Electronic Superhighway 2016-1966 – a retro: Texts, ar*se and ASCII rolls A large photo of a woman's bottom greets you as you walk in. Chat messages are emerging from it. Not to worry, it's only Olaf Breuning's mischievous "Text Butt" (2015). Immediately to your left is Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's Geometry of Space (2014), a mixed-media installation comprising stretched oxidised steel, …
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I don't know much about art
Obviously.
but I don't think this is it
I believe you can amend your first claim to "I know nothing whatsoever about art".
"I don't think X is art" is pretty much the most basic category error you can make in aesthetics. Once you've committed it, you're starting from a foundation so intrinsically incorrect that you'll only arrive at a useful insight by accident. It's game over.
Art-ness is not an ontological attribute.
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Yep, downloading clarinet texts from Usenet about what was called "Operation Desert Storm" back then, not "The On-Ramp to Permanent Clusterfuck and Retardation" while watching endlessly looping War Porn on CNN from the corner of my eye on an illegal tuner connected to an Amiga Monitor (also known as a rebranded tunerless Magnavox TV). Good times, in a sad sense.
No girls, though.
Web? 1993? It was all Gopher and downloaded software by e-mail from DEC's ftpmail server
Hardly. Frickin' Mosaic was released in 1993, so the web had already gone GUI. (Yes, yes, there still were, and still are, text-mode user agents. I don't mean they were exclusively GUI.)
I had my first web site up in late 1993. On an internal network and long-gone now, of course, but already you could find lots of folks on Usenet and various listservs talking about building and configuring NCSA httpd.1
And this wasn't just IT. I actually first heard about Mosaic in a 1993 literature seminar.2 I just browsed through the now marvelously-dated "Geography of Cyberspace" special issue of Works and Days, published in 1994 (and so written largely in 1993), and noted it contains at least a few URLs; already the the academic humanities had picked up the web from the sciences.
1Which had already surpassed CERN httpd as the server of choice, at least in the circles I inhabited. Later, of course, people would start collecting patches for NCSA httpd, eventually bundling them into a distribution referred to as "Apache". Because it was "patchy".
2I'd seen people talking about HTTP, but at the time had no particular interest in it. With FTP, NNTP, Archie, Gopher, etc, who needed Yet Another protocol? Sure, HTTP was the transport of choice for HTML, but I was just fine with plain ASCII. Hypertext was for Nelsonites and other visionary types. When I wanted to automatically follow a reference in an electronic document, I wrote a script, the way god intended.
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"Art may also be something that challenges your perception of the world around you, and asks you to look at if from a different perspective."
Are you saying David Cameron1 is art and we should all pay £12 each to see him?
1Insert Corbyn, Osboure, Trump, Putin or whichever dickhead de jour you like here.
Are you saying David Cameron is art
man rhetoric
and we should all pay £12 each to see him?
Of course not. That would be silly.
For that matter, I can't think of a single work which everyone "should" consume. Or, actually, under what rubric we might make a compelling argument that any particular person should consume any particular work. Unless we're using "should" in a very weak sense, e.g. "I think you'd enjoy...".
"I thought showing a naked woman's anything to a child now resulted in a mandatory 5 year prison sentence and life on the sex-offenders register?"
You have obviously never visited the National Gallery, the Louvre or the Uffizi.
But then, neither, equally obviously, has our dear Home Secretary.
I thought showing a naked woman's anything to a child now resulted in a mandatory 5 year prison sentence and life on the sex-offenders register?
The woman in the work in question isn't naked. Her buttocks may be exposed, but the visible portions of most of her calves and torso are covered. Problem solved!
Yep. My last car was a 66 Dodge Coronet. With the 318cc, it got 18 mpg (highway) back then, so when I saw some newer vehicles stating that 26mpg is *impressive (pre hybrid ubiquity) I just had to laugh (and cry) given proof that there hadn't been all that much change in 40 years...oil economy...industrial yada...
We've been in the age of *information for so long one would think it would have taken a stronger hold earlier... like it's beginning to do now.
I hear similar things about Pizza Hut: "It's not authentic pizza, etc". I don't really care whether it's authentic or proper or otherwise approved by a committee of categorisation. A spinning LED ring that reads "LOADING..." on a continuous loop for hours might not seem like art but it is funny and means something.
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Psh, that's simply cold perfection spat out by soulless machines, like a randomly taken photograph. Now, you want ASCII art, you go telnet into towel.blinkenlights.nl...!
...incidentally, for those who have heard of Dr. Horrible, you should really traceroute bad.horse, if you haven't done so yet.
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