Dear Lisa;

    I saw that in history, art has always changed the way how people is
perceiving his environement, and how he's thinking it.  If we are
considering art on this level, we'll see that nothing has changed since
thousands and thousands years in human history. But there was big changes
on formal level:

- for example, if we are considering visual art: we know all the debates
in our time in between the classical painters and the radical conceptual
artists, but otherwise from this point of view they are focusing the same
thing:  definition of art ...  We can also find this kind of debate in all
art and cultural domains

I wonder that new tech has nothing different, and is reproducing on
archaic way the same way that other artist from visual art tooked before
through photography, cinema and video ....  Anyway all this changes were
dealing with a new kind of perception and vision...

In the case of Linux, I would like to understand where is the aesthetics
dimension. I agree about everything you said about this, anyway where is
the artistic dimension:  I love Proust, I love Valery. They are a writer
and philosopher, poet. they are using the same language when they are
working "french". They changed through their way this language perception
and maked it evolve it. Everybody is Ok to say that all of them are
artist. Anyway I've never heard that french language is a new kind of
ethnic collective art dealing with exchange, mutation and relation ship.
We may consider this language like this, but in tis case I can not see how
the art definition is evolving and how it is bringing new vision ...

I guess, that in the media world, the same thing is happening with Linux.
Can we say that linux is art because it has got a prize ?  I'm really
surprised !!! let's wait and see how it is bringing aesthetics mutation in
our cultural environment ! we should think about facts and not about
science fiction facts...


Valéry Grancher
vgranger@imaginet.fr
http://nomemory.tsx.org
http://www.united-art-space.com

Lisa Goldman wrote:

> over the last few days, it has been interesting to watch the discussion
> resulting from the hoax email and to consider whether an elegant algorithm
> could, in fact, be considered "literature."  however, i feel compelled to
> submit that this was not a question that preoccupied the .Net jury in our
> deliberations this year.
>
> the jury was looking for works that reflected a net aesthetic - derrick de
> kerckove coined the term "webness" to describe this quality.   we thought
> of this as work that is distributed, community-driven, evolutionary in
> it's form and development, and that actually couldn't be created without
> a network.  Using this criteria, Linux seemed to us to be an outstanding
> example of what the net makes possible, and to be well deserving of the
> prix.
>
> _Lisa Goldman (really)

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