http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/20/arts/design/20RIGH.html

It's a pretty cool piece, but $18K a crack? He must be seriously well-loved,
a genius.
Nevertheless, he is using documentary or documentarism very much in the same
venue as called for by the ESMOML, but not nearly as importantly, if I'm
correct? Could be debated.

Minsky uses listing (a list of books), matching (a topic for each book), and
then documentation, and seriously didn't Eryk figure this out first?
Superbad certainly did–if I may make a generalization about composition in
websites–in fact I'd say compared to most good net art Minsky's "art" here
is subpar. His unique gesture appears to me to prove netart can sell a
better object for way under $18k. The unique gesture is the inspiration
behind Minsky's piece and it's not bad, but is it original if you compare it
to netart? No. Does net.art underutilize the multiple? I would say yes,
but that brings up a whole new problemo. C'est la vie.

What constitutes a unique gesture? This idea isn't just a topic or theme of
net art but more a starting point, the starting point. So I place Curt
Cloninger's nature quilt over Minsky's piece from an art-critical viewpoint.
Not to mention many other–shit, all other–netart websites. Minsky
inscribed the US Bill of Rights into a series of specially chosen books for
sale as unique objects–and the they are pretty nice.

Along the same lines, the tickets at SFMOMA82700.html are all hand-numbered
with roman numerals (which took about five hours at
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/maybe.JPG.)

I get sick of underground ideas and styles going aboveground with no credit
given.

They're telling me, "it's Chinatown," and I'm like, "no, it's not Chinatown,"
and so on and so forth.

Nechvatal is working in the medium of manipulation, and so is Minsky (who has
the supercomputer name also). But in Nechvatal it's robot hands, and for
Minsky it's like "my real hands man," fluxusy-multiple with catchy satire. I
think they both call for revision, in that I think the moment of manipulation
in both is metaphorized in the same way, similar to Michelangelo's God and
Adam.

At first they don't seem that similar but I thought it over. Nechvatal's
digital painting and Minsky's manualized concept-art are using a common
factor of manualized text or image.

What I'm saying people don't discuss enough is that the change from
observation to expression is like a hinge or fulcrum–the point where for
example a joint bends, i.e. arthritis–not a "point of manualization" as they
call it at all. That is not it, at all.

Well clearly to some degree it is the lesson of new media art, the point of
manualization, but also the not yet widely know idea that that point is more
like a hinge than than a discrete inscriptor.

Another side tangent, I think that cellular automata function or waver around
some kind of inscription/exscription feedback loop. The permutations of this
particular kind of loop, an awareness of fulcrum or hinge is a visual,
manual, and rhetorical rule that could be the origin of human speech, for
example. I base this argument on Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey, AI, Wolfram, etc.

Not that I am against Richard Minsky or his art, because it's a good idea
well realized and a provocative choice of books. What is the story on
Richard Minsky?

Regards,

Max Herman

ref urls:
http://www.one38.org/fulfillment/fulcrum.swf
www.geocities.com/genius-2000/1stMaterialActofCommunication.JPG
www.salvaggio-museum.org
http://www.tao.ca/writing/archives/ctheory/0026.html

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