aesthetics

Thinkings at Southern Exposure

Southern Exposure will be hosting my three-part discussion series called “Thinkings: How computers change the way we see by altering the way we think.”

Tuesday, September 21, 7:00 – 9:00pm
Tuesday, October 19, 7:00 – 9:00pm
Tuesday, November 16, 7:00 – 9:00pm

September, 2010

Thinkings: How Computers Change The Way We See By Altering The Way We Think

Life with computers has changed the way we see and think. A thorough understanding of the import of that change is difficult to attain. We tend to focus on the epiphenomena rather than the deep structure of computational culture. We are immersed in brands, in products, in the spectacle and the experience mediated by computers and screens, but we rarely consider data as such, or what a system is. And yet, data and system are the concepts that affect our way of seeing and thinking and make them radically different after the recent ubiquity of computers.

September, 2010

Soft Monkey

Animal painting is popular again; the evidence is on YouTube. But it was popular in the Fifties and Sixties too and taken seriously by some in the art world and certainly by some biologists. Congo, the painting chimpanzee was a star.

October, 2009

The Game Of Life

If life were a game, what game would it be? Certainly not the game of all possible games. And not Magister Ludi 's Glass Bead Game: the aesthetic athletics of the intellect. It must rather be either war or race; in either case, it is a contest.

The Rules of the Game | The Game of the Rules

If life were a game, what game would it be? … It must be either war or race; in either case, it is a contest. The abstract field of contest is a schematic representation of the territory beneath our feet: a map of the world. It is at once a field of combat as an un-owned commons, and the territorialized space of land as possession, with all places and possible positions marked out. Against this grid the move is made; the move is measured. The pieces find their places.

May, 2007

Flame Hardened Bed

The site of production for Inscription, has a significance beyond some breezy fascination with the "making of" things. The machine shop instantiates a particular machinic aesthetic.

June, 2005

Epithet-Body

How is it that image and the epithet have replaced rhetoric as the stuff of American politics? This is the question proper to Schwarzenegger’s exploitation of the insult “girly-man” in order to attempt to force the recalcitrant state legislature to assent to his budget proposal.

A Children's Game Transformed by the Solvent of Computational Method Thus Allowing for the Displacement of a Moral Overlay by a Free Play of Algorithmic Patterning.

In modeling the game Chutes and Ladders on a computer, we gain insight into the nature of both games and computation. The computer version, unlike the rule bound cardboard version, is unfixed, thus allowing for the displacement of a moral overlay by a free play of algorithmic patterning. The abstraction of the model preserves a structure but unleashes a principal of variation: the computer makes every constant a variable (as Marcos Novak observes as he describes the liquefaction of architecture). The arbitrariness of particular rules becomes evident.

March, 2004

IV. Instantiations

I take three pieces from the recent CODEDOC show at the Whitney’s Artport to be representative of a certain strain of abstraction in software art that takes into account both the modernist traditions of abstraction outlined above and a cybernetic version of abstraction that, although it may share some surface characteristics with modernist painting, has a basis in the logic of its own particular essence and modes of production.

VI. Yet Another Science

The trajectory of computer science moves in the direction of greater and greater self-consciousness about the practice of modeling to the point where it can deploy a term like "second-order cybernetics" (or "applied epistemology") referring to a modeling practice which takes into account the effects of model making on the system which is being modeled itself. Following from Wiener's lack of distinctions among human and machine elements, model making is not only integral to the design and technical production of computer software systems, but also to the design of their interfaces, which, to a certain extent are composed of complex reflexive systems of modeling.

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