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survey answers

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 30, 1998 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  



movies: AESTHETICS

No idea what this was used for.

> For an essay I would like to do a survey, would people like to answer these > questions and email the responces?

What is this survey going to be used for in this essay? A content analysis for marketing purposes or what??

>>>>responses:

1. What do you think computer/ digital art is?

Art.

[It's also important to recognize that "computer art" historically encompases different things than "digital art" historically does, and conflating these two terms is both innacurate and misleading.]

2. Do you think computer/digital art is a valid form of art like painting and drawing etc?

What is an invalid form of art?

(Isn't this like asking "when is a dog not a dog?") I don't understand this question at all.

Do you mean "valid medium"? In which case I would like to know how you're defining "art"; such a question about appropriate and inappropriate media relates to notions of medium-based purity. (These notions were never historically valid, a point clearly side stepped by Greenberg and his followers if you are familiar with their criticism. Also, such definitions are currently very much doubted epistemically.)

3. What place do you think art has on the internet?

The internet could be a useful way for artists to present their work to an audience; it could also become an "open" museum accessible and accepting anyone's work. However, for it to do either of these it would need to be part of a culture that values art as something other than a commodity or a status-object that could be owned by an individual because there is only limited ability to own works presented on the internet, and it is impossible to understand the works presented through it except in terms of open series of multiples, much as with television. This is built into the technology (is the technology), rather than being a side effect of it, as with traditional printed matter.

The non-physical nature of materials presented on the internet (binary code) means that they are at once easily distributed, copied and owned by anyone who wishes to make a copy of the work in question. This defeats the conception of ownership in the sense of a unique object. If I have a file and I want to give it to a friend I simply make a copy and then there are 2 essentially identical files. Further, I can delete one of them and it makes no difference which because of their identical nature.

At the same time digital works can only be viewed through technology, that is, they require technology to remain digital works. Prints are not digital works; they are prints made from digital files, which is to say that they are essentially different.

4. Would you use computer/digital art?

Use it for what? Does art need to have a use? If that is the case, then you're disagreeing with Kant, and I would like to know what you base this disagreement upon.

[Do you mean "make" this work? If that is the question, then the answer is yes.]






 
 

 
 
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