Very Angry Birds

Hacktivism at it's best. It just really cracks me up to see "artists" hack into our pop culture.

A Cultural Phenom!

What was that again about people leaving the planet's most vociferous social institution!

Not What Bush Envisioned!

Vannevar Bush in his essay couldn't have predicted how people would use this new tool that is capable of sharing all of mans collected knowledge. Cyber bullying and related harmful uses weren't even noted. Such a powerful tool and look at the ways we use it.

Vannevar Bush - As We May Think

I hadn’t heard of Vannevar Bush before taking the introductory Atlas course here at CU. I quickly learned that he was the big cheese in R&D for the military as well as the founder of Ratheon. His memex microfilm viewer quite possibly could be considered the genesis for the World Wide Web. I think he would be astounded at the way the internet has responded to his call for sharing of information. Even by the time of his death in 1974 they couldn’t have guessed that it would become so much a part of how we live that few can remember going without it. In the same manner that Bush asked “of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence” maybe we should be asking what we should be doing with the internet. He would probably roll over in his grave if he knew how deeply social media has burrowed into the fabric of our society. The serious question today is the issue of how connected but disconnected we are. Applications are coming and going at such a rapid pace today that they are obsolete in a matter of months. Instant messaging has almost replaced email (let alone a phone conversation) as our primary mode of communication and family albums can be stored in our phones. Bush talks about the economics of the situation and well, I think we have crossed that threshold where we can afford to develop any certain technology we want to. I still can’t understand why we are dragging our feet on clean energy solutions - but that is a political thing I believe. “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Yes it has Vannevar but do we really need all these “cheap” devices. What a great essay though, kind of Treky even, the way Bush describes the future. I just love the way, he is describing modern day digital photography; “often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.” And so funny to hear him describe our modern supermarket transaction all the way down to minute details like the magnetic strip on the back of our debit or credit card with a point-of-sale merchant. What a delight to hear him ramble on about our futuristic “work station”, where I am at this moment speaking, yes voice recognition software, into my personal computer and creating one of his “threads” while I am at it. The personal computer even has its own acronym which a military man such as he could appreciate. He talks about systems of indexing which uncannily suggest web pages. The collective knowledge he speaks about can be accessed in a matter of nano-seconds and the threads he mentions are being mathematically hypothesized by search engine algorithms that know what you are looking for two letters into your search. In his paper he basically defines every little detail about our digital culture today. Another very important question here concerns the ethics of online interactivity. With all this sharing of all this collective knowledge it begs the question who has gained the upper hand. We are starting to sound like the Borg from Star Trek. What is this doing to our individuality? With the advent of Life 2.0, people are living fuller lives online than off. Mr. Bush couldn’t have possibly known the side effects of all this technology when he wrote of “his excursion being more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important (Pg. 19).” We have already seen this in the web's ability to both facilitate and destroy human relationships. Where do we go from here?

Walter Benjamin

In response to Walter Benjamin's essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” I felt like I had to wade through a lot of philosophical ramblings to discover his point or as Susan Sonntag pointed out; he had a "freeze-frame baroque" style of writing and cogitation which was difficult. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct". Although the essay was a bit hard for me to decipher at times, Benjamin, being the philosopher that he was, made some interesting observations in regards to art works having a soul (or “aura” as he called it) of their own. His reasoning that “the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual”, Part IV) tells us a lot about how far we've come in today's digital realm. Not as far as we might think! As I am writing this and staring at a computer screen (ritual?), I am not feeling any sense of aura as I see this blog post materialize before my eyes, not to say that it's a piece of fine art. But if I add my own text, design and pictures to my blog post does it then develop a sense of aura, uniqueness and originality for the author, or has it moved toward a piece being produced or designed for the soul purpose of reproducibility and therefore lost its aura? We have new rituals now…think texting and imaginary farms or PS/2 (or whatever version). That old tired argument is as fresh now as it was when Benjamin wrote this essay; what makes this piece original, what is unique about that one, why did the artist do it that way? Terry Barrett reminds us in his book “Why Is That Art”, defining art is a major enterprise in aesthetics, historically and recently. I believe that our sensibilities have changed but deep down our idea of aesthetics hasn’t. That’s to say that we constantly have to define what art “is” before we can determine if the impact of mechanical reproduction or technology even matters. Take the Shredder for example; there is to some degree an aesthetic to the work and we can’t deny its originality. This is a piece that embodies technology yet is still a work of “art” BECAUSE of mechanical reproduction not in spite of it. All this talk of originality and authenticity got me to thinking about the commercials I see on television where they provide you with a “certificate of authenticity” on something they're trying to sell you - whether it's a copy or not. In Walter Benjamin's time we can be sure that there weren't as many copies as there are today but the original will always be the original (no matter then or now) and will always have its own innate value no matter how many copies of it are made. How does that translate in today's culture of limitless copies of just about anything? Does the original even matter anymore? Like he said its pointless to ask for the authentic print of a photo negative. On page 9 the author writes, “With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones”. In the previous sentence you can easily replace the word readers with subjects and the word writers with photographers to represent today's visual culture. With everyone and their brother and sister being picture takers these days where does art fit in the conversation? In Donald Kuspit’s book “The End of Art”, Kuspit writes that “works of art no longer have any important human use: they will no longer further personal autonomy and critical freedom. A commodity identity has overtaken aesthetic identity and they have become everyday artifacts. Almost a century apart these two authors basically agree, Benjamin talking about film and a mobilizing of the masses by distraction and therefore forming a habit; think texting again. Regardless of whether a piece of art is unique, original, authentic or seems to have some type of “aura”, technology continues to move us in directions we can't even fathom and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Benjamin mentioned that our sensibilities change with the times and it's just human nature to look backward. The sudden interest in outdated photography processes leads me to believe that the discussion will keep coming around every time a new technology takes hold.

What is Net Art?

http://www.artnews.com/2013/06/12/the-new-world-of-net-art/ And we thought a game called Truth or Dare was risque in my day. On the subject of art, the lines continue to blur in today's digital culture and "Dorm Daze" is a prime example of shredding the boundaries of what we call art and a small glimpse of how it may be viewed in the future.