[PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:

> I reckon one learns it better in real life, not all schools are enough 
> good to teach you that. :) 

Well, in the end, a student has to teach oneself, and is ultimately 
responsible for one's own learning ; though some are lucky to find people 
who make this easier. I didn't study in an artistic department, so those 
are all second-hand impressions (outsiders are very rarely present during 
crit sessions).

> @ Derek: Agree with you, this is perhaps the focal point here. However, 
> I would suggest to observe the same miscommunication not only from a 
> pragmatical point of view (the artist might not know how to properly 
> code something) but also from a conceptual perspective.

There are a few more layers between the coding and the artistic concepts : 
there are the math concepts layer, the programming concepts layer, etc. 
Those are all different levels at which something can « break » or be 
otherwise unsatisfying.

> Maybe the artist does not always need to perfectly know how to code 
> something,

What is that perfection that you refer to ? I have no idea.

And it's one thing to know how to « perfectly » code something,
but it's another, to know « perfectly » what you want to code.

If one sticks to the existing vocabulary of artist statements, there is 
quite a gap to bridge between the concept in art history's terminology 
(usually called just « the concept »), and the art object itself, because 
once one has stated what is usually called « the concept », the art object 
is hardly described at all, and almost everything is left to decide, and I 
mean almost everything that matters to the experience of the audience.

> but the conceptual relevance of a work can be unveiled and successfully 
> diffused even if somehow a work lacks of technical consistence,

That sounds like the artist statement is being successfully diffused, more 
than the work in itself. Or otherwise, it can sound like the artist 
statement and the work in itself lead two separate lives...

> or does not fulfil requirements of a scientific paper.

(Do I have to restate what I said about scientific papers and art ? It's 
not like I expect art to fulfill those requirements, but that's the 
caricature that I read twice already this week.)

> But this is probably OT already :P

pd-list would be quite dry without a healthy dose of OT.

(and the sexism thread of 2007 is not what I have in mind here.)

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