Hi List & Randall,
Good point but Tinguely built the piece which was a series of Rube Golberg actions mixed with his aesthetics and artist point of view. Would the machine build itself and then destroy itself?
There’s also a toy that’s a black box with a lever on top. You flip the lever and the box rattles around and eventually a lid pops up with a miniature hand that pushes the lever off.
It’s a joke. Did the machine come up with that joke on it’s own? Obviously note. What differentiates a joke from a work of art? What differentiates a practical bit of code from a political statement or an artwork or a joke?
So to answer the question posed before Does a performance need an audience (well yes if the meaning of the work is to be interpreted correctly). Code either functions or it doesn’t. Good code can be defined on the least amount of calculations or steps to accomplish a task. Maybe an artist has a reason for creating inelegant code on the one hand or totally refined code on the other. This may set up a bracket for the aesthetics of code but the appreciation and interpretation of the code( is it crude, complicated or elegant) can only be done by the creator and the viewer. If for some reason you have a machine that can write code to accomplish a task, it still takes a person to judge it’s aesthetic value.
On Mar 17, 2014, at 11:50 AM, Randall Packer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I would just like to add to our discussion of non-human, performative
> machines: Jean Tinguely¹s self-destructing sculpture, Homage to New York.
> I am sure most of you know this work, which was a collaboration with the
> Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver in the spring of 1960, executed at the
> Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden.
G.H. Hovagimyan
http://nujus.net/~gh
http://nujus.net/~nublog
http://artistsmeeting.org
|