20240405 - on 30 plus year old air, textiles and Richard Serra's gravity

Richard Serra & Hal Foster - Conversations about Sculpture (2018) is one of my favourite books on sculpture. I really resonated with Serra's ideas on gravity — of course, his ideas are for physical materials and process art, but the ideas can be re-applied to digital art. It was a reminder and aha moment for me — obvious in hindsight — that digital art is not limited by gravity, so when making 3D models / worlds / scenes etc, you can do what you like. some tools let you apply gravity, but one of my ways of working is to start with basic hand made drawings and convert them to 3D. Some of the specture extinct species were drawn and created this way. some were then 3D printed to physical objects / models, so I could see how they respond under gravity. Often they collapse, or are unbalanced, and definitely the majority if not all, are non-symmetrical. This is by design, as when the digital versions of the species are put into 3D virtual worlds, or even just onto webpages via the blockchain and their IPFS source files, they can float or spin, and are no longer constrained by gravity.

Also Serra's prime object is interesting — in the NFT / blockchain art community, or in the artworld in general too I suppose, being first or creating something new is lauded. I'm less concerned with this, but it is something interesting to watch when it happens, as those artists become popular for that prime object. Does it become a trap I wonder?

I shall come back to these and this book once I write up my notes from conversations and musings on this during my uni work.

At lunch I read the intro to Hito Steyerl's The Internet Does Not Exist (2012) book. They discussed the transport layer details of the internet in a more metaphysical manner. I'm used to thinking of this at data packet / hex byte level at times from years of watching and decoding packets at this point during integration sessions. It's actually a very simple yet structured protocol that drives the internet at transport and IP level (TCP/IP). Whilst reading I was thinking of those packets that are lost or invalid, or incorrectly structured so they don't make it through. I've heard of people inserting messages into the blockchain, bytes of text, for example on early bitcoin (and later with ordinals, NFTs too on other chains). It made me wonder if anyone had done an art project with plain tcp/ip packets, injecting errors and messages. I'm sure someone has, a note to self to research more one day. Anyway this was a digression. The intro to the book was far more poetic and media theory related than technical, so I was thinking of the layers of meaning put upon everything, by theory. Function and meaning layered upon layers - some people view it as if it were filtered, only the tech, or only the theory / critical thinking. It's all a conglomeration really, a bit of each, mixed together

In the evening I was flipping between twitter and warpcast. One thread on the 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(i)); GOTO 10 book had me remembering my old Commodore computer monitor from my Amstrad computer in the 1980s-90s, recently discovered whilst unpacking old storage boxes. Not my first computer, but one I used for a long duration back then. The computer itself may still be in a packing box, lying in 30-40 year old air, yet to be unboxed this year. Let's see. I'd found the old manuals for this - Amstrad User Guide for Microsoft GW-BASIC and Amstrad PC-20 User Manual and MS-DOS Guide. The first computer I recall having was an Aquarius, and it had rubber keys, which I think were blue. I'd forgotten about the Amstrad computer, and had thought it was a C16 (Commodore 16) as we couldn't afford a C64. Checking the publish dates of the manuals though, I must have bought the Amstrad later. It's all a blur really, but made me think about how memories work over a longer term

And textiles: nice to meet a textile artist from Argentina who corrected my understanding that Hundertwasser came up with the idea of cloth / textiles as second skin with his five skins model — I wasn't familiar with this so will need to read more. India Flint has a book named this, and writes about it often so I've always associated the term with her. A nice chat on cloth dyeing using natural dyes — my explorations in this were put on hold when I concentrated more on digital art for my final year of the art degree, though I have done some tests over the years prior to this and since moving, am planning to try some more. I think they can fit in with the ecology ideas

reading:
Amstrad. 1987. Amstrad User Guide for Microsoft GW-BASIC. USA: Amstrad PLC.
Montfort, Nick, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter. 2013. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(i)); GOTO 10. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press. PDF edition. https://10print.org.
Serra, Richard and Hal Foster. 2018. Conversations About Sculpture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Internet Does Not Exist. e-flux Journal Series. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Kindle eBook edition.
Vass, Susan and Jean Gilmore. 1988. Amstrad PC-20 User Manual and MS-DOS Guide. USA and Canada: Amstrad PLC.

listening:
Copernicus 20 min Binaural Beats Meditation by Sameer Sengupta ::: https://soundcloud.com/sameersengupta/copernicus-20-min-binaural-beats-m...
La Prochaine Fois by Neotropic ::: https://neotropic.bandcamp.com/album/la-prochaine-fois-2
Oscillo Scape 22 by Oscillo Scape ::: https://oscilloscape.bandcamp.com/album/oscillo-scape-22