popular and vernacular level but also business and commerce the whole edifice of work that constitutes the offstage antithesis to the leisure that follows on when labor's done mk you seem to be expanding the meaning of the term institutional critique beyond its normal art world usage jw i think you're quite right institutional critique is generally reserved for work which is posed in relation to a gallery or museum and is often supposed or presumed to deconstruct those institutional spaces but the project taken on by this book is to investigate not so much how this movement was founded or even how subsequent generations reformulated its concerns but to reflect on its successes failures and possible futures some younger artists for example have opened the aperture of the term institution by turning their attention to macro systems such as globalism international trade corporate trans nationalism new regimens of virtual institutionality and so on your trajectory is quite different i think but it also ends up locked in debate with mega institutions such as religion or para institutionality as in the family or criminality mk the gallery and the art museum are small fish who cares about them showing in them is hardly any different than showing at the mall it's just a fancy pants version of the same thing it's really not important enough to comment on jw let's take that for granted then as it's quite clear that this focus has never been of interest to you on the other hand maybe you've moved almost invisibly along a similar vector to that traversed by young artists who are conscious of the legacy of institutional critique but who share your view that it was often limited in scope potentially dull and paradoxically self referring mk i'm more interested in the disruptive personal politics of the new left the beatniks yippies situationists or whatever than i am in this art world academic version of politics jw well to put it crudely you found the back door quite literally into the big questions about institutions for you it's not top down it's not academic it's not ok let's theorize the family and figure out how it works and then do some case examples you've inverted that whole model of empirical or academic research one of the starting points for the hans haacke axis of institutional critique and you've begun with ass backwards experiences borne out of blank memories but the point is that you somehow get back to the intellectual construct dare i say it you get there in the end mk in my view much of modernist art developed out of something akin to institutional critique questioning social assumptions of visuality or given structures of knowledge my work comes straight out of that tradition p 7 8 jw sure all this is complicated because it's attractive it's seductive it's pleasurable and there's an aesthetic investment which we've talked about before but at the same time your experience is ironical deconstructive political what interests me most maybe is this intense layering i mean day is done is about eight or ten things simultaneously this is precisely what you don't see in classical works of institutional critique because their input output relations are often quite binary even when very complex issues of property and sponsorship influence and power are being investigated mk i hate to generalize but classical works of institutional critique are often the byproducts of the anti optical minimalist derived leanings of conceptualism reductivist simplicity is meant to be read as an anti market stance language and ideation supposedly usurp material considerations i'm completely opposed to this stance because i think part of the obligation of materialist analysis is to have an investment in one's self as a material object and to consider objective relationships in light of that all rituals address this collision of material and symbolic reality that's what i think ritual is all about i only really have one bone to pick with conceptualism and that's its reductivism and the politics of disembodiment the dematerialization of the art object lucy lippard's term only sets the art work outside of the capitalist system symbolically and at the cost of material complexity i have always felt more connected to those artists who understand the psychic importance of materials like joseph bueys and the vienna actionists they are every bit as intellectual as the conceptualists but they are not burdened with this iconoclastic mindset which strikes me as very puritan that's what i don't like about institutional critique its puritanism p 10 mk yes there is a risk that my intentions could be misinterpreted but if a viewer is racially or religiously prejudiced and projects that onto my work what can i do about it their will to believe in their own world view will supersede my clues to the contrary these are willful misunderstandings at the service of preexisting ideologies and i will not let my work sink to their level of simplistic reading i'm not interested in producing straight agitprop i don't think it is effective anyway what bothers me more is when pc liberal critics paint me as an enemy of the left when they know full well that this cannot be the case they will purposely misread my work in order to promote their liberal cause i had some harsh criticism from feminist critics regarding my use of craft materials that i was stealing from women and not giving them credit etc i have always been very open in my indebtedness to feminist art so this reading of my work is delivered only to fan the fire of their cause at my expense i find this unnecessary but such tactics have become very common on the left in fact it's this kind of theoretical hair splitting that has destroyed the left in this country the constant need to invent enemies within your own camp i have no tolerance for such moralistic bullshit when you make enemies of people who aren't your enemies you are digging your own grave that's why i don't want to go on record bad mouthing any artist involved with institutional critique i completely support the general aims behind such work even if i don't think a lot of it is very interesting art on the other hand people who look at my work from the point of view of say the christian right people on the other side of the so called culture wars will point me out as an enemy and they picked it right they somehow sense the critical impulse behind my work even though it is not explicit to take my work at face value as a proclamation of some kind of belief system is impossible i'd say anyone who would truly invest in my screwy systems in spit of their rambling contradictory nature to my mind would have to be psychotic but we live in a psychotic world run by people who believe in psychotic fantasies they invest in mythologies on faith alone and they refuse to analyze them as political or symbolic constructs they simply have a will to believe even in nonsensical and dangerous belief systems i think fundamentalist christians and muslims and so forth are psychotics but they're the people who run the world the world accepts their mythologies as reality i think they're crazy they call me crazy p 11 mk i think people have a great investment in things as extensions of psychic drives or desires things are symbolic extensions of themselves people are of the world people have object relations people are disgusted by objects or love objects that's a powerful thing i became an artist because of this fact not because i was interested in art theory i became an artist because i recognized that things have power materials have power and that attracted me it doesn't bother me it's not immoral it's normal it's enabling that's what my work's about jw so there's a level of your work based on commitment to material objects that privileges making process i guess to use an old term composition right but then there's also a level that you were willing to call nonsensical in another conversation i liked that proposition because it pushes the envelope of what we're talking about here cross dressing ordinary things in the strange fabrics of the nonsensical it's almost alice in wonderland in day is done you go through the mirror backwards in a sense this seems like an essential counterpoint to your relinquishment of the notion of the high because if your investment in art as material and making ends up being able to bear nonsense then you have surely relinquished the only thing that institutionally critical purism strives to maintain which is dogma or sense as truth message and meaning are one and they're political and moral mk but at the same time nonsense always reveals a certain kind of sense making nonsense is constructed for example i'm a teacher and i often hear from students that they want things that transcend sense my response is that one can produce nonsense but as an artist i think it's their responsibility to know how to construct it it has to be a conscious act i think that's what differentiates fine artists from folk artists this awareness about how meaning or non meaning is constructed and taking responsibility for it jw how they're relinquishing meaning mk yes as opposed to somebody's who's on automatic pilot who's just working with received knowledge they don't really know what they're doing they're just following a preordained set of axioms or practices even though i make nonsense i'm willfully constructing it in relation to certain categories of order i think being a good artist has to do with the dramatics of constructing nonsense it's making impressive nonsense as you well know most nonsense is boring there's nothing there to draw the viewer into it it just seems random very few people have the talent to produce affective nonsense you mentioned alice in wonderland well lewis carrol is such a master his work is intriguing in its structure you are sucked into it jw sure it has characters who are very deviant and don't act like characters who are in fact illogical but you still invest in them momentarily as characters for all that's worth for their narrative potential mk or you just fall into the beauty of the language and the counter logic his play with sense making you get lost and then you come back out carroll plays you i think that's what artists do they play people in a sense art is very much like rhetoric it concerns strategies of controlling people's emotional responses artists are like con artists p 12 13 mk the only real point of connection between all of these people converges in how their various personal interests relate to the cartoon character sugar bear and in the sexually loaded figure of this local girl whose nickname is sugar bear jw this seems like a really interesting line of flight out of any notion of institution even family it's predicated on associational clusters desires fetishizations sexual perversions and desires and they're all coming together and they're leaping down this line and another line and taking us further and further away from the surface of things from modes of structural organization mk well i approach my work less through the bracket of art history than i used to i'm interested in the myths that people construct myself included that are related to meaningless daily images such as sugar bear for example people base their entire existence around such things i know this from my own experience i still carry around a lot of baggage related to my art school training and art world pressures that i find hard to get rid of greenbergian notions of materiality post minimalist conventions of display etc etc i'd like to figure a way to address personal modes of object relations in my work more directly free of these influences and more connected to myth making practices like when you go into a bar and engage someone in conversation how does the conversation begin you talk about peanuts or something you focus on a simple object relation and build from there such exchanges can potentially develop into something very complex but they have to begin in some simple material reality that's what i'm interested in now jw what kind of process is this mk something akin to free association i guess but at a certain point it has to shift to conscious construction i suppose such strategies are how all narratives are constructed jw but these are narratives that have been dislodged from master structures they're not narratives that are necessarily coming out of a religious or academic background they're actually coming out of objects themselves they're coming out of the nature of an encounter so they're substrate narratives rather than master narratives mk i have a photograph of a hot dog sale i could simply construct a narrative about that but it wouldn't be very personally engaging i have a complex relationship with things i can go on and on tangling various strings of associations around them to the point where it almost becomes unstoppable then i realize that this mode of projection needs to be thought about dialectically with the viewer in mind i start assigning different ideas to different things or in the case of these photographs different characters i'm not so interested in single things i like the collisions between things i'm not so interested in straight lines of thought i prefer collisions of different lines of thought that strikes me as a more social mode of construction less like the produce of a unitary voice p 14 15 mk in my next video installation or whatever form it takes i'd like to have a more clear progression or arrangement of narrative chunks jw this will be your next projected reconstruction mk yes jw which is what you are dedicated to doing at least in major part for the next few years mk yes even though i'm not limiting myself to only working on this project and i have no delusions about finishing the proposed 365 tapes but because the extracurricular activity projective reconstruction series has such an open structure i don't feel limited by it in fact the project gives me a certain sense of security the found photographs give me a limited framework within which to work if i don't have anything special i want to work on i just take out these photos and they tell me what to do the pictures tell me what the characters look like and how they're dressed and beyond that i can go anywhere and as i just said now i'm even giving myself the freedom to work beyond the frame of the pictures p 15 paul mccarthy new museum paul mccarthy's inside out body and the desublimation of masculinity amelia jones typically donning a mask for these performances mccarthy carefully prolonged the tension between his position as creative agent and that of a seemingly unhinged personality who exposes himself simulates penetration and childbirth with plastic toys and forcibly inserts viscous and or organic materials to suggest a primordial state of consciousness maintaining an unbroken attention to his obsessive activities this persona is as incapable of resisting the flow of his own impulses as he is of rendering the motivation for these actions comprehensible to viewers in their time these works gained for mccarthy a reputation for shocking his audiences our current understanding of these performances revolves around the notion of an individual who subverts the socially conditioned subject by embracing a form of uncivilized behavior and experience where such rules no longer apply the experience of watching a fellow human being enter the state of provisionally nonhuman invites a sense of the uncanny wherein the standards for distinguishing between person and thing or between living and dead are rendered temporarily inoperable p 60 as we behold the degrading and fetishistic behavior carried out by the characters artist dealer collectors in the video it strikes us that it differs from the sharply defined hierarchies of the art world more in degree than in substance also because painter is that rare example of mccarthy's recent work in which the performance artifacts are also art objects of a sort our inability to examine them closely only serves to emphasize that the myths mccarthy is exploring are much more important than their more celebrated by products p 63 there is no shortage of artists willing to peer closely at the dark underside of the american psyche but mccarthy does so from a unique perspective he does not believe himself to be separate from what he perceives the images and texts that suffuse his art are drawn directly from both media generated ideals of behavior and the depths of his own psyche p 63 mccarthy's work as in inside out olive oil takes place in two reciprocal conceptual and material spaces the architectural and the embodied which interlink the social cultural and public with the personal specific and private these architectural embodied enactments activate the psychoanalytic narratives of subject formation and the structuring of civilization outline in the work of sigmund freud most notably perhaps civilization and its discontents 1930 for freud part of the development of the normal adult subject a subject who is always implicitly male in his logic is the fabrication of the ego as a facade of unity as the putative public identity of the subject we learn in other words to project an external image of self ego which appears unassailable and unified but is in actuality chiasmically intertwined with the boundary less id that anarchic locus of affect which articulates itself as a kind of feminine excess while in the normal subject freud argues there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self of our own ego which appears to use to be something autonomous and unitary the ego is actually continued inwards without any sharp delimitation into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id p 125 6 in every performance mccarthy's body itself is also a kind of spatializing force at least attempting to dominate the human made environments surrounding and containing it if architectural spaces represent the civilizing influence the weight of the law and the structuring force of institutions versus the chaos of open space outside the walls of buildings and rooms that which like the mask hole of the camera contains then bodies too can be seen like the ego itself as containers for the chaos of subjective interiority associated with femininity or some other dimension of otherness in desublimating and un repressing mccarthy thus frees this chaos often literalizing the collapsing of borders through the use of viscous food fluids mayonnaise mustard and ketchup are key ingredients which he calls appropriately the flux the flesh of the building body is ruptured such that the insides gush out the integrity of the building body is destroyed as the efficacy or even the possibility of repression and sublimation is denied p 126 at the same time while the son will escape and still has a chance to make something non patriarchal out of himself it is the father who is truly trapped in the generational malaise that perpetuates masculinity and its privileges finally though the scariness of mccarthy's brutality is as usual mitigated by the buffoonery of his attempts at domination the son seems to call the shots as the father flails around helplessly his bark being worse than his bite the father is forever trapped in the architecture of his own psyche itself in patriarchy predetermined in its structure by the anatomical destiny of his penis wielding body mccarthy in this sense profoundly subverts freud's misogyny which leads him to claim vis a vis the female body that anatomy is destiny which explains women's natural intellectual inferiority to men since morphological difference i e the female body's inherent lack must express itself in differences in the development of the mind mccarthy's family romance exposes the paternal function in its profound lack that external failure to cohere which in fact motivates the oppressive dynamics of patriarchy in the first place for why would oedipal and social prohibitions and exhortations of masculine superiority be necessary if the male body self were inherently superior all of the penises in mccarthy's vast repertoire of works are detachable pathetic exposed as contingent flesh rather than proof of masculine transcendence beyond the bodily the penises in mccarthy's work are in fact never phalluses far from scary or authoritative they are resolutely detumescent and even funny in their fleshy responsiveness they exist as props among many other props to be manipulated and exchanged finally then the forty foot long penis of spaghetti man is less a proof of phallic transcendence than a sign of the element of fantasy that lies at the unstable base of masculinity a noodle rather than a rod its limpile resembles desublimated shit the desublimated shit of western masculinity rather than a hardened dick symbolic of male prowess it appears then that the architecture of embodied masculinity is as full of holes as the sets upon which mccarthy endlessly enacts oedipal and other sexual dramas p 131 richard serra talk mcasd 6 6 06 american academy of arts sciences each block weighs 21 tons manifest something that people still find interesting if you're interested in the elevation of sculpture matter imposes its form on form louis kahn i take a brick and ask it what it wants to be bauhaus take a material and apply a process to it very competitive guys that would stay up and work for days material is an intuitive sense formalist pleasevote org stop bush it takes discipline to remain positive smile its a pleasure to be bipolar it takes discipline to walk 3 miles up and down the beach every morning remain positive evolving language limitless open ended you have language that is limited because you're just one individual and you think one way draw doodle drummers don't tap a pencil bleed it out of you the meaning is in the subject that is the viewer vs representational art where the meaning is in the iconography in the image for me the idea of representation is a non starter are you talking about blind people i don't think about blind people i don't know any blind people i don't know how they think its not something i've ever considered i don't make work for blind people unit operations ian bogost mit press 2006 heidegger called the grasp of totalizing systems gestell or enframing enframing is the modern condition of ordering the potential of structures in the world only to conceal and hold onto their energy for potential future use heidegger gave the name bestand or standing reserve to the output of everything that is ordered to stand by p 7 after cantor philosophy's interest in set theory mostly centered on structural applications the most well known of these are assuredly those of gottlob frege and bertrand russell the intensional conception of a set as a collection of objects held together by a common predicate in an intensional set like the set of all red things redness serves as the foundation of the set such sets require a coherent and clearly defined set of properties and as such intensional sets are top down affairs system operations an opposite extensional conception understands a set only by the collection of objects that it contains the extensional set is fundamentally constructed from the bottom up as peter hallward describes it such a set is simply a result the result of collecting together a certain bundle of elements p 11 deconstruction consists of a variety of neologistic tools trace differance etc that the critic can deploy in almost any program these tactics appear to be highly unit operational deconstruction musters an approach to reading that seeks to expose the internal inconsistencies that cause apparently stable systems to break down derrida is obsessed with dismantling totalizing systems an aim that won significant empathy leading to vast application in a wide variety of fields from literature to architecture however taken as a whole deconstruction can also be said to exhibit remarkable systematicity while derrida succeeds in upsetting the hierarchies of binary systems in so doing the process of deconstruction itself threatens to become a closed static system the certainty that all subjects of analysis are bound to destabilize could be construed as a new alternate system of eternal return a return to fundamental instability it can only stand in suspension as a problematic or a question in mark taylor's words what derrida cannot imagine is a nontotalizing system or structure that nonetheless acts as a whole the stability of fixed totalizing meaning risks replacement by the ironic stability of play alain badiou suggests that deconstruction is fundamentally a negative philosophy one oriented against totality and obsessed instead with instability this instability argues badiou marks the final victory of polyvalence over truth p 25 5 the von neumann architecture as the conditional control transfer design has become known is the basis for all modern computing the key to von neumann's success was not the specifics of his solution so much as his approach to the problem of computation rather than treating universal computation as an engineering problem he recognized it as a logical one antecedent to any specific instantiation p 26 the universalization that underlies the critical theory and information technology of the twentieth century uproots the notion that meaning making serves a universalizing purpose in its place however these fields posit another kind of universalism that of an iterable strategic process or praxis this praxis while applicable to a set of highly contingent circumstances creates fields of relation reliant on structure and method rather than on content to generate meaning p 27 the main distinction between analog and digital calculation is that the former uses a physical surrogate an analog for the physical system to be measured the work of analog computation was indeed universalizing however it was not generally universal as is digital computation in the von neumann architecture mathematician georges ifrah makes this distinction clear in his remarkable history of computing says ifrah no analogue device no matter how complex or extended its structure may be is capable of becoming sufficiently general to serve for the solution of arbitrary categories of problem an analogue calculator is not universal p 28 universal they may not be but analog computation systems do begin to universalize certain representations in the same way the conditional control transfer would later broaden analog systems fashion one to one representations of a phenomenon in the real world for example the film camera matches patterns of luminescence from a lens onto patterns on a chemical treated film these precise iterable manifestations of natural phenomena make it possible to map the material world with little more than the squeeze of a shutter an act requiring little or no specialized training or convention walter benjamin observes a decline in the aura of mechanical reproduced artifacts a dissolution of the bonds between artistic production and ritual in benjamin's conception when representative practice became possible anywhere anytime the ties between art and tradition are unknotted freeing the art for use in other contexts such as protest and revolution this too is a kind of universalization a universal serviceability previously unavailable to art such too is the universalizing capacity of the stored program technique a universal serviceability for virtually any kind of computation expression p 28 postman seeks to understand technology from the perspective of the monster the system's inevitable control over its master kittler claims that software as human metaphor is viable only in relation to its hardware constraints but such a claim has merit only if one wishes to construct or reconstruct human experience through software instead we should consider software and programming as a possible mode of expression equivalent to any other striving to meet describe and comment on human activities needs and relations binary data storage then becomes an accident of convenience one undeniably relevant but given the same status as was accorded manufactured ink to the book in the nineteenth century or monochromatics to the early cinema p 37 the methods that compose software objects thus do not necessarily condense the complexities of the natural world via mathematical or symbolic reductions rather they encapsulate representations of the world into specific software structures nevertheless manovich's observation is important the logical structures of software design have begun to remap themselves back onto the material world the were invented to represent p 40 manovich is correct to observe that the material world must be compressed to be represented in software but rather than thinking of this phenomenon as a mechanical overthrow of human culture kittler or as a mere influencer of human culture manovich i would suggest that these technologies serve as structures that frame our experiences of the material world while offering representations that cause us to think critically about those experiences p 40 in the savage mind structuralist anthropologist claude levi strauss characterizes two modes of thought the mythical and the scientific mythical thought is grounded in observation of the sensible world whereas scientific thought is grounded in the imperceptible levi strauss draws an analogy between mythical thought and bricolage a french word with no precise english equivalent but similar to our notion of tinkering of dabbling the bricoleur is a skillful handyman a jack of all trades who uses convenient implements and ad hoc strategies to achieve his ends unlike the engineer the scientific thinker who strives to construct holistic totalizing systems from the top down the bricoleur performs his tasks from spare parts from odds and ends the scientist strives to create events by means of structures whereas the bricoleur seeks to create structures through events p 49 when distribution practices limited atari's reach in the coin op market bushnell recruited his neighbor joe keenan to start a new company with the goal of capturing more total market share the new company was called kee games and atari founders bushnell and al alcorn sat on its board to fuel the clever deception bushnell had two of his top atari men defect and join kee p 58 in his concept of the anxiety of influence harold bloom argues that all literary texts are misrepresentations of the texts that precede them strong poets such as keats are able to achieve a high revisionary ratio based on their internalization of writers like milton and wordsworth that vaults them out of obscurity and into the literary canon as original writers there is a calculation in the anxiety of influence and bloom argues that the poet works against himself and against the fear that he will be snuffed out and forgotten bloom pshchologizes this struggle in relation to freud's oedipus complex but bloom's can only ever be a theoretical explanation not a material one p 61 although one could argue that half life has anxiety of influence for quake as a father figure their relationship is more formal than even psychoanalysis can characterize accurately half life literally embodies core portions of quake the abstracted unit operations to which the engine provides access although the two games do relate to one another in a history and perhaps even a hierarchical history of the fps their relationship is not one of oedipal anxiety in lieu of this anxiety both games agree to mediate their commonalities through an external structure intellectual property ip as an external mediator also differs from bolter and grusin's idea of remediation remediation does describe a technique that may be at work in half life but the borrowing is mediated by outisde forces both legal and commercial the game's very acess to the unit operations it seeks to borrow from quake are themselves redeemed through another unit operation licensing licensing is a legal function not a discursive one literature and art have always had a volatile relationship with permissibility censorship and book burning are nothing new recently u s courts have entertained fair use violation cases related to audio sampling in hip hop music but by relying on a less ambiguous relatinship game engines relate cultural artifacts and the market in a fundamentally new way similarly the common material and functional basis of games made from the same engines collapses literary critical notions of metaphor and analogy into encapsulated unit operations quake and half life are different in some ways but they share the same material basis the same core code the low level routines that render objects manage collision fire projectiles and model physical interactions between characters and objects are fundamentally explicitly identical while intellectual property implicates a state and an economy in the game materiality implicates a set of softer cultural social and microeconomic forces p 62 the unit operations of the abl api encapsulate abstract functions for human discourse while engines like quake ii concentrate on abstract functions for object physics in both cases developers who use these engines as the basis for other works are bound to the material functional and in many cases intellectual proprietary attributes of the engine these confines both facilitate and limit discursive production just as the rules of natural languages bound poetry and the rules of optics bound photography such confines can always be challenged of course as evidenced by poets like e e cummings and photographers like jan saudek in such disciplines material analysis often accompanies content analysis given their even greater conflation of materiality functionality propriety and discursivity the same must be true of videogames p 66 i am most interested in how baudeliare creates tools for living modern life strategies that function procedurally even more than the do lyrically as a figure in transition across an anonymous urban expanse the flaneur's role is fundamentally a configurative one his passage through the city constantly opens up new paths new glances at passerby new storefronts and sidewalks just as it closes down others because flanerie is fundamentally a passage through a space it bears much similarity to the configurative structure of procedural texts aarseth describes such configurative structures in terms of the multicursal medieval labyrinth one in which the maze wanderer faces a series of critical choices the work of the flaneur is constructed of these individual unit operations some of which he configures as he traverses the city some of which configure themselves for him based on the emergent effect of actions taken by all the other individuals in the vicinity p 75 through a une passante baudelaire marks a strategy of lonely love not erotic love to come to grips with the shock of modern life the inability to find meaningful social engagement in this constantly reconfiguring world this experience again in benjamin's words one might not infrequently say was spared rather than denied fulfillment p 77 will wright has explained that some of the interaction design of the sims is based on scott mccloud's principles of comic design mccloud argues that in comics the reader fills in the spaces between the panels projecting themselves into their reading and interpretation of the story p 84 5 when a sim goes downtown to interact with other sims he is thrust into a highly formalized representation of the modern social space a representation directly inherited from models like baudelaire's downtown the sim can enter an arcade sit on a street corner visit the beach or stop by a club p 86 learning and winning or in the case of a non competitive software toy reaching one's goals at a computer game is a process of demystification one succeeds by discovering how the software is put together the player molds her or his strategy through trial and error experimentation to see what works which actions are rewarded and which are punished p 97 frasca argues that computational simulation amends narrative expression with the ability to model behavior frasca defines simulations this way to simulate is to model a source system through a different system which maintains to somebody some of the behaviors of the original system frasca further clarifies that simulations are indeed narrative in that for an external observer the outcome of a simulation is narration frasca privileges simulation over narrative the former providing an interactive experience for representations the latter providing at best a more distant and less first hand experience of the representation in question janet murray calls this phenomenon of first handedness immersion or the ability to construct new beliefs through interaction with computational media p 98 each of these purposes is a special sort of the one general purpose frasca exposes in his simple definition the simulation represents the real world in part but not in whole generalizing this characterization of simulation one might revise and add to frasca's definition as follows a simulation is a representation of a source system via a less complex system that informs the user's understanding of the source system in a subjective way as frasca notes this kind of simulation is subtly different from the field of computer simulation which typically seeks to model accurately some referent in the material world the simulation serving the sole purpose of informing the observer's opinion or knowledge about the real system p 98 derrida revises saussure's idea of difference showing how differences are palpable we can talk about the differences between signs but at the same time differences are not stable identities that persist derrida names this new kind of difference differance a neologism that combines the french terms for differ and defer in this respect meaning for derrida is a relational system a network of actual and possible things and experiences differance disrupts the primacy of originary meaning or pure presence and founds a principal part of derrida's critique of origins and self presence in western culture p 105 writing about authority and origin in writing in general derrida has argued that archivization in written and other forms always implies inclusion and exclusion the preservation of something to remember and the omission of something to forget derrida gives a name to this obsession to return to stable remembrance he calls it mal d'archive or archive fever a compulsive repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive an irrepressible desire to return to the origin a homesickness a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement archive fever is the simultaneous drive toward and fear of archivization p 108 derrida points out that the only way to preserve work in an archive is to expose that work to its possible destruction the archive always works and a priori against itself choosing what to include and what to exclude is not an impartial process working through simulation fever means learning how to express that simulations choose to embed and exclude starr and turkle suggest that part of the cure entails creating new simulations that revise or rethink the ambiguities omissions errors or controversies of previous simulations this is indeed a worthwhile project but a more accessible and readily fungible strategy is to create a body of criticism for simulations that relate their rules to their subjective experiences and configurations p 109 simulation fever can also be related to badiou's event the rupture of stability in a situation and the reconfiguration of its multiplicities the confrontation with the event is one of commitment and renewal badiou even reserves the title of subject for individuals who respond to the void of a situation and choose to consider and respond to its implications this process is interminable and thus badiou reserves the name truth for an endless fidelity to the restructuring of an event p 109 later play theorists further increased the conceptual divide between games and cultural production french sociologist roger callois expanded on huizinga's work offering his own concepts of play in man play and games most notably callois extends huizinga's arguments that play resides outside everyday life for callois play is make believe accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or a free unreality as against real life there is clearly an affinity between the idea of play as separate from and contrary to everyday life despite both callois's and huizinga's insistence that play structures and organizes human culture both segregate play into a pure space freed from daily production huizinga calls this isolated space the magic circle a concept that has become central to many contemporary theories of games and to which i will return later p 115 6 koster's understanding of fun decouples the outcome of gameplay from pleasure in the ordinary sense enabling other kinds of responses but in the same gesture koster insists that these outcomes still entail fun albeit fun of a different kind we might call koster's alternate fun fun' fun prime a kind of alternate reality fun that entails the social political and even revolutionary critique that benjamin first envisioned for mechanically reproducible art despite this conceptual similarity koster's insistence on grouping meaningful responses of any kind under the rubric of fun is simply perverse one need go no further than everyday experience to recognize how absurd the notion of fun' is i couldn't believe it when i walked in on her and jim i know our relationship has been mostly fun' lately but i didn't realize it was over or i heard mary's husband had another heart attack and so soon after her mother died they've really been going through a lot of fun' this year chris crawford recognizes this limitation and observes its inappropriateness as a measure for the impact of a videogame fun observes crawford doesn't quite fit the adult's experience p 119 earlier i talked about the importance of what simulations exclude as much as what they include in this case costikyan is responding based on his presupposition that terrorism can not be discussed in this one sided fashion in the present case this response is personal and perhaps psychological costikyan lives a block from the former site of the world trade center and has even published a detailed personal account of his experience on september 11 this may be why costikyan's response to september 12 is so provocative he wears his simulation fever on his sleeve if simulation fever is the struggle between the omissions and inclusions of a source system and the player's subjective response to those decisions then costikyan's position shows how very ill he is with the condition p 132 play theorist johan huizinga has articulate a structure he calls the magic circle a safe place to play the arena the card table the magic circle all are in form and function playgrounds i e forbidden spots isolated hedged round hallowed within which special rules obtain all are temporary worlds within the ordinary world dedicated to the performance of an act apart during this act apart the magic circle delineates a place of predictability and order in an otherwise chaotic world the figure of the magic circle has been popular in contemporary discussions of games where it often prefigures a claim about the safety of games game designer chris crawford cites a form of the magic circle in his four characteristics of computer games representation interaction conflict and safety crawford clarifies the last of these characteristics carefully a game is an artifice for providing the psychological experiences of conflict and danger while excluding their physical realizations in short a game is a safe way to experience reality p 134 in fact huizinga is mainly interested in how such play activities persist after the game is abandoned the feeling of being apart together' in an exceptional situation of sharing something important of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game this suggests that the magic circle of the game world ruptures into the material world but yet it does not disappear entirely such an understanding of the magic circle disrupts the notion that play space possesses a stable interiority and exteriority the idea that you're either playing a game or you're not or that games offer an artificial space that contrasts sharply with the material world needs to be revised in light of this new understanding of the magic circle p 134 crawford's definition can also be read more subtly games provide safe ways to experience reality but that safety is not necessarily preserved once the game ends and the player slips through the gap in the magic circle into the sincerity of his or her own mind games do provide a protected space in which players are spared all the physical consequences of their actions but for the magic circle to couple with the world it must not be hermetic it must have a breach through which the game world and the real world spill over into one another the residue of this interaction infects both spheres causing what i earlier called simulation fever the nervous discomfort caused by the interaction of the game's unit operational representations of a segment of the real world and the player's subjective understanding of that representation huizinga lamented the fact that play in modern society has become relegated almost entirely to sport a field of mere distraction the idea of simulation fever insinuates seriousness back into play and suggests that games help us expose and explore complicated human conditions rather than offering mere interruption and diversion p 136 emergent structures are elegant and aesthetically appealing perhaps even seductive or sublime and it is understandable that one should admire the simplistic elegance of go stephen wolfram's opus on emergent automata includes full color plates of the graceful structures his cellular automata generate inside mathematica as aesthetic structures emergent systems are undeniably captivating although perhaps only as instances of the sublime not the expressive for this reason one must take great care when assigning value to such systems p 150 one of the alternative structures for desire deleuze and guattari suggest is the body without organs bwo the bwo is a reformation of the physical body that rejects its boundaries in flesh it is a mass of potential zones of intensity but suspended in an indeterminate state waiting to pass through a state transformation deleuze and guattari give a name to these state transformations which correspond with the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization they call them degrees of intensity or degrees of freedom the bwo maintains a higher degree of freedom the more impulses it might consider following kant believes that beings are free when they act in accordance with what they should do and what they should do is universally attainable through reason via the categorical imperative rejecting kant deleuze and guattari instead follow spinoza who conceives of ethics as a process of augmenting existing potentials towards a greater power conatus the bwo has a tendency to expand its potential continuously through the desiring machines that crisscross it rather than imposing boundaries that limit its potential in brian massumi's words the bwo is the body outside any determinate state posed for any action in its repertory deleuze and guattari's project focuses on removing boundaries in rejecting the idea that boundaries create meaning instead meaning is always provisional in a state of openness p 155 6 thus a small amount of time has passed and several simultaneous events have been coalesced into a successive series of singular actions each point of view configuring what it does not encounter p 165 the unit operational properties of software objects i discussed earlier do not change however the unit operations of networked data communications extend the reach of these units creating a network of networks if the internet has created a complex network of information through shared viewers web services strive to create a complex network of procedural systems through shared applications p 175 critical networks require an embodied study a fusion of theory and practice badiou's name for this is a thinking i call thinking the non dialectical or inseparable unity of a theory and a practice to understand such a unity the simplest case is that of science in physics there are theories concepts and mathematical formulas and there are also technical apparatuses and experiments but physics as a thinking does not separate the two a text by galileo or einstein circulates between concepts mathematics and experiments and this circulation is the movement of a unique thinking badiou's other examples of domains that represent a thinking include politics and psychoanalysis unlike science the latter domains can't rely on the repetition of mathematical proof and laboratory experiment these domains address singularities rather than repetitions in badiou's words they attempt to find a possibility which is not homogeneous with the state of things thinking produces what badiou calls events disruptive restructurings of a situation but badiou takes thinking beyond the event offering a special kind of fidelity that a thinking requires badiou encourages individuals faithful to an event to then show other people the relation between the statements and or writings and the singular process one must rally these others around a thinking by referring to what does not repeat itself p 177 8 this approach differs fundamentally from other postdisciplinary gestures that strive to fashion theory as a cement to fill the fissures between disciplines taylor argues that deconstruction has attempted to take this role in the modern institution serving as a mercurial fixative that hopes to replace and converge the lower faculties of kant while holding that adhesion in characteristic deconstructive suspense this transformation purports to effect material institutional change but as taylor points out that change is always limited within the precincts of the university politics in other words is always academic politics p 178 atlas gerhard richter if i disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light then i'm practicing photography by other means i'm not producing paintings that remind you of a photograph but producing photographs p 6 do you know what was great he said in 1964 finding out that a stupid ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture and then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like stags aircraft kings secretaries not having to invent anything any more forgetting everything you meant by painting colour composition space and all the things you previously knew and thought suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art p 7 gerhard richter the daily practice of painting writings and interviews 1962 1993 how did you come to adopt this objective way of painting i think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them you want to understand what you see what is there and you try to make a picture out of it later you realize that you can't represent reality at all that what you make represents nothing but itself and therefore is itself reality p 72 the centre cannot hold' accept this willingly along with the loss of consensus and attitude and individuality be a reaction machine unstable indiscriminate dependent sacrifice oneself to objectivity i have always loathed subjectivity even failure poor quality opportunism and lack of character are a small price to pay in order to produce something objective definitive universal right p 78 matisse many of the early pictures 1900 1910 show great talent later the few good things are exceptions the magnificent back view nudes a painting here and there but most of the paintings are vacuous or positively irritating they show a painter engaged in privatizing his work one who has given up wanting anything who paints what amuses him and this personal gratification is of no general interest whatever a naive stupid frivolous game with the brush illustrating his uninteresting surroundings his life feelings and enjoyments why crowds of people queue for hours in the freezing rain to get in is beyond me p 102 3 can you go into more detail as to why they were important to you did it have something to do with the isolation of the object as against the complicated context in rauschenberg rauschenberg was too artificial and too interesting he hasn't got that astonishing simplification p 138 how about technique were you attracted by that perfectionist technique of lichtenstein yes very much so because it was anti painting it was directly against peinture' p 138 it's a bit of a mystery to me why you say lichtenstein and warhol yes but no johns the distraction must lie in the manner of painting which means you're adopting a critical view of warhol's and lichtenstein's technique too what was it that you didn't like about johns was it the complicated technique the artistry yes because johns was holding on to a culture of painting that had to do with cezanne and i rejected that that's why i painted from photographs just in order to have nothing to do with the art of peinture' which makes any kind of contemporary statement impossible p 139 so the negation of the productive act in art as introduced by duchamp and revised by warhol was never acceptable to you no because the artist's productive art cannot be negated it's just that it has nothing to do with the talent of making by hand only with the capacity to see and to decide what is to be made visible how that then gets fabricated has nothing to do with art or with artistic abilities p 140 can you reconstruct that feeling why did he stella leave you relatively cold it was all too arty craft and too decorative too elegant and precious and his symmetrical compositions didn't impress you at all carpets are symmetrical too and robert ryman you didn't see his work until much later i saw a first show at konrad fischer's in 1970 or so i thought it was very good and why was that better or different because for the first time it showed nothing it was closer to my situation p 141 2 i can't understand what benjamin buchloh when we writes in the krefeld exhibition catalogue that you intended a criticism of the cruel gaze' of the police photographs no that's not what i meant at all you share that gaze in every detail in your painting you participate in its horror and yet the painting is something very different from the police photograph it's meant to be perhaps i can describe the difference like this in this particular case i'd say the photograph provokes horror and the painting with the same motif something more like grief that comes very close to what i intended p 189 yes and when i then paint another picture of uncle rudi the little officer i'm actually watering down the true work of art achieved by those two or three private individuals who put rudi behind glass and stored him on the sideboard or hung him on the wall the only sense in which i'm not watering it down is that by painting the thing i am giving it rather more universality the displacement makes it exemplary yes and blurring was the only way of getting this done quickly p 259 i think that what impressed me most was the way they took their own independence as a matter of course p 262 so the quest for the motif' has very seldom led you to a picture the quest for the motif is strictly for the professionals on the other hand when i sit down somewhere out there more or less aimlessly and not looking for the motif then all of a sudden the thing i've not been looking for may open up that's good p 268 duchamp comes back all the time like a boomerang you take up a position opposed to the complexity of the large glass and straightaway in comes the readymade idea as well maybe but what interested me was going against all that psuedo complexity the mystery mongering with dust and little lines and all sorts of other stuff on top i don't like manufactured mystery p 272 possibly and if we disregard the closed quality that every picture has to have if it is not to be a random detail of something else or just plain unfinished then nonclosure may perhaps be a positive quality because it relates more closely to our reality then it might be said that the compositional structure in its openness is the other dimension of a still credible substantive utopian factor that may be so especially because so many paintings nowadays look so stupid precisely because they lay claim to being closed works that's the deception yes and i find this open dimension in very few artists it's the radicalism that leads the artist to run the risk of ending up with a work that looks unfinished infinitely reproducible and internally repetitive the only paradoxical thing is that i always set out with the intention of getting a closed picture with a proper composed motif and then go to great lengths to destroy that intention bit by bit almost against my will until the picture is finished and has nothing left but openness the fiction of an openness a total openness just as the use of chance is not real but a fiction of chance p 159 60 then it's just a private aberration on my part if i always want to do something different from what i did before perhaps it's not an aberration but a private dilemma a gap between possibility and aspiration and even so an important aspect of your work if you were just a rhetorician in the sense of an analytical exploration of the rhetoric of painting there would be nothing particularly interesting about it that's work that other people can do p 164 i don't argue in social terms because i want to make a picture and not an ideology and what is good about a picture is never ideological but always factual p 165 does this reading seem too narrow to you yes because all this effort is not there for its own sake it is justified only if it takes all these wonderful methods and strategies and then actually produces something what a picture and therefore a model and if i now think of your interpretation of mondrian in which pictures can partly be interpreted as models of society i can also see my abstracts as metaphors in their won right pictures that are about a possibility of social coexistence looked at in this way all that i am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements alive and viable in the greatest possible freedom no paradises p 166 most artists are afflicted with more than common stupidity and this makes them even more desperate than they need be and so they make themselves even more stupid than they really are and so they make themselves artistically impotent because by panicking consciously or unconsciously at their own nonsense they lose all self respect and can produce either nothing whatever or nothing but unspeakable stupidity p 173 and then the work bears a strong sense of leave taking for me personally it ends the work i began in the 1960 s paintings from black and white photographs with a compressed summation that precludes any possible continuation and so it is a leave taking from thoughts and feelings of my own on a very basic level not that this is a deliberate act of course it is a quasi automatic sequence of disintegration and reformation which i can perceive as always only in retrospect p 178 i pursue no objectives i have no direction i don't know what i want i am inconsistent non committal passive i like the indefinite the boundless and constant uncertainty you recognize those words of course they are yours although it is a long time since you wrote them would you still say the same today no i wouldn't i'm glad i said it then by doing so i created some space for myself protected myself as it were against being tied down in order to maintain the freedom to do what i like to try anything i like and not to become an artist painter who is tied down to a single trick though you can be very successful with a trick like that because it makes you easier to recognize but then it works this way too it has now become my identifying characteristic that my work is all over the place but this rapid process of change is also a token of modernity constant stylistic shift on principle there are always some people like braque who spend the last twenty or thirty years of their lives painting polished still lives but there have always been others like picasso who do something different every couple of years and often go back to something they've done before as picasso did one thing really surprised me when i lived in the gdr picasso was a kind of demigod to me and then when i came over here he had no influence at all everyone set great store by artistic consistency an artist always doing the same thing and making propaganda for his own concerns i was in no hurry to proclaim a personal concern that might not really be worth calling a concern at all p 115 7 professionalism is no longer valued or needed because society is in no position to make demands of the artist or to work out the criteria that would arise from such demands in the 1970 s there used to be intellectuals who took the risk of saying what was good and right and what had got to be different in a way society leaves us in the lurch as you can see in the art schools at every exhibition everywhere in every press criticism in art magazines in the whole reception of art art is uncritically received and the motto is carry on it's all very interesting it hasn't always been this way but at present it probably has to be to avoid getting in the art's way just for a time i am sure that criteria will emerge when we know once again what we need and what is right for us p 117 8 moca audio robert rauschenberg and dave hickey r i think that's part of a form of gluttony that you want to collect everything all the information you can get that's not written soutine that painter of death surrounded by a crowd of his lively admirers ny times he did not invent a new language as picasso matisse and mondrian did but he renewed traditional genres through his excruciatingly sensuous desperately urgent immersion in the process of painting born in 1893 into a poor family in gelarus soutine went to paris at 20 to become an artist and died from a perforated stomach ulcer in 1943 he was personally tormented and prone to destroying his own paintings but he was successful but it is instructive to compare the difference between soutine and his devotees the other artists tend to assert superficially soutine ish qualities like thick and brushy paint or as in the louise borgeouis sculpture the slaughtered animal subject matter but only in soutine do you see such a sensuous commingling of paint image and feeling soutine is commonly thought of as an expressionist but his painting seems less emotionally assertive than intoxicated flooded by an ecstatic or terrified revelation of existential flux and flow claes oldenburg barbara rose 1970 man must learn when forces make him more and more self conscious how to be self conscious and still effective how to be intellectual still not cold p 193 rejected by the army in january 1952 and no longer under the threat of the draft oldenburg felt free to find a specific focus for his talents he then decided to concentrate his energies on art which he believe could also absorb his interest in literature and theater p 22 during this period oldenburg wrote poems influenced mainly by rimbaud which combined surrealist jumps in logic with concrete everyday details p 26 beginning with his return from lenox in the fall of 1959 and continuing through the opening of the second version of the store in december 1961 oldenburg subjected himself to a most strenuous agonizing and meticulous analysis of his own psychology talents and limitations which he recorded in notebooks simultaneously he conducted analyses of the main lines of american thought and of the history of modern art he also provided himself with a method of working that has enabled him to continue to generate new ideas from his interactions with his environment and his response to other works of art p 30 in the course of this exhaustive self analysis oldenburg pressed himself to reveal as fully and honestly as possible the basis of his intentions and goals as an artist in his nature he found extremely traditional elements mixed with radical aspirations for a revolutionary art the future of his art was bound up with the reconciliation of these contradictions p 30 my procedure was simply to find everything that meant something to me but the logic of my self development was to gradually find myself in my surroundings p 30 rather than ignore his personal conflicts he determined to revel in contradiction in bringing out of myself numerous identities p 30 often he would resort to self irritation a kind of mental scab picking in order to achieve results but he had resigned himself to such self exploitation and to life with myself as a neurotic constantly prodding and goading himself he remarked a tendency to rigidity and admonished himself to take risks to slop over don't be dried up and afraid of being bad p 31 i make my work out of everyday experiences which i find as perplexing and extraordinary as can be the result is not plotted and the paths lead through impossible darkness living is an enigma creation is an enigma a type of form f ex environment means nothing i would as soon do a painting on the head of a pin the thing is to join the current in the depths p 35 the self analysis oldenburg conducted allowed him to make what kubler has described as an accommodation between temperament and formal opportunity to integrate his own natural inclinations with the opportunities open for innovation and so to achieve what kubler terms a good entrance that is to become one of the significant innovators in the history of recent art p 35 oldenburg's use of materials that could be picked up off the street for nothing stemmed in part from economic necessity rather than from aesthetic preference but he also assumed that there was something in his character or experience which needs to work in perishable material a sort of martyric stance p 40 one of the original associations that ray gun had for oldenburg was with hart cranes religious gunman who is identical with christ hence ray gun is not only the artist's alter ego but the religious gunman of christ as well p 61 ray gun saw man as only alive when he is constantly arranging to upset his existence when he is solving situations p 46 the spirit that prevailed however was not so much that of dada as it was of native american pragmatism the point was not to turn junk into art but rather to make art out of what was at hand p 49 the desire to create an art that would encompass every aspect of the world testifies to oldenburg's gluttony for it surely goes beyond mere appetite for experience richness fullness and complexity p 53 it is the easiest thing in the world now to do the right thing the slick thing the thing everybody will agree is good finish and commerce thats what culture fights in america he complained it is quite right to emphasize the vulgar if it has been neglected if art has become too lyrical by vulgar i mean proletarian ordinary tasteless but also instructive life affirming he found himself despising what he terms artificial decorative art that kind which begins with buying a tube of some colored stuff in a store and going home to make a four sided figure very straight no matter how large to smear it on p 53 i'm quite willing to exploit myself and live with myself as a neurotic oldenburg wrote in 1960 in his self analysis he found that i get bored and restless very soon and really consume so much material at one time that there is not enough left i let a little touch stand for a lot and can't bear taking a lot after just a little bit i say i've tasted it p at this point oldenburg fused the technique of free association with the notion of artist as medium a seismographic recorder of cultural vibration or a kind of ouija board receiving from the forces of history their collective message to be read by future ages p 60 hero into loonie p 61 oldenburg was searching for the american archetypes towards which he was determined to take a double view both for and against p 62 brown also counseled the renunciation of repression and sublimation in favor of a return to the polymorphous perverse condition of infancy his advice to give up formal logic and the laws of contradiction because they are rules whereby the mind submits to operate under general conditions of repression was welcomed by oldenburg who had already accorded himself this permission p 64 oldenburg describes his style as a realism which copies the posters and ads instead of the thing itself p 67 analyzing his sense of alienation with his usual removal from the phenomenon he is studying oldenburg concludes my work is thoroughly and honestly self projective narcissistic this weakness' constitutes its power my desire for an audience is the desire to confess a desire to reach or be reached to be saved from enclosure which never happens no one reaches me i reach no one except through disguises and through other players p 70 the fragmentation is the concrete realization of vision passing from one item to another in a multitude the fragments are the naive realization of this piece torn' from reality literal application of this metaphor i am convinced originality is achieved through naivete and literalness p 69 there is technology as a medium and technology as material the first is easy to understand to supply the traditional product for example tv or films the execution a matter for the technical specialists technology as material is a more subtle question and one which involves of course the intimate relationship of technician and artist p 91 where do i stand in relation to the other great elaborate and costly things going on in new york p 91 he has defended the choice of a theme based on childhood associations on the basis that going back in time is not sentimental or camp but is necessary to find a subject one knows' enough about emotionally to which a sufficient number of workable fantasies cling p 93 d h laurence on walt whitman he was everything and everything was in him he drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight along the track of a fixed idea through the darkness of this world and he saw everything that way just as a motorist does in night p 97 8 although satire is primarily a literary genre there is also a long tradition of satire in the visual arts and it is this to which oldenburg appropriately belongs for despite his mastery of verbal as well as visual imagery he does not create an art that is fundamentally literary like much of surrealism meaning in his work is conveyed exclusively by vision through his new vocabulary of forms the absence of any specific narrative or time element in oldenburg's art ensures its distance from literary art or illustration there is no story to reconstruct cognition is immediate and identical with kinesthetic and tactile response hence physical rather than verbal or intellectual p 141 i always begin from a real thing the difference is whether i leave it alone extracting all i can from it and imposing nothing or on the other hand sink it in the impure soup of myself and all associations and in a direct naive way reconstruct the world p 143 that an artist of oldenburg's baroque temperament could discover a means of expressing his vision in terms of current values is evidence of his remarkable genius for adaptation and it was his detailed analysis of art history that enabled him to accomplish this amalgamation his approach to style is nevertheless not imitative nor even eclectic but anthological he is determined to absorb assimilate and telescope the entire range of the various polarities encountered in art history within the context of his own personal style p 148 style means to me a clear and consistent method as to material and technique for rendering a definite state of mind and correlative subject a practical and functional solution which may or may not draw on previous styles mine or others p 151 stylistic development therefore is replaced in oldenburg's work by his exhaustive investigation of different types of materials the artist is periodically involved with a certain material just as civilization was by stages the iron age etc supposedly wishing to be a primitive a crusoe i substitute myself for civilization and speak of my ages' p 151 my theories are not original my execution is and my distinction lies in my sensuality and imagination rather than my intellect p 179 he confounds mass psychology by deliberately blurring the lines between reality and fantasy the better to prove that with regard to action life cannot afford to imitate the irresponsibility of art which is a purely mental act p 179 where stuff comes from harvey molotoch in terms of the object itself good design involves working up good form and good function together as part of a single mind set and practical accomplishment cool i saw people designing the guts of electronic exercise gear and some basic medical equipment at one design office part of the total design and total engineering the consultancy proclaims for itself this means more than for example massaging a particular external form to accommodate a certain kind of apparatus inside and more than tailoring an internal mechanism to accommodate a preferred external form when the process goes right form and function along with marketing and all the rest of it are held in the mind together this is what designers sometimes call concurrent design and engineers call concurrent engineering even if a single person cannot keep it all in play at once a product team can p 31 software may influence substance the word processing program i use to write this book comes with a grammar check that motivates me to make some dubious corrections that should others be acting similarly will cumulatively shape writing in the english language for the designer the computer interface mediates in subtle ways cad is not a prostheses of the mind like the drawing hand p 40 given the stance of so many commentators who champion one or the other form or function art or economy studying the two under the same lens of appreciation runs against some substantial intellectual precedents for some who champion the practicalities of life art may be a good thing but hardly intrinsic to the production process some schools of anthropology but not all hold that art happens historically only when a people generates enough material surplus to free up time and consciousness for the non essentials p 54 out of this mishmash of art for art's sake utility is all that's really needed and the kinds of suspicions that can arise from mixing the two how does one look for art in the goods and the process that leads to them some theories of art do leave a space for merchandise because they define art not in terms of how well the creation itself meets some canon but in the way it connects to its context however mundane this means that ordinary things and miscellaneous experiences can be artful baudelaire was one who searched for an alternative to the academic theory of a unique and absolute beauty p 55 i go one step further than baudelaire and see even his divine base as coming out of social experience for me there is no limit to the excitement that even ordinary experience can generate when artfully invoked what he and others take as divine are the large and small dramas of life juxtaposed in spectacularly particular ways something becomes art through achieving in the viewer an intense lash up of connotations a congealing that gives emotional force even to details like a certain physical curve minor indentation or nipple like bump p 56 every artist must as howard becker has carefully observed face the mundane there are material matters of pigments solvents durability weights scale and interrelations among parts there are organizational issues having to do with agents dealers galleries preparators critics and patrons without whom the work could not successfully exist the artistic output at the end stands as an encapsulation of the practical vicissitudes through which it has come to be as well of course as the magic the artist brings to bear in making the combination happen if the art is a solution it cannot occur without the problems it has come to solve and those problems are in considerable degree practical ones indeed one's signature becomes what one makes of such limits p 58 besides representation there are other ways that art comes before useful object things now seen as functional developed out of things not evidently functional at all indeed precisely because in some cases they appeared merely arty that meant they were let alone perhaps to be later tinkered into something useful no one has argued the point more boldly than the mit metallurgist cyril stanley smith who turned from what today we call materials science and a career that included the manhattan project to larger analytic frameworks later in his life smith says that aesthetics desire and play domains were the engine of materials innovation p 60 getting to a new thing even if only by small and incremental steps requires leaps art helps leaps something that engineers and scientists often acknowledge at least in their memoirs necessity is not cyril stanley smith emphasizes the mother of invention a man desperately in search of a weapon or food is in no mood for discovery he can only exploit what is already known to exist discovery requires aesthetically motivated curiosity not logic for new things can acquire validity only by interaction in an environment that has yet to be children baudelaire explains are always drunk with inspiration always in a state of newness and ready to take on the world unburdened by practicalities or conventions this is the element that even in adulthood makes the creative difference genius says baudelaire is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will p 68 by utilizing known cultural objects including spatial and geographic phenomena people can more easily manipulate dynamic scenarios that is a principle of the desktop metaphor in macintosh and windows in order to remember a long sequence of ideas a cognitive scientist explains one associates the ideas in order with a set of landmarks in the physical environment coming from the other direction geographer yi fu tuan says transient feelings and thoughts gain permanence and objectivity through things which then become repositories of meaning objects and landmarks do their thought jobs because they are affectively redolent this dual nature of objects as both material and emotion is consistent with emerging notions about how people manage to think at all affect makes objects into utilities of the mind p 69 whatever its original inspiration the management of aesthetic detail helps determine the specific ways a product will be useful and durable the polka dots or a favorite disney motif on a child's bedding is more likely to secure a comfortable night's sleep for both child and parent than putatively more functional hospital whites when decoration is a technology of enchantment it is as efficacious as any other form of technology p 82 an introduction to general systems thinking silver anniversary edition gerald m weinberg paradoxically some scientists lead revolutions in several different disciplines though not through a change in personal category systems on the contrary they carry a paradigm intact from one discipline to the other p 33 the generalist on the other hand is like the fox who knows many things just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures without rifles so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines how do they do it when questioned these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science they too carry a single paradigm but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike though often obscured by special language p 34 to be a good generalist one should not have faith in anything faith as bertrand russell once pointed out is the belief in something for which there is no evidence every article of faith is a restriction on the free movement of thought and thus on the free movement of the generalist among the disciplines as reichenbach observed the power of reason must be sought not in the rules that reason dictates to our imagination but in the ability to free ourselves from any kind of rules to which we have been conditioned through experience and tradition p 35 if you're going to be the great integrator you ought to know something p 42 overgeneralizing is the error of a fool or a hero p 44 you have been playing a game that systems researchers call black box the rules of the black box game require that the observer be impotent to manipulate the box by looking inside the object of playing this conceptual game is to furnish insight into the process of observation the black box can be applied as a conceptual tool or as an effective teaching tool but we must not mistake it for a serious model of many real observers p 91 thomas blackburn has written persuasively on the inability of scientists to accept the possibility of truth in complementary views leading to what he calls an underdimensioned science the conclusion of his essay can serve equally as a conclusion for our chapter on the humility with which we must interpret the black box of existence if the practice of science continues its present one sided and underdimensioned course new scientists will be recruited primarily from among those people to who such a view of the world is most congenial yet such people are least fitted by temperament and training to hold in mind the complementary truths about nature that our looming task will require indeed on may seriously question whether even an underdimensioned science can be maintained by scientists recruited from among those of lesser imagination sympathy and humanity neils bohr's vision of the unity of human knowledge only echoes a half century later that of walt whitman i swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete the earth remains jagged and broken to him or her who remains jagged and broken p 121 2 in my own case pursuit of operational analysis has resulted in the conviction a conviction which has increased with the practice that it is better to analyze in terms of doings or happenings than in terms of objects or static abstractions p 171 much more complex systems biological mechanical or what have you can be simulated by electrical circuits in a like manner but since most of us do not meet the requirements in terms of electrical engineering skill analog computers are not a serviceable kind of simulation for fledgling systems thinkers though again those with adequate preparation will reap rewards from their study fortunately the digital computer provides a more accessible simulation tool to those without training in physics or electrical engineering the digital computer has a number of other practical advantages as a general simulation tool over scale models and analog computers but only one need concern us here the relevant feature is programming the scheme that permits us to build white boxes in a language more or less natural to all of us so that we may all be on equal footing in our discussions the study of computer programming is an excellent way to improve the quality of one's systems thinking but programming experience will not be needed to understand a procedure rendered in a language resembling real computer programming languages p 174 in a projection on the other hand crossing does not imply that the system is not state determined an airplane spiraling down for a landing may never return to the same spot in latitude longitude altitude but its shadow latitude longitude may cross and recross itself many times this suggests a heuristic principle associated with behavior in the state space the diachronic principle if a line of behavior crosses itself then either 1 the system is not state determined or 2 we are viewing a projection an incomplete view p 190 when we employ the state space for synchronic representations we obtain a static arrangement of points in the space at a particular moment in time there being no movement among these points we have no line of behavior to guide us instead we may develop a heuristic by analogy with physical space in which no two objects can be at the same place at the same time in an abstract state space this synchronic at the same time rule need not apply but it will if we have a complete view of the systems in question we may frame this heuristic device as the synchronic principle if two systems occupy the same position in the state space at the same time then the space is underdimensioned that is the view is incomplete for a complete view every system must have its unique place which is ultimately what we mean by complete and by system p 190 the second principle of thermodynamics means death by confinement life is constantly menaced by this sentence to death the only way to avoid it is to prevent confinement confinement implies the existence of perfect walls which are necessary in order to build an ideal enclosure but there are some very important questions about the problem of the existence of perfect walls do we really know any way to build a wall that could not let any radiation in or out this is theoretically impossible practically however it can be done and is easily accomplished in physical or chemical laboratories l brillouin p 203 in recent years there has been an up swelling of interest in the study of adaptive machines a term that antagonizes students of natural adaption if we build a simulation of an adaptive system we must build it with a program that may vary but if the system then shows adaptive behavior critics will argue that the system is not adaptive but regulating since the program was designed to be variable therefore any changes exhibited are not to the original structure of the system so the system is not adapting since adapting means changing the structure p 253 in general terms rather than in terms of used cars the law states that 1 a system that is doing a good job of regulation need not adapt 2 a system may adapt in order to simplify its job of regulating in biology the overhead the cost of regulation is expressed in slye's concept of stress the used car law applied to biological situations says that the organism that keeps down the total stress need not adapt but that the organism will adapt or collapse once the stress reaches an unacceptable level the appearance of a change therefore is a heuristic signal to the observer that the cost of regulation has increased even if the increase has not previously been noticed p 254 5 robert rauschenberg combines may 21 sept 4 2006 moca grand avenue in rauschenberg's words i'd really like to think that the artist could be just another kind of material in the picture working in collaboration with all the other materials but of course i know this isn't possible really i know that the artist can't help exercising his control to a degree and that he makes all the decisions finally p 1 we have ideas about bricks a brick just isn't a physical mass of a certain dimension that one builds houses our chimneys with the whole world of associations all the information that we have the fact that it's made of dirt that it's been through a kiln romantic ideas about little brick cottages or the chimney which is so romantic or labor you have to deal with as many of the things as you know about because if you don't i think you start working more like an eccentric or primitive which you know can be anyone or the insane which is very obsessive p 1 any incentive to paint is as good as any other there is no poor subject painting is always strongest when in spite of composition color etc it appears as fact or an inevitability as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement p 1 an artist manufactures his material out of his own existence his own ignorance familiarity or confidence i come to terms with my materials they know and i know that we're going to try to do something sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but i would substitute anything for preconceptions or deliberateness if that moment can't be as fresh strange and unpredictable as what's going on around you then it's false the nature of some of my materials gave me an additional problem because i had to figure out how they could be physically supported on a wall when they obviously had no business being anywhere near a wall that was the beginnings of the combines p 2 i began that piece by getting some materials to work with again we have that business of limitations and possibilities i just got a bunch of tires not because i'm crazy about tires but because they're so available around here in new york even on the street if i were working in europe that wouldn't be the material p 2 i'm particularly attracted to elements in life that for the most part are taken for granted so successfully that no one sees them or understands them anymore the chairs that i do incorporate in my work are classically ordinary maybe that's their revenge p 3 i have always worked in series i think this is because i am not interested in the finished painting they all have to work they all come with their own set of rules because i enjoy working very much this gives me an excuse to engage in a whole series and when i get really comfortable within a series i quit i move on p 3 the order and logic of the arrangements are the direct creation of the viewer assisted by the costumed provocatives and literal sensuality of the objects p 3 with sound scale and insistency trucks mobilize words and broadside our culture by a combination of law and local motivation which produces an extremely complex random order that cannot be described as accidental p 3 one looks forward to a painting finishing itself because if you have less of the past to carry around you have more energy for the present using exhibiting viewing writing and talking about it is a positive element in ridding oneself of the picture and it does justice to the picture that defies this so that you may not accumulate mass as much as you may accumulate quality p 3 general system theory foundations development applications ludwig von bertalanffy it was the aim of classical physics eventually to resolve natural phenomena into a play of elementary units governed by blind laws of nature this was expressed in the ideal of the laplacean spirit which from the position and momentum of particles can predict the state of the universe at any point in time p 30 the entities concerned can be considered in certain respects as systems i e complexes of elements standing in interaction p 33 general system theory is not a search for vague and superficial analogies analogies as such are of little value since besides similarities between phenomena dissimilarities can always be found as well the isomorphism under discussion is more than mere analogy it is a consequence of the fact that in certain respects corresponding abstractions and conceptual models can be applied to different phenomena only in view of these aspects will system laws apply this is not different from the general procedure in science p 36 while in the past science tried to explain observable phenomena by reducing them to an interplay of elementary units investigable independently of each other conceptions appear in contemporary science that are concerned with what is somewhat vaguely termed wholeness i e problems of organization phenomena not resolvable into local events dynamic interactions manifest in the difference of behavior of parts when isolated or in a higher configuration etc in short systems of various orders not understandable by investigation of their respective parts in isolation p 37 general system theory therefore is a general science of wholeness which up till now was considered a vague hazy and semi metaphysical concept in elaborate form it would be a logicomathematical discipline in itself purely formal but applicable to the various empirical sciences p 37 if you take any realm of biological phenomena whether embryonic development metabolism growth activity of the nervous system biocoenoses etc you will always find that the behavior of an element is different within the system from what it is in isolation p 68 there is a further case which appears to be unusual in physics systems but is common and basic in biological psychological and sociological systems this case is that in which the interactions between the elements decrease with time in terms of our basic model equation 3 1 this means that the coefficients of the qi are not constant but decrease with time the simplest case will be lim aij 0 t inf in this case the system passes from a state of wholeness to a state of independence of the elements the primary state is that of a unitary system which splits up gradually into independent causal chains we may call this progressive segregation as a rule the organization of physical wholes such as atoms molecules or crystals results from the union of pre existing elements in contrast the organization of biological wholes is built up by differentiation of an original whole which segregates into parts the reason for the predominance of segregation in living nature seems to be that segregation into subordinate partial systems implies an increase of complexity in the system such transition towards higher order presupposes a supply of energy and energy is delivered continuously into the system only if the latter is an open system taking energy from its environment p 68 9 increasing mechanization means increasing determination of elements to functions only dependent on themselves and consequent loss of regulability which rests in the system as a whole owing to the interrelations present the smaller the interaction coefficients become the more the respective terms qi can be neglected ad the more machine like is the system i e like a sum of independent parts p 69 here the important question of the relation of general system theory and cybernetics of open systems and regulatory mechanisms appears cf pp 160 ff in the present context a few remarks will suffice the basis of the open system model is the dynamic interaction of its components the basis of the cybernetic model is the feedback cycle fig 1 1 in which by way of feedback of information a desired value sollwert is maintained a target is reached etc the theory of open systems is a generalized kinetics and thermodynamics cybernetic theory is based on feedback and information both models have in respective fields been successfully applied however one has to be aware of their differences and limitations the open system model in kinetic and thermodynamic formulation does not talk about information on the other hand a feedback system is closed thermodynamically and kinetically it has no metabolism in an open system increase of order and decrease of entropy is thermodynamically possible the magnitutde information is defined by an expression formally identical with negative entropy however in a closed feedback mechanism information can only decrease never increase i e information can be transformed into noise but not vice versa an open system may actively tend toward a state of higher organization i e it may pass from a lower to a higher state of order owing to conditions in the system a feedback mechanism can reactively reach a state of higher organization owing to learning i e information fed into the system p 149 50 luc tuymans phaidon press 2003 these are very existential images and from a very existential level they grew into something very rationalized i don't want to make portraits on a psychological level i take all the ideas out of individuality and just leave the shell the body to make a portrait of someone on a psychological level for me is an impossibility i am much more interested in ideas of masks of creating a blindfolded space of mirrors p 15 paintings have a long life span which turns them into very abstract elements paintings were the first transmitters no matter how long they are hung in a museum three years or 400 years they still give you something every image has this disconcerting element of going further in time into magical time p 29 with the appearance of belatedness and painterly clumsiness in his painting tuymans apparently frees his work from an modernist commitment to the category of the new and the problem of the medium itself he assumes an attitude of disinterest the paintings are coded with signs of simplicity and inconsequentiality p 38 according to c s pierce's theory of signs the reflection like the shadow or for roland barthes the photos should be considered as an index these are pictures in which an object presents itself in an uncoded form and which are in direct relationship with the object itself p 42 the colored landscape painting is an icon defined by a relationship of similarity isomorphy to the object represented the acceptance of similarity requires the knowledge of a code regulating the relation of the icon to its referent whose status as reality remains indeterminate p 42 finally a third symbolic sign function is apparent in the written characters which synthesizes the indexical and the iconic and gives the work its overall meaning p 42 g dam is important for him for reason of personal biography but also because this was the work in which he first expressly connected painting with memory in this sense g dam is the counterpart to amnesia with my memory i try to maintain something from the past in the present compared to the original memory is secondary a repetition it is easily connected with the sensation of inadequacy the connection between memory and its object is so indeterminate that a memory can erase all the actuality and verifiability of the thing remembered and take its place at the other extreme it can be so weak that it threatens to lose its object completely one might also say that where memory is concerned its failure in the sense of a loss of its object forms its very basis with the idea of a painting of memory' tuymans returns to his concept of the authentic forgery' as a condition of painting since painting like memory is fundamentally belated it is false in its relationship towards its past object but authentic as it is inadequate and thus autonomous representation p 44 antichamber 1985 the most recent painting at the time of the exhibition is a linear schematic representation of space with two overlaid graphic systems in different colours blue and black against a uniform light colored ground for this work tuymans transferred preliminary drawings of his film into painting p 46 with regards to the work in the exhibition suspended' tuymans himself has referred to the fetishistic character of the painting which likens it to the availability of the toy fascinated by the paintings of edward hopper he wanted to own one of his works as a child wants to possess a toy it is as though tuymans to fulfill his desire has painted some hoppers for himself and thus the representation of the toy is also a representation of the fetishitic painting the self reflexivity of pictorial representation comes full circle the painting depicts a scene with figures yet the figures are themselves substitues toys rendering the scene uncanny just as the model figures inhabit the realm of fetish so does their representation in constructing these pictures as fetishistic objects and turning the substitute objects into the object of representation tuymans subjects his work to the conditions of industrialization's second central challenge to painting the transformation of the artwork into commodity p 63 4 authors such as peirce and others regard photography as an indexical sign in so far as celluloid does nothing but record the light that falls upon it without any form of translation any imposition of compositional order referring to something beyond the image the photograph is characterized by the same absence of symbolic order as nature itself p 67 tuymans asserts that in order to paint portraits he needed illness as a pretext illness meant that he does not have to paint the portrait for its own sake as the expression of a personality or the revisualization of memory as he attempted in g dam which would lead once more to the failure of representation but instead can turn to a medical function of representation which promises an uncoded image given the natural relationship between signifier and signified p 67 the photograph is given the sign function of a trace an unmistakable uncoded indication of the presence of the real object which left the trace p 67 in explicitly referring to a visual index tuymans gives the appearance of seeking the encounter with the real p 77 in the case of the historically based works it is not enough simply to talk about missing the real' however it would be better to call it realizing' history under the conditions of the irredeemable i see art as conscious personal perception' claimed cezanne i convert this perception into sensations visual impressions and require intelligence to shape these impressions into a work of art cezanne's concept of realization' can also be applied to scenes from history over and above the treatment of contemporary matters in still life landscape and portrait the image captures the past to the power of two not as reality but in a state of irrevocable and at the same time intolerable absence the german word vergegenwartigung recall suggests something that is distant in memory as an event in the present gegenwart in tuymans' work this eventful memory is constantly renewed in unavoidable confrontation with the static image p 166 open systems tate 2005 ed donna de salvo 48 portraits rely on a common source for their uniformity all photos were from the encyclopedia and so had similar attributes appearance and could be painted in a standardized learned method a system is a human construction and thus fallible and imperfect p 22 measurement room enabled bochner to completely encompass a space and through the mediating system of measurement create distance between the viewer and what they were seeing that he accomplishes this through a system of standardization is what enables the room to function on multiple levels p 19 measurement is one of our means of believing that the world can be reduced to a function of human understanding yet when forced to surrender its transparency measurement reveals an essential nothingness the yardstick does not say that the thing we are measuring is one yard long something must be added to the yardstick in order to assert anything about the length of the object this something is a purely mental act an assumption p 33 as early as 1967 he had invoked the figure of the solipsist to describe the constraints of serial art the solipsist denies the existence of anything outside the self enclosed confines of his own mind serial art is likewise self contained and non referential p 33 externally referent hyperlinks the measurements bochner provided suggested a doubled and different space like an architects blueprint a geometrical abstract rendering of the physical space bochner was certainly concerned with exploring the difference between abstract systems of knowledge and real embodied perception bochner had told an interviewer that he wished to undermine the domination of architecture to free it it surrender its transparency the first installation of measurement room pointed out the proportions of the private gallery space but the installation was not a one off the work was a portable idea' p 34 martha rossler vital statistics of a citizen simply obtained 40 mins watching rossler as victim while hearing her as perpetrator of a depersonalizing discourse p 42 charles ray all my clothes a new take on the kind of self exhausting' serial system deployed by sol lewitt all' every' art of totality and transcending but emptying out those pretenses at the same time p 46 ader and rays all my clothes archives of the personal clothes that touched your body art needed an injection of comedy and feeling p 46 are bas jan ader's and charles ray's all my clothes to be taken as representing a kind of retreat a turning away from the social and political towards the private perhaps not perhaps what we are seeing here are representations of masculinity on the ropes p 46 7 or as artist brad spence has argued it seemed to be ader's futile desire to represent genuine emotion within the empty tropes of melodrama brad spence painfully ironic' in bas jan ader's ex cat univ art gallery uc irvine 1999 p 39 for all its knowingness about the construction of emotion it is no less touching both artists rejected the picture of the artist as a beuysian shaman and refused to indulge in performance art's spectacularization of the traumatic self p 48 francesca woodman performing the photograph staging the subject benjamin bucloh exh cat marian goodman gallery ny 2004 p 42 hegel's post revolutionary societies demanding explanations justifications and precise plans from them it is obvious that our present art system functions precisely according to these rules the claims of a single artist that his or her work is an unpredictable creative act seems obsolete and is not taken seriously by today's art world it therefor falls under the rubric of pure snobbism p 55 systematic praxis guided by a certain formalized code code program computer code the minimalists practiced not negation but variation thus judd's large installations in marfa texas show the transition from one object to the other as a series of reiterations and modifications as a series of binary decisions about which elements of the previous object should be retained and which modified and how p 54 the typical minimalist installation is perceived as a fragment of a formalized algorithm of reiterations and modifications however powerful and fascinating the immediate visual impression of these installations on viewer may be ultimately they point to something invisible merely conceivable virtual clearly the same set of binary oppositions the same visual code that is manifested in the installations can produce a potentially infinite row of new objects p 55 the most important aspect of minimalist installations took place in the zone of the invisible that is between the art objects michael fried art and objecthood' 1967 one might say that minimalist installation practices the mimesis of thinking in that phrase thinking is understood to mean a step by step movement from one option to the other from one variation to another within an over arching virtual system that incorporates and arranges all such conceivable options and variations the goal of using art as a mimesis of thinking subsumes many of the attempts to use language as a supposedly direct representation of thinking but a piece of text is still an image the romantic as well as the modernist artist tried to create an image of infinity be it an infinity of nature of of negation but the infinity of thinking can not be represented by an individual image thinking progresses from one image to another in a systematic way without any conceivable end thinking is the infinite progressive movement the infinite et cetera therefore it can be represented in the art context only in the form of an installation that recreates this progressive movement even if only inside a finite limited space p 56 7 minimalist installation represented the process of methodically systematically organized thinking precisely by directing the visitor to a step by step movement from one object to the other here we are dealing with the same understanding of thinking that lies at the basis of computer programming 57 minimal and conceptual art of the 1960 s had however taken the decisive step in the direction of representing thought processes by taking pure thinking as its object and thus aestheticising it in this sense minimalism is at the same time very much a megalomaniacal maximalism that wants to transcend the limits of the finite installation space not only does the artist subject the uniqueness of his or her artistic decisions to an abstract infinite generative code but the artwork itself also ceases to be a concrete unique artwork and instead presents itself form the outset as a fragment of a potentially infinite progression that while it can certainly be understood grasped and even continued at will cannot be completely realized p 57 now however every programme for mimesis leads to countless difficulties and paradoxes rene magritte 1898 1967 observed that a representation of an apple is not an apple and a representation of a pipe is not a pipe so to a representation of thinking by means of computer programs or artistic installations is not yet thinking the mimesis of thinking is thus in many respects confronted with the same difficulties that faced the mimesis of nature above all it faces the fundamental question of how one represents the system of all possible options in the necessarily limited space of the artistic installation the thinking is potentially infinite the space of the installation by contrast is finite minimalist installation lives from the tension that results from the encounter of an abstract infinite generative code that regulates the production of art objects within the installation space and the external contingent characteristics of this space whose size limits the code's further realization this incursion of the contingent into the infinite progression of thinking which takes its internally unmotivated irrational' limit from the external form of the installation space is however merely an external symptom of the irrationality that internally infects every code and every system of thinking from the outset if for example artists are asked why they chose precisely this rule of variation and not another they can explain it either by falling back once again on their own contingent subjective creative decisions or by reference to a meta system that determines the choice of the specific rule in each case such a reference to an ever higher meta level system however famously leads to insoluble logical paradoxes that in turn can be eliminated only by the contingent decision to limit the system p 58 kabakov the universal system for depicting everything p 60 the big archive p 60 art takes on the character of a project the general praxis of the contemporary world which is known for being above all project oriented p 61 at the same time the understanding of art as art project also entails art's re adoption of technique the avant garde was an attempt to liberate art from technique by equating the act of artistic creation with the act of negating the tools and devices of traditional artistic technique the contemporary artist is once again a technician a producer but now the artist is no longer an artisan or worker but a project developer and project manager who produces the artistic project documentation by analogy to technical documentation p 62 installation using art documentation explicitly manifest the poetic of modern bureaucracy that increasingly shapes our everyday experience p 62 it is possible to see how the notion of systematicity could be read by a single artist as extending logically from the ostensibly hermetically analytical through to socially investigative p 68 the square and cube visual forms that correspond most accurately to the linguistic form of the tautology p 68 husslerian phenomenology the bracketing of the world p 71 lewitt in progress 1978 rosalind krauss lewitt plays out subversive ideas the purposelessness of purpose to the spinning gears of a machine disconnected from reason pretext for a display of skill' false problems that manifest fully in the brilliance of the routine p 72 freuds reizschutz p 73 by constructing a means of denying the world one necessarily constructs a system of belief in relation to it p 74 works by helio ottico and lygia clark defended against the notion of a self that was not contingent positing all subjects as richly defined by communal and multiply sensual experience p 75 systems esthetics jack burnham 1968 artforum already in california think tanks and in the central planning committees of each soviet futurologists are concentrating on the role of the technocracy that is its decision making autonomy how it handles the central storage of information and the techniques used for smoothly implementing social change p 165 the significant artist strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society p 166 art is a rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension to refuse the comforts of validation by affective congruence when such validation is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake p 166 oblique type of criticism resisting emotive and literary associations it resembles what computer programmer would call an entity's list structure or all the enumerated properties needed to physically rebuild an object merleau ponty asserted the impossibility of conceptually reconstructing an object from such a procedure modified to include a number of perceptual insights such a technique has been used to real advantage by the antinovelist robbe grillet a web of sensorial descriptions is spun around the central images of a plot p 166 n the components of systems whether these are artistic or functional have no higher meaning or value systems components derive their value solely through their assigned context therefore it would be impossible to regard a fragment of an art system as a work of art in itself as say one might treasure a fragment of one of the parthenon friezes p 167 the real transformers nytimes magazine july 29 2007 flesh and machines rodney brooks cynthia breazel kizmet was programmed to have the same basic motivations as a 6 month old child the drive for novelty the drive for social interaction and the drive for periodic rest the behaviors to achieve these goals like the ability to look for brightly colored objects or recognize faces were also part of the basic behavior anyone who tells you that in human robot interactions the robot is doing anything well he is just kidding himself whatever there is in human robot interaction is there because the human puts it there lijin aryanada the accident of art kasem's art you said is the art of the accident he breaks it down so we see it for what it is p 41 hobsbawn declared modernity to be a failure in so far as it aspired to a continuous progress comparable to what science technology can offer the idea that the expression of each period would be superior to what preceded it p 59 against interpretation susan sontag iv end interpretation based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content violates art it makes art into an article for use for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate sharp loving description of the appearance of a work of art randall jarrell's essay on walt whitman are among the rare examples of what i mean notes on camp' susan sontag the androdgyne is certainly one of the great images of the camp sensibility in the swooning slim sinuous figures of pre raphaelite painting the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of greta garbo note 9 ready made rebellion the empty tropes of transgressive fiction jonathan dee harpers magazine april 2005 on neil labute the psychological source of their his character's most vicious thoughts and actions he insists is to be sought not in the characters themselves or even in their creator but in a self fulfilling postulate about how men really are it's a savvy way to frame your own work because it has the effect of preempting criticism if you dislike labute's art at least if you're a man presumably it's not because you actually dislike it but because you can't take it if his art is a mirror then rejecting the art itself risks seeming like a kind of denial an unwillingness to confront your true nature since a reader's final judgment of a character represents the terminal point of that character's development the writer is well advised to delay the reader's ability the reader's human instinct as kundera calls it to arrive at that point the method for frustrating that inclination is to actively complicate it to provide multiple judgments multiple moral viewpoints within the work of fiction itself moral judgment is suspended in the way that say a bridge is suspended via tension between opposites books that generate that sense of opposition internally by credibly advancing more than one idea are working at the highest level books that depend for their sense of oppositions on the straw man of a presupposed bourgeois mentality outside the fiction itself are working in conditions of profound safety disguised as risk the characters suffer no repercussions nor do the writers for that matter regardless of outlaw posturing but the atmosphere is one of self conscious edginess and aesthetic daring on a m homes music for torching dissatisfied with their empty wretched existence they try to burn their home down this act symbolizes their desperation to break free from the relentless pressure of suburban conformity the sinister violent heart that beats beneath the repressively prisitine exterior of life in the suburbs surely it behooves a writer to at least question such received ideas rather than found one's work on them in this case though the soul crushing imperative to behave normally is embodied nowhere inside the novel itself the specter of stepfordesque repression is a kind of prefabricated mentality that homes' occasionally invokes but that the reader is expected to have previously internalized on denis cooper's novel frisk here too the emptiness of modern life is presumed to take the place of character development on bad faith labute is actually conducting a conversation with the reader over those character's heads the narrator may be too dumb to know that that picture of the guy crying out is called the scream but you and labute certainly aren't and so he provides these little interludes during which author and reader can exchange a knowing indulging wink before you both turn your attention back to the poor slob at the center of the story it's a device that lays bare labute's contempt for the men with whom he declares solidarity i think if women actually had a sense of what we are he once told an interviewer they would run screaming yet that we is itself a lie his male characters are not surrogates for his own sensibility but sacrifices to it artist diagnose thyself storming the reality studio a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction larry mccaffrey cyberpunk questions the relevance of a physical body the definition of consciousness database is the mythic journey to the underworld it makes us heros p 201 cybernetics deconstructs sterling's posthumanism with a vengeance which in its representation of monsters produced by the interface of the human and the machines radically decenters the human body the sacred icon of the essential self p 202 antihumanist words to be looked at liz kotz these are inseparably words to be read and actions to be performed p 4 cagean indifference' p 70 modeled on a recording apparatus brecht bringing things into evidence' phrase accretion which is what i just decided to call it when several words seem to form mysteriously meaningful phrases sometimes even whole sentences and many mottos and exhortations p 130 1 frank stella by increments of identical gestures the ground of the canvas was transformed into the field of the painting' p 144 acconci 0 to 9 magazine on text p 160 4 for the page to work as a field of operations it must be staked out specified and tested p 165 once the limits of the field are determined a system of flows and stopping places can be established p 165 mel bochner language 1966 2006 objecthood is little more than interference something that merely has to be passed through or by p 16 the materiality of ideas p 16 language was a direct line to an artist's idea or intentions any material manifestation outside language itself was deemed unnecessary questions of subjectivity originality and interiority the specters of abstract expressionism were neatly done away with too p 17 a binary that did away entirely with materiality in lieu of language neglected to turn its meta critical lens a full 180 degrees however ephemerally maintained or dedicated to banality words became unexpectedly and unavoidably gestural once they were afforded the role of providing direct access to an artist's ideas words became just as intimate and personal i e expressionistic as they were critical p 17 19 tenderness causes love love causes friction friction causes heat heat causes pain pain causes tenderness cause and effect 1966 minimal art the movie 1966 p 62 an utter transparency that nonetheless disallows comprehension p 21 character of seriality systematically predetermined processes attention to procedure over execution and completed work reached by self exhaustion of the system employed to produce it p 21 22 notes on the index seventies art in america rosalind krauss narcissism a stage in the development of personality suspended between auto eroticism and object love p 69 as distinct from symbols indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents they are the marks or traces of a particular cause and that cause is the thing to which they refer the object they signify p 70 i would like to focus on the autist's problem with the shifter the problem of naming an individuated self a dramatization of which is also to be found throughout the later work of duchamp p 72 in most of these portraits there is an insistent naturalism a direct depiction of the persons who formed the extension of duchamp's most intimate world p 72 4 it was as if cubism forced for duchamp the issue of whether pictorial language could continue to signify directly could picture a world with anything like an accessible set of contents p 74 it was not that self portraiture was displaced within duchamp's subsequent activity but only that the project of depicting the self took on those qualities of enigmatic refusal and mask with which we are familiar p 74 the accumulation of dust is a kind of physical index for the passage of time p 74 5 the rayograph that subspecies of photo which forces the issue of photography's existence as an index rayographs or as they are more generically termed photograms are produced by placing objects on top of light sensitive paper exposing the ensemble to light and then developing the result p 75 the photograph is thus a type of icon or visual likeness which bears an indexical relationship to its object its separation from true icons is felt through the absoluteness of this physical genesis one that seems to short circuit or disallow those processes of schematization or symbolic intervention that operate within the graphic representations of most paintings if the symbolic finds its way into pictorial art through the human consciousness operating behind the forms of representation forming a connection between objects and their meaning this is not the case for photography p 75 in the essay the ontology of the photographic image andre bazin describes the indexical condition of the photograph painting is after all an inferior way of making likenesses an ersatz of the processes of reproduction only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation the photographic image is the object itself the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it no matter how fuzzy distorted or discolored no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be it shares by virtue of the very process of its becoming the being of the model of which it is the reproduction it is the model p 75 the notes for the large glass form a huge extended caption and like the captions under newspaper photographs which are absolutely necessary for their intelligibility the very existence of duchamp's notes their preservation and publication bears witness to the altered relationship between sign and meaning within the work p 77 directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines p 77 the photograph heralds a disruption in the autonomy of the sign a meaninglessness surrounds it which can only be filled in by the addition of a text p 77 it is also then not surprising that duchamp should have described the readymade in just these terms it was to be a snapshot to which there was attached a tremendous arbitrariness with regard to meaning a breakdown of the relatedness of the linguistic sign p 77 the readymade's parallel with the photograph is established by its process of production it is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art image by a moment of isolation or selection p 78 duchamp's work manifests a kind of trauma of signification delivered to him by two events the development by the early teens of an abstract or abstracting pictorial language and the rise of photography his art involved a flight from the former and a particularly telling analysis of the latter p 78 if we are to ask what the art of the 70 s has to do with all of this we could summarize it very briefly by pointing to the pervasiveness of the photograph as a means of representation it is not only there in the obvious case of photo realism but in all those forms which depend on documentation earthworks particularly as they have evolved in the last several years body art story art and of course in video p 78 in the work that dennis oppehnheim made in 1975 called identity stretch the artist transfers the image index of his own thumbprint onto a large field outside of buffalo by magnifying it thousands of times and fixing its traces in the ground in lines of asphalt the meaning of this work is focused on the pure installation of presence by means of the index p 78 80 david askevold's work the ambit part i 1975 is likewise made up of photographic panels captioned by text in his case like oppenheim's we find the index pure and simple the images are of the cast shadows of an outstretched arm falling onto a luminous plane the meaning of these three works involves the filling of the empty indexical sign with a particular presence the implication is that there is no convention for meaning independent of or apart from that presence p 80 for there the indexical presence of either the photograph or the body cast demands that the work be viewed as a deliberate short circuiting of issues of style countermanding the artist's possible formal intervention in creation the work is the overwhelming physical presence of the original object fixed in this trace of the cast p 80 the functioning of the index in the art of the present the way that it operates to substitute the registration of sheer physical presence for the more highly articulated language of aesthetic conventions and the kind of history which they encode will be the subject of the second part of these notes p 81 we could say of several generations of painters in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries that the conscious aspiration for their work was that it attain to the condition of music as paradoxical as it might seem photography has increasingly become the operative model for abstraction p 58 on deborah hay the aspiration for dance to which she had come she said was to be in touch with the movement of every cell in her body that and the one her audience was witnessing as a dance to have recourse to speech p 58 a flight from the terms of aesthetic convention a fantasy of total self presence to be in touch with the movement of every cell in one's body a verbal discourse through which the subject repeats the simple fact that she is present thereby duplicating through speech the content of the second component if it is interesting or important to list the features of the hay performance it is because there seems to be a logical relationship between them and further that logic seems to be operative in a great deal of the art that is being produced at present this logic involves the reduction of the conventional sign to a trace which then produces the need for a supplemental discourse p 58 9 once movement is understood as something the body does not produce and is instead a circumstance that is registered on it or invisibly within it there is a fundamental alteration in the nature of the sign movement ceases to function symbolically and takes on the character of an index by index i mean that type of sign which arises as the physical manifestation of a cause of which traces imprints and clues are examples the movement to which hay turns a kind of brownian motion of the self has about it this quality of trace it speaks of a literal manifestation of presence in a way that is like a weather vane's registration of the wind but unlike the weather vane which acts culturally to code a natural phenomenon this cellular motion of which hay speaks is specifically uncoded it is out of reach of the dance convention that might provide a code and thus although there is a message which can be read or inferred from this trace of the body's life a message that translates into the statement i am here this message is disengaged from the codes of dance in the context of hay's performance it is then a message without a code and because it is uncoded or rather uncodable it must be supplemented by a spoken text one that repeats the message of pure presence in an articulated language the phrase message sans code is drawn from an essay in which roland barthes points to the fundamentally uncoded nature of the photographic image what this photographic message specifies he writes is in effect that the relation of signified and signifier is quasi tautological undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene cropping reduction flattening but this passage is not a transformation as an encoding must be here there is a loss of equivalency proper to true sign systems and the imposition of a quasi identity put another way the sign of this message is no longer drawn from an institutional reserve it is not coded and one is dealing here with the paradox of a message without a code p 59 it is the order of the natural world that imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print this quality of transfer or trace gives to the photograph its documentary status its undeniable veracity but at the same time this veracity is beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the necessary property of language the connective tissue binding the objects contained by the photograph is that of the world itself rather than that of a cultural system p 59 60 in the photograph's distance from what could be called syntax one finds the mute presence of an uncoded event and it is this kind of presence that abstract artists now seek to employ p 60 on lucio pozzi the painting's colors the internal division between those colors are occasioned by a situation in the world which they merely register the passage of the features of the school wall onto the plane of the panel is analogous to those of the photographic process cropping reduction and self evident flattening the effect of the work is that its relation to its subject is that of the index impression the trace the painting is thus a sign connected to a referent along a purely physical axis and this indexical quality is precisely the one of photography p 60 1 in theorizing about the differences among the sign types symbol icon and index c s pierce distinguishes photographs from icons even though icons signs which establish meaning through the effect of resemblance form a class to which we would suppose the photograph to belong photographs pierce says especially instantaneous photographs are very instructive because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent but this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature in that aspect then they belong to the second class of signs indices those by physical connection p 61 3 i am claiming then that pozzi is reducing the abstract pictorial object to the status of a mould or impression or trace and it seems rather clear that the nature of this reduction is formally distinct from other types of reduction that have operated within the history of recent abstract art p 63 on ellsworth kelly to pozzi whatever the similarities in format the most obvious difference between the two is that kelly's work is detached from its surroundings both visually and conceptually it is free from any specific locale therefore whatever occurs within the perimeters of kelly's painting must be accounted for with reference to some kind of internal logic of the work this is unlike the pozzi where color and the line of separation between colors are strictly accountable to the wall within which they are visually embedded and whose features they replicate p 63 kelly accounts for the occurrence of drawing by literalizing it if the painting has two visual parts that is because it has two real parts p 63 if we wish to interpret the message of the work discontinuity we do so by reading it against the ground within which it occurs painting in this sense is like a noun for which discontinuous is understood as a modifier and the coherence of kelly's work depends on one's seeing the logic of that connection what this logic sets out is that unlike the continuum of the real world painting is a field of articulations or divisions it is only by disrupting its physical surface and creating discontinuous units that it can produce a system of signs and through those signs meaning an analogy we could make here is to the color spectrum which language arbitrarily divides up into a set of discontinuous terms the names of hues in order for a language to exist the natural order must be segmented into mutually exclusive units one could say then that the reduction that occurs in kelly's painting results in a certain schematization of the pictorial codes p 63 4 now in the 70 s there is of course a tremendous disaffection with the kind of analytic produced by the art of the 1960 d of which kelly's work is one of many possible instances in place of the analytic there is recourse to the alternative set of operations exemplified by the work of pozzi if the surface of one of his panels is divided that partition can only be understood as a transfer or impression of features of a natural continuum onto the surface of the painting the painting as a whole functions to point to the natural continuum the way the word this accompanied by a pointing gesture isolates a piece of the real world and fills itself with a meaning by becoming for that moment the transitory label of a natural event p 64 the operations one finds in pozzi's work are the operations of the index which seem to act systematically to transmute each of the terms of the pictorial convention internal division drawing is converted from its formal status of encoding reality to one of imprinting it the edge of the work is redirected from its condition as closure the establishment of a limit in response to the internal meaning of the work and given the role of selection gathering a visually intelligible sample of the underlying continuum the flatness of the support is deprived of its various formal functions as the constraint against which illusion is established and tested as the source of conventional coherence and is used instead as the repository of evidence since this is no longer a matter of convention but merely of convenience the support for the index could obviously take any configuration two or three dimensional each of these transformations operates in the direction of photography as a functional model the photograph's status as a trace or index its dependence on a selection from the natural array by means of cropping its indifference to the terms of its support holography constituting a three dimensionalization of that support and all are to be found in pozzi's efforts at p s 1 the work by michelle stuart a rubbing is even more nakedly involved in the procedures of the trace while the matta clark cut through the building's interior becomes and instance of cropping in order that the void created by the cut be literally filled by a natural ground p 65 in each of these works it is the building itself that is taken to be a message which can be presented but not coded the ambition of the works is to capture the presence of the building to find strategies to force it to surface into the field of the work p 65 like traces the works i have been describing represent the building through the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote this sense is made explicit in the title of the stuart work where the artist speaks of relocation as a form of memory p 65 like the other features of this work this one of temporal distance is a striking aspect of the photographic message pointing to this paradox of a presence seen as past barthes says of the photograph photography set up in effect not a perception of being there of an object which all copies are able to provoke but a perception of its having been there it is a question therefore of a new category of space time spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority photography produces an illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly it is thus at the level of the denotated message or message without code that one cain plainly understand the real unreality of the photograph its unreality is that of the here since the photograph is never experienced as an illusion it is nothing but a presence one must continually keep in mind the magical character of the photographic image its reality is that of a having been there because in all photographs there is the constantly amazing evidence this took place in this way we possess then as a kind of precious miracle a reality from which we are ourselves sheltered this condition of the having been there satisfies questions of verifiability at the level of the document truth is understood as a matter of evidence rather than a function of logic in the 1960 s abstract art particularly painting had aspired to a kind of logical investigation attempting to tie the event of the work to what could be truly stated about the internal relations posited by the pictorial code p 65 6 the third feature of that performance the addition of an articulated discourse or text to the otherwise mute index was i claimed a necessary outcome of the first two this need to link text and image has been remarked upon in the literature of semiology whenever the photograph is mentioned thus barthes in speaking of those images which resist internal divisibility says this is probably the reason for which these systems are almost always duplicated by articulated speech such as the caption of a photograph which endows them with the discontinuous aspect which they do not have p 66 in film each image appears from within a succession that operates to internalize the caption as narrative p 66 marcia hafif at p s 1 on the walls above the original blackboards hafif executed abstract paintings of repetitive colored strokes while on the writing surfaces themselves she chalked a detailed first person account of sexual intercourse insofar as the narrative did not stand in relation to the images as an explanation this text by hafif was not a true caption but its visual and formal effect was that of captioning of bowing to the implied necessity to add a surfeit of written information to the depleted power of the painted sign p 67 the flight of the wild gander joseph cambell what can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion which in light of modern science must be said to be erroneous philosophically false absurd or even formally insane the value is to be studied rather as a function of psychology and sociology than as a refuted system of positivistic science rather in terms of certain effects worked by the symbols on the character of the individual and the structure of society p 126 this is the point of view that professor rudolf cernop has presented in the chapter the rejection of metaphysics in his university of london lectures philosophy and logical systems' 1935 metaphysical propositions are neither true nor false but expressive' they are like music lyric poems or laughter yet they pretend to be representative pretend to have theoretical value metaphysicians believe he has asserted something and is led by this into argument and polemics against the proposition of some other metaphysician a poet however does not assert that the verses of another are wrong or erroneous he usually contents himself with calling them bad p 126 7 jung distinguishes between sign' and symbol' sign is reference to some concept or object definitely known symbol is the best possible figure by which allusion maybe be made to something relatively unknown it does not aim to be a reproduction and its meaning can not be more adequately or lucidly rendered in other terms p 127 wherever a system of mythological symbols is alive and fully operative it unites in a single cohesive order all phenomena both of the corporeal and the hence an impressive fusion of sign and symbol fact and fancy is characteristic of the entire range and history of archaic cultures p 129 1492 a fracturing of this vague mythological order the drawing of a distinct dividing plane between the world of dream consciousness and that of waking together with a radical shift of the commitment of the waking intellect from the logic of the former to the latter p 129 mythological cosmologies fact vs dream and vision the dog having already joined the human family as early perhaps as about 15 000 bc p 139 40 whereas in the camps of the hunters the community was constituted of a group of practically equivalent individuals each in adequate control the whole inheritance in the larger more greatly differentiated communities that developed when agriculture and stock breeding had made for a settled more richly articulated social structure adulthood consisted in acquiring first a certain special art or skill and then the ability to support or sustain the resultant tension a psychological and sociological tension between oneself as merely a fraction of a larger whole and others of totally different training powers and ideals who constituted the other necessary organs of the body social p 144 the shaman is one who as a consequence of a personal psychological crisis has gained a certain power of his own p 159 origin legend of jicarilla apache tribe nm hactcin personification of powers that support nature tsanati six blue summer and six white winter former shamans clowns six white with four black horizontal bands face chest upper log lower p 161 2 the weird of the gods ragnarok p 164 birds commonly appear as spiritual messengers angels are modified birds p 167 two contrasting functions of religious symbols 1 reference and engagement 2 disengagement transport and metamorphosis p 168 medieval mandala of the church militant suffering and triumphant p 169 when then the symbols is functioning for engagement the cognitive faculties are held fascinated by and bound to the symbol itself and are thus simultaneously informed by and protected from the unknown but when the symbol is functioning for disengagement transport and metamorphosis it becomes a catapult to be left behind p 169 whereas the symbol functioning for engagement had to remain convincing on the levels of both corporeal and spiritual reference that functioning for disengagement need refer to neither its function is simply to propel the soul p 171 my ancestors appeared to me and began to shamanize they stood me up like a block of wood and shot at me with their bows until i lost consciousness they cut up my flesh they separated my bones and counted them and they ate my flesh raw when they counted my bones they found that there was one too many had there not been enough i should not have been able to become a shaman while they were accomplishing this rite i for a whole summer ate and drank nothing at the end the shaman priests drank the blood of a reindeer and gave some to me also to drink after these events a shaman has less blood and looks pale p 171 as we read in a celebrated buddhist text stars darkness a lamp a phantom dew a bubble a dream a flash of lightning or a cloud thus should one look upon the world here is disengagement with a vengeance the entire mandala of the meso micro macrocosm is dissolved and the individual having burned out of himself the so called impairments' or as we might say the engrams' of his culturally and biologically conditioned personal character now experiences through complete withdrawal the wholeness of an absolutely uncommitted consciousness in the pristine state called kaivalyam isolation' the universe has been rejected as a meaningless delusion referring to nothing beyond the mirage of its own horizon and that transcendent state has been realized which schopenahuer celebrated at the close of his magnum opus when he wrote that to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself this our world which is so real with all its suns and milky ways is nothing p 177 that silence is where we are between two thoughts the world the entire universe its god and all has become a symbol signifying nothing a symbol without meaning for to attribute meaning to any part of it would be to relax its force as a bow and the arrow of the soul then would lodge only in the sphere of meaning like the shaman's soul among his ancestors or the christian's among the saints and angels the bow in order to function as a bow and not as a snare must have no meaning whatsoever in itself or in any part of itself beyond that of being an agent for disengagement from itself no more meaning than the impact of the doctor's little hammer when it hits your knee to make it jerk p 177 8 a symbol and here i want to propose a definition is an energy evoking and directing agent when given a meaning either corporeal or spiritual it serves for the engagement of the energy to itself and this may be compared to the notching of the arrow to the bowstring and drawing of the bow when however all meaning is withdrawn the symbol serves for disengagement and the energy is dismissed to its own end which cannot be defined in terms of the parts of the bow there is no heaven no hell not even release we read in one of the texts celebrating the yogic rapture in short this text continues in the yogic vision there is nothing at all p 178 it is impossible to say when this absolute dismissal of all that the universe god or man might offer began first to enhance the indian mind p 178 virtual muse charles o hartman the complexity of poetic interaction the tricky dance among poet and text and reader creates a game of hesitation in this game a properly programmed computer has a chance to slip in some interesting moves the brute force effort to make a machine into a human poet seems doomed to death by boredom a more promising attack concentrates on the open field where poems and readers meet p 4 i know that i undertook my computer chorale project because i was fascinated by a certain kind of boundary when it occurred to me that a computer could do what i had spent a year learning to do that wasn't a reason to feel foolish or under mechanical attack instead i became interested in formulating one part of musical knowledge by automating it in part it was a way of conforming what i knew and bringing it into consciousness p 12 13 one effect of poetry can be to shift its language from use toward mention making us aware of words an sentences partly as language and not simply as reference to nonlinguistic things this need not be trivial or a retreat from human concerns much of the mystery in our relation to the world is embodied in language's mysterious relation p 24 the lines used for the sample i gave before favor variety and disjunction a different store of lines could favor continuity instead but continuity isn't closure only the act of a person deciding to stop the program establishes a defining boundary for the poem the decision to stop and maybe to select to edit the output can be completely arbitrary a human decision though its motivation may be unknowably complex or obscure can't be random p 32 how do we know whether a given word line sentence is the right one to add to the poem when the poem is breaking new ground if it really is given or inspired as we used to say how do we know whether to trust the source of it how do we tell false from true inspiration we're flying by the seat of the pants this also makes revision difficult not difficult in the old sense of being hard work but difficult to justify point by point that's one reason a lot of poets following the lead of the jazz musicians have become interested in improvisation the improvisor can't edit but must fall back on the most basic standard of all is this interesting to me right now p 35 none of this deliberation about strategy really explains the fascination of programs like the little one running on my zx 81 it doesn't account for the fact that i could fascinatedly watch the program produce a number of poems this way but never seriously consider adopting the program as my customary method of writing programs other poets who saw the machine's little trick seemed fascinate as well but none of them ran out to buy computers as a result simple randomness won't suffice to shock language into poetry though chance will play an important part in experiments we'll see later in the meantime a more atavistic pleasure such programs give is that of delegating a human function to something else p 36 a second minor problem that i've skipped over was deciding exactly what would and wouldn't be included in the input text arbitrarily i simplified some punctuation and ignored lineation all this was to increase the smoothness the fluidity and ultimately the plausibility of the output these were ploys to boost the appearance of sense the lure of meaningfulness p 62 if as coleridge said poetry is the best words in the best order then the poet must be a specialist in recognizing the best words the pleasure i took in this part of the work was related to the pleasures of poetry best as sly old coleridge knew is a tricky and contingent measure p 81 instead of feeding my poetry to the computer to digest or indigest i could alter its impromptu output to suit my own poetic sense and what i was doing while i edited this text the way i could hear myself thinking felt very much like the way i think when writing poems most of any writing process is actually rewriting p 83 one interesting point in the final version is the addition of and the breath knows ghosts i wrote that not the program yet it's not a phrase i could imagine myself finding except under the spell of the program's language so dreamily detached from the immediate necessities of saying things p 84 imitating this kind of communal work wouldn't be completely off the poetic track historically the impulse towards multiple voices has informed a lot of modern poetry the literary theorist mikhail bakhtin distinguished lyric poetry which he called monologic from the dialogic nature of novels poetry too can be dialogic in a sense how could it not be our own selves aren't simple single entities as bakhtin says the ideological becoming of a human being is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others p 91 even without the dictionary within my own private response to certain evocative sentences that emerge from the prose machine i can hear more than one character speaking there's a finicky analyst of logic and grammar a fellow who luxuriates in images conjured up however remotely by any fragment of phrase a literary interpreter of figures of speech and so on i began to see a rare opportunity to work simultaneously as poet and as critic p 92 the trap for poetry is that the more accurately the computer mimics human language the more ordinary it becomes in fact the ordinariness is how we measure the accuracy of imitation the perfect ai language machine would convince us win the turing game by being rather dull like a good secret agent the computer poet wants a more unstable balance of the plain and the strange p 94 5 as input i used a file containing the complete manuscript of a book of poems i was working on this didn't just establish some more formal authorship for me in the output in my eyes at least it put my unmistakable stamp on the results p 97 once again the advantage of the computer here lies in its perfect ignorance of language as such p 100 as with increasing values of n in travesty something seems to be struggling towards coherence p 102 this correction is likely to make us think about poetry in what m h abrams calls pragmatic rather than expressive terms that is rather than dwelling on how the poet has said what the poet wanted to say we'll probably concentrate on how the reader is affected by the poem this means asking what the poem does and looking at the devices and choices and parts of a poem as the ways it does it the reader's role isn't just to be a spectator but to be the arena in which the poem acts itself out p 104 5 if we think peculiarly of human beings as language output devices the output is very largely contingent depending on various kinds of history of the speaker of the speaker's relation to the person spoken to of the language created by generations of speakers of the world in which speakers and listeners find themselves one effect of computer poetry experiments is usually to release language from contingency of course the meaning of a bit of language depends heavily on the contingencies that have shaped it if we get rid of contingency entirely replacing it with purely random or arbitrary linguistic acts we get genuine gibberish the point rather is to introduce calculated bits of mechanized anarchy into the language put the results back into the contingent world where language lives and see how the dust settles p 109 self image technology representation and the contemporary subject amelia jones notably baudrillard proposes that postmodernism is defined by the loss of the referent but also insists that this includes the loss of the body as such it will probably already be clear that i intend to counter this common tendency promoted most aggressively by baudrillard himself to posit an end to embodiment and materiality as the key effect of postmodern culture in fact i would argue that the idea of the body as a referent among others is continuous with the modernist logic of differential signification outlined above and explored in the prologue baudrillard's erasure of the body reiterates modernism's erasure of the body as that which entails a subject who desires and thus pollutes the oppositional logic of semiotics p 18 we most avoid seeing the body as objectively posited and perceived from the vantage of an other and shift to also feeling what it is to be my body as it is lived and perceived by me from my side of it this rethinking must inform critical thought with a phenomenological understanding of the body that includes and resonates with our own bodies o ur bodies are lived and make meaning in ways that include but far exceed the particular sense and image making capacities of vision finally as sobchack notes in the quotation cited earlier even the most ordinary images find their value their substance their impetus in the agency and investments of our flesh p 20 exaggerating their own self performances these artist then explore the capacity of the self portrait photograph to foreground the i as other to itself the artistic subject as taking place in the future through interpretive acts that bring her or him back to life via memory and desire the i i am arguing is always other to itself these practices merely foreground this structure of subjectification as derrida points out in the quotation opening this chapter such images point to our deferral of the subject who must pass through the other in this case the interpreter via an eternal return this exploration of the process by which we constitute ourselves in relation to others pivots for these artists around the mobilization of technologies of representation by performing the self through photographic means artists such as cahun play out the instabilities of human existence and identity in a highly technologized and rapidly changing environment the self portrait photograph then becomes a kind of technology of embodiment and yet one that paradoxically points to our tenuousness and incoherence as living embodied subjects p 43 the punctum then brings the image into the present via my act of remembering and projection both of which are fully embodied processes emanating from my desiring body they in turn form the subject sherman the objet a of my own desire a subject as lacan and copjec would have it who promises to complete my but never does at the same time the punctum renews my memories as now expressing them as and in relation to sherman's act of self performance the image re forms me then as i rework its meaning through interpretation the punctum is the wound that binds me to sherman as an object of my desire its opening offered by sherman's pose setting clothing and attitude p 54 ultimately to engage with a photographic portrait to pass through its fleshy mask or screen is to remember or in kaja silverman's words to bring images form the past into an ever new and dynamic relation to those through which we experience the present and in the process ceaselessly to shift the contours and significance not only of the past but also of the present p 55 while it is death defying to the extent that it memorializes her body for posterity for the prying eyes of later viewers such as myself wilke's self projection into the scene of representation is also like carvaggio's one of loss and fragmentation her mutilated and soon to be dead body is like the bodies of christ and thomas amputated castrated by the drama in which it finds itself caught between the living and the dead captured between the flat surface of the image and the depth' of the body's interiority p 71 finally returning to kaja silverman's eloquent arguments about interpretation by performing open ended readings such as those offered here securing thereby my own tenuous existence for posterity inasmuch as my own readings are thus open to future engagement i want to suggest that we work to activated rather than disavow or repress he processes of displacement projection and identification through which all intersubjective engagements take place p 72 happiness is over rated p 163 in the kind of postmodernism i am interested in here one that pivots around aspects of subjectivity and is epitomized by martinez's self imaging in this work the crucial activating force is the radical confusion put into play through such representations which put the lie to the entire previous renaissance to modern conception of how representation functions in relation to the things it seems to represent martinez's robotic body both is and obviously aggressively isn't the embodied person we think of as martinez whether we know him personally or not more than anything else it asserts the fact that there are no longer any clear boundaries between an object made by someone particularly one referencing his own bodily appearance and the identity or subjectivity purveyed by the living body of the same person this is an attenuation of the commonly understood fantasized relationship between the artist's work and the artist that was established in the renaissance p 165 while the artist's work has long been believed to be an expression of the artist's identity almost a synecdochal extension of his core being in recent years this relation has been stretched to the breaking point through martinez's robotic self or cindy sherman's reiterative self portraits we have an assertion of this connection that is so aggressive and repetitive it shatters the belief system that underlies it in encountering martinez's robotic body or sherman's film stills rather than feeling closer to knowing who they really are we are made aware of the impossibility of grasping this essence and thus of there being an essence to the subject at all much less one that can be transparently rendered or represented p 165 my body flies off into the ether and yet extended prosthetically it is the crucial lynchpin of all these new modes of communication and transportation p 165 6 as one reviewer has pointed out the irony of stelarc's reiterated idea that the body is obselete is that it is nevertheless his body that is the subject the focus and the controlling device of his performances i would add to this the controlled device of his performances the productive paradox of stelarc's work is the tension it maintains between the body as actor and the body as object p 169 elsewhere stelarc makes his cartesianism even more explicit calling directly for the transcendence of the human body my events are involved with transcending normal human parameters including pain p 171 one could say that the body in schneeman's work is evoked as always already prosthetically enhanced but impossible to transcend while stelarc's work implies a previously natural body that is now in the process of being obviated by advances in cybernetic and robotic technologies as beauvoir pointed out white men can dream of transcending the body while women and others have a harder time doing so p 173 penny explores how this cartesian belief system dovetails ideologically with the propensity of computer technologies to create the illusion that human intelligence is completely discrete from embodiment to produce a dangerous state of affairs in current thinking and again on substantially less sophisticated than the model propose by de la mettrie 250 years ago p 173 hubert dreyfus in his book what computers still can't do which was first published in 1972 was one of the earliest to intervene into ai discourse dreyfus points out the various mechanisms through which ai researchers have occluded the role of the body and emotions in their supposedly objective scientific modeling of human intelligence dreyfus presents simple examples to demonstrate how feelings and bodily coping skills are necessary to understanding language and of course complex spatial and social interactions the body is central to aspects of imagination and perception to understanding analogy and social behavior p 174 it is the body wet unpredictable emotively disorderly itself a technological marvel that is at stake in and also inevitably escapes the control of stelarc's cerebral rationalizations p 175 it is the body that actualizes thought putting it into motion as what brian massumi has called an interrupter of the technologized network the thinking body the activator of human agency is always already technologized and yet in its inexplicable materiality its inexorable mortality it confuses the regularized logic of technological networks p 176 as theorists such as jurij karpan and massumi have argued stelarc's performance practice is powerful because it labors to concretize and de abstract the effects of new technologies by enacting them in and through the body the point being the enaction rather than the claims of transcendence which massumi for one chooses to ignore p 177 stelarc's strategy of self inflicting technological trauma or more accurately his strategy of exacerbating the trauma of this high tech age on what he calls the body is a gesture that makes particular sense for a heterosexual white male subject at this moment in time even just in the context of us one can hardly imagine a white middle class feminist or a working class black lesbian perpetrating such violence on their bodies bodily technological invasions would be experienced and understood differently by such subjects who may for example have actually experienced the childbirth pain that stelarc wants so much to emulate and yet simultaneously to disavow p 177 i want to insist on the wetness of stelarc's body its uncontainable messiness down to the cellular level its unpredictability its irrationality its fear its panic in the face of the trauma of everyday life in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries and most of all its electrified but inexorable coextensivity with his dripping sodden brain and the often perversely contradictory thoughts that filter through it it should be clear why by definition it will be a feminist project to embrace irrationality rather than the rationalized instrumentalism of cartesianism to refuse claims of transcendence in favor exposing the interconnectedness of brain flesh and the other fleshed aspects of the body to derationalize the body p 178 stelarc claims he is not a masochist and not interested in masochism this talk or emphasis on masochism in the context of what i'm doing is utterly totally wrong but what do he have here but willfully i e masochistically self inflicted discomfort p 178 9 in stelarc's suspension pieces per karpan's and massumi's arguments the artist could be said to be concretizing the sci fi fantasy of the body as meat p 182 far from opening himself to random interpretive input stelarc produces himself specifically as a pain filled subject and object to produce a kind of interpretive response even to produce a specific kind of interpretive subject p 182 the imagery is viscous tunneling wet pulsating it could be anyone's body and yet clearly not that mole those dark swathes of facial hair are particular that vaginal canal couldn't be just anyone's in response the visitor experiences her or his own particularity through identification or not i marvel at how a man heterosexual or gay might experience the voyage through the vaginal canal p 185 while techno theorists wax euphoric about the capacity to expand bodily functions through prosthetics stelarc calls them at their game enacting a prosthetic body that points to the abstract limits if not the concrete literal ones here he is still utopian of the flesh machine interface p 187 stelarc's foreclosure of body to body contact in this newly articulated fantasy of wired lovemaking his conflation of self body with other body of love object with loved self as object produces the ultimate rationalized and instrumentalized in fact explicitly onanistic postmodern subject one who makes love by stroking himself while imagining he is consorting with another still again oppositionally conceived if connected via a network one might be inspired to ask in fact whether the remote lover is necessary at all in this fantasy of networked eroticism the danger here of course is that the obliteration of otherness leads to more confirmation of the self same p 193 of course as stelarc's work suggests we may no longer know what human is or means but still beaune's point is well taken the mechanized body proves not the obsolescence of the body nor of all the strange and unaccountable pain pleasures and other emotional extrusions that haunt it but its stubborn refusal to be transcended p 194 julien offray dee la mettrie l'homme machine man a machine 1748 p 195 simon penny the virtualization of art practice body knowledge and the engineering worldview fall 1997 p 196 in this chapter then as suggested i am going to make use of rist's art practice in order to imagine new ways to think about how we situate ourselves in relation to technologically rendered bodies and correlatively how we identify ourselves in gendered and other ways in relation to self imaging projects such as rist's p 212 she draws on the work of diania fuss to argue per fuss that sexual identity in particular lies not in the self sufficiency of the spectator but in the very vacillations of the gaze between identification and desire p 215 rist's willingness to embrace her confusion her struggles her deliberate courting of seduction and spectacle and her presentation of her work as an openly admitted pursuit for her lost body never to be found can be counterposed to the tradition of european art of producing bodies in pictures as a way of securing the making and viewing body or to put it in more complex terms to secure the making and viewing subject by allowing him to take a position of viewing and knowing that enables him to imagine he is transcending his body through pure thought and knowledge p 238 their work points to precisely the tendency to deploy performative self imaging strategies documented again through video and still photographs often taken by rose herself in order to prove the subject's ongoing viability as sovereign particular and paradoxically to reveal it as contingent on these very acts of representation p 245 repeating and extending the barthes quote noted above the photograph always leads the corpus i need back to the body i see it is the absolute particular the sovereign contingency what lacan calls the tuche the occasion the encounter the real in its indefatigable expression p 248 zen and the art of stand up comedy jay sankey for me truth based material can be divide into two categories information and emotional informational material is a joke based on a commonly known fact for example the fact that mcdonald's restaurants have drive thru windows emotional material is a joke based on a commonly held feeling such as that it's fun to eat food jokes that refer to either informational or emotional truths are often a very safe bet p 27 ideally your writing should be a clear simple and vivid invitation for people to imagine specific things and situations rather than generalities but you should try to avoid making your words so specific that they exclude too many people in your audience p 36 to me the real challenge of writing stand up is not to make my stuff as dumb as possible anyone can do that but to express the abstract imaginative and unusual thoughts i have in terms that are as simple and clear as possible p 43 in reference to a joke with an overly long set up will rogers once said that porch is too big for that house p 45 unlike most jokes which derive their humor by making reference to experiences that the comic and the crowd share but that occurred outside of their relationship to each other callbacks make reference to stuff that's been shared since they met by calling back a fact the audience has in their heads a fact that he himself gave them the comic artfully completes a kind of psychological loop at the same time the comic is also playfully suggesting to the crowd some of this stuff is scripted folks p 45 originality and the feeling of one's dignity are achieved only through work and struggle dostoyevsky p 47 another style adopted far less often than that of the magnifying glass is the telescope style with this approach the comic's jokes are based not on our collective experiences of this world but on the comic's individual experiences of another world namely his imagination e g a joke about being married to a kangaroo these comics share with their audiences descriptions of a place where their audiences do no live despite any parallels that may exist to their own world and in this way the comic acts like a telescope bringing a strange faraway place into focus p 54 as a telescope the comic challenges our imaginations asking us to both think and feel about not how things are but how they could be p 54 imagine if you will a pie cut into eight pieces and let's say that each piece of the pie represents one of the dominant characteristics of who you really are anxious cerebral shy loud etc now what successful stand ups tend to do is to concentrate on one or two of the pieces of their pie and then exaggerate the degree to which these real characteristics dominate their personality that way they get to draw energy from real life characteristics but they also present a character who is inherently theatrical and powerful onstage p 55 whenever considering a new approach or attitude to your performance always first ask yourself not will this be funny but will this bring the audience and me closer the audience will always tell you with their laughter or their silence what is and isn't funny but developing trust with them is a much more subtle thing p 59 when it comes to your stage character or almost anything for that matter you can approach things in one of four ways you can do something 1 old in an old way 2 old in a new way 3 new in an old way 4 new in a new way p 61 one part of your character's consistency is the factual information contained in your material if you tell a joke about a woman you've been dating for a few months and then a minute later tell a joke about not having had a girlfriend for years you're going to put the crowd's believe in jeopardy your jokes must fit together and reflect a single reality p 63 show your neck p 111 william pope l rogers m 2008 the artist was once accused by a museum director of being too messy to exhibit p 23 art in a closed field hugh kenner 1962 elizabeth sewell the field of nonsense on louis carroll the closed field contains a finite number of elements to be combined according to fixed rules p 600 in order to get a closed field you have to have its elements and it was flaubert who took this particular step it was he who defined the elements of the novel as not the event but the word fulcrum of strain between fiction and life written and spoken languages p 601 a cliche is an element of the closed field closed fields of language character event the various closed fields in which a flaubert may deploy his fictional energies are supplied from various directions to be superimposed several of them at a time n the achieved novel closed field from general number theory is the dominant analogy of our time 1962 the concept of the field is a device for making discoveries p 608 the act which for three centuries has constituted he continuing cultural history of the united states selection definition choice p 612 curriculum this closed field since it implies that what is left out the author has examined and determined not to put in often to sharpen our attention p 613 danto barney on beuys 2006 as the primary objective of this system is to generate sculpture the narrative remains abstract a way to leave space for more specific distillation in the form of sculpture p 65 i had an ability to use my body as a tool toward a creative end and if my body could belong to a sculpture making language as artists like beuys had proven then this crossover into the studio would feel very natural to me p 67 expressive processing noah wardip fruin 2009 because digital media's processes often engage subjects more complex than timekeeping such as human language and motivation they can be seen as operationalized models of those subjects expressing a position through their shapes and workings p 4 the logics of dialogue trees and quest flags are about location in a given space but while the visual spaces of games are often simulated in a manner that supports almost innumerable possible locations the milestones of quest flags and graphs of dialogue trees mark out all possible positions and transitions between them ahead of time p 59 kotor is constantly providing doses of narrative closure and transition jill walker rettberg talks about the pleasure found in learning the quest based fictions of a place the network of fragments most of which are not necessary to experience the game fully and yet which cumulate into a rich experience of a storied world p 61 it is this quantified progression of a primary player character that has lead william huber 2009 to call the rpg genre a statistical bildungsroman p 62 pop has a linear semicinematic story with a sense of inevitability artfully fused with a context for player struggle p 71 finite state machine fsm each of an npcs basic behaviors is defined as a state with particular rules for transitioning from the current state to other states p 73 4 pop's fiction has an extremely narrow range of possible responses to interaction the story system is as players put it on rails and its structure can be completely exposed to the audience by letting them know when they are departing for the next metaphoric station p 75 the practices of the mainstream game industry present authors of digital fictions with two bad options for going forward to design around breakdown and essentially forfeit the processing power of digital media at the level of fiction or to layer a semiflexible story over a much more flexible game world p 76 collision detection is a common operational logic for the models of space in games similarly finite state machines are a common operational logic for non player character npc behavior p 82 source claims concept has relation to predicate predicate verb and object robert abelson at yale university 87 abelson's ideology machine computer simulation of individual belief systems 1965 p 86 rationalization mechanism like the credibility test these strategies are implement as search processes on the belief data p 91 process intensity chris crawford 1987 p 103 costikyan greg designing games for process intensity 2006 p 104 michael matteas expressive ai views a system as a performance of the author's ideas the system is both a messenger for and a message from the author 2002 63 p 108 conceptual dependency expressions schank 1975 a interlingua p 117 yale ai task orientation psychological process model canonical representation of knowledge p 118 scripts human knowledge for certain routine situations exists as stereotyped sequences of common events p 119 build systems around abelson's and schank's developing versions of the central ai concepts of plans and goals p 119 four sigma states sigma hunger sigma thirst sigma rest and sigma sex p 126 delta acts meehan from abelson p 127 develop a set of intention primitives as building blocks for plans each primitive is an act package causing a state change each state change helps enable some later action such that there is a chain or lattice of steps from the initial states to the goal state abelson 1975 5 p 127 schank embellished the idea of deltacts with what he calls planboxes specific approaches to achieving the state change p 127 possible worlds theory and modal logic p 138 suchman lucy plans and situated actions 1987 just as it would seem absurd to claim that a map in some strong sense controlled the traveler's movements through the world it is wrong to imagine plans as controlling action' 189 p 151 tale spin has lost its status as simulation tale spin has become i would argue more interesting as a fiction it can not longer be regarded as an accurate simulation of human planning behavior with a layer of semisuccessful storytelling on top of it rather its entire set of operations is now revealed as an authored artifact as an expression through process and data of the particular and idiosyncratic view of humanity that its author and his research group once held p 151 it provides us a two sided pleasure that we might name alterity in the exaggerated familiar p 151 a simulation of human behavior is always an encoding of the beliefs and biases of its authors it is never objective it is always a fiction p 151 espen aarseth traversal functions p 159 texts visible on the work's surface are scriptons textual data are textons and the mechanisms by which scriptons are revealed or generated from textons and presented to the user are traversal functions p 159 strips stanford research institute problem solver first order predicate calculus a type of formal logical representation that allowed strips to use theorem proving in its planning operations rather than searching exhaustively for a set of actions that could move the world from the current state to the goal state strips following a means end analysis strategy widely used since the seminal general problem solver project in 1957 worked backward from a goal state p 175 6 jeff orkin 2002 no one lives forever 2 p 171 phil agre computation and human experience 1997 p 182 plan construction is technically tractable in simple deterministic worlds but any nontrivial form of complexity or uncertainty in the world will require an impractical search 156 activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation 156 p 183 all games are authored microworlds p 184 case based reasoning cbr p 187 three major types of cases we work with ossified cases paradigmatic cases stories schank and christopher riesbeck 1989 13 p 188 procedural rhetoric the art of persuasion through rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken word writing images or moving pictures ix ian bogost persuasive games the expressive power of video games 2007 procedural rhetoric strives to help authors and audiences of process based arguments a much more appropriate goal for computational models than attempting to reproduce processes of human thought p 218 paul n edwards the closed world cognitive science views problems of thinking reasoning and perception as general issues of symbolic processing transcending distinctions between humans and computers humans and animals and living and nonliving systems 1997 19 scruffy and neat ai researchers still speak of their computer systems in terms of human derived symbolic formulations such as beliefs goals plans rules and so on p 220 rodney brooks elephants don't play chess p 220 we argue that the symbol system hypothesis on which classical ai is based is fundamentally flawed and as such imposes severe limitations on the fitness of its progeny 1990 3 p 220 black white richard evans representational promiscuity p 223 beliefs about individual objects are represented symbolically as a list of attribute value pairs opinions about types of objects are represented as decision trees desires are represented as perceptrons and intentions are represented as plans 2002 567 570 p 223 the issue is how models whatever their original source can be employed toward current authorial goals in a manner that acknowledges their limitations the next chapter considers systems with this more pragmatic approach to story generation p 225 digital authoring systems p 232 like any digital media system a story generation system has one simple requirement along some dimension s the system should offer an advantage over other solutions p 233 universe michael lebowitz 1984 5 p 235 character history generation cycle ongoing fiction generation few characters in queue simulation of characters' life gain lose spouses birth of children possible death etc p 237 character goals vs author goals p 239 character goals churning lovers p 239 high level goals carried out by low level goals planning takes place through plot fragments plot fragments are a primary type of data in the universe model of authoring p 239 bringsjord and ferrucci brutus 2000 artificial intelligence and literary creativity p 245 terminal time michael matteas paul vanouse steffie domike 2000 as a player a lot of what you're trying to do is reverse engineer the simulation the more accurately you can model that simulation in your head the better your strategies are going to be for going forward will wright in pearce 2002 p 300 the modes of interaction made available through their surfaces encourage a process of play p 301 the result of the simcity effect is the development of system understanding p 307 sims hunger comfort hygiene bladder energy fun social room p 311 agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices janet murray 1997 p 342 a player will experience agency when there is a balance between the material and formal constraints mataes p 343 simplec analysis p 359 textual instruments p 366 in ergodic literature non trivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text aarseth 1997 1 p 366 john cayley's work performative on the part of the program p 368 n 7 method of dictionary substitution popularized by the writers and mathematicians of the oulipo p 382 mesostics john cage n gram play p 394 batch mode p 384 vs active context a way of playfully exploring a textual possibility space to encourage construction of meaning along new lines built with an architecture of information processing tools resists the contemporary desire for everything to be knowable searchable and analyzable p 395 rather than batch processing the player would build the text word by word from that point with individual options generated by the n gram model p 398 philosopher linguists who imagine democratic debate in gamelike rather than warlike terms no quantifiable outcome though certainly playable p 401 griot call response p 405 playable media p 422 learning to understand the ideologies encoded in models and processes p 423 mediated memories in the digital age 2007 jose van dijck institutionalization of personal memory items p 11 assman stresses the importance of memory objects' materiality in texts adn images the sum of individual objects of memory never add up to one unified collective memory but the objects are unique anchors of remembering processes through which self and others become connected p 12 this inclusion in our public memory sites of many individual testimonies each presenting a unique prism through which to make sense of historical events will never add up to an overall collective view of the holocaust p 11 cultural memory as an act of negotiation or struggle to define individuality and collectivity closely entwined with these two notions are the of public and private memory is as much about the privacy to inscribe memories for oneself and the desire to share them only with designated recipients as it is about publicness or the inclination to share with a number of unknown viewers or readers p 12 13 plato viewed the invention of writing and script as a degenartion of pure memory meaning untainted by technology p 15 the continuation of memory's technolization p 15 due to the rise of electronic images writing gained status as a more authentic container of past recollection p 15 pierre nora laments the enormouse wealth of media versions of the past as a giant storehouse archive or library p 16 jacques legof media representations form a filter through which the past is artificially orrdered and edited manufactured rather than registered p 16 raphael samedi memory keeping is a function increasingly assigned to the electronic media while a new awareness of the artifice of represetntation casts a cloud of suspicion over the documentation of the past p 16 films records or other cultural expression constitute a repository of collective memory that places immediate experience in the context of change over time p 17 media are paradoxicallhy defined as invaluable yet insidious tools for memory a paradox that may arise from the tendency to simultaneously insist on the division between memory and media yet conflate their meanings p 16 the term mediated memories offers a tool for analyzing complex cases of memory formation and transformation taking personal showebox items as culturally relevant our private shoeboxes are interesting on their own devices as stilled cultural acts and artifacts teaching us about the ways we deploy media technologies to situate ourselves in contemporary and past cultures and how we store and reshape our images of self family and community in the course of living p 25 mediated memory can be located neither strictly in the brain nor wholly outside it in material culture but exists in both concurrently they are manifestations of a complex interaction between brain material objects and the cultural matrix from which they arise p 28 clark argues that memory and its enabling technologies are mutually constituitive proposes a cognitive science that includes bodies and brains' as well as props and aids' p 38 produced through media technologies whether pencil or camera p 39 euguene thacker biomedia' bot material and immaterial both biological and informatic p 45 memory is neither inside or outside embodied experience mind computer and object form distributed agency p 46 technologies of self' computers are bound to obliterate even the illusion of fixity a collection of digital data is capable of being reworked to yield endless potentialities of a past perhaps not coincidentally the reconsolidation theory recently adhered by neuroscientists finds its technological and material counterpart in digital media technologies that boost our ability to redesign one's past on the conditions of one's present p 47 digital manipulation may augment the role desire has always played in mental articulation of images fantasy and wish fulfillment memory may become less a process of recalling than a topological skill the ability to locate and identify pieces of culture that identify the place of self p 50 embedded vs embodied deep brain p 50 the comptuer storage and retrival share and revises download and upload recollect and project invent why memories matter humans have a vested interest in surviging and therefore invest in creating and preserving imprints of themselves p 52 varthers photo four image repertoirs the one i think i am mental self image the one i want others to think i am idealized self image the one the photographer thinks i am photographed self image the one the photographer makes use of when exhibiting his art public self image imago camera lucidea p 102 digital media acquiring another status beside traditional media which in turn adjusts to suit this new object p 110 the transformation material to digital photo seems to come with an inherent bias towards the communicable and disposable at the expense of permanence and durability p 111 easy manipulation and sharing reflect and confirm a desire to control and direct identity formation p 112 photo shift from documentation memento to communication momento p 116 since the emergence of digital photography pictorial manipulation seems to be the default mode rather than an option p 118 increased control over picture 119 120 less control over framed meaning p 120 family as co productions of mind technology and culture mental projections enqable by technology embedded in cultural apparatus p 124 james noran the home mode p 131 home movies feature a familie's life as a concatenation of ritual hilights p 133 lightweight video camera enabled metaphysics of presence sean cubitt p 133 we recognize moving images stored in our family archives to be input for rather than output of memory acts p 146 mller material storage devices necessary form of production p 132 consider media technologies to be tools for selecting framing and encapsulating autobiographical memories rather than mechanical devices for recording and storing documents or files they play a constitutive role in the continuous re construction of our p 163 technologies of self end of page three myths p 162 memories recorded should be separate from the rest of connected wired world p 162 multimediality p 175 mechanisms new media and the forensic imagination matthew kirschenbaum the conditions governing electronic textuality are formal conditions artifical arrays of possibility put into play by particular software systems p 57 the kind of intentional writing we routinely do with a word processor or a text editor is responsible for only a small fraction of the elctronic textual output of modern computer systems p this has been a day of solid achievement p 86 his fundamental insight was to see merit in deliberately abusing keys thereby attempting to destroy any vestige of structure p 85 kuhn's hashing for kwic yet kuhn's method was precisely not random a given key would always yield the same unique index p 85 random access vertical file cabinets and vinyl records unable to scroll or magnetic tape or a filmstrip p 89 mediamatic storage mania geert lovink p 74 http www mediamatic net page 8421 en john guillory the memo and modernity p 94 the impulse towards equating subjective identity with personal data stores is emerging as one of the most dramatic features of contemporary discourse networks p 102 are we really to accept we are simply the sum total of all of the media we produce and consume but where does the outside commence askas derrida in archive fever this question is the question of the archive there are undoubtedly no others a project such as zannis achieves part of its effect in holding up the mirror and allowing the viwer to see objectively and defamiliarized the entirity of what he or she has amassed on their hard drive the depends not on the simple question of life with data but on the proposition that if you were the user must retain some sense of self apart from their data p 105 factive synechdoches p 113 character codes any serious student of text and transmission must come to grips with the specifices of character sets and encoding p 238 visibility of storage manchester lab p 255 performance a critical introduction richard carlson 2004 essentially contested schechner restored behavior distance between self and behavior john mac aloon no performance without pre formance p 12 richard bauman performance as marked to be interpreted in a particular way bateson 1954 a theory of play and fantasy how living organisms distinguish between seriousness and play social changes catalization turner liminal regular cultural activity mark sites of challenge but ultimately reaffirm the status quo liminoid play sport leisure art more likely to be subversive clifford geetz deep play likely to raise shallow play art as play huizanga and callois man play and games not obligatory circumscribed in time and space undetermined materially unproductive rule bound concerned with an alternate reality performance theorists and practicioners have similalry looked to chance as a means of breaking free of the normally highly codified structures and expose effect tation of the conventional theatrical experiences thought as a chance effect p 21 callois illinix vertigo foregrounding of phys agon battle contest mimicry mimesis akea chance bakhtin on rebeleis carnival bears resemblance to turner's liminal or liminoid 1968 jacques ehrman seriousness play division assumed cleavage priveleges seriousness as the ground of play false grounding p 24 kirten hastrup clinical gaze abandoned in favor of embodied patterns of experience p 27 ostentation umberto eco when onstended something is picked up among existing items and displayed paul bests's female alter ego octavia elanor antin's king of solana beach p 125 whoopi goldberg's dramatic monologues eric bogosian spaulding gray dreams memories and reflections spun into oral history delivered simply sitting on a table with notes and a glass of water p 127 performance artist barbara smith i turn to question the audience to see if their experiences might enlighten mine and break the isolation of my experiences to see if performance art puts them into the sme dilemma michael kirby non matrixed performance kaprow's happenings p 105 141 artaud sought an art complete within itself p 141 lyotard postmodernism incredulity towards metanarratives p 151 modern science having lost the support of the metanarratives that tied discovery to aabsolute freedom and knowledge science has split into a host of specialties each following its own procedures or language game incapable of harmonization with the rest through any appeal to an overall truth or authority the language game that supports knowledge are composed of discourse and figure discourse general process narrative meaning figure specific event of narration p 151 i notice that the most productive artists are very task oriented daniel martinez how to con a capitalist 1995 in a clown suit offered mexican potatoes and zapatista inspired wooden guns for sale in belfast northern ireland p 182 interventions push ing the boundaries of permissable public activity turning public spaces into sites of confrontation p 182 valie export ulrike rosenbach replace vienna aktionist equation material body nature with body social construction transfigured nature gomez pena had no idea he was doing performance art when as a student at the university of mexico in 1970 s he simulated assualts on the metro disrupted public meetings with absurdist questions and showed up at public places nude or in disguise but he alread clearly recognized the power of such activites to challenge existing structures p 202 performance by its nature resits conclusions p 207 conquergoods surve ether 1991 1 an awareness of the constructedness of human activity 2 interest in liminal 3 return of the body embodied practice which priviliges the body as a site of knowing 4 shift from viewing the world as a text to world as performance p 208 radical empiricism rejects the boundary between observer and observed william james via michael jackson tension between embodied performance and film plastic arts mine that gap p 215 stand up comedy in theory or abjection in america john limon 2000 as i wrote these essays over time abjection became my master theme i mean by abjection two things first i mean by it what everybody means by it abasement groveling prostration second i mean by it what julia kristeva means a psychic worrying of those aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of that seem but are not quite alienable for example blood urine feces nails and the corpse the abject in kristeva's term of art indicates what cannot be subject or object to you but i came to realize that that was also the essence of abjection as it is commonly understood when you feel abject you feel as if there were something miring your life some skin that cannot be sloughed some role because abject always in a way describes how you act that has become your only character abjection is self typecasting p 4 jewish comedians took the body and turned it into a gag which is not the same as expressing it or repressing it it is abstracting what is the essence of the concrete i invert the view of schopenhauer who thought of laughter as the revenge of the senuous on the conceptual p 7 an individual may suspect that what he or she called love was lust or lonliness or that suffering was self pity but the collective experience of humor like the personal experience of pain fills its moment and perishes reflection misprizes it of necessity p 11 exclusively formal considerations are an evasion what am i evading the pertinent expert here would be eve sedgwick who in virtuoso readings of dorian gray and the beast in the jungle scorns the alibi of abstraction the reduction of content to kitsch and elevation of formal self consciousness to high art as a function of the quarantining of homosexuality from early modernism if as i hypothesize the attractiveness of comedy is in the disturbance of its own compulsive formalism it ought to intrigue queer theory p 32 reiner's premise that abstraction is what appears as the end result of wildness is no doubt borrowed from contemporary abstract expressionism he might with equal justice have observed that brooks's bit is almost abstract because it is almost geometric reiner wants brooks to arrive at abstraction but the erotics of the routine begins with it it is a joke so astract it is almost wild the abstraction is the one that sedgwick herself begins with and resolves so much that it gets conic the triangle by which rene girard reduces all desire to a communion of rivals over an object regarded only secondarily p 32 in james characters fend off the perfection of privacy by the delicacy of their misprisions brooks keeps his comic energy stimulated by indelicate approximation by misplaced concreteness he is in this way schopenhauerian since for schopenhauer comedy is the reveng of the sensuous on the abstract p 38 there looms within abjection one of those violent dark revolts being directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside ejected beyond the scope of the possible the tolerable the thinkable it lies there quite close but it cannot be assimilated it beseeches worries and fascinates desire which nevertheless does not let itself be seduced apprehensive desire turns aside sickened it rejects a certainty protects it from the shameful a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it but simultaneously just the same that impetus that spasm that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned unflaggigly like an inescapale boomerang a vortex of summons and reuplsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself excerpt from intro to essay on abjection julie kristeva p 71 however you take kristeva's neo freudian etiology it is certain that she knows how abjection is experienced it is experienced first of all as a negative ecstasy you are literally beside yourself it may be summarized as your failure to know what is inside of what to find your own synechdoche the homonculus that stands for self this entails a series of incongruities p 71 who is ellen this is the question that degeneres keeps posing only to keep on posing it a comedian has i have mentioned an odd relation to his or her identity caused by the indescretion of role and reality personality and character having and being a comedian whose name is jerry seinfeld playing a character named jerry seinfeld is perhaps the limit case a comedian whose name is ellen degeneres playing a character named ellen morgan in a show called ellen after the character after the star comes close this sort of imbrication is almost unheard of in a dramatic series p 117 i call the comedian's position abject for the following reason a fascination with what is detachable may be fetishistic if its object is a distraction from what one fears to lose what one fears one has never really possessed a fascination with what is detachable may be abject if it concerns what one fears cannot be lost what will always return it is not anxiety about ht ecutting off of the penis that causes abjectness it is anxiety that fingernails hair excrement and the corpse itself will always be with you despite all cuttings excretings and buryings p 117 in the case of comedians the appearance of phaillisism implicity in stand up itself is what makes the abjection funny but the source of the phallus's power is as always its detachability it is the detachable mike that comedians adore which is to say that abjection produces a fetishistic relation to anything that can come off the thing on the other hand that always returns to comedians is their lives apparently and it may seem dismaying or disgusting the close approach of having and being seems to a comedian as opposed to a christian existentialist dreadful p 117 8 so using ellen as the title of her show does not seem to ficionalize its signified it seems to protect it from attributes p 188 what follows is an attempt to suggest that everything degeneres does including palying with coming out or actually coming out as a lesbian is meant to protect the pure attributeless ellen materializing new media embodiment in information aesthetics anna munster p 2006 the computer as a medium is strongly biased an so my impulse while using the comptuer was to work solidly against these biases because the computer is purely logical the language of interaction should strive to be intuitive because the computer removes you from your body the body should be strongly encouraged because the computer's activity takes place on the tiny playing fields of integrated circuits the encounter with the computer should take place in human scaled physical space because the computer is objective and disinterested the experience should be intimate david rokeby quoted on p 1 i am here concerned then with what i bleieve were the inextricably entwined problems of that panel the question of the geneology of digital culture and the insolvent place of the body in relation to new media technologies and the culture they help to shape we need to radically question the birth of digital culture as one that has been shaped largely via a binary logic this outdated cartography has previously forced us to either celebrate or denigrate the cartesian mind the disembodied gaze and the transcendence of dematrialized information as salient features of digital aesthetics what if we were to produce instead a different genealogy for digital engagements with the machine one that gave us the room to take body sensation movement and conditions such as place and duration into account p 3 as felix guattari argues it is not possible to understand a technology without locating it within its social ensemble of relations although the machinic can be seen as the potential for movement of technical material social and aesthetic elements between limit poles any actual formation of a machine whether technical or social cuts across and separates itself from the flux of all of these constitutents this provides us with a starting point for a new way of conceiving of machines as movement capture formations they arise out of heterogenous flows yet sever the flows' movements in myriad directions as deleuze and guattari state we define the machine as any system that cuts the fluxes p 14 in traversing the gaps discontinuities or differentials between bodies and new media we can begin to situate an emerging digital embodiment although this may appear paradoxical i will argue in my third chapter that ideas about virtuality that have traversed information aesthetics since the 1980 s need to be reexamined pairing back older notions of the digital as the pathway to the virtual in which we were promised better and more complete access to either the sensorium or hyperreality will leave room to acknowledge the contribution of our corporeal capacities to technological interaction by looking at these technologies as concrete actualizations of the virtual capacities both of the digital and of human bodies i will show how it is possible to move out of the quagmire of the virtual real mind body and informatic material that characterizes the digital thinking about virtuality we can propose a different idea of embodiment one immanently capable of becoming both sensate and virtual p 17 this project proposes and puts into motion the idea of transversal technological studies the transversal can be configured as a diagram rather than a map or territory directional lines cross each other forming intersections combining their forces deforming and reforming the entire field in the process by taking this transversal route as a proposal for traveling the circuits of new media it is possible to understand digital culture as a series of diagrammatic lines p 24 serial art systems solipsism mel bochner 1967 it is of course a misnomer to speak of my experience experience is simply whatever experiential facts there happen to be it is quite impersonal and is not in any sense mine in fact except in the sense that i' am a certain configuration of experience the word i' has no significance j r weinberg for the solipsist reality is not enough he denies the existence of anything outside the self enclosed confines of his own mind sartre refers to solipsism as the reef for it amounts to saying that outside me nothing exists schopenhauer speaks of the solipsist as a madman shut up in an impregnable blockhouse viewed within the boundaries of thought the random dimensions of reality lose their qualities of extension they become flat and static serial art in its highly abstract and ordered manipulation of thoughts is likewise self contained and nonreferential when one encounters a lewitt although an order is immediately intuited how to apprehend or penetrate it is nowhere revealed instead one is overwhelmed with a mass of data lines joints angles by controlling so rigidly the conception of the work and never adjusting it to any predetermined ideas of how a work of art should look lewitt arrives at a unique perceptual breakdown of conceptual order into visual chaos some may say and justifiably that there is a poetry or power or some other quality to this work that an approach like the above misses but aspects like those exist for individuals and are difficult to communicate using conventional meanings for words others may claim that given this they are still bored if this is the case their boredom may be the product of being forced to view things not as sacred but as they probably are autonomous and indifferent cut stop quit exit