The FAT site was archived and now when I look back at it I find it very like a museum and a very good one. FAT ideas and projects still seem fresh and alive, just in the same way that a Van Gogh drawing doesn't seem to date. Jimmy Cauty's conversion of police riot shields into smily faces, seems as relevant now as it did then.
Jimmy Cauty: Riot Shield
From fast art ideas to mini events designed to create a moment of serendipity, such as vacations in Paris, the FAT archive is a store house of irreverent and yet thought provoking ideas. If you are wondering why I am promoting this on a blog about drawing, I would argue that FAT is another example of contemporary 'disegno', I am thinking about drawing as a conceptual base around which other forms of art can emerge. Before painting, sculpture or architecture we had 'disegno', because those more solidified discipline specific concepts had to have a platform out of which to emerge. I can still remember when I was first introduced to the computer as a tool that could deal with drawing, I undertook a six week course on programming in BBC basic, after which I could determine points on a screen by indicating geometrical coordinates and then once I had written the correct the code, could join them. Every letter I am typing, has an associated code, that determines its shape and then another mass of code is used to determine where it goes, a simple word processor is using a deeply embedded set of codes for each typeface as well as code needed to control, spacing, kerning, indents, etc. etc. All of which is at its root linked to a type of drawing based on geometric principles, but we forget what lies beneath and FAT didn't. *
*That comment about forgetting what lies beneath gives me another link or entanglement back to my interest in object orientated ontology. Graham Harman wrote about computer languages in response to his own question about the relationship between OOO as a philosophical system and object orientated computer languages. He pointed out the fact that older computer languages were always holistic entities, but what programmers now do is put together independent programming 'objects' that are made to interact with other objects, whilst the older internal information belonging to each holistic 'object' remains discreet or hidden. In effect the reality that lies behind what programmers do becomes more and more hidden or locked deep down inside the structure. These 'objects' are also in Harman's terms 'opaque' to each other as well as to the end user. He then goes on to suggest that unlike other philosophical systems, OOO adherents believe that in a similar way to object orientated programming all objects are mutually autonomous and enter into relation with other things only via a mediator. (See pages 11 and 12 of Graham Harman's 2018 Object Orientated Ontology: A new theory of everything Pelican edition)
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment