{"id":34,"date":"2014-09-02T12:45:44","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T12:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/?p=34"},"modified":"2014-09-02T12:45:44","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T12:45:44","slug":"i-me-mine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/ideas\/i-me-mine\/","title":{"rendered":"I me mine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/01UipbZL3ww\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Allright, I give. I&#8217;ve got a million things I want to say about DS106 Week 1, but if I don&#8217;t say something and hit publish, I&#8217;m never going to give myself permission to move on to week 2. Plus, I&#8217;m not part of\u00a0the group conversation as long as these ideas are in my head.\u00a0Rather than let the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/blog\/happiness-in-world\/201106\/why-perfect-is-the-enemy-good\">perfect be the enemy of the good<\/a> I&#8217;m just going to hit the damn Publish button on my thoughts on Art, and come back to technology and The Wire later.<\/p>\n<h2>In Art<\/h2>\n<p>Thinking back over the <a href=\"http:\/\/ds106.us\/open-course\/unit-1-bootcamp\/#what-is-art\">videos for Open DS106 Unit 1<\/a>, I&#8217;m struck by the feeling that they all treat Art as something selfish. I heard a lot about what the Artist is trying to do in their creation, and I heard a lot which suggests that Art is found in the viewer&#8217;s reaction. What I don&#8217;t remember hearing is the idea that Art is a mode of communication &#8211; that the creation and the reaction are inseparable (except by time and distance).<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s worth it to conceive of Art as a very stylized (and slow)\u00a0way of having a conversation. Certainly this addresses all of the points in the Rhett and Link video. Conversations are allowed to presuppose a certain base of knowledge. That can be as simple as a common language, or as complicated as an academic debate. Some conversations are easy, and some are hard, demanding active listening and a willingness to have your attention focused by the interests of another. So no, sometimes Art isn&#8217;t a transcendent eureka moment, sometimes it&#8217;s a hard slog to figure out what you&#8217;re supposed to get out of it.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t to say that it&#8217;s always the listener&#8217;s fault when the communication doesn&#8217;t happen. Particularly in Art, where the artist may be manipulating details and symbols very subtly (or more boldly than we&#8217;re used to), I think it&#8217;s important that the artist thinks about\u00a0who they&#8217;re talking to, and why. Gaiman&#8217;s advice to try things in your art before someone tells you they can&#8217;t be done is terrific advice &#8211; but I think it implies a certain element of the scientific method. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/arts\/culturebox\/2014\/01\/samuel_beckett_s_quote_fail_better_becomes_the_mantra_of_silicon_valley.html\">Fail again, fail better<\/a> is a good slogan, but it requires that evaluation of what &#8220;better&#8221; would look like, and how we might reach it. (And particularly, to the extent that an artist fails to include groups in the conversation, I think they at least have an ethical obligation to ask themselves if they&#8217;re OK with that and why.)<\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Allright, I give. I&#8217;ve got a million things I want to say about DS106 Week 1, but if I don&#8217;t say something and hit publish, I&#8217;m never going to give myself permission to move on to week 2. Plus, I&#8217;m not part of\u00a0the group conversation as long as these ideas are in my head.\u00a0Rather than &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/ideas\/i-me-mine\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">I me mine<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ds106-2","category-ideas","category-summary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p53vXx-y","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}