Analyzing Abstraction

story © Michael Betancourt | published October 9, 2005 | permalink |  |  

I have written some notes on abstraction (.pdf) that might be of interest.

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 18, 2005 | permalink |  |  

Here is the full story. Strong emotions may cause short bursts of blindness!

story © Michael Betancourt | published June 7, 2005 | permalink |  |  

Here are some questions that have been bothering me lately:

Why has so much technology-based culture gotten "stuck" in the 1970s? (The "best" albums for scratch, and most common samples all come from 1970s funk and disco.)

Does the continuous extension of copyright serve to prevent cultural innovation by allowing companies to continually recycle older creations where each new issue is essentially all profit, instead of funding new work?

Since 1950, a great deal of both high and popular culture are simply recycling earlier innovations: what is causing this cycle?

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 7, 2005 | permalink |  |  

Any technology dependent art is subject to two kinds of technological failure. The first is familiar and obvious: those glitches, stoppages, etc. that happen when our technology fails to work properly; the second comes in the form of obsolesence, the failure of technology due to its having been replaces, revised, updated or otherwise pushed out-of-use. The greatest problem for all tech-dependent art is what happens when the second of these has come to pass and it is no longer possible to view the art because the tech it depends upon no longer exists? We are already seeing the early stages of this with art that relies upon the internet for its existence, or that depends upon particular software/hardware combinations (punchards, 8-inch floppy disks, etc.) that are no longer in use.

The fate of any tech-dependent art work is ultimately one of staying “live” or vanishing all together.

story © Michael Betancourt | published May 12, 2004 | permalink |  |  

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