hi again

I believe many artists (or some, at least) nowdays issue
instructions to others on how to contrust their works of
art. In many cases the artist is not present as the work
is built from its parts, and the work can tour from gallery
to gallery.

This practice is entirely analagous to art (or anything else)
represented on a computer. Specifically in the case of digital
images, the computer system (which includes peripheral devices such
as a printer) follows a set of instructions that turns
numbers into a picture.

Now, if instructing other people yields Art, why should instructing
a machine not also be Art? Be careful in answering this, for it
raises many philispohical issue regarding Artifical Intelligence,
wherein it is quite possible to regard people as machines of amazing
sophisitication - and, I suppose, we would want to take a consisent
view of the world around us.

Actually, there are many other ways to represent images on a
computer besides a table of numbers in which each entry denotes
a spot of some colour. I fact, it may even be possible to submit
more-or-less the same set of instructions to a computer and to human
such that the same artefact is produced.  Indeed, if we think of people as
very special machines, this is trivially true. But more usually the
instructions to human and machine-that-everyone-agrees-is-a-machine
could be surpisingly close.

I conclude that chasing groundlessness in terms of digital images is to
chase a red herring. Groundlessness, it seems, is much conceptual.

Groundlessness could be much closer to the
Plato's notion of the "horseness" of a horse: which is that property
of all horses that enable us to recognise them as such.

Plato could be wrong, there maybe no specific property of horses that make
them so, rather horses are horses because they are not cows, or cars or
table-lamps etc.

Groundlessness could mean either of these, and concievbly it could be both
at once. But I doubt it depends on computers.

Peter



> hi folks,
>
> hi mark,
>
> maybee one of the central problems of digital art is the fact that the
> product is
> entirly "virtual". there can be no original and as you rightly say any
> hard copy is
> merely a print... tho this is also problematic as any print you care to
> make is a
> copy of an original that does not actualy exist..
>
> so in accepting digital art as fine art we first have to accept that the
> notion that
> originality is no longer a a neccisary component of art perhaps .... or we
> go back to
> jean baudrillard and ask him if he has a fifth degree of simulacra in mind
> to help us
> see what is comming next=)
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