“Engaging Ambivalence” deals with the issues of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) policies of engaging academics to research with civilian and military applications. The author feels that DARPA’s methods are disingenuous and often obfuscate the actual motives for the research it buys; while DARPA purports humanitarian applications of such research, these pursuits actually have primarily martial purposes.
The author points to several interesting projects that invert/subvert the nature of DARPA’s ambiguous research objectives, ‘The Tactical Mobile Robotics program is developing robotics technologies
and platforms designed to revolutionize dismounted operations by projecting
operational influence and situational awareness into previously denied areas’’ becomes a mechatronic spray painting apparatus. These projects interpret the vague intent of the research verbiage in favor of human empowerment, creating devices and processes that ease one’s burden when rioting, or facilitate expedient graffiti tagging.
While I often enjoy subversive technology, I don’t consider it art. The output of these tools might be possibly be art, but the sheer act of creating a tool does not endow the creator with the title of “fine artist”. I am not arguing any of the classical definitions of fine art: that it should be merely contemplative, elicit emotion or poetically describe some phenomenon of life.
In the same sense, subversion and activism are no more art forms than is war itself. If some enterprising young artist began and successfully waged a war on some political entity, would he be nominated for a Golden Nica? If not, why then do we find activist, subversive projects now hand in hand with computer animation? But it’s ok that subversion and activism are not fine art forms--they are necessary tools of patriotism. However, if the trend toward subversion and activism being included in academic arts continues (e.g. the title, “Andy Bichlbaum, assistant professor in Subversion at Parsons”), then the door is opened for all acts that have previously been excluded from “high” art (for good or ill).
Showing posts with label engaging ambivalence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label engaging ambivalence. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Baldwin Response Article 2
Response to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
This response is classified and may not be shared with parties outside of the University of Illinois AD509 Spring Semester Rooster led by Professor Sabrina Raaf.
Any responses may be used for further research, quoted, and/or reprinted without permission from the authors.
The Engaging Ambivalence article immediately draws up fond memories of the film The Last Starfighter:
This is the story of a videogaming boy, named Alex Rogan who lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. Meanwhile, Alex becomes the top player of Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends "the frontier" from "Xur and the Kodan armada" in a space battle. After achieving his best score, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri. Stepping into Centauri's vehicle, he is seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all in his life, he finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defense force when Centauri is a disguised alien who whisks him off to another planet. Written by Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com} (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/plotsummary)
But after years of playing video games, the NRA never called me up for my Duck Hunt abilities, nor did the Association of Italian Plumbers look me up for my turtle bopping skills to seek a princess. Then again, here I sit, punching buttons over and over again...
I think the author tries to make a calm connection between military to academic and corporate research labs but fails in my eyes and the writing ends up as bait for a would be conspiracy theorist. What I feel the article succeeds at is inspiring to think of a better design. It points to the somewhat forgotten but obvious fact that someone can take what we do and make bad things happen with it (i.e. in the movie Real Genius, engineering students build a laser that is secretly being built for the government which ends up being reversed into being the worlds biggest popcorn maker).
The end goal then becomes the responsibility of the artist to find ways to protect the interest and scope of the work while making work that has little room to be adapted into military functions, or even functions the artist does no desire to be implied upon them. Or as Jasper Johns said:
Publicly a work becomes not just intention, but the way it is used. If an artist makes something — or if you make chewing gum and everybody ends up using it as glue, whoever made it is given the responsibility of making glue, even if what he really intends is chewing gum.
So in agreement with Johns it falls on the artist to make sure that what they are making is equal to their intention of what was to be made.
This response is classified and may not be shared with parties outside of the University of Illinois AD509 Spring Semester Rooster led by Professor Sabrina Raaf.
Any responses may be used for further research, quoted, and/or reprinted without permission from the authors.
The Engaging Ambivalence article immediately draws up fond memories of the film The Last Starfighter:
This is the story of a videogaming boy, named Alex Rogan who lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. Meanwhile, Alex becomes the top player of Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends "the frontier" from "Xur and the Kodan armada" in a space battle. After achieving his best score, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri. Stepping into Centauri's vehicle, he is seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all in his life, he finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defense force when Centauri is a disguised alien who whisks him off to another planet. Written by Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com} (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/plotsummary)
But after years of playing video games, the NRA never called me up for my Duck Hunt abilities, nor did the Association of Italian Plumbers look me up for my turtle bopping skills to seek a princess. Then again, here I sit, punching buttons over and over again...
I think the author tries to make a calm connection between military to academic and corporate research labs but fails in my eyes and the writing ends up as bait for a would be conspiracy theorist. What I feel the article succeeds at is inspiring to think of a better design. It points to the somewhat forgotten but obvious fact that someone can take what we do and make bad things happen with it (i.e. in the movie Real Genius, engineering students build a laser that is secretly being built for the government which ends up being reversed into being the worlds biggest popcorn maker).
The end goal then becomes the responsibility of the artist to find ways to protect the interest and scope of the work while making work that has little room to be adapted into military functions, or even functions the artist does no desire to be implied upon them. Or as Jasper Johns said:
Publicly a work becomes not just intention, but the way it is used. If an artist makes something — or if you make chewing gum and everybody ends up using it as glue, whoever made it is given the responsibility of making glue, even if what he really intends is chewing gum.
So in agreement with Johns it falls on the artist to make sure that what they are making is equal to their intention of what was to be made.
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