Soundscape

Do we really interact with computers, or just input commands?

In "Diary: Audience 1966, A Year From Monday", John Cage compares the evolution of the relationship between artist and audience to the relationship between man and machine. He says that we are an audience for computer art and we need a computer that isn't just labor-saving, but increases the work we are capable of doing. In this he was a visionary, seeing the future path that Personal Computers had yet to show. My argument though is that the computer is still just a tool. At most it is a static medium.
Although programs and tools now allow the expression of multiple forms of art through a digital landscape, they are still reacting back and forth in real time. The artist makes a move, and the computer responds like a chess game, with the dance between them forming the art intended. I think the artist still just inputs their will and the computer reacts. It is not yet to the point like with John Cage's new concept of audience where the artist is truly affected by the reaction of the medium to the building of the performance.

Situational Tour

Life goes on in the big city
A testament to heroes of old fades into the background
From 9-5 they shuffle on by

At the end of the day the rush begins
Caught up in the rat race, but who really wins?
Passing by, they stare straight ahead,
Soon the memory may be dead.

Modern measures to protect the art.
Is it a shield, or a cage?
The memory gets locked away.

Visitors come from far and wide,
but do they know what's kept inside?
They see the man, but do they see hi-s-tory?

A great leader on his throne,
His memory demands respect,
He alone can break the rules
Calmly seated, waiting to be forgotten

Many enter the grand hall
They pay tribute to the man,
they don't see what it used to be,
they don't see the reality of the memory

Solace for the fallen.
A permanent hush has settled on the hall.
Like dust on a mantle it blots out what people used to feel
It feels like you have stepped away from the busy world outside

Young and old they mark their visit
In an out in an instant
Few stay to learn what happened here
About the man in the chair

This shrine may be a tomb
A testament torn by time
As the days go by few remember
Few hold on to the truth behind the stone facade

The hero of a nation looks out from his seat
He watches over the seat of power
He serves as a reminder of hard fought ideals
But on this bleak day, does anyone even notice?

At what point does the audience start to affect the artist?

There are many levels to the involvement of an audience in multimedia artwork. With Wagner, the audience merely was hit from multiple fronts and was not particularly involved in the outcome of the piece itself. As time went on though, artists like John Cage helped the development of methods that involved the participation of the audience and added a factor of "indeterminacy and chance operations" to his work. Artists today range greatly in their inclusion of the audience, from simple multimedia performances with traditional audiences to performance comedy like that seen on "Who's line is it anyway?" where the audience directly affects the outcome of each skit.
I think that it is imporant to note that the artist chooses the level of involvement the audience has, but as soon as the audience is given any sort of choice to affect the outcome of the performance or piece, the artist is subject to their whim. If nobody that showed up to telesymphony had a cell phone, or had the correct brand, Golan Levin would have had to abandon his original plan for the cell phone musical performance. Technology opens the door to new methods of integration between artist and audience, but also forces the artist to often relinquish full control of the situation to gain that interactive spark.


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I chose the Lincoln Memorial because it represents a number of things depending on who is there. To most, it is a representation of the authority of liberty and justice and the solidarity of our nation following the civil war. Many of the people found visiting do so out of ritual purpose, usually related to education. I know certainly that many of my friends and myself included made school trips to the national mall, but to the lincoln memorial inparticular to catch a glimpse into our country's history.

Isn't the terminator a cybernetic machine?

How crucial are visionary leaders to cutting edge technological development? Were their ideas a natural progression or blind leap of genius?

As the reading stated, men like Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wienerm and J.C.R. Licklider lead the way with ideas of personal computers despite a general consensus of skepticism on the subject. On one hand, the super-computers that took up entire buildings were slowly growing in power and shrinking in size, but without the large support of Douglas Engelbart I don't believe NLS would have come out when it did.

Once the idea for a personal computer that acts as an extension of humanity for enhancement rather than as a potential rival in the still-mythic artificial intelligence I think that it was a natural progression to reach the xerox alto. Every scientist or engineer working at all in the field of computers were going to naturally be drawn to the idea of making computers more accessible and certainly more useful. One can definitely notice though that the enhancements came slowly. First size came down, then punch cards were replaced with an actual code interface, and finally a GUI which we all use today (like windows) was developed in the final steps of development before the Xerox Alto.
Like the theory that given infinite time a room of monkeys with typewriters would compete all of Shakespeare's works by chance, I believe that the move towards personal computers was inevitable once world war 2 ended. It naturally sparked interest as a powerful new tool and demanded to be enhanced to expand the user base.

Is multimedia legit?

As an Information Technology major in KOGOD I am constantly coming up against the question, "Where do you draw the line between IT and non-IT business"? I want to re-pose that question for this class as, "Where does one draw the line between digital art and computer tools?"

The answer I think depends highly on one's perspective. A computer certainly has a number of programs ranging from video games to script editors, from doing your taxes to organizing your favorite music. How you use these programs can certainly affect whether they are considered capable of producing art. I think that at this point the specific art form viewed from a computer is limited to programs that produce visual or audio media formats. Whether using photoshop, finalcut, flash, or something that creates machinima through videogames and other graphical engines, the final product is multimedia, limited to a combination of existing separate media types found outside of the digital world.

The key factor is that computers enable the combination of media with ease.

Multimedia Website