Category: Digital and Interactive Art

Who are the barbarians?

Denys Arcand’s movie Les Invasions barbares (2003) is a sequel to The Decline of the American Empire that nicely works through the clash of two generations, the 60s book-oriented intellectuals of the left and their 90s/00s children who play computer games and make money with computers.

Some of the same issues are posed by the essay in FrontPage The Magic of Images by Camille Paglia. Paglia believes that knowing images is more important than ever, but our postmodern approach to the visual prevalent in universities doesn’t work. It is a literary approach grounded in the theories of our generation not the practices of our children.

My take is that the humanities lost relevance when we abandoned creation for criticism. As important as criticism is, as a practice it is sold as the practice of the custodians of value. There are the struggling artists and programmers who make and the custodians (think Plato’s guardians) who decide what is good. Well … no one pays attention to our connesseurship, even when grounded in French theory. Popular culture passed us by when we detached creative practices from criticism. Students passed us by when we were no longer teaching people to contribute culture, which is what they want to do. While it is expensive to teach the arts, we need to reincoporate them into the humanities. To some extent Philosophy is the last humanities discipline where to study philosophy is still to do it.

Returning to Arcand’s film – who are the barbarians? Are the game playing ADD students that we complain about the barbarians or are we? (Yes, I do have a beard.)
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Research/Creation

Is research as practices in the humanities compatible with artistic creation? This question is important as more and more humanities researchers are disseminating their research through creative works (as opposed to publications) and more and more artists are conducting serious research in creation. The line between fine art and art history has been bypassed as we have artists working with engineers on new materials. See Arts and Humanities Research Board – Homepage.

Here is my take on how to judge a work as research creation (to use SSHRC’s phrase).
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Ethics and Art

Now that we have a tri-council ethics policy for social science, humanities, science, engineering and mediacal researchers, what about art research/creation? Art Ethics is a site that links to a number of ethical guidelines for art practice.

This is a new problem, especially in interactive art that can aggregate and re-present information about viewers. Below is my first take on this.
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Hayle(s) The Humument

Katherine Hayles dedicates a chapter of Writing Machines to Tom Phillips’ original treated art book A Humument.

Humument began as A Human Document a forgotten novel that itself purports to be an edited version of the journals and scapbook of lovers. Phillips paints over the pages letting rivers of text flow through to produce a new material work of art and literature. Hayles uses Humument to bring forth the materiality of textuality – a materiality that helps us understand problems for electronic literature. There is always a technology of inscription, even when we forget it.
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