At 10:58 7-09-99 +0100, David Garcia wrote:
>To give the Prix Ars Electronica to Linux is as ridiculous as awarding
>Einstein the Nobel prize for literature because of the beauty of his
>equations.

Great thought David! Actually, come to think about it, it is probably a
postumous outrage that Einstein never _was_ awarded the Nobel literature
prize. In hindsight he has been a crucial influence on western literature
ever since the publication of his relativity theory. Freud should have had
one too, by the way...

I'm not sure whether your critique addresses the right context, though. Ars
Electronica may be twenty years old, but as far as I can see it has always
operated, and still operates, outside the rather classical art-idea that
you seem to have in mind when you refer to
>a distinctive discourse with its own history and frames of reference...
and
>a mysterious force called creativity...

The idea behind endeavours like AE is that the artistic discourse has
become rather less distinctive than you imply, and that art and technology
are merging into something that challenges the standard definitions of
Culture and culture, and the distinctions between the C and c. Calling this
'Duchampian' may be a nice rhetoric trick to relegate the idea of merging
contexts, practices and operations of 'high' and 'low' culture to the
ancient history of the 1920s avant-gardes, but it ignores the very real and
interesting topicalities behind it.

In many respects art has become design, and insofar as any design that
claims to be culturally effective, on a conceptual level, needs to address
the kind of meta-levels that once were the province of the high arts,
design has become art. That AE has ackowledged this, is, I feel, one of the
reasons it is seen as 'groundbreaking' and 'influential'. Therefore I
applaud the jury to have stepped outside of the 'distinctive discourses',
and awarded the prize to a collective enterprise that in effect may be as
influential as it is principally anonimous. In the true sense of what
Steven Johnson wrote in his 'Interface Culture', we're talking about
'cathedral builders' here...

>The Free software/Open source community has demonstrated clearly
>enough that hackers have their own distinctive culture and have little need
>of awards from inappropriate sources.

I would think that both hackers and 'open source' developers thrive on
making no distinction at all when it comes to sources that might be
appropriate for their purposes ;-> It would only be fair to grant the same
licence to the AE jury.

sincerely,
max

for a review of 'Interface Culture', see:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maxb/eye28-interface.htm



----------------------------------
max bruinsma
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http://www.xs4all.nl/~maxb
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amsterdam
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