James Pine's
 Art 160 Web Journal
James Pine's
 Art 160 Web Journal
James Pine's
 Art 160 Web Journal
James Pine's
 Art 160 Web Journal
James Pine's
 Art 160 Web Journal


Entry 1 990905 // Entry 2 990908 // Entry 3 990919 // Entry 4 990926
Entry 5 991005 // Entry 6 991011 // Entry 7 991017 // Entry 8 991025
Entry 9 991101 // Entry 10 991108 // Entry 10 991115
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991115

     So I forgot to put two definitions of mine into this journal during the last two weeks. The first one was Immersion:
The complete saturation and occupation of one or more of the five senses.
The other was for Narrativity: (in the context of interactive media)
The reason to interact i.e. the narrative compels one to "do something".
I've been working pretty hard coding and designing Arthoo! for my final project. As for the term world brain I'm guessing it's sort of an unorganized collective intelligence i.e. it has all the input and power of 6 billion brains, but is not organized for a specific purpose. I have to figure out a way to incorporate that into my work.

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991108

     I posted my manifesto over the weekend, and responded to all the ones posted as of midnight. I've been working too hard on Primal Chaos. I just finished correcting a couple of bugs in the ad tracking code. Geez, I'm tired.

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991101

     I'm not sure where the proverb/clichè, "Two heads are not always better than one." comes from, but I postulate that the same would hold true if two were switched with 6 billion. The concept of a world brain sounds great at first, everyone knowing everything, information disseminated instantly, the collaborative thought of so many neurons at once. Utopia, no?

     My view is that a world brain would be too bogged down in filtering out bogus ideas/thoughts, and daydreaming to actually be productive. Sure many times teamworks succeeds where an individual would fail, and many times an idea comes out from a discussion between many, bouncing ideas off each other; however, when a person really wants to lock down and think, he or she opts for solitude, "I just need some time to myself." Humans do not even use 20% of their brain's full capacity, why not work on utilizing one's brain fully before tapping into someone else's?

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991025

     I've been trying to catch up with the telematic manifesto e-mails, and I've read two in the last week that touch upon the "art on the net" theory. Helen Thorington writes:

As I have said before, my problem with net.art right now is that not enough artists are attentive to the medium; instead they are making single, self-contained works with predetermined paths; the network brings in the audience, end of use. They are not exploring what it means to work in a networked environment...
Here she is eluding to the fact that most of the artists in Net_Condition are not even close to using/exploring the full potential of the Net. I had similar views which I expressed in my manifesto.

     Further proof, and I had to chuckle at this came from Andy Deck who wrote:

Secondly, although I liked the table arrangement designed for MoMA's "Unprivate House", I think a more important reference is the MoMA's parallel use of the web in their Fame After Photography exhibition. Here the use is mostly in name: the web browsers were reading off of the workstation harddrives. Visitors may not have been aware of this, or of the URLs where they later could find the pages shown. The "web" pages shown were closed from connection to the internet. Both this use of the "web" and the table are closely related to CD-ROM technologies, because they are not connected to the internet, and not capable of the metamorphosis that is one important potential of network art.
Again, my point exactly. I am now going to read the assigned reading for tomorrow.

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991017

     So I guess besides being happy that I finished writing two papers and taking amid term last week, I also wrote my first manifesto this weekend. I abhor manifestos because they seem to be long rants by someone who is just too into, obsessed if you will, with something, but I put my beliefs aside and wrote one. I think it came out well, in true manifesto form, though I'm a little weary because whenever I read a manifesto it's usually pretty easy to find problems with their logic, and I'm sure that holds true with mine. I am somewhat pleased with the idea I came up with to illustrate the point of my manifesto. It's pretty simplistic and came to me about 6 minutes after I thought about net art. That doesn't usually happen to me.

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991011

     Last semester I took a digital storytelling class which dealt heavily with hypertext and its advantages/disadvantages. I think the first two web sites from the syllubus minimized one of the big problems I had with hypertext, granted one of them used a java applet and a database. The problem I had with hypertext and all its path choices was that one could easily get lost amidst the links and miss a large part of the reading. The author might argue that it was ok because they wrote it so that you did not have to read the whole thing, but I did not believe that all the time. My boyfriend came back from the war and Visual Thesaurus gave me the feeling that I got to experience the whole thing.

     The first site was especially good I thought because even if I had made it to the last frame before finishing all the rest, I would know what I had missed and finished those, or gone back to do it in a different order. I think the second project was probably a little too large for me to have gone through all the words, but it left a trail for me which I thought was visually helpful.

     As for the Grammatron, my experience was not quite as enjoyable. I found that the automation left me waiting on some pages and went too quickly through others. The lack of control also made it feel like the process would never end. I didn't have any conception of how many pages of one liners existed. Then I right clicked to view the source and apparently stopped the program. When I hit reload it reloaded the http://go.to/art160/ url that was still in my location due to the frames, and needless to say, I did not go back to the Grammatron. I read the "about" section before I started it and all the quotes there seemed to think it was the bomb, but oh well.

     On a side note, I think I inadvertantly missed a lecture last week because I thought last week was when we had two lab periods, but according to the syllabus I think I was mistaken. I'll try to read better from now on.

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991005

     If only everyone had a Dynabook. Well, if only everyone had a handheld quantum computer, they could crack the French National Bank system's RSA 512 encryption in 12microseconds. Technology, especially computing technology, changes so fast that by the time everyone has something, it's obsolete.

     The page that preceeds this is kind of a poke at interactivity, nothing more. It was just an attempt at a feedback loop, and also to show that I am not sitting on my butt doing nothing and being lazy. Actually, it's also a poke at the internet as a medium of information. Pornography saturates it, and therefore, my homepage would be incomplete without it.

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990926

     I do not aspire to be a starving artist, and those who are glorified as such should really try not to act the part. It is one thing to be struggling through life trying to do what you want to do, but it's another to be able to do exactly what you want, be recognized for it and somewhat famous, and then to still act the part of the starving artist. I'm in another art160 class that tries to change this stereotype, get the artist out of the studio, into the community and functioning as a person as opposed to an outcast. Granted there is nothing wrong with being a social outcast if that is what doing what you believe in leads to, but trying to be a social outcast seems like a ridiculous endeavor to me.

     More specifically, in the case of jodi.org, I just think they're stuck up. I do not know much about them, but I've been to their site several times in the past year and I just feel they're one of those groups that tries to push the envelope and than backs away. I still hold that having a save option turns them into hypocrites and defeats they're whole message of the process/interaction being the art and not the finished product. But oh well, they're free to do whatever they want just like me.

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990919

     The first reading, concerning cybernetics, brought up some thoughts about perpetual motion machines. All the talk about message passing got me thinking about how to construct a path in which the messages never stop being passed. My first thought was how easy that was to do with a computer i.e. to write a infinately looping program; however, the computer requires power to keep looping, and that was not under my control. What if there was a black out or someone tripped over the power cord? That when I thought about a more standard perpetual motion machine and the problems with friction, entropy, and other forces that usually end up stopping all machines, and subsequently their message passing and receiving, at some point.

     As soon as I finished the second article, I immediately thought of that performance where someone sat at a piano for a very specific period of time and people started to walk out. The audience's footeps, grumbles, and other noises and motions became part of the artwork.

     I believe the artist I refered to above was John Cage. He was mentioned in the third article. The Cybernetic Art Matrix sounds a little sci-fi-ish to me, though I could see the WWW as being one in the infantile stages. I don't know that it would be a good idea, socially, to be aware of everything that was going on everywhere (in the art world), but quick access to things in general seems like a good idea so long as it isn't abused.

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990908

     I'm waiting for the people from Flashcom to call me back right now, as they have been having some technical difficulties with their DSL service. I just finished writing the cross-browser script that animates the page title in Netscape and IE 4.x or higher, so that's pretty Xciting.

     I had some problems with the reading/discussion. I do not like it when people are stereotyped. Sure there are plenty of engineers who do not shower, have no friends, and study all day long, but there are also plenty who are well-rounded, knowledgeable in the liberal arts. I would agree that it's nice to be able to do all the art and tech yourself, but there are many advantages to working with others and breaking the project up into parts, the main one probably being time. My friend Pete and I worked on Western Messenger and he did all the graphics and layout, while I did the CGI and JavaScript programming. Granted I could have done the entire site; however, his work on the design and layout was Xcellent and the site was done very quickly.

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990905

     So I'm still having trouble getting my reader for this class. I went to Copy Central again and they still did not have it. I have already PAID for it, and have this funny yellow receipt that they keep telling me entitles me to a reader, but they have yet to come through on this. I have read all the web assignments though, so I can comment on those.

     I'm not sure how much the computer is something of a mental notepad just yet. For many people, like myself, sure, but I have to keep telling myself that not everyone spends almost every waking hour in front of a computer. Perhaps with the evolution of the Palm Pilot, this number may grow, and I'm sure with the digitalization of society, it is a certainty.

     As for the manifesto, I didn't really understand the rant. I find most manifestos to just be babbling. I understand the definition of the word, so there is a fine line between rambling and manifesting one's idea; however, in my opinion, most of them tend to the former. I read it twice and really couldn't hold my concentration once the car was pulld out of the lake.

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