writing element

Not the Only Game in Town

Experiments which aim to queer the rules of the game foreground the conventionality of rules, the arbitrariness of rules, the relationship of agency to rule making,  the location of changing rule sets within the diachrony of history, and the aesthetic nature of rules and rule making. They strive to

[ ]

I. A Collision

In the space we awkwardly refer to as the digital (denoting perhaps an era, perhaps a technology, a mode of production, a means of communication or recording, a virtual world or the mechanisms enabling its imagining, production etc.

[ ]

II. Art

In the orbit of art, abstraction lies cozy within the compass of a modernist program described by Clement Greenberg as an outgrowth of a Kantian immanent critique:

[ ]

III. The Abstract

The word abstract has several senses: (1) it denotes, most literally, separateness, a meaning directly correlative to its Latin root abstractus, “to draw from, separate;” (2) it means something considered apart from a particular application or real world existence, i.e.

[ ]

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, ha

[ ]

V. The Front and the Back

The front-end/back-end model taken as paradigmatic of digital art by CODEDOC is what is supposed to make the show’s reversal, its focus on the code, make sense. But CODEDOC’s presumptions are several: that digital art is visual; that digital art involves code; and, that its split is binary between a front and a back end.

[ ]

VI. Yet Another Science

For computer science, the meaning of the word abstract is tied most often to the third sense of the term, as outlined above, generality. As with art, there seems to be some slippage, and particularly in theoretical deployments, the term can denote the conceptual.

[ ]