Jon C. Ippolito on Fri, 22 May 1998 19:01:01 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> more on Bochner/jodi/formalism |
[Maybe some arts institution should start a program in the conservation of ascii art, which is proving to be a surprisingly fragile medium. -T] Saul Albert sent me the following reply to my post on the relevance of Mel Bochner's 1966 _Working Drawings..._ piece for digital artists like jodi. Saul suggested I post his message together with my own reply, so I'm doing that now. (Apologies for the delay, Saul...) >>>>On 4/21/98 Saul Albert <saul.albert@virgin.net>wrote: Looking through my nettime archives I was very interested in your discussion, particularly in relation to jodi. I understand from your descriptions that the diagrams were not Bochner's own, but were denoued from various technical resources and re-presented. It is in this re-presentation that I would posit the artistic endeavour. The diagrams may not have been created as art, but they were certainly curated as such. The argument heads from here to the good ol' content/context, nature/nurture debates and will drag on forever. In the meantime though, you have called attention to some very interesting points of entry into this part of the greater debate. "His use of a photocopy machine to generate the artistic content of the show suggests the infinite reproducibility of e-mail messages and Web pages" The suggestion is there, but there is a considerable ontological difference between the photocopy and the collection of bits that make up an e-mail or a web page. The photocopy is still a copy. Even Sherrie Levine's pirated photographs are essentially copies; something that denotes an original, whereas the e-mail or the webpage exist simultaneously on every computer on which they are displayed. The transfer of data over the web can be seen as teleportation, or induction of multiple existence rather than as an imitation or a copying. The disk onto which the data is written does not change physically, it's magnetic charges are simply re-arranged. Hmm. I'm going off on a tangent.. The concept of a "copy" is a tricky one here. Intellectual property on the web is another wall you have sent me running into...*1 "what is gained--and what is lost--in cutting these diagrams out of their original context and inserting them into art?" context is gained...and lost. In their original context these technical drawings may have illustrated certain theories or had some narrative relevance that is lost in their re-presentation. However in the freeing up of the context within the conceptual "white cube" of the contemporary art we are presented with alternative modes in which to evaluate these drawings. for example: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX > What? Damn..., you...you...(I > > ___ > =5B1=5D =5B2=5D =5B3=5D =5B4=5D =7C S =7C =5B5=5D =5B6=5D =5B7=5D > ________ _________ ______ =7C w =7C ________ >______ > =7C =7C =7C =7C =7C =7C __ =7C i =7C __ =7C =7C =7C >=7C >=5C/=5C/=7CSampling=7C-=7CQuantize=7C-=7CEncode=7C__=7C =7C__=7C t =7C__=7C >=7C__=7CDecoding=7C-=7CFilter=7C/=5C/ > =7C________=7C =7C________=7C =7C______=7C =7C c =7C =7C________=7C >=7C______=7C > =7C =7C =7C =7C_h_=7C =7C > =7C PAM PCM >PCM =7C >Analog Signal (You Talking) / =5C Analog >Signal__=7C > / =5C > / =5C > / =5C > / =5C > Blow Up / =5C > / XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX this e-mail image from jodi re-configures an ASCII diagram that was originally meant to illustrate a phreaking text explaining the bell American telephone system. The re-presentation of the diagram has not only warped the diagram (it was originally written in notepad, not meant to be viewed in this format), it has caused us to re-evaluate the diagram on different terms. It is no longer an explanatory illustration, it is an aesthetic and conceptual statement. The ASCII characters themselves are phonetic representations, which symbolically relate to THINGS..images and objects... Jodi creates a circuit of reference....The phonetics and graphics become abstracted and blended into a pixellated Mcluhanesque mosaic of phonetics and signs.....I could blah blah...but I'll spare you. "The argument that "scientific diagrams cannot be art because they are tools" doesn't work in the case of Galois theory and other abstract mathematics, which has very few, if any, useful applications." =09 This argument makes no sense in this context. As Donald Judd has said "If someone calls it art, it's art". Exactly half the "artness" of an object is derived from the intention behind it's creation. The scientific diagram in a technical manual, viewed in that context is not art. However, someone who has never seen a canvass based painting before might think it a rather poor tea tray, or a crap kite. The other half of the object, situation or concept's "artness" comes from how it is viewed. You have identified a very interesting area. On the net it is hard to ascertain any sense of context as everything, art and non-art appears in the same context. In a recent nettime post I argued that in the case of jodi.org this context was provided by jodi's programming. Briefly, I ranted on about programmes being contexts within a computer. The parallels are seductive... In one context (a photoshop context for example) a gif. image looks like a bitmapped representation of whatever the author had done with it. In a BBedit context it looks like ASCII gibberish...Hmm perhaps the analogy is a bit laboured but it is a starting point for a discussion. *1 for a brilliant discussion read Rosalind Krauss p151-170 from The Originality of the Avant-Guarde (if you have not read this, do so at the first opportunity) >>>>On 5/20/98 Jon Ippolito (ji@guggenheim.org) responded: I agree with many of Saul's insightful comments. I find particularly appealing his suggestion that "exactly half the 'artness' of an object is derived from the intention behind its creation." (I'm curious to know how he knows it is exactly 50% and not 49.5%*) His objection that the photocopy is fundamentally different from the digital copy is technically accurate, and I see why he thought this might be a fundamental distinction between Bochner's approach to redistributing content and the Webcast paradigm. It's important to remember, however, that Bochner was presenting *diagrams*: documents whose symbolic content is supposed to insure their repeatability. That is, an algebraic equation or Venn diagram handwritten by Albert Einstein is no more valid mathematica lly than the same thing copied by an eighth-grader--or reproduced by a Xerox machine, for that matter. (It is interesting to note in this light that both Bochner and jodi in their own work reproduce diagrams of the very mechanism that makes that reproduction possible: Bochner included in his Xerox book a wiring diagram of the Xerox machine itself, while jodi include in their Web site a diagram of the "neighborhood" of the Internet in which their site is embedded.) So in practice a photocopy of a diagram may be no more "lossy" than a digital copy of a Java applet. Of course, scientific documents like the ones Bochner copied only convey information in their proper context (mathematical journals and the like), where there is an implied convention for translating those particular formal marks into symbolic content. As Saul points out, since the gallery for Bochner's installation offered no such context, his viewers were forced to make meaning of these "working drawings" in any way they could manage. The important question, it seems to me, is whether displaying diagrams or computer code outside their original contexts will push viewers toward more radical--or toward more conservative--ways of looking at images. In Bochner's work, such re-presentations are always implicitly questioned. For example, one of Bochner's photographs shows his arm next to a strip of tape on the wall marked "12 inches"; the photograph looks straightfo rward enough until we realize that there is no guarantee that just because the scale looks 12 inches long in the photographic print that it was really a foot long on the original wall. Given his thesis that "language is not transparent," Bochner may have chose to present technical diagrams in a gallery precisely in order to draw critical attention to his viewers' tendency to read them aesthetically. Witness his title: _Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art_. jodi does much the same thing by cutting diagrams such as the one Saul cites above off from any trace of their original meaning--but while Bochner presents his conundrums in as clear a form as possible, jodi thrives on obfuscation and illegibility. This leaves viewers who can't imagine the code underneath jodi's digital larks little choice but to read them as formalist abstraction--albeit abstraction from an interactive interface rather than just from a static image. To be sure, some approaches to formal abstraction can lead to radical questioning. When Robert Ryman reduced his imagery to white brushstrokes and employed magnets, bolts, and other unusual means of affixing his supports directly to the wall, he drew his viewers' attention to the architectural and physical constraints that easel painters usually take for granted. But if Saul is correct that programming is the context for jodi, then that fact is both their strength and their undoing. The lay viewer understands the physics of brushstrokes and bolts. What are non-programmers to do when faced with jodi's free-floating code--except admire the dazzling patterns and pretty colors? Jon Ippolito www.three.org --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl