Saturday, September 15, 2007
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In George Fifield's class we talked about the the cultural record that we as a predominantly digital culture will leave. Sure, the great thing about digital information is that it, on its own, does not degrade, you can make an infinite number of copies and backup. You can disseminate it to all ends of the earth and every copy is identical to the first. However, by the very nature of technology, it is rapidly and constantly changing, thus unless this infinitely copied data is migrated from one generation of technology to the next, it becomes not only inaccessible, but also invisible. At least with untranslatable ancient records we can see what we can't read, but in 500 years, try knowing about, opening, and reading a Microsoft Word document.
As we talked about in the class, we are a culture with absolutely no mind of the future. We may talk about the future, but what we really mean is simply some fuzzy point in time that is later than now. We consider time in decades, not millenniums (or even centuries).
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As we talked about in the class, we are a culture with absolutely no mind of the future. We may talk about the future, but what we really mean is simply some fuzzy point in time that is later than now. We consider time in decades, not millenniums (or even centuries).
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Friday, May 4, 2007
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My recent silence can be attributed to several things. The first of which is laziness. However, I have been wisely spending my time. Since January I have been in a couple of small shows. Mainly I have been spending a bunch of time in research, reading, and learning a new programming language.
I realized that I have been complaining a lot lately that I had no theory at all in school and that I really knew nothing about it. And I knew very little of the history or "new media" art. It dawned on me, in one of those embarrassingly obvious eureka moments: I could buy books and start reading. I don't know why it never occurred to me. I put together a little book list on Amazon, and bought a pile of books.
Books:
The Art Dealers by Alan Jones, Laura de Coppet
Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Leonardo Books), Alexander Galloway
The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books), Lev Manovich
New Media in Art (World of Art), Michael Rush
Digital Art (World of Art), Christiane Paul
How Images Think, Ron Burnett
In addition to reading I have been learning a new programming language called Processing. Up till now, all of my programs have been written primarily in PHP. PHP is great language of pretty much everything I was trying to use it for. Processing, on the other hand, is essentially designed to do exactly what I want to do. So, that being said, I have been rewriting some of my projects in Processing, primarily as a way to learn the language better, but also to create more portable, faster, stabler (more stable), programs. To make rather long story short: if you are interested in programming and art and are not a programmer, check out Processing. It is a full featured language built on Java, in fact you can use real-deal Java in your programs if you want, but it give you a simplified syntax and structure so you can bang our projects quickly.
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I realized that I have been complaining a lot lately that I had no theory at all in school and that I really knew nothing about it. And I knew very little of the history or "new media" art. It dawned on me, in one of those embarrassingly obvious eureka moments: I could buy books and start reading. I don't know why it never occurred to me. I put together a little book list on Amazon, and bought a pile of books.
Books:
The Art Dealers by Alan Jones, Laura de Coppet
Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Leonardo Books), Alexander Galloway
The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books), Lev Manovich
New Media in Art (World of Art), Michael Rush
Digital Art (World of Art), Christiane Paul
How Images Think, Ron Burnett
In addition to reading I have been learning a new programming language called Processing. Up till now, all of my programs have been written primarily in PHP. PHP is great language of pretty much everything I was trying to use it for. Processing, on the other hand, is essentially designed to do exactly what I want to do. So, that being said, I have been rewriting some of my projects in Processing, primarily as a way to learn the language better, but also to create more portable, faster, stabler (more stable), programs. To make rather long story short: if you are interested in programming and art and are not a programmer, check out Processing. It is a full featured language built on Java, in fact you can use real-deal Java in your programs if you want, but it give you a simplified syntax and structure so you can bang our projects quickly.
Labels: art, books, computers, processing, research
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