AEC FORUM - "FLESHFACTOR"
(http://www.aec.at/fleshfactor/arch/)

Allow me to be cranky. I think of myself as relatively well-informed on
the subject of art-making and technology, having punched music-V note
cards in 1972 and having grown with the medium since then. Over the
years I have come to believe that the worth of ideas is inversely
proportional to the number of pages it takes to explain them and I
confess much of what has been said here flies right over my head. And it
bugs me. Maybe the truth is simpler than it appears?

At the moment, I am involved in a drawn-out and difficult music project.
I always conspire to find diversions to keep me from actually working on
what I am supposed to work on. Hence this tirade.

To the chagrin of my family, I am spending an innordinate amount of time
in the company of my assistant, which I happen to like. I have no
feelings about this relationship being good or bad, and I don't find it
productive to spend time worrying about it. It just is. As a practicing
composer, I have had a number of assistants in the last 30 years. Most
of them have been machines.

Certainly, the music coming out of the relationship is different than it
would have been had my assistant been a smart human music copyist. Not
better, just different. But the process, by and large, is the same. Like
a copyist, my machine has been educated. It has formalized knowledge of
the work I do. It comes from common or rarefied breeding. It has a
quantifiable amount of smarts and memory. It is fast or slow depending
on what I ask of it. I submit my problems to it and choose to take or
ignore its advice. Should the relationship prove unsatisfactory, I can
fire it and hire another one. For this, I pay money. Either way, I don't
feed it, nurse it or love it. It just needs to be friendly, not too
annoying in public company and do as told.

The organizational and cultural aspects of these kinds of relationships
have been discussed to death in the sociology of labour, class warfare
and the generation of wealth. It is my concern only in so far as it does
not impede my productivity. I am not ready to feel sorry for my machine
since the one different parameter in the man-machine relationship is the
irrelevance of physical pain and punishment. Guilt of exploitation has
been removed. I'll be the only one sorry when I throw a brick through
the monitor. Thankfully, my machine does not have dignity and readily
handles my mood swings. To a point - this leaves me a lesser human in
not having to deal with the subtleties of human frailty.

I lived in India for a year. India has a weird relationship to machines.
India can make machines with the best of them. But machines are seen as
usurpers at the bottom of the caste system. Labour is cheap, survival a
daily concern and human dignity a foreign concept. Roads, skyscrapers
are built by hand and a slave is available for every task known to man.
Calculate pi to 15000 points of precision? Here are 5000 bean counters.
For India, and if you are Indian, this makes perfect sense. It is a
culture that manages to function within the guidelines it set for
itself. And it falls apart spectacularly when appraised by western eyes.
We use machines because we like to think we understand and have
compassion for humanity.

So. Machines, computers and content? In my life, not a federal case. I
sign the music I do, not my machine. Some things are easier to do with
their help but, strictly speaking, anything one may think has been
contributed by them is largely the result of serendipity – which I can
also use. My computer is not and never will be an artist because it
lacks the capacity to claim the work. I don't subscribe to conspiracies:
machines will never be able to do so.

Content is the mysterious to you and me, it is the imaginary adventure a
work travels through. I have no decent explanation for this phenomenon,
nor do I desire to have one. You can dissect its mechanics but that will
not help you recreate it. In that sense, the mechanics are completely
irrelevant to the artistic experience. There is no new content to
technologically based art forms. Successful art that uses technology is
successful because, fundamentally, you could have done the work with
other means, assistants, media, helpers, machines, instruments or
slaves. The rest is window dressing and flashing lights. If it's cool,
it flashes. If it's really cool, it doesn't.

Afterthought: One of my jobs is teaching composition to grown-up kids. I
always think teaching is like micro-coding. The more tuned the program,
the less it can do.