i realise all art, but particularly net.art, is the subject of much hubris and much randomness. i have seen software performances and lecture/demonstrations that i have very much enjoyed. but there is something elevating about the intangible that its practitioners harp on, as they implement trivial effects in familiar tools.
i was witness to a heated net debate, or flame war,
between an open-minded hacker and an artist who prefer to instruct
others what to program. it is an odd situation for this artist
whose net traces are barely discernible, putting himself about as a
director, and abstracted auteur. his creation is a pleasing if
superficial headline constructor: news announcements from a
parallel word, spoken through a zoid - newzoid
.a self-mythologist,
hopeful provocateur, who would have had his own press in recent
times, not limiting himself now to a stable of code amanuenses.
he engages on a mailing list of hopeful, inspired practitioners, coders and theorists, discussing generative art and their roles in making and identifying it, brushing up again against those questions destroyed in the last century, the thisness of art and authoriality, identity, rediscovery through abstraction of creation of oneself. (a community distantly hosting at least one famous fictual personality, netochka nezkanova).
the persona-as-work is no new fiction, but in net context an unsettling one, where integrity of a certain kind is clearly measurable. i won't dissimulate myself, mostly because i dont have the energy to, yet failing to is a kind of inhibitionism.
the tone is at once serious and ingenous, yet mildly mocking, confrontational - asking of earnest people questions to which the answers are clearly mapped out. the tone is self-protective, parodically 'i don't know much about generative art, but i know what i think'. the key premise being his questioning of the input of the programmer, his arrogance in that respect, yet backslashed with admittance of own ignorance.
yet the man is a suspicion, the fake title of professor, he has no traces, the grandiose project has no funding or foundation. beyond self-reference on net.art archives the owner of the persona has slim existence either.
a question, a joke of the serious reply, the hard felt hard thought opinion. some good responses - my own, even - the presence of the controversialist stimulating. justified paranoia. cease of debate, conflation of personae.
many years ago there was, still is a a uk-netmarketing list that quite a few geeks use to hang out on for a laugh. all these years ago, a particularly flagrant an annoying goon harried the list for a while and rumour got about this was a geek, trolling the marketers with their own inanity. but the persona is sustained for years with reasonable energy, and now speaks sense; is it possible they have been inhabited all this time?
this is not generative though it may possibly be art. a definition offered by philip galanter's is broadly accepted:
Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.
but then to reduce anything to words is to slander it a little.
how possible is it to work with the computer-as-entity or an aspect of it? for software artists the work is the software in the hands of the user. are they feedback in their own usership? can this act be a collaboration?
not the hubristic humility found in more - dare i say practical creators. http://generative.net/ http://usdept-arttech.net/ http://auto-illustrator.com/