nici /danm 250 a /notes Apr

Project Group

  • UC Darnet

    • Everyone was kind of befuddeled. People were showing off toys, lots of programs have lots of funding but fall short on the ideas part

    • Sharon and Warren did their content stuff, also Sky Brian (?) doing work with Kids with turrets. These were the most content rich.
    • Polution sensors being attached to homing pigeons. Beatrice Socasta?

      The istory of conceptual art was that art is an experiment in ideas. The art is not the point it's the ideas. Interested in analytic philosophy and language and working through it t hrough creating  art experiments.  

    • Elliots interest is in aesthetics and understanding the world through these technologies. The aesthetic manipulations of nature.  Artificial Natural Selection : Arifacts of mans Influence on Nature
    • Fantail Pigeons: used to show how man always manipulates nature. unconscious selection is that artificial selection will set forth a particular pattern, something that is happening unconsciously. Darwin talked about fantail pigeons to illustrate the unconscious form of Artificial Selection and how it is always present inwhen Humans encounter nature.

      Enter Botany of Desire: Plants seduce us in order to further their reproduction. Sweetness: Aplles were originally bred for cider, they weren't meant for food. Intoxication, Controll, Beauty are the other areas. Elliot is interested in the beauty part.

    • The Tulip Bubble: The first plant that was actually bred for aesthetics reasons not medical ones.  It's actually a virus that causes the varigation that creates the stripes that were so greatly prized.

      The Sublime: Int he 18th and 19th century there were categories of aesthetics for philosopht. The separated beauty and sublime. Burke is the one who split the category. Prior to the 17th century the world was an ugly palce, it was a fallen world, because of mans sins and corruption it was nonsymetrical and thus ugly. In the 18th century they start to see the world in a different way that is chilling and scarry but beatiful. Feminine is symetry and smoothness, Sublime is masculine and cragy and dark. The experience of the sublime is internal, it's about the approach of death.  Comming in contact with your mortality, with what you cannot overcome, it became a means of self controll, controll over your responses to it.

    • The Golem project: Frueds theories of the uncany, a 20th century version of the sublime. Something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The dopelganger, it is disturbing to your core and identity. "The Sandman", nathaniel's mother tells him about the sandman, his father is involved in something wierd, Nathaniel wakes up sees them , there's an acciednt his father dies. buys these eye glasses. falls in love she's an automaton names Olympia. Something that seems real but is really artificiall is part of the uncanny. E.T.A. Hoffman.

      Then cloning and artificial life and The Genome Pallette. Art in the furutre will allow us to use genetic material as art material. We will manipulate genetic material for aesthetic purposes. Back to Darwin: Through our process of artificial selection we will ...Americans adopted the sublime because it fed into national character, man approaching the wild the west, manifest destiny. It allowed Americans to confront the frightening aspects of the westward expansion. Once they realized it they tried to find more sublime ways of approaching it. The technology will approach overcome or controll the natural sublime and thus gains the sublime through it.

      The american sublime in is the spectacles that are created around these technology. the expression of the wonder the awe and the enormity of these expansions?

      The sublime is also about the infinite. Infintesimal space. Article called "Why the furture doesn't need us." A critique of how our technologies are going to destroy us. Can we stop? Tie this in to manifest destiny, god has meant us to do this.

    • Tap into the sublime in Biotechnologies, the taxonomies that would allow us to make use of them?
    • Mustard is the plant everybody modifies to see if they can affect plant in general (like biologists study mice) they're trying to geneticly modify them to leach arsenic from the soil. Plants that could cleant up the environment and make the places more beautiful than nature itself. Our controll over nature will become complete.
    • Invisible five did an audio project that created an audio tour of I5 corridor that describes places that have had invormental issues arrive.
  • Ideas for Projects

    • Transgenic Plants and the tool box

    • Tree bending installation
    • Looking at plants as indicators and remove them. Have plants that will react to anthrax or other terrorist alert worthy activities. Terror Alert Colors coding

      Landscapes: relating the outdoors to our cultural memory of it.

  • Books
    • The Botany Of Desire
    • Plants Eye View of the World
    • Sceens from Deep Time
    • American Technological Design
    • Frues article on the Uncanny
    • The Sandman, ETA Hoffman
    • Poision Wood Bible
  • The Concept

    • Disturb the heck out of people!

    • Not completely for or against, not definitly stated.
    • Getting people to have discussion and look at the double edged sword. We can't stop out technologies, we can't say we're not going to make those, so let's have a discussion so we can be more conscious and try to make better decisions.
    • Address enviornmental issues through beauty is more likely to get people to care . If you talk about quality of life and reservation of open spaces (for our use is implied).
    • How we manipulate nature for non-utilitariam reasons. Aesthetics play a role somewhere, bruise freeze tomaoes and such. What gets made and what are the expiriments? What are the things that come out of it? What do we get to make?
    • We can now bend nature into our desires, not just warp it or represent it but change it.

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