Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Power to the arts
I posted another Ream Appropriation this afternoon, a big one--an 82-meg mp3. All the appropriations are pretty big. That's what computer programming is good for--making and managing things we can't with our naked selves. Computational technology lets us store unimaginable amounts of data and to get back a particular one of them in seconds. It allows us to record entire books in minutes, books algorithmically composed in hours.
So far, artists haven't really advantaged themselves of the deep possibilities available in the tools and techniques for building large-scale applications. And large is really large. Rule of thumb: Any application with fewer than 20,000 lines of code should be considered trivial. Another way to think about that: 20,000 lines is 300 pages of single-spaced text. Output equivalent to a fair-sized novel doesn't even get you started.
Until artists and technologists forge the kinds of collaborations that saddle up the real power of computational systems, we're just dabbling. Ream Appropriations is a case in point.
# posted by Jim @ 4:07 PM 
