[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> GENERATION FLASH (3A / 3)

[Sawad <sawad@utensil.net>]

>
>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.]


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