I am working on a project (which I will discuss later). It would be a HUGE help if everyone who visits would fill this out. What this poll collects will dramatically influence the processes of my project.
The poll software seems a bit unreliable (it is my first time using it). If it appears to not behave properly (like it is displaying giant text and you can't see the submit button) follow this link to the the poll.

Labels: art, poll

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ART MACHINES
MACHINE ART

In general we presume that artists make art, but what happens when machines produce art? Do artists then become engineers? What does the apparent withdrawal of the artist from the creative act mean, and what consequences for the originality and the uniqueness of the work of art result from it? What is a work of art in the first place in such cases: the machine, the product, or the act of production? What role is granted the viewer in the course of production: interaction or exclusion? Beginning with Jean Tinguely’s drawing machines of the 1950s, an exhibition conceived jointly by the Schirn and the Museum Tinguely in Basel will present art machines from various contexts right up to the present – such as works by Michael Beutler and Roxy Paine. The exhibition space becomes a production space.
Curators: Katharina Dohm (Schirn) and Dr. des. Heinz Stahlhut (Museum Tinguely, Basel)

link

So lately I have been thinking about the automation of various elements of life. It started when I was playing Angband, a text based hack-n-slash style roleplaying game. I used to play this game for hours and hours as a teenager. Nothing much happens in it except you run around and kill monsters and get treasure. Everything in the game is represented by ASCII characters. All of the maps are randomly generated each time you access a level. A couple of weeks ago I dug the game out and started playing it because I wanted to grab the maps and start making some prints from them. I did not want to have to loose hours and hours playing the game again so I found a "borg," a AI program that will play the game for me. It was absolutely fascinating. Instead of playing the game for hours and hours, I watched the computer play the game. Essentially I had found a program that would play my computer game for me so I could go about doing different things. This lead me to thinking about other areas of our leisure culture that we automate...

Recently I Rhizome.org there was a post about the show mentioned above, about artists' machines that make art.
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I was thinking about it today and realized that the book that has most influenced my artistic thought and production has not been anything big and fancy or erudite, instead it has been Douglas Adams' book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
It just so happens that there is a new radio play being made of the book available via podcast here: http://dirkgently.podomatic.com/

Perhaps I will elaborate more, but for now I wanted to share that. It is fantastic book, on par with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It really seemed like a vehicle for Adams to express some ideas that he had instead simply of weaving a narrative.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the podcast radio play that I linked above...is...pretty bad. If you are interested in this book, don't listen too it via that podcast just buy it and read it.
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Sometimes I find work that gets me excited about being an artist and making work. While reading Ed Winkleman's Blog (if you care about the art world you should read it too) I found Mark Bradford, a painter/collagist who's work I think is brilliant and beautiful.
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So in reading a catalog of Paul Pfeiffer (the purchase of which was a result of the fabulous Symposium Books in Providence) I came across this quote:

"I've often thought of making artwork in terms of providing an entry point for the viewer. How to draw the viewer into a dialogue? That's the challenge every creative person has to face: that there are things you want to say and do, and you have to find a way to say them in the idiom of your time and place. The work can't exist outside a given context. So there's a labor involved to make sense of your relationship to the conditions and constraints you live in . It seems to me to be a labor of translation, or mediation."

This is a constant challenge, especially in Digital Media/New Media. Work that can be so technical and so wrapped up in its own technicalness that it pushes the viewer out.
This lead me to think about Interactivity in Art. Interactivity in art is something that I have a very hard time with, and yes all art is interactive in some way, but I am talking about the stuff that asks you to play with to make it do something. And it might be in that relationship that I have a problem. As a viewer I have a hard time engaging an interactive work with the same sobriety that I tend to approach non-interactive objects or installation. As soon a person is asked to do something with a work of art a whole slew of problems can (and do) come up. The user interface begins to take a front row to the content. Since that is a person's primary level of communication with work of art, it will be the thing that makes the first impact, and thus the most significant one. Now, I think an interactive work can be successful when the method of interaction is so smooth and seamless that it manages to disappear. But then the temptation is to create something so slick and seamless that everybody stands around and says "Gee Whiz, that is slick" and again the attention is drawn away from the actual work of art.

I suppose then the challenge is to find something that treads a middle ground. A solution perhaps is to employ methods that are extremely familiar and are part of our social context. On a small scale, putting on headphones. While a very low level of interactivity, and perhaps it isn't even a from of interactivity, it requires the viewer to perform an action. Headphones can be used quite fluidly, they are not gimmicky, they are not intrusive, and they are very familiar.
A method that follows a similar model has a greater chance of succeeding.

Another problem I think I have with interactivity in Art is that the viewer is now positioned with a set of options. With a painting, you have very few options 1) Look At it, 2) Don't Look at it. With an interactive piece the viewer now has to choose what to do. Since there is that choice, the authority of the author and the intent of the author come into question.

There are many other problems that I have with interactive art, and I am sure my opinions will continue to develop over time. It may be that I simply have too narrow of a vision of what interactivity in art is. We shall see.

Labels: art, ideas

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