I have developed an interest in my own work into the self reflexive state of a media. As Tristam Shandy and 24 hour party people are reflective of being a film -there is an implication within digital art that it should also be reflective of what it is made of and where it comes from. New digital technology seems to be driving in the direction of a truly interactive experience for every individual who becomes a viewer/participant in the work.  Which becomes an analysis of the way that digital technology is being used. The internet is very much a personal experience that one person has with an ephermal information.

The failing of work on the internet is it often doesn’t address directly the fact that it is being viewed through a variety of different objects in different spaces at different times. In music artists are becoming cogniscent of the different experiences that different people have interacting with the actual object. For example Mono putting sand in the sleeves of there vinyl to create an individual sound that differs slightly for each person who buys the album. Music has also become a relic because of the constant tie it has with the person who wrote the composition and recorded it. Rock stars are conscious of there image and the effect that it has on listening to the album -there is no way of seperating the to.

Visual art relies less on the image the artist creates of themselves. It seems to be almost the opposite artists as a whole are lumped into having a singular personality only devided by the differences in there work. As art prgoresses into an era where it is more “democratic” or more readily available to the public it seems that artists will have to develope personas to appeal to different parts of the public.

One could argue that the happenings and performance art from the middle of the 20th century took into account the image of the artist, but again I would argue that performace art in the public eye was simply an extension of what it means to be an artist. Although it tried to become reflective of the use of human figures how can someone be essentially outwardly self reflective? Can one make themselves a relic or imbue some kind of magical quality into an action?

The challenge for the more traditional (in my my mind the non-reproducible) forms of art is how to extend the interactivity or personal relationship someone is afforded in interacting with there piece. In my mind this transfers back to the image of the individual artist -they need to succesfully create some kind of hype that perpetuates a story of the object they created. In this way a static object can present an awareness of the object that it is.

The latter part of the 20th century became largely about denying art. This is best summed up in Kaprow’s The Education of the Un-Artist in which he encourages to stop making art and take up a functional place in society. The argument is largely based on the in-ability of art to compete with non-art in experience. How can someone make a sculpture more intrigueing than the lunar landing module?

It seems that with digital we have a chance to reclaim that ability. Art can now be made as an appropriation of everyday life -but the key is being able to make an appropriation that is self freflexive of how it was appropriated.

Where Wark is trying to build the tools to start an effective conversation about information Bush is taking a stab at predicting the futre of information based on a small amount of information. Although his guesses about the prevalence of computers in our future lives is for the most part correct he fails were Wark begins. Bush fails to see the most important part of the computer which is the freedom of information on a global scale. This seems mostly like to spring from his extension of the computor into other communication devices of the day i.e telephone, radio, etc.

OS software like Linux is the modern mean of both Wark and Bush’s ideas.  It operates with the accesibility that Wark promotes, allowing for quick change in a community and the ability to freely provide new products to millions of people who can then continue to expand upon the idea. But, it maintains itself as a viable entity/ moneymaking venture that requires it to be a single project operating under one name, giving credit to a group of creators -more in the vain of Bush’s ideas.

Collectively these movements make up the majority of post-war modernism and defined an era that attempted to redefine art (or destroy art).  It’s more interesting to look at the three as one group regardless of their differences in ideology because all three can be seen as the beginning and foremost of manifesto art. Movements had organized before the modern period but less around specific guidelines spread internationally and more around a similar aesthetic.

Post WWII there have been numerous attempts to resurect these three movements all though usually less succesful. In the 50s and 60s the Fluxists attempted to redefine dadaism, and minamalism through performance, noise and film. But the fluxists have yet to gain the popularity or influence that dada seems to enjoy. Although it is arguable that the Russian Constructivists and Suprematists pre-dated the Bauhaus much of there work was never constructed. Scandinavian design has become succesful in the Bauhaus’ stead with stores like IKEA. Futurism has been picked up by the Situationalist International, although they probably wouldn’t acknowledge it,  founded in the 60′s. And in an even more Contemporary context the neoists have worked more in the vain of dada trying to remove their art from the artist by remaining anonymous.

So why were these movements succesful enough to be imitated but never able to be recreated or resurected? I think the fervor of post-WWI europe provided artists with an intial optimism or atleast a blank slate with which they could create new terms for art as a whole. They thought they had seen the worst and could only move forward by reminding people of the absurdity that had happened. But, with the arrival of WWII and the end of the modern age artists had to accept a reality check. Post-Modern art seems to be the result of that Reality check -instead of trying to redo art, artists became hyper-literate in an attempt to continue the conversation of art. Modernism was most succesful in that it created its own dialogue, post-modernism has suffered the weight of history that it tries to reconcile with the brief period of originality that occured during modernism.

For instance Andrea Serranos photograph Piss Christ never would have recieved the reaction it had, if it hadn’t quickly been reproduced millions of times in the news media. If it was left to be seen by the arts community it would never have caused so much controversy and the National Endowment for the Arts might still be given to individual artists.

The problem that arrises from a work being seen out of context doesn’t neccesarily reflect poorly on the artists decision but on the inablity of the surrounding society to understand .  Thats where mechanical reproduction becomes a Catch 22. Reproduction allows for a large amount of society to be able to see your work -which in theory allows them to be self educated about the art world, but it also gives them the oppritunity to reject your work. If a much larger section of society begins to have pull over what kind of work is being produced and shown it is liely to drag art to a mediocre level. Artists for the past 150 years or so sense photography became available have had the freedom to work outside of society, but now that the photographs are more accesible to everyone artists are again starting to be held accountable by society. 

In battle the pointlessness of gaming is finally addressed. Why do we spend hours of our lives battling shapes -not even tangible enemies when we could be doing something more productive? Wark says that the enemy in Rez is time and by playing you allow your chartacter to battle time, essentially living forever, as long as you continue to destroy the malevolent geometric shapes that want to kill him/her. But, as your slowing down time in the game the time that your life exists on remains essentially the same, if not sped up. You invest yourself into the character who by default becomes you. The characteristics of game play are essentially the same as astral projection.

So is it really a loss of your time? If you become the character then the characters time becomes your own. If the game allows you to suspend disbelief just long enough that the game clock, which doesn’t perform at the same rate as the world clock, then the game time is as valuable as your time.

This is incredibly relevant when trying to describe the video game space as an artistic space in itself. Most artists try to involve the viewer in the space of the piece. This is seen very directly in sculpture, less directly in 2-d works. If a video game is capable of creating an imaginary space that the viewer is forced to interact with then the game space is achieving a 2-d works goal successfully.

The only problem was I learned history out of order. Time is completely relative in Civilization (as in real life) so i learned history as a very linear chain of events. All of these events were just catalysts that caused the next event to start almost all games work that way with a linear chain. That’s what makes the game space,
on an abstract level, the same as real space. As time continues we  obtain more knowledge and society becomes more complex.

Katamari has essentially the same concept as civilization. To be successful you have gain the most  “stuff”  the fastest.  In  one it is very regulated, in the other it is more open. Whether you are gathering knowledge or orange juice cans you have to gather the smaller simpler items first before acquiring the larger more complex items. Katamari is control (analog) based and civilization is tactical (digital) based. In civilization you interact more directly with the digital content of the game -any number of controls could be used to the same effect as a keyboard. In Katamari the controls are neccesary for the gameplay.