<nettime> more flash digest [mcelroy x2, klima x2, fahey]

["nettime's_kompressor" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

"Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]" <...>
     RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3)
"Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]" <...>
     Re: <nettime> un-plugged-in digest [sawad, fahey, napier]
John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>
     Re: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3)
"Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>
     RE: <nettime> un-plugged-in digest [sawad, fahey, napier]
John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>
     Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Really Viral Marketing

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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 00:55:04 -0400
From: "Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]" <joseph@electrichands.com>
Subject: RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3)

Quoting "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>:

>   FIRST, programming is hard work! The "individual-artist-genius" model
> of art criticism is hard to apply to Manovich's vision of this new
> "software artist" creature simply because programming is commonly done
> by more than one person. While individual artists like Praystation or
> Golan Levin may often work individually, we are increasingly seeing
> software artwork produced collaboratively. Multi-artist collaborations
> (like Alex Galloway's Carnivore collaborations) and murky artist
> collectives (the excellent c404) are able to produce works greater than
> the sum of their parts - also, they can frequently achieve greater name
> recognition as a group than as one person. It is widely believed that
> NN/m9ndfukc/nato may be at least five different people, any one of whom
> might have a hard time achieving that kind of notoriety by themselves.
> The amount of labor and specialized skill it takes to produce certain
> kinds of software artworks is comparable to the labor in making a film
> or a building. And like with films, it is often impossible to attribute
> the artistic vision of a single person to the final digital product. 

Software Arts has the ability to take the "fine arts" out of the bronze age (or 
maybe sent it back to the Stone age)...because it forces extensive 
collaborations to achieve sophisticated applications. 

>   This "collaborative model" borders on a kind of "corporate model". Jon

Your getting the picture...the blur begins to leave the screen.

> Ippolito recently advocated that digital artists should give up on
> making money as artists and keep their "day jobs". I would extend that
> idea even further to say that the production of software art is so
> similar to the production of commercial digital products that the two
> modes benefit from close proximity. 

Not just the production, but sales and marketing and SERVICES!  

>It is not uncommon to find that
> digital artists have day jobs working for digital companies, or to find
> artists who actually OWN or are principals of a commercial enterprise
> closely linked to their artistic production (examples include
> http://www.futurefarmers.com, http://www.netomat.net/,
> http://www.c404.com, and even my own comparatively staid
> http://www.behaviordesign.com). Increasingly we are seeing artists who
> do not hide their day jobs from the art world, who are not embarrassed
> by their day jobs - and these artists tend to be digital artists.

Real women and men with hair on their chests. 

> 
>   This is not to say that I exactly buy into the McElroy model of
> marketing artwork as a corporate product (to me his position often reads
> like a parody of the artist's aversion to corporate thinking), but I do

In college, I was the parody king!  I could think anybody under the table. 


> agree that the separation of art and commerce is unnecessarily
> artificial and does not lend itself well to the production of software
> artworks of any level of complexity above D.I.Y. 
> 
>   I do not think that complexity=quality, but I do know that many
> artists (like myself) have dreams and visions of building artworks that
> are simply beyond the ability of a single person to realistically
> complete. While this has always been true for many art
> practices(fabricators and artists assistants are common even among plain
> ol' oil painters), it is particularly true for digital artists who
> cannot specialize in every digital production tool in the world. Someday
> we may have digital artists with their own (paid) programming staffs in
> much the same way a Nam June Paik likely has a nice little staff of
> fabricators and video technicians. 

Not too far away. Your cooking with Crisco Christopher.

> 
>   This also ties quite closely with Ippolito's advocating that artists
> employ the General Public License method of copyright/patent-free
> production. The GPL itself was born out of the idea that building
> software products *requires* large teams of people: If a large team of

No - Richard Stallman got pissed that he didn't have the code to make his 
printer work and started on the path to make sure he always had the code.  The 
GPL solves two problems, one is to prevent others from making code proprietary 
and the other is to absolve the creators of liabilities and implied warranties. 

> developers is producing something just for fun, then they at least need
> some assurance that one of the members of the team won't just take the
> whole product and sell it as their own. The GPL allows development teams
> to form without worrying about who is the real "owner". And online
> source control systems like CVS provide the infrastructure for
> developers to work as close-knit virtual teams without stepping on each
> other's toes and without corporate management.

There is always management - somebody always has control.  People are managers, 
corporations are just legal constructs to protect individuals and/or to help 
capital grow. 

> 
>   While I find the collaborative model more politically interesting than
> the "single-auteur-genius-with-a-staff-of-technical-assistants" model, I
> would also give my left arm to have five hotshit programmers working for
> me building my most elaborate ideas. 

Have you joined any Software organizations?  There a programmers out there who 
can be inspired to work on cool projects for free. 

> 
>   SECOND, I think that "software artwork" needs to be subdivided
> somewhat. I think the net/not-net debate is less important than the
> interactive/non-interactive debate. We are living in a moment where we
> see an increasing number of artist-programmers whose work manifests as
> either "Autonomous Algorithm" or "Interactive Experience". 
> 
>   "Autonomous Algorithm" describes a work that is entirely
> self-contained, where the software is executed and it does its thing
> regardless of what any human audience does to or with it. This category
> includes a wide variety of works, from 'artificial life' applications to
> automated data visualization systems to even plain old fashioned video
> and film and performance. Actions occur over time according to a
> pre-arranged plan. The plan may be simple, as is the case with a video,
> or it may be very complex, influenced by intricate algorithms,
> dynamically scraped data, random seeds, etc. Such works often have some
> interactivity to allow the user to browse through the product or change
> perspectives, but this interaction is not critical to the overall
> concept.

> 
>   "Interactive Experience" includes everything from mouse-following
> Flash toys to Playstation games. In such a product, the interactivity is
> central to the experience. The user is invited to be involved, and the
> artist's intention/emotion/message is communicated through the user's
> actions and decisions. The experience can be physically immersive,
> visceral, or tactile... or it can be psychologically immersive or
> suspenseful. 
> 
>   I am essentially trying to make a distinction between experiences that
> are meant to be *seen*and those that are meant to be *used*. 

> 
>   It is my feeling that the Interactive Experience model is the only
> truly new art form because it alone introduces a fundamentally new and
> different kind of experience to humanity. Browsing and clicking freely
> from page to page on a web site and seeing different pictures,
> animations, and texts only scratches the surface of what interactive
> artworks really can be. Browsing, in fact, is not even the same as using
> or playing. AutoIllustrator and NATO, or Quake III and Grand Theft Auto
> II, are qualitatively different kinds of things from most web sites -
> they invite the user to stop being a viewer and to start forming goals
> and plans entirely within the context of the app/game. They involve a
> mental transformation, a mode change in the mind. They ask the user to
> invest a bit of their own consciousness into the machine's
> protoconsciousness, to put a stake in what the program does next. 
> 
>   Just as experiencing traditional media is different from experiencing
> unmediated real life (this difference is disappearing in our
> media-saturated world, but this was not the case 100 years ago when
> seeing a movie was a jarring experience), experiencing interactive media
> is different from traditional media in a fundamental phenomenological
> way.


Yes, and people have been trying to figure out what to do with it for 30 years. 
The point is that, yes we have new abilities, but when cavemen discovered they 
could draw on walls with charcoal sticks, they didn't draw pictures of charcoal 
sticks or write thesis on the walls about how cool it was to draw pictures of 
charcoal sticks.  They didn't put charcoal sticks on ebay and say how cool they 
were for selling the instruments of change for spare change. They didn't argue 
about which type of tree made better charcoal sticks for drawing on walls.  
They didn't claim to be drawing on invisible walls.  However, I am pretty sure 
that cavemen used to sit around breathing smoke and commenting on the spirtual 
essense of stick figures. 

-- 
Joseph Franklyn McElroy 
Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]
Electric Hands, Inc
www.electrichands.com
212-255-4527
Electrify your sales, Electrify your Mind


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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 09:42:57 -0400
From: "Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]" <joseph@electrichands.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> un-plugged-in digest [sawad, fahey, napier]

Quoting nettime's_api <nettime@bbs.thing.net>:

>I also think that many non-artist programmers would resist referring to 
>Flash as a programming language. Well, they would giggle. Programmers tend 
>to think of C/C++, Fortran, Basic, Java as their materials. To be sure, 
>there is a bravura at work there. Programmers tend to work with programming 
>systems or libraries in order to create their applications, but Flash still 
>seems very much tied to the development environment Macromedia sells. 

Having started on Qbasic in the 70's (i was a very young prodigy), munched on 
hexadecimal dumps and machine code during the 80's, baptized in C and VB in the 
90's and now feasting on Java and Actionscript in 00's I think that I can say 
that Actionscript is programming.  Any programmer (or paper writer) that 
disagrees can meet me at the next Iron-man competition where we will duke it 
out to determine the winner. We will get Howard Stern to broadcast it live.  As 
for being trapped by environments - that only happens to the kids - there are 
always strategies for migration or emulation.  All this might change, but 
currently nothing can trap you but time. 

-- 
Joseph Franklyn McElroy 
Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]
Electric Hands, Inc
www.electrichands.com
212-255-4527
Electrify your sales, Electrify your Mind


Quoting nettime's_api <nettime@bbs.thing.net>:

> Re: <nettime> GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3) 
>      Sawad <sawad@utensil.net>
>      "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>
>      napier <napier@potatoland.org>
> 
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> 
> Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 14:58:19 -0400
> From: Sawad <sawad@utensil.net>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3) 
> 
> >A software artist re-uses the language of modernist abstraction and design
> ­
> >lines and geometric shapes, mathematically generated curves and outlined
> >color fields ­ to get away from figuration in general, and cinematographic
> >language of commercial media in particular. Instead of photographs and
> clips
> >of films and TV, we get lines and abstract compositions. In short, instead
> >of QuickTime, we use Flash. Instead of computer as a media machine ­ a
> >vision being heavily promoted by computer industry (and most clearly
> >articulated by Apple who promotes a MAC as a ³digital hub² for other media
> >recording / playing devices), we go back to computer as a programming
> >machine.
> >
> >Programming liberates art from being secondary to commercial media. The
> >similar reason may be behind the recent popularity of ³sound art.² While
> >commercial media now uses every possible visual style, commercial sound
> >environments still have not appropriated all of sound space. While rock
> and
> >roll, hip-hop, and techno have already become standard elevator music (at
> >least in more hip elevators such as the Hudson Hotel in NYC), it seems
> that
> >the rhythm-less regions of sound space are still untouched ­ at least for
> >now.
> 
> 
> Lev,
> 
> I don't know that programming is as liberatory as is stated here. If 
> anything, programming holds the possibility of involving one in a different
> 
> set of relations to product(ion), as well as to a different class of 
> worker. I've made some references to this other relation elsewhere.
> 
> Mentioning Flash already seems to undermine this libertine vision you want 
> to advance. Although the Flash spec were released by Macromedia a few years
> 
> ago, and is considered "open," as far as I understand it people working 
> with Flash are still very much using the tools provided by a Macromedia. I 
> have seen very limited software libraries written in Java and C (one by 
> Paul Haberli) which allow C programmers (and at some point Java programmers
> 
> too) to create Flash-generated imagery on-the-fly from within their C 
> programs, but I get the sense that this type of programming is not what you
> 
> mean when you talk about Flash. Flash remains essentially "media," as you 
> define it, much as Quicktime. I don't think that scripting separates it 
> from being so. For that matter, some "programming" is also possible using 
> Quicktime. In many ways, for programmers, Quicktime is much more useful 
> because Apple provides an extensive C library through which to access its 
> functionality, which extends far beyond making digital videos. In fact, 
> what is so interesting about Quicktime is that it is not old-media (film, 
> video, sound) specific. Rather, in many ways it is more of a protocol for 
> creating, playing, and delivering *time-based information*. In theory, one 
> can do much more with Quicktime than what artists have tended to use it 
> for. This is not simply a limitation of Quicktime, but of artists as well. 
> Mostly of artists and the systems within which they learn. Anyway, one can 
> also access Quicktime from within Java, as Apple has made a set of classes 
> for doing that easily: Quicktime for Java. I am not defending Quicktime, 
> simply pointing out some problematic issues in the distinctions you are 
> making between programming and media.
> 
> I also think that many non-artist programmers would resist referring to 
> Flash as a programming language. Well, they would giggle. Programmers tend 
> to think of C/C++, Fortran, Basic, Java as their materials. To be sure, 
> there is a bravura at work there. Programmers tend to work with programming
> 
> systems or libraries in order to create their applications, but Flash still
> 
> seems very much tied to the development environment Macromedia sells.
> 
> Furthermore, this issue of liberation through programming seems somewhat 
> more Romantic than it needs to be. One of the linguistic issues which 
> programming languages have made so apparent is the citational dimension of 
> all languages, be they social, mathematical, or programmatic. "A software 
> artist re-uses the language of modernist abstraction and design ­
> lines and geometric shapes ...." Similarly, programmers very often learn to
> 
> program by copying and modifying other programs and, on a more abstract 
> level, algorithms. (Beth Stryker and I delivered a paper earlier this year 
> at CAA in Philadelphia which sketched out some relations between 
> programming algorithms and notions of space and representation in general.)
> 
> Advanced programmers use these same techniques. They also utilize software 
> libraries (talked about earlier in the case of Quicktime) which contain 
> code which can be referenced ("called") from within one's (own) code. In 
> other words, programmers are always already indebted to other programmers. 
> The whole GNU project depends on this structure of debt. I don't disagree 
> that there is an element of liberation to be studied here, but it is not a 
> simple one, and certainly not one that is merely oppositional.
> 
> While it is true that Flash currently is implemented upon a vector-based 
> set of routines, your use of its attributes to characterize all software 
> art is simply synecdoche.
> 
> "A software artist re-uses the language of modernist abstraction and design
> ­
> lines and geometric shapes, mathematically generated curves and outlined
> color fields ­ to get away from figuration in general, and cinematographic
> language of commercial media in particular. Instead of photographs and
> clips
> of films and TV, we get lines and abstract compositions. In short, instead
> of QuickTime, we use Flash."
> 
> There is no reason that software art cannon use/create "images" in the 
> narrowly defined sense of "pictures," or any other form we identify from 
> our experiences with so-called old-media. Through software one can create 
> images or effect any number of sensuous phenomena. Your position vis-a-vis 
> the "modernism" effected by the Flash protocol, which is designed to 
> deliver compressed animation over relatively narrow bandwidth seems to me 
> mistakes technological limitations for an iconoclastic morality.
> 
> 
> Sawad
> 
> 
> >To return to the topic of new modernism. Of course we don't want to simply
> >replay Mondrian and Klee on computer screens. The task of the new
> generation
> >is to integrate the two paradigms of the twentieth century: (1) belief in
> >science and rationality, emphasis on efficiency, basic forms, idealism and
> >heroic spirit of modernism; (2) skepticism, interest in ³marginality² and
> >³complexity,² deconstructive strategies, baroque opaqueness and excess of
> >post-modernism (1960s-). At this point all the features of the second
> >paradigm became tired clichés. Therefore a return to modernism is not a
> bad
> >first step, as long as it is just a first step towards developing the new
> >aesthetics for the new age.
> >
> >PART 3B will be posted shortly.]
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> 
> From: "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>
> Subject: RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3)
> Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 17:36:00 -0400
> 
>   I agree with Eryk that NN/m9ndfukc/nato epitomizes the "software
> artist" to a certain extent, but there are several mitigating factors I
> would like to add to this discussion:
> 
>   FIRST, programming is hard work! The "individual-artist-genius" model
> of art criticism is hard to apply to Manovich's vision of this new
> "software artist" creature simply because programming is commonly done
> by more than one person. While individual artists like Praystation or
> Golan Levin may often work individually, we are increasingly seeing
> software artwork produced collaboratively. Multi-artist collaborations
> (like Alex Galloway's Carnivore collaborations) and murky artist
> collectives (the excellent c404) are able to produce works greater than
> the sum of their parts - also, they can frequently achieve greater name
> recognition as a group than as one person. It is widely believed that
> NN/m9ndfukc/nato may be at least five different people, any one of whom
> might have a hard time achieving that kind of notoriety by themselves.
> The amount of labor and specialized skill it takes to produce certain
> kinds of software artworks is comparable to the labor in making a film
> or a building. And like with films, it is often impossible to attribute
> the artistic vision of a single person to the final digital product. 
> 
>   This "collaborative model" borders on a kind of "corporate model". Jon
> Ippolito recently advocated that digital artists should give up on
> making money as artists and keep their "day jobs". I would extend that
> idea even further to say that the production of software art is so
> similar to the production of commercial digital products that the two
> modes benefit from close proximity. It is not uncommon to find that
> digital artists have day jobs working for digital companies, or to find
> artists who actually OWN or are principals of a commercial enterprise
> closely linked to their artistic production (examples include
> http://www.futurefarmers.com, http://www.netomat.net/,
> http://www.c404.com, and even my own comparatively staid
> http://www.behaviordesign.com). Increasingly we are seeing artists who
> do not hide their day jobs from the art world, who are not embarrassed
> by their day jobs - and these artists tend to be digital artists.
> 
>   This is not to say that I exactly buy into the McElroy model of
> marketing artwork as a corporate product (to me his position often reads
> like a parody of the artist's aversion to corporate thinking), but I do
> agree that the separation of art and commerce is unnecessarily
> artificial and does not lend itself well to the production of software
> artworks of any level of complexity above D.I.Y. 
> 
>   I do not think that complexity=quality, but I do know that many
> artists (like myself) have dreams and visions of building artworks that
> are simply beyond the ability of a single person to realistically
> complete. While this has always been true for many art
> practices(fabricators and artists assistants are common even among plain
> ol' oil painters), it is particularly true for digital artists who
> cannot specialize in every digital production tool in the world. Someday
> we may have digital artists with their own (paid) programming staffs in
> much the same way a Nam June Paik likely has a nice little staff of
> fabricators and video technicians. 
> 
>   This also ties quite closely with Ippolito's advocating that artists
> employ the General Public License method of copyright/patent-free
> production. The GPL itself was born out of the idea that building
> software products *requires* large teams of people: If a large team of
> developers is producing something just for fun, then they at least need
> some assurance that one of the members of the team won't just take the
> whole product and sell it as their own. The GPL allows development teams
> to form without worrying about who is the real "owner". And online
> source control systems like CVS provide the infrastructure for
> developers to work as close-knit virtual teams without stepping on each
> other's toes and without corporate management.
> 
>   While I find the collaborative model more politically interesting than
> the "single-auteur-genius-with-a-staff-of-technical-assistants" model, I
> would also give my left arm to have five hotshit programmers working for
> me building my most elaborate ideas. 
> 
>   SECOND, I think that "software artwork" needs to be subdivided
> somewhat. I think the net/not-net debate is less important than the
> interactive/non-interactive debate. We are living in a moment where we
> see an increasing number of artist-programmers whose work manifests as
> either "Autonomous Algorithm" or "Interactive Experience". 
> 
>   "Autonomous Algorithm" describes a work that is entirely
> self-contained, where the software is executed and it does its thing
> regardless of what any human audience does to or with it. This category
> includes a wide variety of works, from 'artificial life' applications to
> automated data visualization systems to even plain old fashioned video
> and film and performance. Actions occur over time according to a
> pre-arranged plan. The plan may be simple, as is the case with a video,
> or it may be very complex, influenced by intricate algorithms,
> dynamically scraped data, random seeds, etc. Such works often have some
> interactivity to allow the user to browse through the product or change
> perspectives, but this interaction is not critical to the overall
> concept.
> 
>   "Interactive Experience" includes everything from mouse-following
> Flash toys to Playstation games. In such a product, the interactivity is
> central to the experience. The user is invited to be involved, and the
> artist's intention/emotion/message is communicated through the user's
> actions and decisions. The experience can be physically immersive,
> visceral, or tactile... or it can be psychologically immersive or
> suspenseful. 
> 
>   I am essentially trying to make a distinction between experiences that
> are meant to be *seen*and those that are meant to be *used*. 
> 
>   It is my feeling that the Interactive Experience model is the only
> truly new art form because it alone introduces a fundamentally new and
> different kind of experience to humanity. Browsing and clicking freely
> from page to page on a web site and seeing different pictures,
> animations, and texts only scratches the surface of what interactive
> artworks really can be. Browsing, in fact, is not even the same as using
> or playing. AutoIllustrator and NATO, or Quake III and Grand Theft Auto
> II, are qualitatively different kinds of things from most web sites -
> they invite the user to stop being a viewer and to start forming goals
> and plans entirely within the context of the app/game. They involve a
> mental transformation, a mode change in the mind. They ask the user to
> invest a bit of their own consciousness into the machine's
> protoconsciousness, to put a stake in what the program does next. 
> 
>   Just as experiencing traditional media is different from experiencing
> unmediated real life (this difference is disappearing in our
> media-saturated world, but this was not the case 100 years ago when
> seeing a movie was a jarring experience), experiencing interactive media
> is different from traditional media in a fundamental phenomenological
> way.
> 
> -Cf
> 
> 
> [christopher eli fahey]
> art: http://www.graphpaper.com
> sci: http://www.askrom.com
> biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> 
> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 00:16:06 -0400
> From: napier <napier@potatoland.org>
> Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3) 
> 
>  >>> Lev Manovich wrote:
> >Thirty years of media art and post-modernism have inevitably led to a
> >reaction. We are tired of always taking existing media as a starting
> point.
> >We are tired of being always secondary, always reacting to what already
> >exists.
> >
> >Enter a software artist ­ the new romantic. Instead of working exclusively
> >with commercial media ­ and instead of using commercial software ­
> software
> >artist marks his/her mark on the world by writing the original code.
> 
> An interesting term: "original code".  Is this:
> 
>          machine language (binary)
>          assembly language
>          BIOS calls
>          OS API calls
>          C, C++
>          Java
>          Flash Actionscript, Lingo
>          HTML, DHTML, Javascript, Perl
> 
> A programmer can code in any one of these.  What distinguishes hard-core 
> coding from soft-core is the level of access to features.  To an assembly 
> level programmer Java is a lightweight language, but to an HTML programmer 
> Java is hard-core coding.  The more power, flexibility and control a 
> language provides, the more we think of the language as "original code".
> 
> Is IOD "original" code (written in Lingo, the programming language of 
> Shockwave -- a commercial product).  Is Netomat "original" (where screens 
> are generated by a scripting language that is built on XML and 
> Java).  These authors of these works have found a point in the technology 
> where they can accomplish their goals.  IOD could be implemented inside the
> 
> browser, using Perl, GIF images and Javascript.  Is this less a product of 
> code than the same piece written in Lingo?
> 
> >Programming liberates art from being secondary to commercial media.
> 
> As much as I'd like to believe this...
> 
> Progamming may produce new forms outside of commercial media, but 
> programming puts the artist into new relationships with other existing 
> forms.  If I dabble in 3D rendering then my work could be competing with 
> Pixar, Toy Story, and Shrek.  Can I accomplish what teams of Silicon 
> Graphics programmers can pull off?  No, but that's not my role as an
> artist.
> 
> A low tech example: Is an rtmark sabotage secondary to the corporate image 
> being sabotaged?  The two are certainly related, and the sabotage can be 
> seen as a reaction to the corporation.  But this sort of action has it's 
> own presence as well, it's own aesthetic impact, that relies on leveraging 
> existing forms, much as software artists leverage existing forms.
> 
> Artists look for leverage points in the technology.  Flash is one such 
> point, where powerful features are available with relatively little 
> effort.  Comparatively, Java has lagged behind in usage because of it's 
> steeper learning curve, despite being versatile, powerful, and an early 
> standard in browsers.
> 
> There is a prejudice that a downloadable EXE is "real software", maybe 
> because it appears to be more like the corporate software products we're 
> familiar with.  Yet this is a 1980's approach to software.  For years 
> software has been breaking into pieces that can talk to one another through
> 
> specialized programming interfaces.  Today the browser is an engine that 
> can be embedded in email clients, Word documents, and 
> spreadsheets.  Software components provide services to other software 
> components, and languages frequently become the glue that connects 
> pre-fabricated components together.
> 
> To use these powerful and complex tools the software artist has to find 
> ways to create maximum impact with relatively little coding.  Very few 
> artists have access to a team of eager programmers.  And many artists are 
> unwilling to invest the time to learn low level languages like C, given the
> 
> inevitable dent it will make in the time they spend on aesthetic issues.
> 
> The artist has to decide where they will operate within this structure of 
> interdependent software.  HTML is a form of high-level code that instructs 
> the browser environment, much as Java can instruct the Windows OS, or 
> assembly code can instruct a chip.  All of these code forms require 
> investment of learning time, and provide access to features of the 
> computer.  The question is not "does the artist write code".   The question
> 
> is: how much leverage does the artist get from their knowledge.  What is 
> the bang-for-the-buck of HTML vs. Java, or C++.
> 
> What this means, though, is that the artist never completely "rolls their 
> own" software.  The artist never gets back to the world of pigment, oil and
> 
> canvas.  In the medium of software, there is always interdependence.  Even 
> suppose that I find a team of C programmers that are happy to code low 
> level graphics routines for me, then I become dependent on that team, still
> 
> a far cry from the romantic image of a solitary studio painter.
> 
> My role as an artist is to crack open the technology and find the humanity 
> at work under the tech veneer.  If I can do that with a Perl script, then I
> 
> will.  When that form is too limiting, then I turn to Java.  But any tool I
> 
> use requires that I work in relationship to other tools, environments, 
> products and media.
> 
> mark
> 
> napier@potatoland.org
> 
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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 11:17:45 -0400
From: John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>
Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (3A / 3)

napier wrote:
> 
> > > Lev Manovich wrote:
> >Programming liberates art from being secondary to commercial media.
> 
> As much as I'd like to believe this...
> 
> Progamming may produce new forms outside of commercial media, but
> programming puts the artist into new relationships with other existing
> forms.  If I dabble in 3D rendering then my work could be competing with
> Pixar, Toy Story, and Shrek.  Can I accomplish what teams of Silicon
> Graphics programmers can pull off?  No, but that's not my role as an artist.

it's impossible to attain the level of scale that a pixar team attain,
but you sure as hell can try, and in my mind, one probably should. there
was a time in the not so distant past that all software was created by
only one or two individuals.  as the technology became more able, it
required larger and larger groups of people to take advantage of the
abilities. visi-calc, the first spreadsheet program, was coded by one
guy. ms excel is a whole company in and of itself, more or less. but it
all seems mostly a measure of scale. an independent artist can't create
shrek, but they can create a scene from shrek. an independent artist
cant create the sims, but they can invent a new gaming paradigm. this is
in line with pat lichty's alpha-rev manifesto which makes a lot of sense
for the individual artist. software art as prototype. in a sense, this
describes netomat, starting as an individual's art project, it expanded
to the point where it is now a viable company.

the reason why flash is so compelling is that at this point in time, the
best commercial flash actually lags behind the best non-commercial
flash. and whats really interesting, is that the lag is both in function
and in content.  non-com flash often exhibit the highest degree of tech
sophistication available, in service to an intent far more compelling
than a nike ad. its as if time were turned back and we are all coding
for a 8086 processor again. one person can code wolfenstein in flash.

last week i was out in LA and i had a long conversation with a student
who was trying to produce a game with some of his friends. they naively
thought it would be possible to design and build a fully functional top
shelf game in a semester. well, i told them that it actually *is*
possible if you chose your platform carefully.  i told them to build a
game for the gameboy console. its basically the same challenge one faced
when writing a game for an 8086. there's only so much you can do, so
there is only so much you have to do. flash is sorta the same. it then
becomes up to the individual artist to decide when they have exhausted
the possibilities of their platform.  with the highest level
environments like flash, this happens sooner. in C/C++ it never happens,
or if it does, you have exhausted the possibilities of the medium
itself. but thats not to say that flash tech will not someday be as
utile as C/C++. 

i've been working with two guys from parsons on a semi-commercial game
project. last year they created in flash, a functioning but simple game
with a fairly complete back-story, so i invited them to assist on this
project (and yes, i'm paying them for the trouble). we are using flash
to create a series of animations as part of the demo/proposal to garner
further funding for the project.  it is quite obvious that the game
could never be built in flash, flash is slow as piss and games need to
run fast. but its great as a rapid prototyping tool, it more than
adequately describes the look and feel of the final game, and best
thing, it allows us to quickly try out new things. though not the final
product, flash is integral to the process. the guys i'm working with,
though big fans of flash, want to get into deeper code, they see it as
essential to the realization of their vision.
 
so what i'm trying to say here is that flash is a really really really
good entry point into the realm of programming, and in fact for some
individuals it may be all they ever need. however i think most if not
all the young people who are using flash now, will shortly discover that
it wont work for "such and such" a project, and they will have to bite
the bullet and "upgrade" their tech. that flash exists as an entry point
is only a good a thing. that flash allows for more time spent on an
aesthetic and less on a functionality is also a good thing. that a
generation of people are ubiquitously involved in both an aesthetic and
a functional investigation is a great thing, borderline revolutionary.

best,
j

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From: "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>
Subject: RE: <nettime> un-plugged-in digest [sawad, fahey, napier]
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 12:44:02 -0400

> Flash remains essentially "media," as you define it, much 
> as Quicktime. I don't think that scripting separates it from 
> being so. 
...
> I also think that many non-artist programmers would resist 
> referring to Flash as a programming language. Well, they 
> would giggle. Programmers tend to think of C/C++, Fortran,
> Basic, Java as their materials. 


Any programmer who giggles at the idea of Flash as a programming
language is uninformed. Your comparison of Flash to Quicktime is
ridiculously uninformed.

ActionScript is a robust, object-oriented, ECMA-262-compliant
programming language, roughly identical in syntax, structure, and
sophistication to JavaScript. I'm not saying that JavaScript is the most
powerful language in the world, but you cannot deny that it IS a
programming language.

This is what Flash is: Flash is a multi-platform run-time environment
that executes ActionScript code. It allows ActionScript to manipulate
multimedia elements. The multimedia elements can be vector graphics,
bitmapped graphics, sound, and animations/videos. The manipulations are
done by treating the multimedia elements as objects.

What makes Flash different from, say, JRE? It's easier to use, it is
easier to manage the inclusion of media elements, it's nearly
ubiquitous, and, well, it's slower and less powerful code-wise. 

What makes Flash different from, say, JavaScript? It's all in the GUI:
Where JavaScript is designed for manipulating HTML objects in a web
browser environment, ActionScript is designed for manipulating Flash
multimedia elements in the Flash Player environment. And the Flash
Player is *way* more powerful than any web browser in terms of
presenting and manipulating user interface elements and multimedia.

Anyway, it sounds like the last time you (and many others in the snobby
"Flash is not real programming!" camp) looked at Flash was in 1999. Take
another look. As I said to someone else recently, multimedia is only
about 5% of what Flash is. Check out this site to learn about how
ActionScript is a 'real' programming language: 
   http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/12/07/action.html

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com

> Furthermore, this issue of liberation through programming 
> seems somewhat 
 <...>

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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 15:14:11 -0400
From: John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>
Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Really Viral Marketing

this is an intriguing idea, and i'm gonna play devil's advocate and not
reject the notion off hand.  you rightfully say that our machines are
our souls, but personally i own more than one (soul?).  if say, i made
one of my old (as in a year) clunkers just a net media machine, what do
i care if some spare cycles are used for a render farm, as long as my
tunes don't get interupted, this could actually be a really "sound"
idea. i have any number of old machines that are more than capable of
playing mp3's, if offering my spare cpu cycles, on a machine i only use
for media playback, solves the whole payment problem, i'm down with it.

j




> 
> This is a fascinating article about the new owner of Kazaa, Nikki
> Hemming, who has turned the notorious file-sharing application into what
> could be a very disturbing yet influential chapter in the history of
> file-sharing and, hence, copyright law. She's a daring businessperson,
> I'll give her that:
>   http://news.com.com/2100-1023-890197.html
> 
> She seems to be quietly gearing up her company for a long legal battle.
> She also seems to have a "get rich while you can" scheme just in case it
> all fails:
>   http://news.com.com/2100-1023-873181.html
 <...>

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#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net