Name: Dr. Dene Grigar
I am a university professor who teaches digital media. My current topic of interest is ephemera––that is, I am fascinated with objects that are made in the moment without the goal of archiving or sustaining them in any way.
Course Syllabus
Nouspace Electronic Environment
Questions to Guide Your Reading
Steve Gibson's Website
The Planetary Collegium
Trammell Crow Asian Collection
When Ghosts Will Die
visited *loading* times
What New Media Offers Rhetoric and Literature
by Dr. Dene Grigar
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes:
If it were possible to imagine an aesthetic of textual pleasure, it would have to include writing aloud. This vocal writing (which is nothing like speech) is not [yet] practiced . . . . In antiquity, rhetoric included a section which is forgotten, censored by classical commentators: the actio, a group of formulae designed to allow for the corporeal exteriorization of discourse: it dealt with a theater of expression, the actor-orator ‘expressing’ his indignation, his compassion, etc. Writing aloud is not expressive; it leave expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication.; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections. . . but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body. . . . [I]t granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, its cuts, it comes: that is bliss." (66-67)
Written in 1975, this passage suggest a type of text that did not yet exist and a definition for text broader than the one held by traditional literary scholars of the period and offers a view of rhetoric that puts it at the center of the act of interpretation and analysis in the way it functioned in ancient times. As such, he conjoins literature and rhetoric in the production of language and ideas, a step that is in line with postmodern thought. Current literary scholars who work with digital media and who embrace postmodern ideas, like Kate Hayles and Jay David Bolter, echo Barthes’ sentiments. In Writing Machines, for example, Hayles describes electronic texts as involving “sound, animation, motion, video, kinesthetic involvement, and software functionality, among others” (20). In Remediation, Bolter, in collaboration with film scholar Richard Grusin argue that "remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media" in which the “older medium is never replaced but is present always in "acknowledged or unacknowledged ways" (45-47). The way to understand remediation, according to them, is to "treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (77). Thus, literary texts that are electronic are not limited to words but can involve other elements like sound and movement––literally doing what Barthes says is impossible to do, that is, allowing the artist to write aloud with her body. And despite their new forms, what they call "hybrid," these texts always carry with them traces of the prior literary form.
The mention of the word hybrid is important here since in its original Latin form (> hybrida) it suggests state of being possessing a negative connotation: a mongrel or half-breed. Hayles’s allusion, in How We Became Posthuman\, to the cyborg, the image of the “human being . . . seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines” (2-3) carries no such value judgment in regards to hybrid states of being. For her, it is merely a fact of life in the late 20th C.
Those writing at the start of 21St C also embrace hybridity. According to Jorg Huber in “Video-Essayism: On the Theory-Practice of the Transitional,” it is a natural offshoot of “new communication technologies and globalization,” which he identifies as having driven the development of postcolonial cultural studies, a theory those epistemological underpinnings differs from "traditional forms of knowledge production with their enclosure into disciplines and dogmatic methods [which] are hardly adequate to this task. It rather requires an approach that understands itself as an open, interminable and transdisciplinary process which is self-reflective of its procedure, also in terms of its style" (92). Put simply for our goals, traditional approaches to text net us little in the way of understanding in what it means to be human today in a world whirling so fast and so knotted together as it is. Needed are theories and methodologies that provide new ways of understanding. For him that would be postcolonial cultural studies provides and trandisciplinarity, respectively.
While he defines the former, he does not provide much explanation of the latter. For our purposes, transciplinarity is a methodology that looks “between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline” in order to unify the knowledge produced from their study and embrace the complexities that may emerge from the process (Nicolescu). It is “particularly suitable for solving complex . . . problems, as it integrates knowledge from different scientific [or technical] disciplines and knowledge from non-scientific sources” (Regeer). Essentially, a transdisciplinary approach brings together seemingly disparate areas of study into a new field, a new way of thinking.
Where all of this information is leading me is this idea: a department with two graduate programs, one in literature and one in rhetoric, needs to think of ways––projects, courses, and the like––for uniting the fields if, indeed, we wish to make new knowledge and keep our program and work vital. Postmodern, postcolonial thought suggests that there is not one particular way to achieve these goals, but rather it is up to each individual to pursue her own path. The path I have taken for my own work, and which has been represented here in this course, is one that utilizes new media as a bridge between literature and rhetoric. I have taken this path because each of these fields deals with texts––and as we have come to discover, the notion of text in new media is a very open concept, one that includes not only word-texts, but sound-texts, motion-texts, image-texts and the like. So for myself, what new media has to offer rhetoric and literature is a way of seeing that allows for vistas beyond the print artifact and beyond the orator’s podium. It provides a landscape where I can bring together my body and mind with other protheses, to use Hayles’ term (How We Became Posthuman3), like computers, but also motion tracking technology, LCD projectors, and video screens, to a place where I can take my consciousness, and perhaps that of others, to a state of sublimity, of Bartheian “bliss.” It is a path leading me to new lovers, whose names I do not yet know, to an act of love––to Roy Ascott's “telematic embrace.”
Anne Schoolfield
ENGL 6313-01: Telematic Texts
Dr. Grigar
May 1, 2005
What does the study of rhetoric offer new media?
To begin to answer this question, we should perhaps attempt first to define new media and its interests, then to define rhetoric and its contributions.
My initial understanding of new media was that it is a field that designs, combines, transfers, delivers, and possibly, preserves media--text, graphics, sound, etc.--through digital technology. My understanding of the interests of new media changed somewhat when I heard the opening remarks of Roy Ascott, Founding Director of the Planetary Collegium, which offers a Ph.D. in new media, at Shaping Consciousness, a symposium presented at the Dallas Museum of Art, April 6-7, 2005. In his opening remarks, Ascott revealed not only that the purpose of the program was "to identify and theorize emergent new media fields [and] to develop a transdisciplinary discourse for new media" (Ascott, 4/6/2005), but also that one of the goals of the program was--by drawing on the intersections of art and technology within new media--to marshall for art the financial resources typically provided to technology and the sciences. Going even further by outlining questions important to meeting these purposes and goals, Ascott asked how "new technologies and the metaphors of science [might] be employed in the education of the artist" (Ascott, 4/6/2005).
I confess that I find many of the metaphors of science disturbing--metaphors that posit nature as a woman to be probed and mapped and dissected until she reveals her secrets, for example. What I find encouraging, nevertheless, is the willingness of new media practitioners to entertain the possibility of self-reflective scientific inquiry, such as that advanced by Varela et al., rather than to cling to the faulty conceit of scientific objectivity maintained by popular, mainstream science (within the practice of medicine, for example). Still more encouraging is the actual examination of the political split of science from the probable (in favor of objectivity) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as detailed by Michael Punt (Punt, 4/7/2005) because the probable is the stuff of rhetoric.
Rhetoric, throughout its long history, attempts to deal with probable truth--with what we can know in a given context and with how we can frame discourse both to explore and to reach decisions within that context. Long before Heisenberg stated his uncertainty principle, the sophists acknowledged that all perceived truth, or knowledge, is contextual; that what we know, and therefore, what we experience, is contingent. Further, in acknowledging rhetoric as the counterpart of dialectic, Aristotle, too, posits rhetoric as the tool for examining the probable. Continuing this tradition well beyond the height of classical rhetoric, eighteenth-century scholar Giambattista Vico argues that education in rhetoric is far more important than scientific education to young citizens simply because these young citizens when they eventually become state leaders will rarely, if ever, have access to certainties.
In addition to dealing with probability, rhetoric offers a way to think about invention, creation, and discovery in relation to form and form's impact on audience reception, thereby delineating an open, recursive process. And in dealing with context and contingencies, created meaning--its form and reception--rhetoric also provides a way to examine consciousness. Rhetoric further considers means of arranging and delivering content and of holding within memory the ephemeral. Rhetoric avoids partitioning emotion, logic, and credibility, drawing on each to form an integrated, persuasive whole.
What the study of rhetoric brings to new media is a tradition of dealing with the probable, the contingent, the momentarily perceived as well as a tradition of shaping and transmitting consciousness through forms of logic, emotion, and credibility. Rhetoric is the means through which the logic of science, the emotion of art, and the credibility of each unite.
Aliscia Rogers
Dr. Dene Grigar
Telematic Text
April 30, 2005
Rhetoric offers New Media a Forum for Discourse
In a quest for truths in the arena of new media, rhetoric provides a forum for the messages to be discussed and documented. Viewing rhetoric from the perspective of the canons, I assert that invention, style and delivery are key components that rhetoric can use to impact new media.
Rhetoric represents persuasive discourse that alters attitudes and actions, which can result in change. Because there is a lack of formal structure within new media today, the inventor creates new theories that can change the technology and rhetoric provides the venue for the inventor to prove his theories.
Rhetoric should not be viewed in its pejorative sense or be limited to the view of just argument. Doing so causes one to underestimate or overlook the way rhetoric can be used to deal with values when they conflict. Because new media theories are in an evolving genre, conflict will occur and rhetoric should be used to clarify the commonality and define the differences. Here, rhetoric allows for a dialogue to encourage consensus. Absolute values may not be established, but hopefully, some universal values may be ascertained from the conversations.
Kenneth Burke explains that humans are symbol driven beings and our language is created based on agreement to certain signifiers. New Media artists are using technology as a language to create new symbols. By analyzing the artist’s premises rhetoricians can use these new symbols to define new signifiers and create some standards or basic syllogisms.
Message transmission is key in audience interpretation. As I experienced Claudia Westermann’s “I am …/waiting” at the Project X installation of the Planetary Collegium’s projects on April 9, 2005, I noticed a disconnect in the recursive process between the messenger, message and receiving audience. When probed about her piece, Westermann referred me back to her poem, which lacks information to direct the receiver to the premise or conclusion of the message. The recursive process can be instant in an interactive environment; thus, artists need to be prepared to explain and defend their ideas.
How the audience experiences new media art is essential to its present and overwhelming to its future definition. If the artists do not clearly define their work, the receiving audience can easily transfer intentions into a void attempt by the artist at self-gratification, which can undermine the connotation of new media in general. The meaning and context of new media need to move beyond the subjective functions of pure aesthetics to a more objective science of functionalism. By understanding style and delivery, the new media artists can better relate to the audience; thereby making it easier for the artists and the audience to achieve “bliss” as define by Roland Barthes.
As Kevin Parent and his partner, who created G-Speak and coined the term “gestural technology,” have experienced that new media needs to be interactive and functional. Their contract with Raytheon to expand their research is based on the practical applications associated with the technology not just the aesthetics and fun. While pathos and ethos appeals are warranted, logos appeals motivate corporations, which can help to promote mainstreaming new media ideas.
Jennifer Cozzolino
English 6313: Telematic Texts
Dr. Dene Grigar
01 May 2005
Before the invention of the technology of the alphabet, literature was alive in an oral world. The stories morphed with each telling, inviting the story teller to include his or her own personal inflection, interpretation, and experience changing the story and blurring the lines between author, speaker, and audience.
The fundamental question of ‘what is literature?’ is being reconsidered as is the question ‘what is text?’ As New Media has shown us, the message or meaning is found through the connection of many different elements or senses. Where, for thousands of years, the text or literature has been found on the printed page, it is now being found in sound, movement, visuals, etc. Or, in the lack thereof.
In a technologically advanced society, thousands of years after the first oral stories were initially written down and the lines between author, reader, and audience were darkened, we find ourselves once again embracing the traditions of an oral society. Through the advent of New Media, artists, authors and the like are finding themselves caught in the vortex of a field that is changing the perceptions of what we know to be text, literature, and the author.
Being a field whose contents have been cultivated from separate existing disciplines, or a hybrid, New Media continues to search for a language that can genuinely support every facet of its being. This is where literature, its study and its history can assist the field of New Media. Literature ‘brings to the table’ a language of elements meant to organize a piece of literature in order to facilitate comprehension, investigate meaning, and achieve potential. This language addresses the institutions of theme, idea, character, plot, etc. Application of these ideas onto New Media could not only heighten understanding, but also allow for additional connections of separate fields of study to one another, thus allowing for the creation of a new language specifically for New Media.
The history of literature also serves as a guide for New Media. With its roots firmly planted in the oral tradition, literature has already thrived through muddled periods of hybridity itself. With the use of gesture and sound, and with the inclusion of multiple authors and audience interaction, literature has evolved from a hybrid past. With literature’s inclusion in the field of New Media, it is forecasting a hybrid future. With its ability to adapt, literature also offers New Media longevity. Literature’s connection to being an essential part of being human allows New Media the ability to grow and change without rendering itself superfluous.
Jennifer Brockman
ENG 6313.01
Dr. Grigar
1 May 2005
Collaborative Communication: Using Rhetoric to Build Bridges Between New Media and the Academy
Currently, New Media is seen by scholars as a hybrid between art, science, technology, and other fields of study. Because it gathers its roots from so many different fields of study, New Media is rarely understood as anything more than “art” by those who are not completely familiar with it. Therefore, rhetoric can provide New Media artists with several important avenues, each centered on one specific tool: language.
New Media can use language in several ways. First, language can be used as a means of communication for New Media artists so that their ideas might be more accessible to those scholars and artists outside of New Media. For example, New Media artists often use the term “technology” to characterize the tools used in creating their works of art. This is problematic, however, when describing New Media to people outside of the field because there is no longer one static definition of “technology”. New Media artists do not define “technology” in the same way as other artists and scholars. Therefore, non-New Media academics and artists tend to become confused by the distinction that New Media artists make between their understanding of the term “technology” and the mainstream definition. Rhetoric can provide New Media artists with the language necessary to both clarify the terminology they use among themselves and communicate those ideas clearly to others.
New Media artists can also use language to give voice to the theories that provide the foundation of their art. As New Media artists introduce their works to academia, they are at a significant loss because many of them do not have the language necessary to communicate their art in terms of theory. When we look upon a work of art for the first time, we only see the finished product. We were not present during the creation of the art, so we have very little understanding of the ideas, theories, and processes that may have been involved in creating the piece. Rhetoric can provide the artists with an understanding of the tools necessary for communicating effectively through theory.
In addition to effective communication, rhetoric offers New Media a means of physical documentation through written theory, study, and scholarship to ensure that the significance of New Media will be noted and studied in the future. Through continued thorough study of New Media, artists and theorists can work together to create new ideas and new ways of understanding the ideas we already know.
Finally, rhetoric can provide New Media with the tools to redefine and/or extend the meaning of the word “text” and what it represents. With the creation of New Media as a hybrid field, “text” takes on a new meaning because New Media art does not allow itself to be defined only by written text. Instead, it creates text out of sound, light, image, movement, and other artistic genres. Just as New Media can help rhetoric to redefine “text”, rhetoric can provide New Media with the words and theories to communicate this new and extended definition so that it can be understood and embraced by future artists and theorists.
Cheri Crenshaw
Dene Grigar, Ph.D.
Telematic Texts
30 April 2005
What Can Rhetoric Offer New Media?
On April 9, 2005, when I attended the Project X and Planetary Collegium installation with the intention of finally experiencing what I had read so much about in Roy Ascott’s Telematic Embrace, I found it curious that very few of the installations were interactive in the sense I had expected given the premises expressed in Ascott’s writing. For example, Ascott criticizes communications views that have "the artist as sender and therefore originator of meaning, the artist as creator and owner of images and ideas, the artist as controller of context and content." Ascott explains that this view requires the viewer to be "at best, a skilled decoder or interpreter of the artists’ ‘meaning,’ or, at worst, simply a passive receptacle of such meaning" (234).
In contrast, Ascott admires art that "makes explicit in its technology and protocols what is implicit in all aesthetic experience, where that experience is seen as being as much creative in the act of the viewer’s perception as it is in the artist’s production" (233). Although Ascott’s views are an explanation of his own work with telematics, Ascott’s views also seem to be an ideal toward which New Media theorists are reaching. Thus, although only two installations at Project X involved viewers in an actual rather than an aesthetic sense, Maia Engeli’s "Dollhouse," and Steve Gibson and Dene Grigar’s When Ghosts Will Die and Digital DJ, the contrast between interactivity levels, as well as some of the audience member’s comments on the installations, helped me to understand what rhetoric can offer New Media artists.
One of the first installations that allowed viewer manipulation and participation was Engeli’s "Dollhouse," which was displayed on a computer screen and which allowed viewers to use the computer mouse to move virtually through rooms in a dollhouse image. Engeli said that it was possible to change the configuration so that viewers could "shoot" the characters that were moving around in the dollhouse, and one of the younger audience members at the installation was happy to demonstrate. Engeli explained that she had set up the dollhouse structure itself, but her students had added the light, texture, objects, sound, and, eventually, cartoon characters such as SpongeBob and one of the Teletubbies.
Experiencing Engeli’s installation was disorienting for me, especially since I am not a computer game player, but some of the other viewers seemed to find the experience rewarding. One viewer remarked that it was "pretty cool" that we got to "shoot up SpongeBob" because "my husband hates SpongeBob." Significantly, out of all the aspects available for appreciation in Engeli’s installation, the viewer picked out a familiar piece of pop culture to mention. What interested me the most, however, was the disorientation I experienced as I attempted to navigate the spaces. Since my educational background involves rhetoric, the disorientation I experienced allowed me to realize that I did not have the "language" I needed fully to understand the experience. I did not have all the conventional points of reference available to gamers or computer hackers. In other words, what I "got" out of the experience was based in my interest in literature and other forms of communication while what the viewer who commented on SpongeBob got out of it was based in her experiences in popular culture.
Variant experiences, however, are part of the point of New Media art projects, as would occur even in experiencing traditional art forms such as writing or painting. As most people realize, appreciating a text such as James Joyce’s Ullysses or Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons involves knowing the context within which the pieces were created. Otherwise, there seems to be no reason for the unconventional syntactical arrangements and intense wordplay. Further, with Engeli’s piece, the main interaction between the dollhouse and human beings took place before my viewing of the installation. The students who created the layers in each room were the ones interacting with the technology to express their own notions of creativity.
As I continued to survey the various installations, I talked casually with some of the other viewers. The gist of the comments were "What’s the point?" and "I don’t get it." Indeed, the videos were fascinating to watch, such as Yakov Sharir and Norbert Herber’s "Automatic Body" and Michael Punt’s "A Catalogue of Small Fetishes," perhaps because the context was quite familiar. But the installation, overall, indicated that, from a rhetorical standpoint, the audience members were not getting all that they needed to help direct their understanding of the projects.
So, to answer the prompt a little more clearly, rhetoric can offer New Media an understanding regarding ways to appeal to audiences. To go back to the basics, how does one appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos through technological means that are not all that familiar, and thus are somewhat incomprehensible, to audience members? I think that the other immersive installation, Gibson’s and Grigar’s, actually did a much better job interesting the audience.
Just to give an example, the project clearly addressed all three rhetorical appeals. For ethos, if one takes seriously Ascott’s assertion that viewers ought to be involved in the construction of New Media projects, then the invitation to dance within the lights of the digital DJ appeals to the authenticity of the project. The audience member participates directly in the construction of the art, and each new participant changes possible interpretations of the project. Some approached their involvement in the dance humorously, and some took it very seriously. Some interacted with Gibson. Some ignored him. One could easily write an essay regarding differences in approach to digital DJ dance depending on gender, or perhaps on familiarity with Gibson, or familiarity with the project itself.
For pathos, in the "When Ghosts Will Die" portion of the installation, clearly the man riding the rocket down to earth as well as the nuclear explosion appeals to pathos, specifically empathy, humor, and fear. Finally, the addition of words to the installation adds, at least subliminally, to the logos of the project. Words hold the connotation of logic and rationality, and adding them to the presentation implies an increased seriousness. Unquestionably, a background in rhetoric adds to a New Media artist’s awareness of audience. Thus, a background in rhetoric can not only facilitate projects that viewers can more readily understand but can facilitate interpretation as well.
Sandy Robinson
ENGL 6313 Telematic Texts
Dr. Dene Grigar
29 April 2005
Gigi Gregg
English 6313: Telematic Texts
Dr. Dene Grigar
28 April 2005
Dismantling the Temple to Build an All-Inclusive, Equal Opportunity Co-op: Blending Technical and Writing Skills in College Composition Courses
The feminist scholar, teacher, and poet Audre Lorde once wrote: “"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." In light of this observation, one might examine the incorporation of telematic texts into the academic canon. What is called for may not be a complete “dismantling” of academic programs that focus on literature or rhetoric; rather the texts created by blending technology with communication or narrative might produce new media with which to reach the much sought-after audience. Technologically produced art forms, however, require new skills, new ways of conceptualizing communication, and new ethical questions. It is within this space that rhetoric may play its most important role.
When considering telematic texts, one must also consider the different types of impact such texts may have. The geographic, cultural, and physical boundaries these texts cross may have legal and ethical ramifications. For example, the practice of blogging during the last American presidential election had an impact on the immediacy in which information became available. Bloggers were able to publish their observations online directly from the convention floor. However, the opinions expressed on many blogs are often criticized for being narrow and one-sided. What impact will blogging have on rhetorical integrity? What effect will blogging have on the public receiving this information? Since anyone can publish on a blog, what impact will blogging have on making information and reporting more egalitarian?
The standard for how texts are examined, classified, and defined as worthy of consideration has been, for the most part, controlled by academia. Shifts occur when new forms are introduced. For example, some academics still do not consider film as literature. The same is true for new media. Many academics prefer to categorize new media as belonging in the computer sciences or in technical fields. What can change this perception are artists and writers who demonstrate the uses of new media as art forms.
The traditional notions of text may be slow to change. As was demonstrated in the “Shaping Consciousness” symposium, text does not necessarily imply a written work. Texts can be composed of sound, or be determined by topography, or can disrupt the notion of time. New definitions of text created with technology can re-inform how we approach rhetorical discursive space. In order to prepare for the oncoming changes, we must also prepare ourselves technologically. Without technical knowledge, we will never have the keys to “the master’s house” in our hands.
Notes Toward the Complete Works of the Planetary Collegium Presentations
Held in Dallas, Texas, on April 6th and 7th, 2005
Cheri Crenshaw
On April 6th and 7th 2005, I had the privilege of assisting Dene Grigar, Ph.D. in hosting the Planetary Collegium in Dallas, Texas, for a conference entitled "Shaping Consciousness: New Media, Spirituality & Identity." According to the overview given at www.planetary-collegium.net, "The Planetary Collegium is concerned with advanced inquiry in the transdisciplinary space between the arts, technology, and the sciences, with consciousness research an integral component of its work." Roy Ascott, who is a founding director of the group, presented an overview of the collegium during the first presentation of the day and explained that he wanted to set up a "worldwide research network" to, at least in part, "identify and theorize the emergent field of new media arts." One of the requirements for the doctoral and post-doctoral participants is that they participate in three mandatory ten-day composite sessions over a three year period. The conference at Dallas was one of those mandatory sessions.
Being in the background at the conference had its advantages, especially in that I was able to meet and speak with many of the new media artists and theorists personally. However, one of the disadvantages is that I saw many of the presentations only in part, and missed a few completely. Yet, as Sandy Robinson, Anne Schoolfield, Jennifer Brockman, and Jenny Cozzolino, (who were some of my cohorts at the conference), and I decided, the manner in which we experienced the conference was entirely appropriate to the genre under discussion. As the presentations, and background reading, made apparent, New Media theories emphasize non-linearity, multiplicity, recursiveness, and, as suggested by Norbert Herber’s presentation entitled "Wabi Sonics: Tea Esthetics, Zen, and Composition in Experimental and Ambient Music," the value of "the imperfect and unfinished."
None of us understood everything completely, certainly not perfectly, but the composite effect nonetheless is exciting. In other words, rather than providing the definitive version of New Media theory, the participants suggested avenues of approach, with an emphasis on creativity as well as on an openness to "mistakes" as part of the creative process.
For instance, in "trans@for@ma@tion (trnsfr-mshn, -fôr-) . . . an evolution in form," Mike Phillips talked about a book written by monkeys given access to a computer. The experiment is a playful approach to the well-known notion that, if given an infinite amount of time and access to typewriters, monkeys will produce the complete works of Shakespeare (see http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/documentation/ for more details). Although the book, humorously entitled Notes Toward the Complete Works of Shakespeare and authored by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowan, seems to consist mostly of the letter "s," nonetheless, human beings attribute form and meaning even to such seemingly meaningless activities.
Indeed, as Herber suggested through his discussion of Zen aesthetics, leaving art unfinished in the conventional senses inherent to varying artistic genres also leaves the art open for imaginative interpretative play, play uninhibited by notions of "right reading" or inviolable truth. As an inveterate reader of conventional fiction (meaning fiction composed for the book format), I know how the richest stories continue in my imagination even after I have read every word. The stories for which I end up dreaming new endings and new adventures are the stories that have the greatest impact on the way I think.
Overall, then, what was most delightful, engaging, and inspiring about the conference is the seriousness and respect with which the participants approached playfulness in both art and technology. After all, play is the most ubiquitous act of creation on the planet. As we have seen, monkeys do it; thus, it seems likely that humans may be able to do it, too.
Hey,
The link to Ascott's website works now. Definitely cutting edge, I would think. More for artists? But many of the ideas in the text regarding cybernetics, the "moist," and a few examples of the art are flashed across the screen. It would be interesting to have a chance to examine some of the art they are producing more closely--this is more like a tease, or an advertisement. Also, I wonder where this is based? Maybe I missed that. Nonetheless--definitely intriguing.
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