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Re: iDrama or hiDrama??


On Jun 6, 2005, at 11:24 AM, Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:

Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 01:39:51PM -0500 in <1117996791.42a346f705f9a@webmail.iu.edu>,
thom@indiana.edu <thom@indiana.edu> spake:
I objected to the idea that any art can be automatically generated in any field
from writing to visual art to music. History pretty much shows that art does
not appear randomly, that machines never produce it and that humans are always
in the mix. This particularly holds true if you are looking at any art from a
historical perspective. Art defined by Picasso, Shakespeare, Otis Redding, Nam
Jun Paik, Laura Mixon etc ... Artists. 

  That may well have something to do with the fact that computers did
not exist when those "historical" forms of art were created.

Obvious. The picture frame was something totally diffrent from wall painted frescos. My point is about the idea of computationally generating art, music and/or story ... the idea that a program will create ART in caps. The computer is a tool which will be used to create art by artists. My money is on artists who use the tool to do what it does best and from the first 50 years of computation it is pretty clear that thinking, feeling & creating like humans is not something which comes easily to software and hardware. I'm interested in an iDrama which is truly interactive and open to the inclusion of all forms of interactivity and not limited to OO class design for modeling. OO class design will be part of the mix but it won't be the mix.

Systems where the driving force will be humans doing what humans have done since the beginning of time will work.

  Automatically generating art is clearly possible in many fields.
Samples, remixing, and algorithmic blending of melodies lend themselves
well to computer-generated music.  There are software-generated poems
and stories, and I've been entertained by them in a few cases, which is
more than I can say for many meat-based writers.

So, you are saying that computational writing is far more interesting to you than human writers? Pure bull shit and describing human writers as meat-based writers is stupid.

  Consider <http://www.random-art.org/>, which is often surprisingly
good.  I've used many of them as desktop backgrounds over the years.

You have to be kidding. Maybe the code to generate the 'decoration' for your screen savers is an art but this stuff on the screen is not art.

At least try Rhizome.org

All of these still have an artist, of sorts: the person who wrote the
program. But your belief that every single work of art must be manually
generated by an *ARTISTE* is clearly false.

That is not my assertion and it was why I mentioned Aaron's code by Harold Cohen. Did you actually read what I posted? Do you even know who Cohen is.

The assertion that modern
impressionists are not artists is more than just false,

Again, what I said was Impressionism was an art movement in the 19th century. We are in the 21st century and that art movement is over. It is played out. anyone today passing themselves off as an impressionist doing field paintings is painting-by-the-preestablished-numbers.

it's openly
insulting, and you need to think long and hard about why you'd say such
a horrible and monstrous thing,


Monsterous? Aren't you the guy who just referred to meat-based-writers?

why the notion of people making art that
is simply there to be pleasant to look at is offensive to you.

I never said anyting was offensive. I said it was decorative. I have two couches in my house; they need company.


The goal of the interactive fiction/drama/storytelling movement (which
this list exists to serve) is to produce storytelling entertainment
generated or mediated by software.

Yo, idrama, that little 'i' stands for interactivity in all its forms, not 'entertainment generated or mediated by software' that would actually be something like the <i>egom<u>bs</u>Drama</i> list. I'm willing to join that list also but short of this I'm lobbying the IDrama list with a BIG I for all aspects of interactivity.

If you're not interested in that,
it's probably not going to be of any use to you, and assertions that
it's impossible and not art are probably not going to be of any use to
anyone here.

Hubert Dreyfus, the philosopher from Berkeley was once said if you want to get to the moon you can climb a tree and you will get closer but until you get out of the tree you will never get to the moon.

i just see a lot of folks in trees yelling back and forth that they are closer. It looks pretty funny from ground level. I'm arguing for a BIG I approach rather than a little i approach and definitely not something limited to <i>egom<u>bs</u>Drama</i> list approach which thinks randomly generated screen saver art is good enough and and no thanks to meat-based writers. I want something which has to and can be held up to the standards of Shakespeare, Picasso, ee cumings, stravinsky and Swoon. Hey, you all used the word 'drama' not me. You use that word you gotta meet the bar ... and I actually think there are people on this list who want to meet that bar.

Sincerely, Thom