There
is a passage in the book that states, “behind much art extending through the
western tradition exists a yearning to break down the psychic and physical
barriers between art and living reality”. The aforementioned, as a possible
interpretation, presents a central goal of art as accurately representing or
getting closer to some metaphysical truth present in what our eyes see. This
thesis, though perhaps slightly applicable to observational rendering, grossly
seems to miss the point of art; that is, like beautiful literature, the
composition and structure of a piece serves to defamiliarize and introduce
novelty. There is something, for instance, inherently intriguing in playing
with realities physical laws in ways that defy and warp them; it makes one feel
almost like a god (creator) free to shape a universe according to whatever
fancy is foremost. The status of
godhood, however, isn’t pure, for one is still limited to the perceptual rules
that we derive from experiencing the everyday (spatial dimensions, colors,
textures).
As
a somewhat tangent point, the work of Ken Feingold provides an interesting
commentary on patterns of human interaction. Specifically, his animatronic
heads implanted in packaging peanuts and forever immersed in conversation with
one another seem to ominously replicate the way humans converse. Via a mode
similar to the way we cling to certain phrases and words to generate formulaic
responses (“how was your day”,
“what’s your major”, etc.”, the Ken’s heads use algorithms to cling to certain
word/word combinations that elicit preprogrammed responses. In sum, Ken’s work
serves to emphasize the point that computers think like humans because they
were made by humans that can’t conceive of other thought modalities.
No comments:
Post a Comment