Not sure why, but nomatter what the topic of this thread turns to be
each time, it is always so interesting!
Re Insecurity I just agree w/ every word Simon wrote & leave it at
that (I am in the Danish countryside myself and see the same here : )

But re the USB port in one's brain that would allow one to print or
save the steps that one goes through before arriving to a certain point ,a few
thoughts come to mind. First, how interesting a metaphore! Digitalis is
really a new enviroment/whole new world in a fuller sense every day. "I was so tired
that my mind went into screen saver all the time", or "I can't remember at all what you are saying - it's like the entire file has been deleted", and so on, are metaphores we keep adding to our language - articulate metaphores that make us understood in a very exact way, like wild nature metaphores used to do. Now, a metaphore like "the small white houses on the side of a hill looked like a heard of sheep" or anything of that nature , tells nothing to urban animal me. I find this to be a growingly interesting phenomenon. We actually , through such metaphores, try to explain or undertand (our) nature through the digital world rather than the other way round. And it would be so interesting if we did have some of the possibilities a computer has, like those Peter mentioned - would help us to undertand ourself or our process even better. Any of the writers have any thoughts about this?

I think that the white square on white canvas, or Dushamp's work or anything that one did not physically sweat over, does include craft: the craft of seeing, if not the craft of doing. As a stage director, i can tell you that it takes a lot of physical sweat and a lot of doing in order to sharpen your view of things, your aesthetics. And the result of the Fountain, let's say does not look like a joke to me (when he suggested it for the exhibition he  was co-curating, the rest of the commitee thought it was, and a bad one indeed), but like a revelation. He offered to the world a new way to look at things, he opened up a door and some new, free breeze came from the crack. In other words, it is never easy to make art.

There was an article a few months ago on New York Times about a new software that can write short stories and novels. The article quoted a few paragraphs of a computer generated story and it was good, well written, kind of interesting i guess. I would not say it was " excellent art" though, nor do i believe that it will ever be. And I agree with Mille that it can never be "as satisfying to viewers as art made by a person" Not sure if it because of the effort that is missing - to me, it is because a computer can create based uopn comands, programming, which is inevitably based on what has alreday been written/done/said & is widely considered to be successful. OK, real people do the same as well, but no white square on white camvas or Fountain could have ever been thought by a computer. Simply because such works change the rules of the game, expand thinking, turn it all around and thus make us feel alive. Imagine one of Joyce's texts, or Beckett's even, written by a pc - impossible. A well-written novel or a mediocre poem about love or whatever that has been done millions of times and rarely exeptionally, yes, could be produced by a computer just as well. But what is the point? In fact, maybe this is exactly the point!  Let's leave the boring reproducing of what has been said a thousand times to some software, let's free the hands of all those who write to satisfy the slow evenings of retired people on the beach and occupy them with some more exciting writting. 

 eugenia 


-- 
"And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been
created to teach us that first of all."
             -- Antonin Artaud, "No More Masterpieces," 1938.

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