Inside/Outside
Shock of the View
Monday, October 6, 1998
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Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 13:01:19 -0400 (EDT)
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From: murph the surf
Subject: [shock] Inside/Outside
Getting back to the "object":
"There exist both verbal artifacts (e.g., the scriptures) and material
artifacts (e.g., altar) that objectify the act of believing, imagining, or
creating as a sometimes graphically represented turning of the body
inside-out. But what is expressed in terms of body part is, as those cited
contexts themselves make clear, more accurately formulated in the endowing
of interior sensory events with a metaphysical referent. The interchange of
inside and outside surfaces requires _not_ the literal reversal of bodily
linings but the making of what is originally interior and private into
something exterior and sharable, and conversely, the reabsorption of what
is now exterior and sharable into the intimate recesses of individual
consciousness."
Elaine Scarry, "The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World"
Friedrich Kittler points out that Information Systems were concerned
primarily with storage (inside) and transmission (outside) until computers
added a third element: computation (mediation). Whereas diciplines like art
history, science and phychoanalysis separate storage from transmission in
order to study them as distinct objects what we in the west think of as art
may have always been a kind of computation -- creating an endless looping
of inside and outside.
Perhaps when we talk about the "object" what we really mean is the
"artifact" and that can be virtual (verbal) or atomic (material) and is a
result of the objectifying process that computers have changed dramatically.
Lots of New Media Art never depended upon computers but do so more and more
because artists instinctively sense this art/computation link is material
to work with. That's where "net.art" may come in, not as a medium but as an
awareness of this computation. net.art isn't a category of artifact but a
kind of objectifying process and an easy way to begin working.
OK, now I've got myself all confused again. Tangled web and all that. But
like I've always said, science creates solutions while art creates problems
and that's why they need each other, for the dynamics.
Rob
robbin.murphy@nyu.edu
Dept. of Art and Art Professions
School of Education, New York University
http://www.nyu.edu/education/art/visartsadmin/infosystems
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