THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Melodic on 18 Nov 2010, 20:05
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saw this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0mpew5WtLQ&feature=player_embedded#!) and thought of you
: )
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what
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Drunk Khar is finally vindicated! I'm into it!
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That's pretty cool but I'm surprised that there was any kind of significant demand for something like that.
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That's pretty cool but I'm surprised that there was any kind of significant demand for something like that.
Khar has been sending them 3 emails a week for the last two years
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no love for the haters
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(http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b198/andthentherewaslindsey/images.jpg)
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Since roughly the millennium, a rift or divide seems to have formed between the art and technology communities, possibly due to an educational re-organisation (with specific degrees now being offered in interactive and screen-based media) and the emphatically commercial focus of skilled IT technicians and designers in the saturated post-dot-com market. The fine art world seems to be in danger of falling behind the times.
But, in fact, perhaps the reasons for the wariness of artists for digital forms is not entirely, or even mainly, due to considerations of culture or commerce. As I have shown in this essay, the gallery space is an environment of meaning unto itself, and much text based art has been about understanding and exploiting this environment. The computer screen, and more widely the internet and other forms of networked communication, are different environment entirely. Crucially, what is shown on a computer screen is not a concrete object; it is an image, capable of endless, essentially perfect reproduction, given the correct hardware and software . The Internet particularly creates an enormous problem of context. Whilst the ‘ideal’ white cube space seeks (thought does not really succeed) to create a neutral lack of context, the internet, with its ever-changing nonlinear structure creates an almost infinite surfeit of context. It is an environment in which work can be infinitely recontextualised, in which the artist loses all control over the work whatsoever. A digital text or image is ‘site-specific’, but only to its location on a network or a hard-drive. In fact, it exists in a new context of its own; the work of understanding how these new structures of meaning relate to each other and to wider reality is still on-going, complicated, perhaps endlessly, by the ever-proceeding pace of technological change.
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Since roughly the millennium, a rift or divide seems to have formed between the art and technology communities, possibly due to an educational re-organisation (with specific degrees now being offered in interactive and screen-based media) and the emphatically commercial focus of skilled IT technicians and designers in the saturated post-dot-com market. The fine art world seems to be in danger of falling behind the times.
But, in fact, perhaps the reasons for the wariness of artists for digital forms is not entirely, or even mainly, due to considerations of culture or commerce. As I have shown in this essay, the gallery space is an environment of meaning unto itself, and much text based art has been about understanding and exploiting this environment. The computer screen, and more widely the internet and other forms of networked communication, are different environment entirely. Crucially, what is shown on a computer screen is not a concrete object; it is an image, capable of endless, essentially perfect reproduction, given the correct hardware and software . The Internet particularly creates an enormous problem of context. Whilst the ‘ideal’ white cube space seeks (thought does not really succeed) to create a neutral lack of context, the internet, with its ever-changing nonlinear structure creates an almost infinite surfeit of context. It is an environment in which work can be infinitely recontextualised, in which the artist loses all control over the work whatsoever. A digital text or image is ‘site-specific’, but only to its location on a network or a hard-drive. In fact, it exists in a new context of its own; the work of understanding how these new structures of meaning relate to each other and to wider reality is still on-going, complicated, perhaps endlessly, by the ever-proceeding pace of technological change.
Where are you copy/pasting this from, its awesome. I want to send stuff like this to people when they are high out of their mind.
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This capacity of the viewer for essentially random symbolic reading is problematic, and the specific nature of intended systems of symbolism is also their greatest flaw. Allegory was deeply important for many years in Western art because of a shared language of religious iconography and symbolism, and because of the simple fact that the vast majority of the populace was illiterate. Outside of their cultural context, however, allegorical images become unstuck. Although the parole of all languages shifts constantly over time, abstract symbols, being almost completely unbounded by the essentially logical structure of grammar, can shift their meaning more suddenly and dramatically, and provide none of the contextual clues that, for example, allow a modern English reader to get to grips with the language of Chaucer. A dramatic example; in the early 20th century, it would not be uncommon to receive a greetings card decorated with the motif of a swastika, meaning ‘good luck’. After the Nazis chose the symbol as their banner the meaning changed absolutely and probably permanently, at least in the western world; for in many parts of Asia, the swastika is still a revered holy symbol. This reveals the deep flaw of the apparent universality of such a symbol; though employed in various forms by cultures all across the world, its very simplicity gives it a vast range of almost entirely disconnected meanings, each one dependent on the context in which it was created and the context in which it is perceived, requiring us to be in possession of a range of subordinate facts to have any sense of its meaning; it might be a paean to fascism if painted by a young man in the former East Germany, or it might be a meditation on the creation of the world if painted by a monk in Sri Lanka (It might also be the opposite way round, or neither ). Although in limited form these subordinate facts, or metatexts, are, as we shall later see, structurally vital components of all works of art, many artists (unless it is their conscious intention) desire to create work that at least partly transcends the facts of its creation, which are after all liable, especially after great amounts of time, to become divorced from the work itself, if only because the cultural context becomes so remote as to be essentially meaningless to the vast majority of people. Though timelessness and universality are far from being universal concerns in art, they unarguably form powerful psychic motivators for many artists. The very act of creating art arises from a desire to communicate something, to make the internal somehow external, to preserve something of a moment or a period, if only briefly.
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This capacity of the viewer for essentially random symbolic reading is problematic, and the specific nature of intended systems of symbolism is also their greatest flaw. Allegory was deeply important for many years in Western art because of a shared language of religious iconography and symbolism, and because of the simple fact that the vast majority of the populace was illiterate. Outside of their cultural context, however, allegorical images become unstuck. Although the parole of all languages shifts constantly over time, abstract symbols, being almost completely unbounded by the essentially logical structure of grammar, can shift their meaning more suddenly and dramatically, and provide none of the contextual clues that, for example, allow a modern English reader to get to grips with the language of Chaucer. A dramatic example; in the early 20th century, it would not be uncommon to receive a greetings card decorated with the motif of a swastika, meaning ‘good luck’. After the Nazis chose the symbol as their banner the meaning changed absolutely and probably permanently, at least in the western world; for in many parts of Asia, the swastika is still a revered holy symbol. This reveals the deep flaw of the apparent universality of such a symbol; though employed in various forms by cultures all across the world, its very simplicity gives it a vast range of almost entirely disconnected meanings, each one dependent on the context in which it was created and the context in which it is perceived, requiring us to be in possession of a range of subordinate facts to have any sense of its meaning; it might be a paean to fascism if painted by a young man in the former East Germany, or it might be a meditation on the creation of the world if painted by a monk in Sri Lanka (It might also be the opposite way round, or neither ). Although in limited form these subordinate facts, or metatexts, are, as we shall later see, structurally vital components of all works of art, many artists (unless it is their conscious intention) desire to create work that at least partly transcends the facts of its creation, which are after all liable, especially after great amounts of time, to become divorced from the work itself, if only because the cultural context becomes so remote as to be essentially meaningless to the vast majority of people. Though timelessness and universality are far from being universal concerns in art, they unarguably form powerful psychic motivators for many artists. The very act of creating art arises from a desire to communicate something, to make the internal somehow external, to preserve something of a moment or a period, if only briefly.
Link plz!
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Don't quote the post above you.
Why don't you try google?
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Don't quote the post above you.
Why don't you try google?
I didn't wanna break your stride man, and thats a hell of a lot to google from.
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Khar, plz post only short essays,
they are gold.
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doesn't netflix already do this over xbox live?
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Thus we see that the process of transformation of an object into art is at least two-fold; it is titled and it is given authorship. This relationship is the same if it had been a piece of text rather than a found object I had placed into a gallery, something much more relevant to my personal practice. These are powerful markers. As much as we would like not to admit it, the authorship of a work can be key to our enjoyment and understanding of it, not to mention it’s economic value, which in a capitalist society must unavoidably be an element we consider about a piece of work, a point made with highly political overtones in Chris Thomson’s Stuckist painting ‘Sir Nicholas Serota Makes An Acquisitions Decision’. These metatexts are absolutely crucial. Exactly the same drawing executed by (or even attributed to) two different artists is, in a very fundamental way, not the same work, even if a forensic analysis of materials etc. could not tell them apart; these qualities are entirely extrinsic to the works themselves. The fact that these metatexts can be altered or obfuscated after the fact of the creation of the work, without altering any property of the work itself, is compelling to some artists. The ur-example must be Michael Craig-Martin’s seminal ‘An Oak Tree’. In the gallery space, it is just a glass of water on a high shelf, but it is mystically transformed into an Oak Tree (albeit one indistinguishable from a glass of water) by the title and a piece of text, originally displayed separately in a booklet. Amusingly, Craig-Martin once had to write a declaration, when importing the piece for exhibition in Australia, that the glass was definitely not an oak tree. And he was indeed not being disingenuous. Outside of the gallery and the metatext, the work cannot be read; the transformation into the Oak Tree can only take place when text, work and title come together in the specific, ordered structure of meaning the gallery provides.
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hey khar is the new agalloch album any good i just learned they put out a new one earlier today
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Yes. It doesn't sound quite like Agalloch as far as technique, but it is still a good album. It sounds a lot more human. Their new drummer is better than Haughm, but also plays looser. And the guitars sound more organic than the last ones. It's hard to explain.
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is your name khar?
i didn't think so
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No, it isn't. Is Storm Rider posting about the youtube thing?
And because if Khar had the wrong opnion I wanted to try to balance it out.
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Pre-emptive balancing
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That's pretty zen, amigo.
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Patrick I think you've been living in California too long, dogg.
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No, it isn't. Is Storm Rider posting about the youtube thing?
Well it was either this or post a new thread in the music forum that would literally be 'hey khar is the new agalloch any good' and this seemed more amusing at 2 AM last night
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thats a hell of a lot to google from.
I'm sorry to point out the obvious but what?
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Yeah, there is a good reason why that dude is currently banned.
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Nice one, nice one.
I'm still going through the process of properly collating my thoughts about the new Agalloch over multiple listens in varying emotional and sobriety/non-sobriety states. It took me literally two years to start fully enjoying Ashes Against the Grain so I dunno. Generally how I start out with an Agalloch release is I instinctively hate it because it's not The Mantle and then I work up from there.
Except The White. First time I heard The White I just plain straight up played it through about forty times and wanked till I got dick problems.
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I accidentally had the perfect setting for it. I was driving before and during dusk, up a canyon full of dead trees and grass. My hair was standing up on the back of my neck for the majority of the listen.
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I actually liked Ashes pretty much right away so maybe I'm just crazy
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Oh I liked Ashes the first time I heard it, but I didn't love it. It takes me a while to develop that kind of relationship with most albums, and it's a relationship I had with most of Agalloch's previous work. Until I have that perspective I can't really have fully sensible opinions about how the album stands in relation to the other albums.