For me, most techno-art devolves into a catalog of effects that someone found they could generate with their synthesizer, video camera, or software package. It's a lack of constraint, in any number of senses. I think this is the result of the1970's commercialization of the efforts of earlier electronic art hackers. What could have been a new aesthetic sensibility became Digital Media Arts. More. Faster. Easier. But not necessarily: Better.
Two years ago I discovered, mostly by accident, that there was an alternative. There were a number of efforts to integrate Cybernetics and the nascent field of Artificial Intelligence into the Arts. Jack Burnham's Systems Art was the most formalized of these. It all happened just before I started studying this stuff in college and, by virtue of being in the California Livin' backwater of Santa Cruz, I was never notified of it's death. I dug in a bit and found a plethora of material: Schip's Systems Art Area
In a strange coincidence, the Systems approach to art faltered at almost the same time that AI took a turn to the symbolic top-down approach which gave us Expert Systems but nothing like a Human Intelligence. It was another 15 years before AI restarted from the behavior based bottom-up, and -- coincidence again? -- Artificial Life research took off on its short flight of fancy. A-Life also faltered due to, among others, making too many un-supportable claims, which is really -- in another strange coincidence -- the job of Art not Science.
For a somewhat different take of where we are and what we need to do I've written YAM (Yet Another Manifesto)...I just can't figure out how to implement any of it. Yet.
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