From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Mon Feb 28 2000 - 10:23:23 MST
Natasha Vita-More <natasha@natasha.cc> pointed out:
> It is what the visual artist "creates" with color that awakens
> artistic brain power rather than the ability to distinguish a wave
> length of the visible spectrum.
Yes, definitely. It is my feeling that you are talking about
the many complex, intelligent, and "artistic" things the brain does
with the phenomenal way it represents information. Computers have
many complicated "algorithms", "data-buses", "registers", and so on
and so forth that give them whatever "intelligence" they have. But at
the lowest level, computers represent information with abstract
"bits". It doesn't matter what physical phenomenon is doing the
representing of a computer's bits, whether it be a paper tape,
magnetic tape, a biasing voltage across a transistor, voltage on a
bus line... or whatever. As long as such is properly "mapped" to be
what that physical property is meant to represent.
It is this fundamental level I'm talking about, not the
complex algorithms, architectures, intelligence and sophisticated art
work the machines are doing which I think you are referring to. I'm
concerned with the physical (and most importantly the phenomenal)
nature of the base or fundamental level representations. For a
computer, the lowest level is the bit and it doesn't matter, really
what it is. But for us, it is the phenomenal qualia, and I think it
does matter what it is. Sure, when an artist is composing a "score"
she is taking all these phenomenal lowest level representations and
composing them into glorious, sophisticated, non trivial,
emotional... "symphonies", the algorithms, registers, data-buses.., of
our mind all based at the fundamental level on phenomenal qualia.
I think any complex enough abstract model (i.e. a long enough
piece of punched paper tape.) can represent any such "symphony". It
can adequately "describe" any "feelings" it evokes in us. But, no
matter how accurately the paper tape abstractly "represents" or
"models" this information it still isn't fundamentally "like" the
representations our brain uses to represent real art right? It is
just a set of wholes in paper that must be "mapped" to what our
phenomenal representations really are right? One is truly art, the
other, though potentially completely precise, is just a non phenomenal
or abstract description of art right? One doesn't matter what it is
fundamentally like since we always "map" it into something else while
with true art, I think it most definitely does matter what it is
fundamentally "like". One is a "map" or "model", or "simulation" of
art, the other is fundamentally the real thing.
A painted picture, like all things beyond our senses, is just
an abstract computational description that enables our senses to "map"
this abstract information it merely represents into the real
phenomenal, emotional... thing, or what the artiest intended on
"creating" or "invoking" or "awakening" in the perceiver. It doesn't
matter if it is oil based, reproduced on an advanced CRT or 3D display
device, or even if we don't have a retina and the identical neural
data is being fed directly to our optic nerve from some precise
virtual reality representation... The important thing is the final
results. That's why I don't think you can really call what is beyond
our senses, or the medium, the real art. It's simply something that
doesn't really matter what it is. I think all real art is in our
brain and it does matter what it fundamentally is. It seems to me
that everything beyond our senses is just a "mapped" representation of
this real thing.
Thanks for joining this discussion Natasha, I've always
wondered what you, as a technical extropian artist that can understand
these kinds of things thought on this subject. I'm such a non artist,
but this seems so fundamentally important to art to me. What (and
where?) is art really? Is it the beginning cause of the cause and
effect perceptual process (the 'art work'?) or the final results (that
which the 'art work' "awakens" in the perceiver)? Or something else
entirely that perhaps doesn't really exist or doesn't matter what it
is fundamentally based on or what it is phenomenally like?...
Brent Allsop
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:04 MST