Post Computer Art — Ontological Undecidability and the Cat with Paint on its Paws

Talk by Brian Reffin Smith at the British Computer Society:

"It is argued that an active re-visiting of computer based artworks from the last 60 or so years is essential to any progress of today’s work towards an activity that pushes at the frontiers of contemporary art.
We need to open up the history, works, techniques and discourses of computer based art to enable a revolution to occur – that of rendering the art problematic and ‘difficult’: then new solutions will emerge. It is suggested that whilst conceptual art was busy doing just this, computer based art was rushing madly in the opposite direction, trying in a reformist manner to make things easier, simpler.
Derrida, ‘Pataphysics, Schrödinger’s cat and the living dead may well be brought into play.


Brian Reffin Smith is a writer, artist, performer and teacher. He was a pioneer of computer-based conceptual art, with the aim of trying to resist technological determinism and ‘state of the art’ technology, which might merely produce ‘state of the technology’ art. He is a French civil servant, having been invited to work for their Ministry of Culture.
Smith, who won the first-ever Prix Ars Electronica, the Golden Nike, in Linz in 1987, is a Regent of the College of ‘Pataphysics, Paris, holding the Chair of Catachemistry and Speculative Metallurgy. He is Professeur, École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges, France.
Areas of work, research, teaching and performance include the idea of the philosophical Zombie in art and elsewhere, and the détournement or ‘hijacking’ of systems, mechanisms, programs etc. to make art.
He became a Zombie, after a short illness, in 1999."
http://www.zombiepataphysics.blogspot.com


And with Zombie toilet paper tied round our heads within the first 10 minutes, well....

I did like the idea of a characatured bicycle in the land of fish.. when you merge two things but then take it to the inverted extreme - a kind of negative space made physical through its opposite.