> I don’t want to believe this is true, because I want to believe culture is an infinite game, and inexhaustible. And surely the number of linear combinations—of distinct ideas humans can have, and works of art we can make—is so high as to be inexhaustible. But each new remixing brings less information than the last.
Were this to be true, surely the usable ideas for art would have been exhausted by the ancient Greek already? There is only so many poses in which you can distort the human body and retell the greek myths and as it happens, quite a while the European artists believed this to he true.
This is why using mathematical logic to describe cultural phenomenons is not necessarily the best approach to understand art. Parthenon statues, Nibelungen or Warhol’s Death and Disaster -series are essentially meaningless without the meaning and value we give them. And this changes when times chamge, new political ideas permiate the world, new technologies change our understanding of time and space. In science you cannot just come up with a new dimension just like that. In art, you kinda can, if you can get enough people dream about it collectively. This is something the great artist of periods have been directors of.
In a sense in our millenia the technology has taken the position art had in the 19th and 20th Century. We dream not through theatre, literature, music, visual arts and cinema, but via new digital technologies that are promising to change the world to a more satisfactory one - newest of course being the AI, whatever one means by that. Startup CEO’s give pitches that are almostly exactly like artist statements of the 80’s and 90’s. Many hackers here make much more interesting projects far superior to the old shit you see in Venice or in the other five zillion biennale’s of contemporary art.
Personally I find transhumanism to be an old hat at this point, but the new dimension to this chaotic space-time-continuum of art seems to me come from some new modality between art and technology, or technology as art. Images generated by AI are rather boring and AI is only one avenue of this. Perhaps future art historians will look at coding itself from the advent of computing to our era as an artistic practice. I think they should.
delis-thumbs-7e•1mo ago
Were this to be true, surely the usable ideas for art would have been exhausted by the ancient Greek already? There is only so many poses in which you can distort the human body and retell the greek myths and as it happens, quite a while the European artists believed this to he true.
This is why using mathematical logic to describe cultural phenomenons is not necessarily the best approach to understand art. Parthenon statues, Nibelungen or Warhol’s Death and Disaster -series are essentially meaningless without the meaning and value we give them. And this changes when times chamge, new political ideas permiate the world, new technologies change our understanding of time and space. In science you cannot just come up with a new dimension just like that. In art, you kinda can, if you can get enough people dream about it collectively. This is something the great artist of periods have been directors of.
In a sense in our millenia the technology has taken the position art had in the 19th and 20th Century. We dream not through theatre, literature, music, visual arts and cinema, but via new digital technologies that are promising to change the world to a more satisfactory one - newest of course being the AI, whatever one means by that. Startup CEO’s give pitches that are almostly exactly like artist statements of the 80’s and 90’s. Many hackers here make much more interesting projects far superior to the old shit you see in Venice or in the other five zillion biennale’s of contemporary art.
Personally I find transhumanism to be an old hat at this point, but the new dimension to this chaotic space-time-continuum of art seems to me come from some new modality between art and technology, or technology as art. Images generated by AI are rather boring and AI is only one avenue of this. Perhaps future art historians will look at coding itself from the advent of computing to our era as an artistic practice. I think they should.