i feel a sense of clarity ever since i realized that "digital art" is just any art characterized by math being done quickly. so there's a continuum between (e.g.) Kepler's Rudolphine Tables and Minecraft
4
Replies
2
Boosts
it's also interesting as a definition because it clarifies a distinction you can make between digital art and procedural art, the latter of which is art that is made by formulating and following rules, which may or may not involve doing fast math! e.g., Jackson Mac Low's "Words nd Ends from Ez" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54491/words-nd-ends-from-ez-ix-from-drafts-fragments-of-cantos-cx-cxvii and maybe fluxus event scores generally etc are rules but not fast math
you can also think of "interactive art" as art where the math is performed quickly enough, and its results made evident to you quickly enough, that it appears to result nearly immediately from the action you took to initiate it. which kinda needs to be done with digital electronics; it's difficult (but maybe not impossible?) to imagine "interactivity" like this being achieved by a bunch of people in a room with logarithm tables
not trying to build a taxonomy or argue over classifications here btw. i'm really just trying to think through all of the threads of practice and context involved when we're teaching computer programming in the arts. (like what *specifically* is made possible with computation? what *specifically* is made possible with very fast digital electronic computers? why might it be important to learn concrete details about all this stuff?)
@aparrish really like this line of thinking
