Truly the greatest steps in evolution of any media have not come about directly after a change in the available tools, but after a change in how we approach those tools -The Upended Perspective Bench

Basic questions are

• what does moving the camera mean here?
• what can we learn by purposefully misapplying ideas from different media to each other, in order to break through our subconscious limitations and constructs?

Subvert society as a medium

• Yes Men
• Situationists
• Deleuze: "In control societies, on the other hand, they key thing is no longer a siganture or number but a code: codes are passwords, whereas disciplinary societies are ruled (when it comes to integration or resistance) by precepts" -Postscript on control societies, p. 180
• • precepts are laws, now we subvert those precepts and instead gain control through passwords, codes, the defacto confines of the language or medium that controls us... (DmThesisCatherineDignazio)

Deleuze and DmSubversion

"In control societies, on the other hand, they key thing is no longer a siganture or number but a code: codes are passwords, whereas disciplinary societies are ruled (when it comes to integration or resistance) by precepts" -Postscript on control societies, p. 180

• • precepts are laws, now we subvert those precepts and instead gain control through passwords, codes, the defacto confines of the language or medium that controls us...

Subvert New Media as a Society

• Internet as society
• Interaction as conversation

Subvert human computer relationship

• DmIhitIhate

Subvert tools of interactive media

• Nam Jun Paik Magnet TV makes Art by intering with the Television

  

Subvert the computer as tool by capturing aesthetics of the crash

• "Alex Mclean's forkbomb.pl (winner of the Transmediale.02 software art prize) is a script written in Perl that creates an artistic impression of the user's computer system under pressure (by repeatedly creating new processes at such a speed that the system comes to a halt)." -DmSoftwareArt
• My own writing on the crash as an aesthetic tool

(mis)Applying digital to physical

redefine/misapply the tool, you redefine the media

• works but shouldn't
• voodoo programming

A rock is just a rock until you hit someone on the head with it:

• weapon
• art implement
• paperweight

Zork and Other Mainframe Works

in Twisty Little Passages, An Approach to Interactive Fiction, by Nick Montfort (2005)

"Janet Murray (1997) describes one way in which Zork presents a compelling "moment of experimental drama." early on: when the adventurer first enters the dungeon, the trapdoor is closed and the way out is barred by an unseen opponent (81-82). This moment... has no parralel at the beginning of Adventure... This improvement, one of several that made interactive fiction and new media more compelling, came about by improving the design of the IF world, not by simply programming more cleverly or writing better bits of text."

Digital media is the only field in which our tools are more complex than our products (?)

• a hammer does not just make a hammer, it makes a house
• but I have never made anything cooler than Photoshop with photoshop, and doubt I will ever make anything cooler than Flash with Flash
• where does the tool end and the art begin? Is the art-making tool a tool or is it art? Or is only the art made by the tool (by any joe shmo user) the art? But then, the user makes the art with the tool the artist made... what about pshop/ artware? (see DmLectureSeries, Session 1)
  • For example, this iterative piece of mine allows the user to make the art, so then which one is the artist?

Moving the camera

• DW Griffith in perspective bench

Appropriation of the idea of existence

An example of this can be seen in the new work Cupboard with Newspapers, 2005, which is a series of newspapers stacked in the alcoves of IMMA's gallery space. Here the gallery becomes the cupboard in the work's title. This is an inflection of his self-referential humour, and serves to underline his appropriation of the idea of existence. There is no cupboard in the sense of a real representation; instead the gallery space becomes the cupboard.
- -Rachael Thomas at Museum of Modern Art Ireland

• "Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it" p. 4, The Judgement of Thamus, in Technopoly, by Neil Postman