http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://monoskop.org/log/?p=4169 To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture. ]]> Wed, 23 May 2012 09:46:17 -0700 http://monoskop.org/log/?p=4169 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 http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/on-the-origins-of-the-arts RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small. Our vision is limited to a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wave frequencies in their fullness range from gamma radiation at the upper end, downward to the ultralow frequency used in some specialized forms of communication. We see only a tiny bit in the middle of the whole, which we refer to as the “visual spectrum.” Our optical apparatus… ]]> Sat, 21 Apr 2012 05:37:47 -0700 http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/on-the-origins-of-the-arts http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski “When I first started on this project, I thought it would become a public art piece,” Marclay said. “I thought, What a great thing, to be in a train station waiting for a train and being able to watch a movie. It would inform you what time it was, and at the same time entertain you. But I realized it was impossible—there’s lighting issues, sound issues, you have to hear the public-address system. And Grand Central, for example, closes for a few hours, late at night, when they clean up the place. Then there’s the occasional nudity and swearing. How… ]]> Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:30:56 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/05/notes-letters-music-modernism-self The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the securely comfortable end of the emotional spectrum we have those zeniths of song, the German lieder tradition, and high opera. In the best examples of both forms words and music appear utterly and indissolubly comingled. However, at the other end of this spectrum we have those kinds of music that attempt to be literary – so-called programme music – and those forms of literature that attempt, either through descriptive representation… ]]> Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:54:22 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/05/notes-letters-music-modernism-self http://t.co/e75AE1R/learnunlearnrelearn-the-internet-makes-it-hard-to-concentrate-good-distraction-sparks-innovation-amp-creativity-httptcoe75ae1r-x Learn/Unlearn/Relearn. The #internet makes it hard to concentrate. Good. #Distraction sparks innovation & creativity http://t.co/e75AE1R #x ]]> Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:03:29 -0700 http://t.co/e75AE1R/learnunlearnrelearn-the-internet-makes-it-hard-to-concentrate-good-distraction-sparks-innovation-amp-creativity-httptcoe75ae1r-x http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/dont-follow-twitter-art/Content?oid=2145066 Twitter art bums me out. Fine, it’s a new medium that we don’t know what to do with yet, but it's receiving a growing amount of attention and most of it is bad. Between Creative Time’s Twitter artwork commissions and a recent ARTnews feature on social media, there’s enough conversation on the subject to start the complaining. Let me lead the way.

I’ll begin with painter and veteran online news maverick Joy Garnett’s self-described social-media performance #LostLibrary. In spirit, the concept is generous: each day Garnett gives followers a chance to pick up a curated selection of… ]]> Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:23:19 -0700 http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/dont-follow-twitter-art/Content?oid=2145066 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when their circulation is grounded on an imprecision inherent in language. The connotative meaning of a word, if I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, can diverge greatly from what are often contradictory origins, allowing ideology to reify itself on a lexical level. Let’s examine the word science itself. It derives both from the Latin, scientia, “to know”—but also from the Greek, scienzia, “to split, rend or cleave.” That art… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:13:52 -0700 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 http://guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age Dusty vinyl records, vintage film cameras, rickety typewriters and antiquated recording equipment … these are the creative tools being used by some emerging artists. Pure nostalgia? Or a laudable refusal to escape the speed and sanitised perfection of contemporary digital culture? ]]> Sun, 24 Apr 2011 06:39:12 -0700 http://guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age http://www.npr.org/2011/04/08/135241869/connecting-science-and-art?sc=emaf Science and art often seem to develop in separate silos, but many thinkers are inspired by both. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, filmmaker Werner Herzog and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog's new film on the earliest known cave paintings. ]]> Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:31:07 -0700 http://www.npr.org/2011/04/08/135241869/connecting-science-and-art?sc=emaf http://www.flickr.com/photos/24140210@N05/sets/72157607329841191/with/4295713286/ The pairs of images in this "Similarities" set are similar visually in one way or another. They are presented without judgement as to the motives of their creators. The viewers of the pieces can form their own opinion(s) about what they see.

Some are "accidents": The creator of the similar piece had no knowledge of the original. Examples would be the 1982 Rafal Olbinski / New Pornographers posters and the Idea magazine cover / Okkervil River poster.

Some are "re-contextualized": Obscure imagery from long forgotten sources was used from vintage printed ephemera like 1940s… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:28:57 -0700 http://www.flickr.com/photos/24140210@N05/sets/72157607329841191/with/4295713286/ 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 http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2010/12/the-novel-is-not-under-threat-from-technology/ One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted.]]> Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:34:33 -0700 http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2010/12/the-novel-is-not-under-threat-from-technology/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/reclaiming-the-imagination/ Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome, it follows that you can’t remember being one — but you can still let your imagination rip. With a bit of effort one can even imagine the impossible, such as discovering that Dick Cheney and Madonna are really the same person. It sounds like a platitude that fiction is the realm of imagination, fact the realm of knowledge.

Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine… ]]> Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:12:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/reclaiming-the-imagination/ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:49:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:53:00 -0700 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.
plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:01:00 -0700 http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ 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 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/avatar-and-the-flight-from-reality In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s studio where, ultimately, he creates a clockwork butterfly in every way indistinguishable from a real butterfly except in its being even more beautiful. Although most of the story is about how misunderstood this nerdy clockmaker is, Hawthorne’s deeper concern is the fundamental mistake of supposing that the idea of artistic creation is not just to create something that is like reality but rather something that amounts to a new reality,… ]]> Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:55:00 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/avatar-and-the-flight-from-reality http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/ Along with his work on synthesis, or using machines to create sounds, Cope had dabbled in the use of software to compose music. Inspired by the field of artificial intelligence, he thought there might be a way to create a virtual David Cope software to create new pieces in his style.

The effort fit into a long tradition of what would come to be called algorithmic composition. Algorithmic composers use a list of instructions — as opposed to sheer inspiration — to create their works. During the 18th century, Joseph Haydn and others created scores for a… ]]> Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/