Non Servium

Games as Art Redux

2011-07-15T10:14:00.010-07:00

Awhile back I was on a "video games as art" kick. This video made me reevaluate my premise a bit: Previously I found it entirely possible for video games to be art, since the only hurdle I perceived, and that a majority of other thinkers perceived, was interactivity. The thinking was that that hurdle was largely arbitray. Video games are like photography, once our experience bias dies off there will be no bar to them being recognized as an artistic medium.This argument isn't invalidated, but it must be revised.The largest hurdle for video games being a valid artistic medium is capitalism.No, I'm not claiming that the other, established and recognized forms of art aren't capitalistic, just that video games, for the most part, are MORE capitalistic, to the point of being almost completely run by capitalistic influences. Art is generally at least partially developed independently of the audience. Some audience consideration may, obviously, apply but for the most part the artist is, first, catering to their own view of what "should be".The artists skill, or luck, at gleaming popular interests and desires influences the success and recognition of the work, but this is rarely the primary goal.Marketability is definitely a factor (generally post hoc), but isn't the primary concern of the creation itself. The work exists prior to marketing factors. Most video games are made by committee, with only a vision of potential marketability. They exist to maximize profit, first. Because of...

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A quick note on aesthetics and history

2009-06-19T15:32:00.001-07:00

There is yet another lamentful post on Slashdot about how video games lack artistic merit. Anyone who knows me on even in the most cursory of ways will know that this is an issue that deeply engages me. Not so much aesthetics of video games in general, but the relation of art to modern society. The general theme among most of the people I talk to who actually care about such things (the minorest of minorities) have a general conclusion that the arts are dying, or at least dramatically reduced from some prior pinnacle of their former glory. The idea is that the various arts flourished "back in the day", and now languish in obscurity, where only a few poor kind souls attempt to keep the flame alive. This brought me to a bit of accidental nuance to my view, it isn't so much how art relates to modern society, but how art relates to modern CONSUMERIST culture, where being a commodity is a goal unto itself, and salability is an ends-unto-itself beyond mastery or skill (the Latin ars root of art comes in here). How can something that we usually see as a means-to-itself (aesthetics) live in a world where the only thing that matters is consumer mindshare, and mass production? With this new-found specifity (which MSWord has decided is not actually a real word) of my purpose flowing into my mind, also came its negation. Art in the contemporary context is probably exactly what art has always been. Yes, read that again, as I'm going against the popular conception, and...

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You are Special, no REALLY

2008-12-17T12:54:00.003-07:00

Reading the latest installment of Psyblog (which sometimes has semi-interesting missives) has reawakened, and given another point of evidence, towards my deep (and deepening) distrust of the human side of psychology. For those who cannot click on links, its talking about a test that highlights the participants "character" strengths. Most (if not all) psychological tests are about outlining flaws, deviations, and weakness, or assessing risks. The authors of this new test have decided that this focuses too much on the negatives, and we should strive to stroke off people as much as possible. Behind the test is the idea of an anti-DSM, the accepted guide to all that can go wrong with a persons mind, leading their lives into despair and disorder. My first reaction to this, outside of a sardonic chuckle, was the pure uselessness of the endeavor. If you need to take a 240 question test to tell you what is RIGHT with you, you obviously have something wrong with you. Perhaps the willingness to take this test should be added to one of the various depression inventories out there (such as the Beck Depression Inventory). It's like going to the garage, and having your mechanic do a diagnostic to see what is actually working on your car. The desire to do this can be traced to desperation, to the motive of "what ISN'T wrong", implying that it seems that everything IS wrong. The second reaction was one of sheer futility. The DSM and psychological testing exist to highlight...

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America's Constitution: A Review and Musings

2008-07-23T12:33:00.002-07:00

I just finished reading Yale Law's Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography last night, it was a very interesting, but dry read. Basically it is a front-to-back interpretation of the US Constitution, taking into account the historical context of each section, and major point, and what social factor came to play in their drafting. His self stated themes are that the founders were more democratic than we give them credit for, but also that they were more "slavocratic" as well. Slavery plays a massive roll in the story, with its tendrils reaching from the founding, to the more modern enfranchisement amendments of the late 20th century. The effects of slavery, and later the Civil War are really the over-bearing themes of the book. The yoke, it seems, was written into the document, and took almost 100 years, with the enactment of the twenty fourth amendment, to be purged. I suppose we all realize this on a subconscious level, those Southerners often don't let us forget how... backwards... they are. From the founding, where the pro-slavery bits had to be inserted to guarantee the South entering our "more perfect union", to the Civil War, from Jim Crow laws, to largely opposing all voter enfranchisement acts besides the most recent (fixing the voting age at 18), the South has been the bulwark of racial and sexual oppression. Just think of their race (and gender) relations from 1776 to 1962. Sometimes I think Lincoln should have just let them go, and saved the...

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A Tentative Grounding for Human Rights

2007-05-09T02:08:00.001-07:00

Ethics, themselves, are probably universal, but it is what we define as worthy of their consideration that changes. These universal ethics are probably the result of evolutionary pressures, and thus completely innate, meaning any theory of ethics would have to be descriptive, not normative. Also meaning that there are not to be confused with "Morals" which are socially, or institutionally prescribed (normative), and thus can vary from place to place and time to time. These universal ethics would have to somewhat resemble Kant's Categorical Imperative, in that they are broad, and requires treating others as you would be treated. Including reciprocity and altruism, both of which contain an essence of mapping yourself onto others. Thus ethics becomes a game of similarity, we map these ethics onto those we can feel familiar or similar too, people (and things) that we can identify with. This allows their application to vary from place to place, and from time to time. This would also explain why dehumanization is an important part of atrocities, and often precedes unethical behavior. We apply ethics to that which we consider "human-like", and things that do not fall into this class do not have to be treated ethically. Anecdotally we can see this in various behaviors that we see as unethical today, such as slavery and the historical mistreatment of Jews. Slave owners were justified in treating blacks as animals because they saw them as such, whereas they still treated...

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Obama Vs. MySpace

2007-05-02T13:23:00.001-07:00

I don't know why I've been so politicized of late, it seems that everytime I open my mouth lately some political polemic pours forth with the requisite amount of piss and bile. This post is no exception. The beloved co-frontrunner of the mainstream Democratic party, and media darling, Barack Obama has decided to hijack a MySpace page from its rightful creator and owner, and then commenced (or at least his campaign has) to spread rumors about the sites original creator being "in it for the money", and allegation that he denies vehemently. Yes, this is a rather small thing, MySpace is extremely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet we can learn a lot about someone by their small actions, how they treat their associates. They original guy's MySpace page represented a genuine grassroots effort, developed independently from the campaign, and only out of a genuine passion for Obama's politics. The 160,000 "friends" were genuine and organic, representing people who actually are interested of Obama, without any political manipulations or machinations. For the Obama campaign to ruthlessly seize control of this shows that they value victory over ethics, or treating people fairly. A sad statement on the morals and ethics of Obama. Victory is not, nor ever, worth stomping on the common man, especially one who devoted his time and energy to your cause with no want or expectation of re-compensation. It also highlights how "grassroots" is now being supplanted by the...

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Geek Ethics: A Modern Digital Mass Movement

2007-05-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Its odd when you realize that there is a strange informational ethic involved with geeks on the internet. Every-time something is censored, over covered-up geeks propagate the information to the point where enforcement becomes futile. This can be seen with web-pages such as The Memory Hole, which serves to document changes in records, and disappearing public records. And most lately in the "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" fiasco. To explain, "09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0" is half of the digital key to decrypt HD-DVDs (the other half being unique to each HDDVD), allowing it to be played on unlicensed platforms. Much the same thing happened with regular DVDs a long time ago, allowing them to be playable on older Macs and Linux machines(since the encryption is copyrighted, only authorized paying vendors are/were allowed access legally, which amounts to extortion, and precludes smaller vendors from supporting the ubiquitous technology). This code (and the one hidden within the HD-DVD itself) make it possible to rip HD-DVDs to data files, playable on all platforms. Some noble hacker discovered this, and now it has lead to a cascade of DMCA take-down notices, burying its mention in blogs and large news services such as Digg, basically government enforced censorship. Censorship of a NUMBER. Yes, for all its cryptic looks it is a simple number encoded in hexadecimal. For a silly analogy, lets say that someone develops a new technology...

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Dehumanization

2007-04-17T01:35:00.001-07:00

In America, today, humanity is slowly and quietly being annihilated. This is an insidious destruction of self-hood in which most of us are gleefully contributing too. This assault on being is being committed on several fronts, including pharmaceutical companies, the psychiatric trade, and the sciences, combined with the changing standards of how we work and find recreation. All together this represents a serious change in our operational episteme, or world view. The result of this shift is that the very idea of humanity, and how we see ourselves, is being radically redefined. This means that our being itself is changing, since how we define ourselves limits our potential modes of being. Science and the pharmaceutical trade are slowly diminishing humanity into a series of blind and meaningless chemical reactions, at the expense of the reality of us being the masters of our own fate, and ultimately responsible for our actions and internal state. Psychiatry is slowly changing us into a series of chemical imbalances that we have no ultimate control over outside of various prescription regimes. The emphasis has shifted away from us struggling to control our nature, and thus ultimately to blame for it. We are no longer responsible for ourselves. This can be seen in medicine with its various "quick fixes" to aesthetic and health problems, such as obesity and distorted body image, replacing a willfully healthful lifestyle as a cure. In mental health we deal with problems...

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Two Media Related Polemics on Religion

2007-04-06T03:35:00.001-07:00

Goto Section II, A critique of Dawkins' view on agnosticism.I. Commentary on the Documentary "Jesus Camp":If ever there was a frightening documentary which fills me with fear for the future this would be it. In this rather even handed documentary we delve into the practices that Evangelical Christians bring to bear on their children, turning them into little hyper-religious time bombs. While most children are busy playing in the dirt (as they should be), these poor children are being indoctrinated in abrasive fundamentalist and political principles, such as creationism, "anti-global warming", and the pro-life ethos. We see how their parents deprive them of all semblance of childhood, and instead instill a vaguely creepy religious fervor upon them, for the pure sake of "winning" some delusional "War".Slightly tangentially there is a severe ethical problem behind this view of their children. They acknowledge using their children (or indoctrinating) towards their (the parents) ends. This is in violation with Kant's second formulation (or the "humanity formulation") of the Categorical Imperative: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means." *Treating humans as means essentially depersonifies them, and removes their autonomy. It turns people into mere objects, or tokens to be utilized for someone else's purpose, eliminating their self-sovereignty and...

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Postmodern Eulogy

2007-03-15T00:49:00.001-07:00

Jean-Paul Baudrillard died on the 7th, apparently. Its always a tragedy when one of our unique and controversial thinkers die, especially in this day and age. Baudrillard can be seen as one of the fathers of post-modern philosophy and cultural studies, and the proponent of many controversial ideas. He personally was very influential to me, even in the parts of his philosophies that I didn't (or don't want to) agree with, especially his views of the Hyper-real and simulacra which many of you have heard me rant about nearly daily. He may also be seen as one of the last of the great contemporary wave of French intellectuals which started late in the 19th century. Agree with his avant-garde theories or not, he was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. His work will live on if by nothing else but the shear weight of controversy that surrounds it, which, indeed, is a distinction. For more about the man please refer to the SEP article, or to the articles on his page though the European Graduate School. While his philosophy was difficult, it is engaging to read, as he tried to discuss issues important to us, things in our culture and world, a thing most academic philosophers are loath (or frightened) to do. Another light goes out in the darkening world. Technorati Tags: death, philosophy. postmodernism, eulogy, simulacrum powered by performancing firefox

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On Aqueousness (the hydrodynamics of the soul)

2007-02-28T03:02:00.001-07:00

I was doing what I usually do, sitting around thinking in some public place (the best places for solitary activities), and realized a short coming of philosophy; philosophers. How can one hope to describe and understand humanity, when one is far from typical? By pondering "what is humanity" we automatically announce we have no clue what humanity actually is. Can a genius understand an idiot, or visa versa? As an idiot I cannot see the high falutin' thoughts of the thinker, and as a thinker and I cannot ponder how the idiot does not see. What do the blind see? Now I'm not posting our hypothetical philosopher into either pile, the jury is still out on that verdict. This lead to a further thought, what can any of us ever say about humanity? We don't even experience our own selves being human. How can I say anything about you, and everyone else, when I can't really say much about myself. 99% of my existence is hidden from me. We are water. Constantly changing and flowing, but somehow still stable things. We are in flux, yet are the same. Like a river, we have an identity (lets call it our banks), but our contents are constantly flowing past. "You can never step into the same river twice", to possibly quote Heraclitus. We ARE this flow. Like a water we follow the simplest path, down hill. The path of least resistance. For rivers this is gravity, for us it is being. We react to the terrain, but always to go down hill. Flow is being. Some famous...

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Body Worlds 3: Momento Mori and Art

2007-02-09T20:37:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Body Worlds, an exibit (an ossuary, a reliquary, a carnal house, art?) brought to you by the German Gunther von Hagens. Yes, a crowded, claustrophobic winding gallery of corpse-stuff, some posed, some dismembered displaying all their normal or pathologic glory. From the walls hold banners with quotes from thinkers from Nietzsche, Kant, and Seneca, our greatest minds musing on mortality, amid neatly displayed relics of it. Upon winding through the child oriented Phoenix Science Museum, getting your ticket stamped not once, but three times (a metaphor, perhaps?), you enter a dark gallery, with dark walls, teaming with middle aged human life. In the corner is a posed cadaver, muscles exposed, one bowed "crusader style" before a simple wooden cross, praying to the fine capillary filigree of a human heart, in the middle a row of medium height glass cases filled with various joins, the bits and pieces that we take for granted. People mill about in an orderly fashion about these exhibits, staring curiously, little speaker things crammed to their ears, as is the fashion. Its all very... curious. Wander around a flayed female, crouched, ready to spring, behind her wondrously muscled buttocks the round sphincter, you can duck down and look up it, to her intestines, if it pleases you. The reality eludes. It still is very abstract, scientific, aesthetic. A large black banner on the wall, pictures of Czech ossuaries, catacombs of arranged bones, skeletal monks...

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Partial Solutions to the Immigration Problem

2007-02-06T14:43:00.001-07:00

Its been awhile since I've contributed anything to my small series on illegal immigration (see here and here, for the precursors to this current discussion.) But today I was having a conversation about earlier views of immigration, and how the current bunch of Latin Americans are different from more classical (but at the time equally reviled) immigration groups, such as the Irish or Italians. These differences are, for the most part, irrelevant, but this conversation did lead to a partial solution to the immigration problem, that caters to both the humanitarian problem, and the economic problems. This solution is equality. I propose a law that forces U.S. employers, and local governments, to treat their illegal employees the same as legal U.S. citizens. Illegal immigrants should have the same minimum wage and insurance laws, and the same taxation, as the rest of the legal American workforce. This may seem like a simple solution, that would do little to help the actual problem, but it would have beneficial consequences for both the illegal worker population, and the public services straining under high number of poor immigrants. By forcing the minimum wage on all workers in the U.S. we would remove the incentive to hire illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants are hired because, simply, they cost less than American workers who are both legally entitled too, and expect, higher wages. By enforcing a universal minimum wage, hiring illegals would loose much of its grounds,...

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Metablogging: Proposals and Introspection

2007-02-05T15:04:00.001-07:00

Problems and Introspection I keep tossing about the idea of getting my own domain name, it seems it can be done rather cheaply (1.99-7.99/yr for .info or .net with various degrees of free hosting), but I keep running into a content wall, meaning do I really have enough to say to even justify that meager fee? Let me rephrase that, I know I have a lot to say (perhaps too much), but do I really have any thing worth reading (or people's time) to add to the already claustrophobic cacophony of the internet? I mean this in both an (egotistical) marketing sense, and in a proper introspective sense. Why would people seek out what I have to say? Why would people be willing to waste a couple mouse gestures, and a minute or so of their time to listen to me, or look at my art, read my rants? I already, on my blog break most of the marketing rules of web content (especially according to the various annoying "how to make you blog popular" things on digg), my content is generally not very useful, I'm not telling anyone how to fix anything, I'm not helping anyone live life, there is no breaking news, I really am not giving anyone anything they want/need to hear. My public ranting serves no public purpose. Sure there are little psychological tricks I can pull to make people stick around and read it, sure there are little technological tricks I can pull to make myself visible, and appear popular (in the internet sense, like MySpace users being popular for having 6gazillion friends...

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The Ethics of Evangelicalism

2007-01-15T19:38:00.001-07:00

Lately I was having a discussion with someone about evolution being taught in schools, and how the religious alternatives don’t belong in science classes as alternative “theories” (as discussed in this previous entry), and it lead me to ponder the ethics of the creationists, and other religious fundamentalist groups that see it as their duty to force others to adhere to their religious principles “for their own good”. This practice is especially seen today in “hotter” issues, such as abortion, evolution, stem cell research, and such, issues where the objecting side is more commonly religious, this can also be seen in morality laws and practices. I am using the term “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” loosely, in a sense that does not only apply to Christians, or any other fervent religious group, but to any person or group that advocates any subjective dogmatic policy as law for all individuals, assenting or not (such as Libertarians, and other political extremists left or right), since they all share a common thread of perceived ideological supremacy. These ideological views are generally anti-rationalist, based on some doctrine, rather than empirical truth, and generally reject proof of theories to the contrary of their views, as we can see most prominently in the evolution debate, where religion rejects the scientific view only for the reason that they are contrary to their dogmas, even if they have a preponderance of factual, and empirical evidence. It’s like Sartrean...

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Video Games as Art: Revisited

2006-12-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Browsing the on-line articles at the American Society for Aesthetics' website, I came across an article by Aaron Smuts titled "Video Games and the Philosophy of Art", where he discusses the current ambiguity and half-heartedness in determining whether videogames could be considered art (philosophically), a top that I discussed earlier, and that originated a brief experiment in interactivity (as discussed here). He, too, spends some time on the topic of "interactivity", and states: ...video games are possibly the first concreative, mechanically reproduced form of art: they are mass artworks shaped by audience input.He also points out that to argue for or against possible aesthetic values in videogames, one must first stake out a definition of what a videogame actually is. This, indeed, seems an area that needs work. Ineed the whole point of the brief article is to discuss how underdeveloped this idea is, even when it contains and exemplifies some of the core problems and issues within the field of aesthetics. This lack of real debate is probably due to the fact that people are resilient towards change of the status-quo, especially when their professional life has been spent analyzing long existent forms. New idea require new techniques, and substantial risk for making embarrassing mistakes. The entry of the upstart videogames into the aesthetics debate is probably just a retelling of the entries of film and photography into the hallowed realms of art. Both of these...

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Idealism as Golden Calf.

2006-12-06T13:29:00.000-07:00

Today, on MSNBC, they had one of the guys from the Baker/Hamilton Commission, I think it was Edwin Meese, the former Attorney General under Reagan. I can't find the transcript on MSNBC.com, but it was something along the lines of: "throughout most of my career we have been fighting the same people. In World War II it was people who quoted Mein Kampf and shot at you, then it was people who quoted Marx who would shoot you in the back of the head, now it is people butchering the Koran and trying to kill you. Its the same people, but different books." Again, this quote is butchered but I tried to get it as close as I could remember from my sleep, and hangover addled state. We can add people quoting the bible and killing millions in its name. Or anyone trying to screw over everyone for a mere idea, such as libertarianism, God, capitalism, communism, any "ism" really. Idealism is the scourge of humanity, when we grasp a "big idea" we do so at the cost of the small ideas such as humanity, and reality. When we attempt to shape the world "for its own good", as guided by some grand thought, we become nothing more than mere tyrants. From our lofty hight we loose sight of the toll our ideas cause on real people, people suffering to make your abstraction a reality. While some ideas have done great things, and moved the world, most of them have lead to suffering. What is the difference between these two classes of ideology? How is universal suffrage different from...

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Musings on Psycho-Pharmacology

2006-11-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

An interesting thought struck me the other night during a discussion on the medication of mood disorders, this thought was "What will we think of the current pharmaceutical treatment regime in 100 years?" While this question is purely hypothetical, and completely unanswerable, it does open up interesting avenues of thought. What is the chance that we might someday compare today's psychopharmacology with the eugenics of yesteryear? Oddly this is not as silly a comparison as it sounds at first blush, there are a disturbing amount of ideological similarities shared between these two areas. Just like we can now look back on the racial views of the past with a large measure of understandable disdain and distaste, we might look back on today's psychological, and biological model with similar distaste. Both models revolve around the idea of a mythical ideal human. The difference is that in the past this model was racial, and based on physical characteristics, and today the model is based on a purely statistical profile. "Inferior" racial characteristics has been replaced with deviation from various physical and affective norms. In the past the "inferior" people were sterilized, or murdered, today deviation is medicated, or operated to bring us to conformity with some mythical peak of the bell-curve. Eugenics was a social solution, whereas the current medical model is is a personal solution, both of these models of what is ideal humanity are both complete mythology. ...

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Musings on Incomprehensibility.

2006-11-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've been so long in posting. I have been either busy, or lazy. Odd how these come at you at the wrong times, when you want to be lazy life happens, and when your being blissfully busy, all you want to do is take a time out and contemplate your navel. The ironies built into life never cease to amaze. The text below are merely notes, I post them out of laziness and guilt. Feel free to comment, to help me whip there formlessness into some semblance of shape: Alt Title: Observations (on a busy day) [from notebook] We Each live imprisoned within ourselves, bodies. Escape is impossible, we are enslaved by body sensation, experience, a wall of distance separating us from the external, other bodies, PEOPLE. We can never UNDERSTAND (or in the jargon; TRANSCEND) beyond the walls of self-hood. We are doomed to be ourselves. To only experience the world fettered by our own finite context. This is a far more profound and immediate form of "angst" than proposed by the existentialists. Their angst is only an abstraction, and to be avoided by merely being ignorant of any so-called meaninglessness, and mortal finitude. Refutations: Here and Now is IMMEDIATE. We exist within a finite moment wholly day-to-day. To step out of this and view it in context to our ultimate mortality is a step into abstraction, hence less real. It is a meta-thought or context. As to meaninglessness: this is the opposite, life is too full of meaning. Meanings shift, collide, melt away. Day to...

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ReReading Kaufmann

2006-10-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to hide from distractions and read, I figured that the world could damn well exist a day without informing me about its constant trivialities and mundane aspirations. Seems I was right, since it seems to still be here. As for my choice of reading material, it was an old (1958) book, I read along time ago, when my interest in philosophy was just beginning, Walter Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Kaufmann is perhaps best known as the foremost Nietzshe scholar and translator Kaufmann was (and still is) rare among philosophers, in that he has a brilliant command of language, and frequently uses humor in his texts. This Critique is also interesting, since, in at least the first section, he attempts to underline what philosophy actually is, how it is written, and how it should be read. He underlines the still-existant problem of the divide between modern analytic (anglophone) and existentialism (continental), and proposes that is it rectified, becoming more whole. He compares each school to "half a Socrates", amusingly, and oddly accurately. Both are portrayed as essentially childish, and bullishly incomplete. It is interesting to re-read this text years later, with much more experience and readings in philosophy, I uncover thoughts that I, today, take for granted but must have struck me as obscure years ago, when I had no knowledge of the disciplines founders or range. Today his book is oddly simplistic (which is a compliment), yet packs...

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Summary of the Interactive Art Project

2006-10-11T03:00:00.000-07:00

I posted the pictures of the previously outlined project on interactive art to my Flickr stream, I would have posted them directly here, but my blogging software is misbehaving. For your convenience, I will also link them individually below, followed by a brief write up of my impressions from the event. The sign for the event: as you can see, no expense was spared, though this also served a secondary function of keeping the atmosphere of the even informal, which we concluded would be more inductive to participation. The following two were taken at the end of the evening, thus show the partially completed project (though the art will be replaced at the next attempt at the project: The original project wall: The original wall was two sheets of cardboard, but these filled up rather quickly. Also the participants were unwilling, to a degree to arrange the work for space, or to post pictures on farther areas, so some manual readjustment was needed by the organizers. The overflow wall: Towards the middle of the five hour event the space on the original surface was pretty much full, so we needed to move to a sign advertising an up coming proposition on the ballot. I wrote up an unofficial reaction on my LiveJournal page, but will try add some further reactions here, later. As I stated in the unofficial write-up, the event was so overwhelming, and contrary to expectations that grasping its full import is difficult. Needless to say, the event was a smashing success, with...

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A brief blurb on Power.

2006-10-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Life is about power. Everything is control. There are two types of power, the power that sociologists (and Foucault) talk about, and subjective, or individual power. They may or may not be different faces of the same coin. Sociological power is nebulous, and uncontrollable. No one HAS this power, this power just manifests itself through them, they are controlled by it, as well all are. All actions are in response to, and thus manifestations of this power. The aims of this power is itself, for its own sake. Thus protesting the state of power serves the power, even while seeming against the state of power. Protesting is an autoimmune response, it allows power to strengthen itself in reaction to opposition. Deviance is also a manifestation of power, it sets up an allowed outgroup in which to contrast conformity. These outgroups must suffer, but only suffer as little to allow their existence. There is no escape from this form of power, since even escape is motivated by it, and thus an expression of it. The ends of this power is... I don't know. But it influences our very being, it creates and shapes us. The other type of power is interpersonal. It is us attacking our own lack of real power. It is us inflicting ourselves on others as means of justifying our existence. It is us trying to claim some control over our lives, and more importantly our environment, through controlling others. I call this inflictive power, in that we inflict it upon others, we...

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Tentative Definition of Art

2006-09-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

In the scheme of writing a larger work (a critique of post-modern art) I decided that an operational definition was necessary. This is about all I could come up with, that is inclusive to what we generally call art. The ultimate goals of the work is dividing what we call art, from what actually can be Art. I'm using the caps distinction like philosophy generally uses "Truth", and "truth". I also want to explore the experience and mechanics of art (not general aesthetics, which is generally permissible in philosophy). The following definition is rather "leaky" in that it bars a couple things we now call art. Ikons and things such as Navajo sand painting, which is now considered art, but isn't intentionally created to be aesthetic communications. I am open to dialogue on this topic, which is why I am posting such a tentative work to the public. So any artist, poet, writer, or philosoph who wants to chime in, please feel free to do so. Art is one of those terms that has proven itself to defy definition. In the real world, art is immediately obvious, we know it when we see it, but cannot define it, but to actually discuss it, we need an operation definition to separate art from not-art. Art is generally a skill, craft or practice (as evident from its latin origin “ars”) that aims for some aesthetic impact. This would place the more unconventional areas that we colloquially don’t think of as art into the same class as more classically regarded practices such as visual...

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Prelude to Interactive Art: An Aesthetic Propopal

2006-09-09T18:46:00.000-07:00

0. Basis: As based on a debate over whether video games could be a valid medium of artistic expression, a major complaint against this hypothesis was the interactivity involved in the medium, which is lacking from the current media included as art. This interactivity in mediums that we classically define as art is not non-existant, it is just concealed, or hidden, since the viewer ultimately creates the meaning as an observer. Classical forms of artistic expression exist, overtly, as objects to be observed, but the observer plays no implicit roll in the form or outcome of the peice. But this can be contrasted to video games as art in which the interactivity can be seen as the medium itself, the very structure of the work is defined as interactivity, where the observer becomes an overt participant. Apparently art has become equated with "functionless-ness", where art is defined as passivity, and lack of purpose beside "being art". This can be seen in a statement attributed to the sculptor Richard Serra that "... the difference between art and architecture is that art is necessarily useless...", and a quote from the French post-modernist Jean Baurillard: "Since a long time art pretends to be useless (it was not the case till the 19th century, where, in a world that was not yet objective nor real the question about useful- or uselessness was not even to be raised). It is therefore logical that it should have a predilection for trash and waste, which is also useless. To...

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Summa Mundi: A work in progress

2006-09-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long absence from posting, I have been working on a summary of my various philosophical positions to date, which is a much more complicated undertaking than it seemed at first grasp. Being that work is chronically unfinished though, I will not post it here as of yet (I doubt any of you have a taste for 10 pages of unconnected, and unfinished notes), but this space definitely needs to be filled, or at least updated. Its sad how our projects demand our attention when we neglect them. I will try to summarize some of my findings from the last month's project though, borrowing heavily from the aforementioned notes.The primary idea I'm developing right now is a tripartite view of the world as experience. The groundwork of what we experience as existence is based within these three interrelated stages, by this I mean they exist as the basis of our actions upon them, they both inform and structure our existence (as action). As of now these worlds are bordering on pure ad hoc, they are place holders to help place the other ideas within a defining context. These worlds exist as a weakened version of what Nelson Goodman presented in "Ways of Worldmaking"The first of these worlds is what I term the External, as in it is the world that exists prior to experience. It is the basis (or bedrock) for all experience, and all subsequent worlds of experience. This is world that most people mean when they use the term. Some of the features of this world are:It is not...

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