Benjamin Geer on Thu, 1 Jun 2000 03:08:42 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> OFSS01..thread on artists' tools |
On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 03:01:04PM -0400, Michael Century wrote: > I think that instrumental virtuosity in music performance can be a > helpful way to think about [software user interfaces]. This is a > very old, and perhaps tired analogy, but nonetheless, consider: A > violinist playing an Amati violin is unaware of the 'magic' in > Amati's craft, or at least, need not have much awareness of this > craft in order to perform on the instrument with skill. Application > software can in principle (but rarely does) start from this level of > refinement. Why not? If we're going to use this analogy, let's keep in mind that it's far more difficult to become a good violinist than to learn to use even the most complex computer software. Try to imagine a world in which computers had violins instead of keyboards, and application programs required the user to produce a good sustained tone in order to save a file. How many people would bother trying to learn to use a computer? Still, the question is whether computer software can attain a violin's level of refinement for a particular artistic purpose. It seems to me that this is possible when you're dealing with a precisely circumscribed set of operations. The craft of violin making could become highly refined because the tradition of violin music defined a narrow field of possibilities (in range, tone, etc.) within which violin makers could seek out nuances. Violins are standardised. However, in contemporary art, anything goes, and nothing is standardised. An artist could decide to create a work of art by selecting all the words in the _Iliad_ that contain more than three different vowels, finding the number of occurrences on the Web of translations of these words in several languages, and printing the fifty most common of the translated words in random fonts and sizes on a fifty-metre sheet of vellum. Computer software could certainly help the artist create this work, but it would surely have to be custom software. I don't see how any general-purpose `art creation software' could anticipate the requirements of such a work. If an artist wants to use techniques that are defined by tradition, a software tool can perhaps be designed to help. However, the artist should be prepared for such a tool to be as complicated to use as a violin. For example, like violin playing, typesetting has a long, complex tradition that has given rise to a vast set of expressive possibilities, using precisely defined parameters. Very sophisticated typesetting software exists to allow people to take advantage of these possibilities. One such software package is TeX, which I use when I want to produce a nicely formatted document. It seems to me that TeX is exactly the sort of application software that you're asking for. I don't have to know how it works in order to use it. It uses complex algorithms (of which I'm completely ignorant) to produce output which looks beautiful; at the same time, I can exercise precise control over what it does. Like a violin, TeX is controlled in a very idiosyncratic way, which takes time to learn: it has no graphical user interface, and instead provides a complex formatting language. If you don't want to learn how to use TeX, you can of course use a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, just as you can play a pennywhistle instead of a violin. Benjamin Geer _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold