Dear Bruce,

You raises good points on the issue of evolutionary change as contrasted with revolutionary change. I’ve been thinking about these issues. In management studies and organisation theory, there is a similar contrast between incremental innovation and radical innovation.

This is an issue that deserves deeper thought in the context of new media art. Once certain forms begin to emerge, what may seem revolutionary contrasted with older art forms may not be revolutionary in the new context. I can't recall anything in recent years with the revolutionary impact that Pong had when it first emerged in the early 1970s. The same is true of such early games as Pac-Man and Space Invaders. These games changed the way that people played games and the way they saw the world, but they also changed the conceptual ecology affecting the way we think of games and art.

The same remains true of all process-based art. Consider the performative elements of Dada. Or consider the even earlier performances around art and partly as a performative art that Roger Shattuck considers in The Banquet Years. There is an archeology of performance that leads me to wonder just how many revolutions are, in fact, evolutions. Performance art goes back to the festivals and grand display pieces of the medieval court, and further back still. When Homer sang the Iliad and the Odyssey, it was a performance. This tradition of the aiodos performing the epic poem remained a living tradition in parts of the world well into the 20th century. It may live still — I don’t know, but it was alive when Milman Parry did his field work in the Balkans to prove that an epic poet could remember and perform Iliad-length works.

In one way, the development of the event structure by George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and the other Fluxus artists was revolutionary. In another, I see a long series of progressive evolutions from the 9th century Chinese Zen poet Han-Shan and the Zen koan tradition leading to the event score. 

These forms of experiential art have always existed where human beings create and live in the cultures we generate. I would very much like to see a good exhibition or an historical survey compiling all of these in a single book.

At any rate, it’s worth considering in a week that saw one auction house achieve over a billion dollars in sales.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia

Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 

--
 
Bruce Wands wrote:

—snip—

I have read through Juliette’s introduction and gave it some thought. I
have several issues to raise. To me, the fundamental shift was away from
the object towards the experience. When digital art first emerged, it
brought with it a new tool set and associated technology. I define the
changes to the creative process as revolutionary and evolutionary.
Evolutionary changes would be digital video editing, digital printmaking
and digital sculpture. Revolutionary change examples include interactive
work, Web-based art and locative art. Not all curators agree with this.
Some say that a print, even though made digitally now, is still a print.
They argue the same with sculpture. I totally disagree. Image making and
sculpture have been fundamentally altered through the use of new
technologies and the content has new potential. I thought Juliette raised
some good points about site-specific work. This brings documentation to the
forefront as a way to archive the work. This also ties in with the
expansion of the art space from museums, galleries and public art to new
and unique venues, i.e. Web-based work and locative art. I have curated the
New York Digital Salon and there are significant differences in how people
from different cultures and of multiple generations experience art. My
final argument is the blurring of the border between art and science. To
me, scientific visualization is not art unless the elements that compose
the artwork are created with an aesthetic intent. Just because scientific
visualization looks “cool” does not make it art. I kept this brief, but
those are some of my concerns. It is difficult to pin down an exact
definition of “process-based art” because it is in the process of defining
itself. For me, the fundamental issue is the contrast between the art
object and the aesthetic experience of this form of art.

—snip—