Hi Bill (and all),
Following Vanevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart, machines augment human thinking. CONTRARY TO Licklider or Kurzweil, machines don't "benefit" from our "coupling" with them.
Artists who subscribe to the latter view wind up making a lot of tech-centric art imbuing "the machine" with all sorts of anthropomorphic wish-fulfillment that's not actually there in the system. So then this kind of artistic approach is really more like theater and less like performance art. It's staged; it makes claims for things that are happening which aren't really happening; it presumes a sci-fi AI future that hasn't happened, is not really happening now, and may never happen.
Artists who subscribe to the former view make work which still engages systems and objects, certainly; but always with humans embedded/entangled at the heart of them, and always happening (performatively) now.
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Here is something MEZ posted somewhere else 18 hours ago that seems relevant:
"Claes Oldenburg has a sculpture in the form of a giant safety pin. It isn't a safety pin; it can't be operated like one. It's there to look at and to be part of the space around the viewer. The fact that it doesn't work is part of the design, not a defect. Mary Flanagan has a sculpture that is a giant joystick, and is a functioning joystick that allows people (ideally, more than one) to play Atari VCS games. It's supposed to work, by design; that's an essential part of the concept. So, it makes sense to me to imagine how Mez's codework or Oldenburg's safety pin would operate if they did work, but to me it is less reasonable and productive to actually try to engineer a working safety pin out of the existing sculpture or a working compiler for existing codework texts."
-Nick Montfort, Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014.
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Curt
On Mar 6, 2014, at 9:20 AM, Miller, Bill wrote:
> where we are in communication with
> software/hardware systems
> then how/when/do we consider the
> the performance
> of software/hardware systems
> ????????????????? If/then ????????
> must i ignore the spamessage brecause
> although it might have similar appearance
> to something we have made - it was
> 'generated' by the machine?
>
> BY THE MACHINE FOR THE MACHINE
> this message brought to you by
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