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INFOWAR: RE: information and art
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
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I have been reading, alternatively with fascination and concern, these
dwellings upon the relationships between information and art, and the
contextualization of these relationships within the so-called INFOWAR.
I must admit that upon first reading of this thread, I felt dismissive
and irritated. (Years being removed from academe has suggested a
mindset uninterested in definitions of "art" and the like.) But after
returning to my robot workforce and cracking a whip to get them going
building yet another component to the information superstructure we
like to call the internet, the question kept returning to me.
Art, it seems to me, is often defined either as an extrema in
craftsmanship and technique, or as the transmission/communication of a way
of perceiving (or, clearly, a combination of the two of these). The later
sense of "art" seems to me to suggest that art is not information, but
rather acts upon information. It can shape and alter associations or it
can offer proof by contradiction. Ultimately, though, it must exist in a
complex with information, and act to illuminate certain aspects of the
information, or to suggest new relationships between individual units of
information.
Now, I realize this isn't quite a rocksolid theory right now. For one
thing, I can see a situation in which Art may enter this complex either AS
ART (and therefore acts upon the information in the complex), or MERELY AS
INFORMATION (in which case it is not acting as art, but merely as
referent).
However, moving on and keeping these distinctions and difficulties in
mind, I wonder now about art and infowar. It seems that Art (or at least
one form of Art) can act in infomation systems to jam relationships and
offer new ways of seeing information. It can expose ill-mannered
information and most importantly Art can serve to create dissonance and
distortion of information. A little noise can really shake a system to its
core... and this is, perhaps, where revolutionary art can fit into our
notions of Infowar. perhaps...
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davcron.technologies;
metric(14).sounds;
SF, CA
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