For the most part I found the beginning of this essay a bit problematic. Pointing out the initial questions referring to an art forms validity in newer technology seemed to echo the sentiments of Walter Benjamin's essay we read at the beginning of the semester in regards to photographic reproductions and whether or not photography could be considered art. The first part seems almost like a stream of consciousness pile of essayist crap with no point articulated soundly. It's more so a bricolage of loosely linked ideas that have no real bearing on the question posed. The fact that there is another part called "second Attempt" seems to me to have the subtext of "yeah that first part was a bunch of drivel so let me actually attempt to formulate a cohesive thought." Cohesive though the "Second attempt" may have been, it still came up wanting.
When posing the question one must define what "ART" is and I don't feel it was ever successfully articulated within the confines of the essay so failure was imminent. What am I left with after this is merely an attempt on my own part to answer the question for myself. So...'Is Pd Art?' : no. I define "ART" as something created with aesthetic intent with varying exceptions left open for happenstance/found art...absolutes will always get you in to trouble so I try to leave an opening for the exception. Pd is a tool for creating art. Pd was created for a function to bring about something with aesthetic intent. The tool, Pd in this case, is merely an agent working at the behest of a consciousness to create a work of art. Simply stated that is my take on the whole thing.
1 comment:
I couldn't hope to be as articulate, as Jerome's treatment of the essay, but I will say that I comprehensively agree with his sentiments. Anytime one puts forth a question, especially one so lofty as to attempt to qualify "art;" some bases of comparison must be established. As Jerome duly point out: Argument, without a testable definition is mere rhetoric. However, PD is software, and is itself a human creation, perhaps with with aesthetic intent, and one might be able to mount a sensible argument that PD is art in that software itself can be art. Never the less, the author's ramblings never manages to stumble anywhere near such a line of thinking, and I would call it a stretch at best. In terms of the media that PD generates, I like Jerome, see it as tool that can be used by the artist to augment the artistic process. I have many different definitions of "what art is," but all of them speak to a creation. As aforementioned PD is software, a machine, garbage in garbage out, if you like, and machine don't create they only help people "do." Now, going back to our lofty "PD is art because software is art" definition I suppose you could say that Miller Puckette (and others) is a contributor to any and all artistic stock rendered by PD. Of course by the same token, one would have to concede that any artist painting with Cerulean blue pigment is working in cooperation with Dutch chemist Andreas Höpfner, (who invented the color in 1805)hardly a conventional notion.
Post a Comment