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Crazy/Nerdy Computer Art Installations
Gernot Ziegler writes "After having read a report on the fusion of Art and Technology, I somehow ended up on Perry Hoberman's page. I don't know this guy, but I've always been fascinated by techno art, and these ones are clearly intriguing.
There is the Workaholic, a pendulum with a bar code scanner over a carpet with bar codes and an attached projector that overlays images on the carpet, or the ZOMBIAC (Zone Of Monitor-Based Inter-Amnesiac Contact) that lures the visitors into thinking that the machines react to them directly. You might also want to have a look at this weird auction (that's where I got this link from) ! :)"
DeadTech
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
We can undo a lot of your disdain for lowly art students by refering you to the book "Information Arts" by Steven Wilson, who also happens to be one of the editors of Leonardo, the journal of art and technology which is behind the website in the lead story.
There's a nice little quiz at the beginning of the book, listing a number of research projects and asking which ones were done by artists and which ones by scientists. You'd be quite startled by the answers.
The link in the parent post is a little out of date. This is the correct link, which has up-to-date concert listings and CD's.
I'm learning programing and System Administration on the job after getting a Masters in sculpture. They're really rather similar fields.
First, some notes for those that have an out-dated or tv-inspired understanding of the art world:
Most artists are really very down to earth. Much of what they make is not, but the people themselves are not flaky astrologer hippies. (like most hackers. vs. their television counterparts.)
Many museum and gallery directors are rather flaky. (like your boss.)
Art is largely self-referential. Artists make art knowing art history for people that know art history.
Art is a lot of problem solving - where the artist generates and solves the problem.
Art has been around for centuries and was changed radically by the camera.
When hacking is five hundred years old, it will seem a lot more like art that it does even now. Already, an experienced coder is not impressed by some newbie's new chat program (like mine) that introduces no new functionality to the genre.
But if that chat app made comments on what everyone said, maybe that would be new and interesting. If it added something to the genre of chat apps while commenting on chatting, it would be self referential, new, and interesting. And regular users all over the world would call it elitist, weird and stupid, claiming it was just designed to make them look ignorant.
Right now, programming is already looking a lot like art. New guys mock Cobol programmers the same way new art school students mock figure painters. No one is interested in my chat program for the same reasons I'm not interested in looking at paintings of mountains - I've seen it a million times before, there's nothing new here.