Where the lines in your mind between utility, chance, aesthetics, and art?

[jwhitsitt]

So...I've uploaded a couple of pictures to my gallery area that I generated while ago as part of my day job (Hackers Like Stars and Cold Meat in Cyberspace). I added them because I was curious what you all thought - do images like these qualify as art? They were created for utilitarian purposes (to find bad guys, ultimately), and there was no effort really made (except for small tone and contrast tweaks that the original tool couldnt accomplish) to manipulate shape, positioning, or content. But at the same time, those same images were structured intentionally to get into the parts of people's heads that we commonly associate with art appreciation. I wanted the viewers (the original audience) to be able to work with and grasp intuitively relationships and stories embedded in them with a limited amount of background context.  Is that enough to make them art? (The two I've uploaded are somewhat exceptional because they're particularly interesting visually, but the intent was the same for all of them.)

[Edit: I don't mean to post the old generic 'what is art?' question. Maybe I shouldve phrased it: Is there a difference between trying to communicate with aesthetics and artistic principles, and art itself?]

[scenicartisan]

personally i think that the responsibility of the artist is to throw at the public anything that they honestly want to share. Thu public decides if they like it or not. to me the image you've shared doesnt speak to me visually, though the work behind it makes me want to know more about what you were doing. in my mind thats not art, but intellectual curriousity.

generally, to me  anyway, art is a thing independant of the how or why it was made. it is experiencing the thing itself, not what that thing can do for you.

to me beauty isn't always art, but art is always beautiful...
art isnt life, it is merely a reflection. an artifice, artificial.

[Jesse]

I think the second image, "Hackers Like Stars" is fantastic.  There's an intent behind the placement of pixels that have a mathmatical quality which make me want to ask more about the how and why.  It's almost a quite mandelbrot, but  not.   

Sceinicartisan has some good comments, but I think the, what it can do for you, can really relate to the process.  But that's just my own spin on semantics.  The next movement is art that's about the process.  Maybe we can start by naming DC's next movement here.  The process.

[jwhitsitt]

I asked this question because I never had an answer for people who suggested that I turn those images into "art" of some sort...get them printed and framed or make them available for sale...I didn't think they "counted", but I've started to question that.


scenic - I used to think I agreed with you, but I could never get away from the fact that nature creates a lot of beautiful, aesthetic things...and I'm not sure anyone would classify the grand canyon as art...

Jesse - I'm with you on intent, I think. Without some sort of a message (even one as simple as 'here's this arrangement of XX, I think it's aesthetically pleasing'), it isn't any different from the grand canyon, really: pretty and that's all.  Without the intended aesthetics, though, I think it's just a message...not art.

As for the "how and why" of Hackers Like Stars, it definitely had math associated with it. We were looking testing the effectiveness of some algorithms designed to weed out "normal" traffic...and two the outputs were plotted against each other and a third used for color.  I don't think this particular grouping ended up being useful, but it was definitely nice to look at and interesting intellectually.

If you're interested, an overview of what we were working on is here:

http://2005.recon.cx/recon2005/papers/Jack_Whitsitt/visual_analysis-recon05.ppt

Regarding process, it's come to mean more and more to me over time. I used to be concerned only about the end product...but recently I ended up sacrificing the final end product in service of the desire to rework it over and over again into different images. It would be pretty neat to see a series of prints done of the same physical image as it transforms over time into different things. I'm sure it's been done before?

As far as naming the movement, is there a lot of focus around here on the process as an end in and of itself? I've been buried in work since I moved here a couple of years ago and have just started to poke my head up and around...


(and thanks re 'fantastic'!)

[Jesse]

Funny, I had a similar response from my co-workers who know I'm an artist.  I work in molecular biology, studying the cytoskeleton of a parasite of interest. Often conversations come up where people see a Gel or some other product of an experiment, and they ask, "why don't you make some art with that?"  I find myself staring at these images removed from the science, and keep stumbling at how or why I'd call it art other than their attractive qualities.    I run into Sceinic's issues with images for the sake of images.  Possibly, my problem is that I'm not trying to send a scientific message, so I don't want to use those techniques.  I'm playing with different ideas, and maybe that's why I'm not producing scientific art...    I look at any technique as a tool.  Painters, photographers, sculptors are all on the same level, they just use different tools.  My problem is I just haven't found a message that requires bio-tech scientific tools. 

I'd think the process as an end is a future movement larger than the DC area.

[scenicartisan]

jwhitsitt,
i said that beauty isn't always art but art is always beautiful. the beauty of people, or nature i would never call art, but real life.

[jwhitsitt]

scenic: Nod...just a question of where that line is...bit that would head back into the "what is art?" realm I guess I'd rather avoid

Jesse:

This might belong in the thread you just started, but: It seems to me that a process movement would be a convergence movement of "performance art" into mediums that are more traditionally static? The older definition of process art (organic/short lived materials being allowed to follow natural paths over time) doesn't seem to fit what you're talking about...

What would a piece that focused on the process look like or how would it be experienced?

[Jesse]

Many people ask what's next.  Thinking about this, I decided to visit wikipedia.com here for a list of movements.  Which then linked here.  It's exciting to see where we've been.  They bring up the term Maximalism.  Exciting!

Maximalism is a term used in literature, art, multimedia and graphical design, and music to apply to post-minimalist movements or works, named in analogy with minimalism. It is not currently in wide use, though it has become more prominent as of 2004.
Maximalism as a genre in the plastic arts emphasises work-intensive practices and concentrates on the process of creation itself. Works from this genre are generally bright, sensual, and visually rich. Artists who do work described as maximalist tend to come from Asian countries, in particular China.

Read about it here. 

 Sceinicartisan has been writing a lot about art that involves the process.  Painting moved away from the subject and focused on the surface.  Now art is starting to follow and focus on the process.  Is Maximalism the way things are going, or an offshoot?  What will we call it?

Good question about what would process art look like? That's a hard thing to ask. Maybe better to search for examples?

Edit: Reposted the process topic you mentioned here

[jwhitsitt]

Maybe better to search for examples?

Or to make some! I wonder if a group can be set up to explore the idea of process as an end(or significant component of the end) in the DC area? It'd make for an interesting discussion...or group art project....

Regarding Maximalism, I think I've actually recently seen it in literature (not that I knew the term then)...where at least 50% of the story itself took place in the footnotes, which discussed the story itself - How it was created, sources, etc...as well as added to the plotline itself. The two (footnotes and main text) were completely inseparable.

I can imagine various stages of the process (through video, photos, copies, recreations) would be incorporated back into the work itself (either embedded in, or in some sort of series fashion)...almost recursively (like the old perl program written to list its own code out in the shape of a camel).

 

[Jesse]

Enter artdc.org.  Glad to help put a group together if there are the interested people.   It makes me thing a bit about the technological art group that Thomas works with.  Dorkbot...  Love the name.

[scenicartisan]

i think we could agree that "cloaca" was about process.


"task" at the hirshhorn  was about process.

i'd say that really Christo's work is about process. The process of creating community and community art.

to me, jackson pollacks work is about process, maybe some of the other abstract expressionists but i couldn't say specifically.


Cai Guo-Qiang who does works formed by using gunpowder and fireworks. he had  show at the hirshhorn about a year ago.

[Jesse]

I like Cai Guo-Qiang's work

[jwhitsitt]

I just started my own interpretation (tonight) of how I'd represent it (process in art)...I'll post it when it's done...


[And thanks for the references, scenic]

[jwhitsitt]

Well, I just got back to using real life data visualizations for aesthetic reasons. This is of old security data, but stuff I havent previously visualized.  Gallery link is here: http://artdc.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=random&cat=11286&pos=-2124

[Jesse]

Just neat.  It reminds me of when I first started looking at 2-d I had no clue what was going on, but after many hours of staring at things, I finally see things.  I bet it's the same with your data.  What's it mean?

Here's one from the biorad.com site:

http://biorad.com/images/60500.jpg

[jwhitsitt]

Your picture looks like either art or mold

Yeah, the idea behind showing information this way is that you can see "interesting" exceptions or features pretty quickly.

The source data for this graph was a comma separated file consisting of:
TYPE OF ATTACK, SOURCE MACHINE, DESTINATION MACHINE, SOURCE PORT, DESTINATION PORT, SENSOR, TIME, COUNT
(and a couple of other things that would take too much space to explain)

So the graph displays:
X axis: TIME (in hours over 7 days)
Y axis: SOURCE PORT (0-65535)
Individual points are scaled by COUNT per hour
Individual points are colored by SOURCE MACHINE
Individual points are shaped by DESTINATION MACHINE

Normally, I would not use shapes (done here because it looks cool) due to the fact that there are far more possible destination machines than available shapes...so they dont say much (although if theyre different, theyre definitely not the same machine)

The color is done on a categorical scale, meaning similar source values have highly contrasting colors. This is as opposed to doing a value range. categorical: A value of "Jack" is Blue and "Jackie" is Red. Value Range: "Jack" is Blue and "Jackie" is lighter blue. This lets you see sublte differences. Doing it the other way would show you groups of similar things (both are useful, categorical just looked better in this case).

If you know some basic networking and how computers choose source ports, what role source ports play vs destination ports, and the difference between ports of 1-1024 and 1025-65535, you'll see some interesting features.

On the other hand, I like it because it seems to be a well balances abstraction with flow and rhythm. Most of these graphs turn out that way because there is intelligence and purpose behind the underlying data...so if you display them properly, youll see that.

Edit: I actually cropped out ports 0-1024 or so...they could make their own image, but it didnt match with what I was interested in showing.  This is due to the previously mentioned difference between that range and the rest of the ports.

[angelakleis]

 

[jwhitsitt]

Yeah...an easier explanation is:
Y axis: What the computer did
X axis: What time it did it
Size of point: How often it did it
Color: Which computer did it
Shape: Which computer got done to.

[Jesse]

Cool.  That makes more sense if you know what your looking for. Same deal in the 2d gells the x axis separates proteins by electrochemical charge or ph.  The y axis is protein size.

[angelakleis]

Now, THAT I actually understood.   
Thanks for the clarification, Jesse.