MachineMachine /stream - tagged with aesthetics http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com The Web Browser As Aesthetic Framework: Why Digital Art Today Looks Different http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/digart-the-web-browser-as-aesthetic-framework-why-digital-art-today-looks-different Collective cultural memory is the foundation on which the significance of a creative practice stands. As summarized in Emerson Rosenthal’s post for #DIGART week, online collections and exhibition spaces have been around since the pre-web BBS years—artists have been online since day one, and this is not to even begin to mention the computer-based creative practices that date back to the mid-20th Century. Then why, in the face of this history, do web-based creative practices (and so too, markets) seem to suffer from a case of eternal amnesia or perpetual newness? In this post for #DIGART week, I propose that… ]]> Tue, 08 May 2012 14:14:43 -0700 http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/digart-the-web-browser-as-aesthetic-framework-why-digital-art-today-looks-different The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838//the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder-ian-bogost-technology-the-atlantic The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder : http://t.co/ZyPWq121 by @ibogost ]]> Sat, 14 Apr 2012 08:21:55 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838//the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder-ian-bogost-technology-the-atlantic The Making of The Rings of Saturn http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-making-of-the-rings-of-saturn/the-making-of-the-rings-of-saturn-quarterly-conversation “These fragments I have shored against my ruins." : The Making of The Rings of Saturn - http://t.co/WLH0et0j ]]> Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:02:37 -0700 http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-making-of-the-rings-of-saturn/the-making-of-the-rings-of-saturn-quarterly-conversation What is the Folk Web? http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/212132 I'm looking for 'Folk' Web Cultures. I am thinking of the recent take-down of Geocities, which seemed to refresh people's love of the naff, kitsch aesthetic it was famous for, as a prime example. What are some other folk cultures still lingering in the dark corners of the web? I use the term 'Folk' in the sense it is used to denote 'common people' cultures, including art, music, dance, songs and stories. The artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane collated a Folk Archive for the British Council a few years ago, it really gets to the… ]]> Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:41:30 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/212132 Next What? http://jadecricket.tumblr.com/post/20446707813/next-what-nextnature-net/jadecricket-next-what-nextnaturenet Next What? « http://t.co/OgnSQIf0 - Technology is never a neutral tool. It is rather a socio-cultural dimension,... http://t.co/nZ73f2eu – quin aaron shakra (jadecricket) http://twitter.com/jadecricket/status/187368761806958592 ]]> Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:42:59 -0700 http://jadecricket.tumblr.com/post/20446707813/next-what-nextnature-net/jadecricket-next-what-nextnaturenet Cory Arcangel Goes Old School http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/webbed-outcory-arcangel-goes-old-school Arcangel’s conflicted relationship  with technology drives his artistic practice and pervades Pro Tools, the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At 33, Arcangel will be the youngest artist ever to receive an entire floor for new work. The exhibition features product demonstrations of mostly outdated technologies Ataris, Commodores, Pen Plotter Printers, to express suspicions about contemporary digital culture. The show is conspicuously absent of the Internet, ironic given Arcangel’s prolific body of web-art: no YouTube mash-ups of Lolcats playing Schoenberg, or digitally altered photographs morphing Paris Hilton into Macaulay Culkin and vice versa, or browser-based… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:11:05 -0700 http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/webbed-outcory-arcangel-goes-old-school GlitchBot http://bitsynthesis.com/glitchbot/ GlitchBot is an automated glitch creation / distribution program and persona.
GlitchBot maintains an active presence on flickr, including a profile and photostream, with new images created and uploaded daily.
GlitchBot is not an interactive program. GlitchBot works alone on a fixed schedule, creating a single new glitched image every day and presenting it to the world via the GlitchBot flickr page (see above links) and slideshow (see below).
GlitchBot creates its images by glitching source images pulled from other flickr users' photostreams. Only source images with an appropriate Creative Commons license are used. In order to… ]]> Mon, 30 May 2011 02:17:52 -0700 http://bitsynthesis.com/glitchbot/ We are as gods and have to get good at it http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate… ]]> Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:27:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html Post-Digital Aesthetics and the return to Modernism http://ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html What is it that constitutes (a) post-digital art, and how can it be thought in terms of aesthetic theory – or even post-aesthetic theory?

In one sense, post-digital(1) refers to works that reject the hype of the so-called digital revolution.  The familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches and artefacts.  And in another sense (as in the term post-modernism) it refers to the continuation or completion of that trajectory.  Post-digital music incudes a number of sub-genres: glitch, clicks & cuts, microsound, headphonics, etc.  All are,… ]]> Sun, 27 Feb 2011 05:57:48 -0700 http://ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html Silver http://vimeo.com/18873391/silver

Silver

Cast: Daniel Rourke

]]> Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:45:43 -0700 http://vimeo.com/18873391/silver In Defense of the Poor Image http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94 by Hito Steyerl

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The… ]]> Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:27:00 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94 On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth http://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatic-truth/ This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Dark­ness” on the fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]
*

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.

—Blaise Pascal

The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by… ]]> Sun, 17 Oct 2010 14:33:00 -0700 http://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatic-truth/ Pink Dot http://vimeo.com/15873210/pink-dot

Pink Dot

Cast: Daniel Rourke

]]> Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:09:08 -0700 http://vimeo.com/15873210/pink-dot Cave Painting: Videogames as Art http://nplusonemag.com/cave-painting Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema. The second is to do with this sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose.” And both points are right. The best games do look great, and we do have a lot… ]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:29:00 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/cave-painting "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" by Jacques Rancière http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=53 We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the most apparently unreasonable of positions: the first virtue of the master is that of ignorance. My book tells the history of a professor, Joseph Jacoto, who created a scandal in the Holland and France of the 1830s by proclaiming that uneducated people could learn on their own without a master to explain things to them, and that masters, on their side, could teach the things they themselves did not know.… ]]> Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:48:00 -0700 http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=53 The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism, By Jonathan Lethem (Harper's Magazine) http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Transitzone/ Against an Aesthetics of Noise http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt to address what I see as the fundamental issue facing contemporary philosophy: how does human experience fit into the world described by science? Contemporary philosophers can be sorted into two basic camps: in the first, there are those who want to explain science in terms of human experience; in the second, there are those who want to explain human experience in terms of science. The former argue that science… ]]> Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:38:00 -0700 http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html Beauty, Art, and Darwin http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/beauty-art-and-darwin It is possible that we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. Where did that resistance come from? Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a nice view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750, and a scene like that on his homepage. In contrast, judging from Denis Dutton’s Darwinian The Art Instinct, a congenial vista for that author might be Ethiopia’s Omo Valley circa 1,000,000 BC. Yet in spite of these differences I expect that across a wide range of cultural artefacts and activities both their… ]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:37:00 -0700 http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/beauty-art-and-darwin Who’s afraid of the avant-garde? http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/10/whos-afraid-of-the-avant-garde/ There's a reason why we find it easier to "get" modern art than avant-garde music, and it's not just about our natural conservatism and love of Mozart... Arts & books Who’s afraid of the avant-garde? Philip Ball 21st October 2009 — Issue 164 Free entry There's a reason why we find it easier to "get" modern art than avant-garde music, and it's not just about our natural conservatism and love of Mozart Looking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen By David Stubbs (Zero Books, £9.99) The writer… ]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:53:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/10/whos-afraid-of-the-avant-garde/ The Art-Work of the Future http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm AS Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man. When Nature had developed in herself those attributes which included the conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously evolved. In like manner, as soon as human life had engendered from itself the conditions for the manifestment of Art-work, this too stepped self-begotten into life. Nature engenders her myriad forms without caprice or arbitrary aim ("absichtlos und unwillkürlich"), according to her need ("Bedürfniss"), and therefore of Necessity ("Nothwendigkeit"). This same Necessity is the generative and formative force of human life. Only that which is un-capricious and un-arbitrary can spring… ]]> Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:37:00 -0700 http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm