“The term sociopoetic describes artworks that use social situations or social networks as a canvas.” I think that might be the best way of describing this ambiguous & confusing form of art makin, followed by: “The questioning of the proper form for art, led to more conceptual work about social systems.”
it takes a little while for me to understand what exactly the sociopoetic work going is: the making of the monies, the act of spending the monies, the monitary system as a whole? any time we start talking about the Fluxus movement or the work of Duchamp, my brain realizes that there are so many ridiculous ways one can make art on so many completely different levels, from the most literal & concrete up to the most ephemeral & conceptual. these kinds of works brig up the ideas of thought & the actions of the work almost being more important than the actual physical piece of currency.
[http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/saper.html]
I have almost always found maps to be a very interesting visual description of a place & have been partticularly fond of maps of places that I have visited or cities where I have lived. being able to pin point exact places of residence & business & event occurances from a three demensional space into a flat piece of paper is comforting somehow.
“Cholera and typhoid, pverty and prostitution, alcohol consumption adn criminal deviance — all regarded as primarily urban ills — came to be understood through the medium of the urban map. […] Rather than celebrating the unity an harmony of urban community, the map’s task was to bring into the light of practical reason invisible bu all-too-potent urban patholoies. Their amelioration often involved further mapping of urban space: clearing and replanning crowded districts, laying water supply and drainage systems, platting new suburbs, cemeteries and park lands.”
this article lays out the history of styles of organizing representations of spaces into images & ideas which are easily recognizable over a broad range of both circumstances as well a groups of people. new ways of catagorizing & laying out visions of spaces can result in convoluted maps of unreconizable icons, legable only to those who know the space intimately or in unusal ways.
I found the description of Laura Kurgan’s maps to be intensely interesting, both formally & emotionally. “These used primary colors and simple graphics to identify key elements of the site: viewing platforms, temporary memorials, cranes and trucks as well as variously demolished or damaged buildings. Her maps negotiated the most delicate of ethical dilemmas given the implications of viewing a scene of mass murder from which human remains were being actively removed.”
“the press didn’t do it just by making books more avalible, it did it by changing the thought patterns of those who learned to read.” this reminds me of the things we would talk about in kevin’s intro to new media class: everything gets remediated over & over again & in order for people to understand new technologies, they have to relate it to older technologies with which they are already acquainted.
it is very odd to think about the very way in which we interact with computers has changed so much from their original form. it’s like when you’ve finally come up with a really brilliant solution to some massively hard problem & then a little while later you can’t even picture how you functioned with that unsolved problem in your life for so long when the answer that would fix everything right up was right there in front of you obvious the whole time. it just takes a jump of the brain to get there.
“Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.” & “Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it.”
these two quotes seem to slightly contradict one another, saying first that technology & science are the best & most direct form of communication while then saying that the readership of certain records becomes highly limited because of the massive technology & science understanding necessary for understanding. the following two quotes seem to sum up a general change of feelings. an uncertain trust of the technologies & into with a more forced reliance upon technologies.
“for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.” & “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”
in the later sections, there is a transition into talking about how soon all the books in the world will be able to fit into one van. for some reason I find that idea to be quite unsettling as well as very nice. it would be lovely to have all of your records so tightly squeezed into such a format, but what happens when that van, with the whole history of the world, is destroyed? also, when these records are so small, they must require outside machines to ‘uncoded’ the information for humans to be able to read. which then leads to the problem of keeping up: “There may be millions of fine thoughts […] all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.” if these records are so cleverly encoded into something that maks the information harder to utilize, is it really that much of a move forward?
“Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”
