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The Performance Art/ Technology
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The Performance Art / Technology

On this page:  {Intro}
               {Basic}
               {The Two Cultures}
 
               {stuff}




Intro

The idea of merging the Arts and Technology (at least as i have been
trained to understand it) takes into account the ideas that originated
from the investigation as to what the various creative differeneces
are in the scientific and artistic endeavors. 

The physicist/author Lilian Lieber (who studied with Albert Einstein)
wrote several books for explaining scinece to the lay public. Chief
among these was her "The Educuation of T.C. Mits" - where "T.C. Mits"
is in fact "The Celebrated Man In The Street" - of everyman, everywoman,
everynether, everychild, everydolphin, etc.

She had the idea of a unified approach to science and art in what she
called "SAM": Science, Art, Maths. A triad that she unified by using
a model of the platonic regular solids and different levels of
abstraction. Part of this succes was not just her brilliance as a
physicist, but i would like to think the fact that she was married 
to Hugh Lieber who was an abstract artist.

If there was ever a person (other than in classical times; eg, 
DaVinci, Goethe, etc - when it was not only possible but desirable
to learn all about our world) that embodied the Aristotelian unities
of mind and body it was certainly that grand old lady of physics.
I feel (as i do often with certain authors) as if i knew her personally
(other than Asimov), i never had the opportunity to correspond with
any of "the great writers" - that is the people who actually create
ideas. That has always been much of my world, as i have often said,
"If in the mind you dewell, there-in you will find a world."

Regardless, but what ever odd quirks of fate and such, i find myself
once again on the same path that i started on many, many years ago
-- but, this time "on the other side of the fence"; ie, an artist
rather than a scientist, a poet rather than a scholar. And yet oddly
enough (mostly due to the pressures of being raised during the
"cold war") that was what i strived most for: Recognition, Genius,
The Great Discovery, The Nobel Prize, and such. Of course, all of
that time (and still), i simply lack the hardware to do it - the
old 3-pound comptuer access port (CAP) is rated at an IQ of 142
which is pleasing numerically, but just frustratingly dull enough
to keep many things that i can *almost* understand out of my
reach, and of course the "great discoveries" will never come.

But, on i go: Tryng  - in what the philosopher/writer Jean-Paul Sartre
called "in good faith" - to understand and bring some new ideas to
the thing called liff.

 

 
Basic Concepts

From one POV (point of view) the two methods of approaching
things from the art and the technological (rational/emotional,
right-/left-brain, etc) seem frought with problems and indeed 
they are. 

In one sense, the mathematical approach tends to lead to only
one possible answer for a given problem - or at the very least,
a definite set of answers with the confines of the problem. In
the artistic sense the number of possible answers are literally
infinite. Thus, the dynamics of not only what approaches to take
to solve a problem - but the very nature of the problems to "solve"
are radically different. 

Let's look at something like the texture to be created in a video
game or a V/R (vitual/reality) environment for a rock or something.
Now on the one hand the "look and feel" of the game is pretty much
everything. So, a rock that doesn't look like a rock - or worse yet
it looks *exactly* the rock in Scene 23. From an art point of view,
we know hot to make rocks look the same or different. If we needed
exactly the same rocks we'd make a cast moulding of one rock and
then mass produce them - pretty much the old "allographic" problem
in printmaking. Of coures only the original rock is the "autographic"
one.

Now, this is important since this is exactly one of the problems 
that DOESN'T occur in the TECH world. 

That is: The way that the same object (a rock, a grain of rice 
on a stalk, even a picture of Marylin Monroe) are presented and
whether they are the same or not has a different aesthetic value
in the two domains.

If an artist works for several months to create as many rice stalks
as possible for a "field of rice" display then *ideeally* all of the
grains of rice WOULD be identical. In some cases, the artist might
choose to purchase two or three hundred objects of identical form.
But, in the case of the TECH world, we all know the real world is
non-uniform or repetitive (for the most part) and as such, each of
the "rocks" should be different and hence more real. 

The art work depends on the fact that it is installed into a gallery
and thus, can in no way be real and the fact that the rice stalks
are all but identical is NOT the point. But, in the immersive world
of V/R the fact that things are not arranged into patterns IS the
point. 

This problem is similar to the problem of painting vs photography.
As the printmaker/photographer Karen Davenport who has said:

   In painting, you start with nothing and have to add
   everythig. In photography, you start with everything 
   and have to take away everything.

That is the two directions (and indeed the two starting points)
are at odds with each other. 




      

The Two Cultures


The Conflicts



  -[Discourse from UH.edu]-

   -[Science Policy colorado.edu]-


  In 1988, Alan Sokal et al published papers as part of a hoax
  to illustrate how poorly edited/reviewed humanities journals
  were - thus, re-opening the old wound of "us vs. them" in
  the sciences vs the humanities.
    -[Humaniteis hoax by Alan Sokal]-


  Mish mash links...

   http://aussiethule.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html