Contemporary means of image production, such as video and cell phone cameras, as well as socially networked means of image distribution such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter give global populations the possibility of presenting their photos, videos, and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished from any other post-conceptual artwork. And contemporary design gives the same populations the possibility of shaping and experiencing their own bodies, apartments, or workplaces as artistic objects and installations. This means that contemporary art has definitively become a mass cultural practice.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
gregory shollette
February 10, 2012 – 9:21 am
Prior to that day of liberation,
any failure to reproduce one’s own academic field
simply amounts to professional suicide.
On the other hand, dissolving art into a corrupt world
appears equally dishonest, and merely adds fuel to a neoliberal agenda
that seeks to eliminate all economically “useless” areas of study
as philosophy, poetry, classical languages,
and all other non-commercial forms of “culture.”
February 9, 2012 – 9:38 am
In algorithmic information theory (a subfield of computer science), the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object.
Kolmogorov complexity is also known as descriptive complexity[Note 1], Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity, algorithmic entropy, or program-size complexity.
For example, consider the following two strings of length 64, each containing only lowercase letters, digits, and spaces:
abababababababababababababababababababababababababababababababab
4c1j5b2p0cv4w1x8rx2y39umgw5q85s7uraquuxdppa0q7nieieqe9noc4cvafzf
The first string has a short English-language description, namely “ab 32 times”, which consists of 11 characters. The second one has no obvious simple description (using the same character set) other than writing down the string itself, which has 64 characters.
http://www.hanshan.com/specials/xubingts.html
February 8, 2012 – 11:01 pm
Between 1987 and 1991, the young Chinese graphic and fine artist, Xu Bing (born, Beijing, 1955), designed a ‘vocabulary’ of 4,000 characters which appear, in terms of their graphic form and structure, to be Chinese, but which are entirely illegible in terms of their linguistic signification. None of them appear in Chinese dictionaries, and they do not relate to any other living or dead, spoken or unspoken language on earth. During the same period, Xu personally carved (in reverse) the pear-wood type from which he eventually hand-printed his «Tianshu» or «Book from the Sky».
freidrich kittler
February 3, 2012 – 8:57 pm
“The story of how the divine instructions to use quills extended beyond Moses and Mohammed and reached simpler and simpler people is a lengthy one that nobody can write, because it would be history itself.”