Don’t we all.
Currently on the side of the Ogden Museum. The original was thought up by New Orleans artist Candy Chang and placed on the side of an abandoned building somewhere in the Bywater neighborhood.
Tag: art
art
/ɑrt/ [ahrt]
–noun
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
That’s one of the definitions for art according to Dictionary.com.
ter⋅ror⋅ism
/ˈtɛrəˌrɪzəm/ [ter-uh-riz-uhm]
–noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
This is what they say about terrorism.
I was having a discussion about what art is recently and my answer is generally, “Anything meant to evoke a reaction.” The reply to this was, “That makes terrorism into art.” At first, I had to agree that my definition was too vague because of this but, after thinking about it more, I’m not so sure. Maybe my initial response was based wholly on the severely negative connotations of the word terrorism. People often claim that the United States is a terrorist organization because of the things we do around the world but, if you live here, that view isn’t very pronounced. Che Guevara is considered to have been a terrorist by some while people who agree with what his purpose was will say that he was a hero. Even people who appear to fit the exact definition of terrorist, like Osama bin Laden, are viewed in a completely different light by members of al-Qaeda who would say that he’s doing God’s work. Basically, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. With that in mind, terrorism becomes a lot more subjective and inserting the word art into its definition no longer requires a sense of disgust.
There are plenty of projects that have been undertaken that, while often provoking denial at first, have become widely considered to be works of art. You have John Cage’s 4’33”, Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism, David Smith’s Cubi sculptures, architecture to some people as a whole, and the list of borderline works of art can go on and on. Eventually, it seems that people decide that these things can be classified as art even if it’s only because they’ve stirred up so much conversation and curiosity. And isn’t that exactly what terrorism does? There are times when you can’t watch or read anything about current events without running into talk about terrorism. The whole purpose of these acts is to make a statement, to make people consider something they haven’t considered before. To me, there’s a blurry line here that doesn’t help solve the problem of defining art at all. Maybe that’s the point though. If art were definable then it might not be art at all. Either way, I think it’s food for thought that’s worth sharing.
That thing I was talking about the other day, the Large Hadron Collider, may have its own spin-off technology. The amount of information created and collected by this machine is up in the petrabyte level (millions of gigabytes). There was no way for the project to use the internet as a backbone for moving all this information between the 55,000 servers they’re using so they developed a new, completely fiber optic system. This network is about 10,000 times faster than current broadband connections. That, from the viewpoint of computing today, is essentially an unlimited amount of bandwidth. What this means is that cloud computing, along with a complete disregard for bandwidth limitations when developing new technologies, could be on the horizon.
The idea behind cloud computing, if I understand it right, is that your computer would be a gateway instead of the workhorse behind your computer use. Your computer’s power would not be limited by what pieces of hardware you have in front of you. Instead, most things would be saved on various computer on the grid and you would just be accessing it all from your computer. You would also be using the processing power from all these other computers. That’s the big thing. Whatever processing power all the other computers on the network aren’t currently using could be picked up and used by your computer. So, all those people who have brand new laptops that they use purely for browsing the web, yeah that won’t be a waste of computing power. The power users who may be playing high end games, running graphic design programs, editing movies, etc, will not have to worry about running out of power. If you build a 3D object in a CAD program that’s really complicated, it might take 3 seconds to render it instead of 5 weeks.
If you think about it, this might also lead to even more independent media being produced on the same level as commercial media without those independent people needing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. Do you know why Pixar movies look way better than the 3D videos you’ll find on YouTube? Because they have the processing power to render them. Imagine if anyone who wanted to could create their own Pixar movie without even having to consider the hardware limitations. Neat stuff.
I’ve been reading the Hunchback of Notre Dame. There’s a chapter in that about how the printing press destroyed buildings. What Mr. Hugo was referring to was the art of architecture. He makes the argument, which may or may not be correct, that before the printing press the most widespread form of the common person’s expression was architecture. People could fancy up their homes and it would be seen by every person that walked by. It was much more expensive for them to write a book and have it copied by hand and only the nobility really had access to those books afterwards because they were so expensive. With the printing press, that suddenly flipped. Writing books was a much cheaper way to express yourself and your ideas could be picked up by more people than those who just happen to walk by your house. The internet has done the same thing to every other form of media. Movies, music, graphic arts, fine arts, are all instantly cheaper to create and easier to spread. The ability to shape our culture is being placed in the hands of the people like never before and things like this grid system can only progress that pattern. I don’t know about the rest of you but that gets me excited.
You can read a bit about the technology here:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/09/06/they-say-my-machine-threatens-the-world-91466-21685078/
BTW, just to tie some political spin into this. John McCain doesn’t even use the internet. How can you trust a guy who hasn’t even used the internet yet to be able to react to how these new technologies are changing our world?
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