The way artists make art often reflect the means of production of their age. The artist of feudalism was an artisan or alchemist, the Renaissance artist was adept at mathematics and geometry inspired by trade and war, and Andy Warhol's factory embodied the spirit of mass production.
If you looked in the jobs pages in the early 1990s, you'd see adverts for "Mac Operators". A Mac Operator would use the only Apple Macintosh in the company to do design work using Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark at a low rate of pay.
When I got to art school at around that time I begged and borrowed access to Macs to make art using Photoshop and Illustrator. I acted out the role of the Mac Operator (rather than alchemist, merchant or factory worker) without realising it to make art.
The Mac Operator is a kind of knowledge worker. Knowledge work is post-industrial work. Another example of post-industrialism is brand-based outsourcing. The production of Jeff Koon's artistic brand is outsourced. But Koons is a manager rather than a worker.
Mac Operators were representative producers of mass culture at that time. But Web 2.0 means that everyone can now use a computer to produce culture as part of the crowd. Outsourcing has become crowdsourcing. Mac Operators, like sign painters, are not now a contemporary phenomenon.
I started out remixing images, and I continue to do so, aided now by the Creative Commons licences so beloved of Web 2.0. I am still sat at a computer producing art as an individual, rather than using the crowd to do so. But I am using a GNU laptop rather than a Power Mac desktop system.
The laptop-based knowledge work figure is the "laptop warrior" or the Bay-area coffee-shop wifi leeching "bedouin". These are the people who start the Web 2.0 companies and web applications that the crowd use to produce their culture.
So I haven't ended up as far from the contemporary creative practice of computing as I'd feared. And I'm not criticising artists who mimic Web 2.0 strategies without adding anything to them, when I do criticise them, from a position of historical irrelevance. I'm just reflecting a different aspect of current computer-based production.
Thanks to Matt for getting the web site back up.
I'm working on reviews for Furtherfield, having long conversations about digital art on Rhizome, reading William Gibson, and learning Rails, Open Inventor and Second Life.
I'm also hacking on some data visualization code (you've seen the patterns on this blog) but I'm not sure whether that's going anywhere. I think 1968/1969 may be my ultimate statement on data visualization. They have the critical distance and irony that a straight piece of data visualization lacks, whatever its input.
Like That is struggling to break through the Processing barrier. I can't think of a language that Like That would be easy in, but it certainly isn't Processing. Maybe I can switch to JavaScript or OpenFrameworks. I've sworn to just use whatever tools do the job at the time, so I'm looking at OpenSim, but when there are no good tools that doesn't help.
I need a project that I can just do.
If you are on MySpace please make friends with a colour or a shape or a compositional principle that you like. Friending The Aesthetic needs friends...
I am now on a new weblog platform (Movable Type) on a new server. Many thanks to Matt for helping with this. And by "helping with" I mean "doing".
The Wiki is gone, and Like That isn't back in the art section, but apart from that everything should have been moved over now.
If anything's missing do let me know.
I've had very little energy recently (no idea, possibly a virus, no not a computer virus, work with me here) and so I'm behind on just about everything I'm meant to be doing. I've also been reading Batman and Silver Surfer collections that the library has in. Oh and the T&H "Internet Art" book, "Laws Of Cool", the second Alfred Jarry collection from Atlas Press, and "War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines" which I've wanted to re-read since borrowing Tessa Elliot's copy about fifteen years ago. All of which has also got in the way of making stuff.
Like That is progressing slowly but surely, I've written some code to screenscrape art market data sites for some possible visualization work, a couple of reviews are almost ready for Furtherfield, and I got to the Open Source Embroidery show opening which was brilliant. I also had to edit my essay for the art & FOSS book, which LaTeX made nice and easy.
As soon as I have anything to show, I'll show it.
I'm still working on various projects, notably Like That and an artworld social network data visualisation project that may be called "Information". And I may have some good news regarding my criticism and design work as well soon.
I'll post when I have something to show...
While I actually do some art and some writing.
I haven't forgotten Persuasion 2 but the response to Terry's article covers much of what it will say. ;-)
My youngest child bought me a toy Laser Screwdriver for my birthday. Mwahahahaha! Zap!
Minara's codebase is now converted to Common Lisp and I have added the functions and constants to cl-opengl that are needed for polygon rendering.
Now for debugging...
