Re: Lev on the embarressment of digital art
>From a private chat thread of 30 young artists, writers, researchers.. In response to Levs post, first added to the chat with the comment: I think Lev is having an existential crisis Person A: I see real people, not ideas and meaningless sounds of yet another electronic music performance, or yet another meaningless outputs of a neural network invented by brilliant scientists and badly misused by artists. B: i wonder why he has the need to generalize so much. no wonder he feels sadness, if he is unable to spot human issues in digital art. the obsoelcense of technologies is in itself an extremely exciting fact that is intertwined with humanities drive to self-enhance. and i totally dont think video art from the eighties looks terrible, and has lost its merit and emotional and intellectual appeal. but that works that are medium specific and that have been preserved can even serve as a way to understand better our current relationship to our soon to be obsolete prostheses and technologies. especially the works of women like vali export yvonne rainer Lynn hershman leeson etc. .aybe i dont get his point about obsolencense..? technologies become obsolete in which way? economically, yes! but obsolete in terms of generating insight, meaning, or lending itself to be misused and experimented with, no! https://youtu.be/BUgSJt7Q7gw great album created with obsolete systems C: I agree with some of his sentiment, particularly when going to digital arts festivals today. However I dont get his lamentation about not being accepted into the art world. The potential of media arts was always that it could bypass much of the art industry and its traditional apparatus of institutions and financial models. Although it has been a double edged sword, since funding is largely by the tech industry / advertising / corporate culture, so much of its core values have become indistinguishable from those industries. That being said, it is probably more of a recent phenomena. When I look at works of Nam June Paik and Lynn Hershman Leeson I still feel extremely inspired. This could easily just be a rant about bad art in general! I like his bravery to speak from the heart. That is quite refreshing. And quite frankly who isnt having an existentialist crisis right now. B: tru 藍 C: Lol yeah, coming from the heart perhaps with a good dose of rumination. D: I mean algorythms which are less predictable than Lev Attention Junkie Manovich are written every day, but I think if you approach the critique from a perspective of Most digital-super-newbigthing art is all about form and theres not any real discourse / something at all apart from oh-impressive-oh-suchatimetobealive-oh-beautiful-oh Id probably buy it E:I find this particular passage Its almost never about our real everyday life and our humanity. Feelings. Passions. Looking at the world. Looking inside yourself. Falling in love. Breaking up. Questioning yourself. Searching for love, meaning, less alienated life. particularly puzzling that someone who spent so much of his life looking at and thinking about technology and suddenly forgetting, in this moment of art-doubt and self-questioning, that humans and technology have always been intertwined, one being an extension of the other (whether technology of humans, or the other way around). What is human? What is it about technology that is not *of human*? Reminds me of this idea of us humans so anxious about the edge between human and non-human world being not defined, and using design (and technology) to make this border more palpable And then something inside (little grown-up Lev) crying out and protesting, and him falling over himself. But agree with C, most likely it is simply indigestion from too much mediocre art, digital or not, and hence ruminating. F: I do think there is a lot of media art that is mostly about tinkering w new technologies, so the creative element of it is that its taking a new technology and using it for a not immediately utilitarian purpose, which makes it fall under the category of art, but which potentially loses its power once those technologies become more integrated into other things. I think theres totally a place for this type of exploration but maybe yes some of the ars electronic type work might skip out on some of the feelings of core truth that makes art resonate and hold its meaning for longer G: I also cant help thinking about Levs perspective when he gave that lecture on AI aesthetics. How he kept mentioning he comes from science background. While he may have looked at new media art for a long time he might have very narrow scope of what hes looking at in new media art now. Also new media art for new media arts sake feels (like any other media) falls a little flat. You could use his same argument about any other art laking the human as a reason for not making it into museums , collections. I agree that a lot of new media does lack
Re: Lev on the embarressment of digital art
After my first visit to Riga in 1999 I mentioned to my aunt that we went
to the Jugendstil quarter that Mikhail Eisenstein, father of Sergei
Eisenstein, built there.
She told me that this was considered a quaint and dated part of the city
because of the "old-fashioned architecture" when she moved there with
her husband in 1930.
One person´s dump is another person´s El Dorado. Except that in the case
of the internet not much of the old El Dorado is left...
How Netflix is any better than any of that is beyond me.
Yours,
Tilman
PS:
Maybe a good occasion to remind the world of the fact that all the Flash
stuff will be history by the end of the year.
What will happen to
http://www.mustafas.de
Am 17.09.2020 um 09:37 schrieb Geert Lovink:
URL or not but this is too good, and too important for nettimers, not
to read and discuss. These very personal and relevant observations
come from a public Facebook page and have been written by Lev Manovich
(who is “feeling thoughtful” as the page indicates).
—
https://m.facebook.com/668367315/posts/10159683846717316/?extid=fWYl63KjbcA3uqqm=n
My anti-digital art manifesto / What do we feel when we look at the
previous generations of electronic and computer technologies? 1940s TV
sets, 1960s mainframes, 1980s PCs, 1990s versions of Windows, or 2000s
mobile phones? I feel "embarrassed. "Awkward." Almost "shameful."
"Sad." And this is exactly the same feelings I have looking at 99% of
digital art/computer art / new media art/media art created in previous
decades. And I will feel the same when looking at the most
cutting-edge art done today ("AI art," etc.) 5 years from now.
If consumer products have "planned obsolescence," digital art created
with the "latest" technology has its own "built-in obsolescence." //
These feelings of sadness, disappointment,remorse, and embarrassment
have been provoked especially this week as I am watching Ars
Electronica programs every day. I start wondering - did I waste my
whole life in the wrong field? It is very exciting to be at the
"cutting edge", but the price you pay is heavy. After 30 years in this
field, there are very few artworks I can show to my students without
feeling embarrassed. While I remember why there were so important to
us at the moment they were made, their low-resolution visuals and
broken links can't inspire students. //
The same is often true for the "content" of digital art. It's about
"issues," "impact of X on Y", "critique of A", "a parody of B",
"community of C" and so on. //
It's almost never about our real everyday life and our humanity.
Feelings. Passions. Looking at the world. Looking inside yourself.
Falling in love. Breaking up. Questioning yourself. Searching for
love, meaning, less alienated life.//
After I watch Ars Electronica streams, I go to Netflix or switch on
the TV, and it feels like fresh air. I see very well made films and TV
series. Perfectly lighted, color graded, art directed.
I see real people, not "ideas" and meaningless sounds of yet another
"electronic music" performance, or yet another meaningless outputs of
a neural network invented by brilliant scientists and badly misused by
"artists."
New media art never deals with human life, and this is why it does not
enter museums. It's our fault. Don't blame curators or the "art
world." Digital art is "anti-human art," and this is why it does not
stay in history. //
P.S. As always, I exaggerated a bit my point to provoke discussion -
but not that much. This post does reflect my real feelings. Of course,
some of these issues are complex - but after 30 years in the field, I
really do wonder what it was all about)
P.P.S.
The mystery of why some technology (and art made with them) has
obsolescence and others do not - thinking about this for 25 years. We
are fascinated by 19th-century photographs or 1960s ones. They look
beautiful, rich, full of emotions, and meanings. But video art from
the 1980s-1990s looks simply terrible, you want to run away and forget
that you ever saw this. Why first Apple computers look cool, cute,
engaged? But art created on them does not? And so on. I still have not
solved this question.
Perhaps part of this has to be with the message that goes along with
lots of tech art from the 1960s to today - and especially today. 19th
or 20th-century photographs done by professional photographs or good
amateurs do not come with utopian, pretentious, exaggerated,
unrealistic, and hypocritical statements, the way lots of "progressive
art" does today. Nor do their titles announce all latest tech
processes used to create these photographs.
Ars Electronica 2020:
https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/
Re: Lev on the embarressment of digital art
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Re: WTF happened In 1971?
Yes, far more interesting would be confirmed stats like that for China, for the last 4,000 years ... jh On 18/Sep/20 00:20, lizvlx wrote: Based on the page content everything is always USA. This graph is not valid in other places and we should stop referring to the USA at all times. It is boring, 20th century and produces false conclusions. Liz -- +++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD subscribe to the neoscenes blog:: http://neoscenes.net/blog/87903-subscribe-to-neoscenes +++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: WTF happened In 1971?
Based on the page content everything is always USA. This graph is not valid in other places and we should stop referring to the USA at all times. It is boring, 20th century and produces false conclusions. Liz > On 17.09.2020, at 21:28, José María Mateos wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 06:13:30PM -0400, tbyfield wrote: >> As a rule, we discourage bare URLs on nettime, but with this one there's no >> other way: >> >> https://wtfhappenedin1971.com > > Based on the page contents, what happened is that there was no Bitcoin. > Also, they live in the same month over and over (their "Book of the > month" recommendation in their newsletter is always "The Road to > Serfdom", by our favourite psycho Mr. Hayek). > > Cheers, > > -- > José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
