23.2.06

f'd up on art

Hey all,

So, I'm doing this project this semester that is a research/process/study of the connections and overlap between art and design. In the end I will be producing a book of sorts... publishing all correspondence, interview, and findings. After the overwhelming success of "We Are Shitizens: We Are Awesome" the book I made last semester, I have realized what a valuable resource this amazing and often overlooked group of people is...

So, what I would like from you all... if you feel at all inspired to contribute to this project, if you have thoughts, ideas, and or opinions on this realm of connections between art and design... feel free to throw some posts up here... or just put em in the "comment" area of this post...

I have started something of a correspondence with miss Anna Nym prior to this post and these conversations are now located in the comments area... feel free to geek out a bit on em if you will...

but please, feel free to contribute.

ETC

2 comments:

E T C said...

What up kid...
yeah, so I was reading some Heidegger, and I thought of you.
hold on tight.

the greek (or roman) basis for the word technology is technikon...as
in, belonging to technē.

yet technē is not only in reference to craft and/or the physical
manifestation of craft, but also the creation.... or revealing that
happens within the mind and within the arts (poiēsis)...

technē = technology and poiēsis

technology is not only this machinery and "technological advancement"
that we so often immediately attatch to the word, but it is a natural
process of inspiration, problem - solution...

so... if technology is poetry... the adverse... poetry is
technology... well, is.

right?
right.

This is all good and well, but I started thinking of it in terms of
all these technological items and kind of understood...

consider an Ipod, or a cell phone... any little gadget... consider
what lead up to it and what it enables us to do.... we do these things
thoughtlessly, but under scrutiny i understand some level of its link
to poetry.

The same in regards to art and poetics being technology... the
advancement and stages that lead up until now... how art and poetry
answer ideas and present questions that cannot be verbalized, but only
experienced when confronting the work...

I don't know...

yeah.

for me it just narrows the gap between art and design, art and
function... life... progression... etc...

I'm interested in your response to this.

sweetness,
etc.







T.M.Hyland 
to me
 More options
  Feb 16 (7 days ago)
This is fantastic stuff.  As I was reading your revelation, I was flooded with immediate correlations.  This is too fun since it combines all my fields of interest.  I've got to thank you this.

And, just in case you lose interest in my writing before I'm done, your brother is coming up to cart me to O-Town tomorrow.  Before that happens, we're going to the Kitty Cat Club for coffee.  Can you join us?

Now let's break some smart bread.

If we look at the history of poetry and the history of technology; they follow the same track.  But for the sake of our analysis (and brevity), my focus will be primarily on poetry. 

Reflection:  The earliest examples of frequently studied verse are unrefined and imperfect.  They are exceedingly simple in mechanics but their forms are unwieldy.  Consider the length and mechanical simplicity of Homeric epics, or Beowulf, or portions of the Old Testament, etc....  These early literary works were recording and counting devises--tracking and preserving the histories and lineages of kings and deities. Early technologies in the traditional sense (from now on will be referred to as TTS) were also cumbersome devices engineered to perform simple tasks--like record keeping (quipu) ,counting (abacus), and tools to assist in the construction of monuments (to preserve and store the physical and spiritual states of kings and deities).

Earlier, yet Relevant to the Point: The earliest and grossest TTS were, of course, simple stone tools created only for the sake of subsistence.  The earliest known art forms/symbolic representations of thought are petroglyphs and pictographs.  These generally depict hunting scenes (perhaps used for subsistence and ceremony education) and are in all instances crude, crude, crude.

I can really see this.  As poetry/art (P/A) develops it begins to serve more purposes and it expresses increasingly complex and varied ideas, but the forms are still restrictive and complicated to generate or use (think sonnet sequences, Spencerian stanzas, and highly enforced rhyme and meter) and --for the majority of people, there is no hope of either composing or enjoying verse, as it is almost exclusive to the upper classes.The lower class only has true and unimpeded access to the most common items, often strictly for the purposes of, again, subsistence and spiritual development.  The same distribution and setbacks correlate in TTS.

I could do this for hours, and it all works out, but I'm taking a flying leap out of loose chronology because I'm lazy.  Today, TTS is fluid and adaptive, it takes on many forms, and it is widely distributed, created, and owned by all classes.  The same goes for P/A. 

And here's where I'm finally (almost) approaching my point.  Your revelation makes me think of the Victorian (and late Romantic) era in literature.  All of these writers were bent out of shape because they felt...outdated and obsolete.  Art and poetic thought was for older, prettier times, before the factories of industrialization.  They imagined that they were becoming unnecessary and that their way of thinking was misunderstood and under-appreciated in an era of Production! (My capitalization and punctuation is a direct reference it Thomas Carlyle, Victorian extraordinaire)  They wanted to view their world as a cohesive organism but they saw it becoming an artificial mechanism.  The Victorian Fear:   Nature:Unnecessary::Production:Key  and  Poetry:Wasteful::Industry:Efficient  

The Mistake:  We tend, as the Victorians did, to consider TTS and P/A as separate entities with oppositional functions.  Even when we track the correlating history between the two, we may be inclined to think they developed separate though equally.  The truth is that there is no distinction between the two; they match historically because they are the same, serving the same function.  It is the manifestation of the enrichment and development of human experience.  TTS-P/A is the reflection of adaptivity, human ability, and cultivation of the true mind. 

Efficiency and Creativity are housed in every body just as TTS-P/A is stored in every house. 

Thank you for taking me here.  I hope you don't regret it.

-Tina

Also--There is some really cool research floating around that correlates quipus with binary code, very cool!

E T C said...

sometimes... maybe.