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Comment by jonahx | Hacker News Reader

"The electronics and the mechanics and the fabrication took me a year. Then it took me an afternoon to program the computer to actually activate it"

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No knock on the artist, I particularly like the pom-pom display, but I get the sense that much of art today is about going roundabout ways, almost Rube Goldberg machine like, to achieve things could be presented in other ways with minimal effort. Sometimes this alternative mediation is interesting, but sometimes it almost feels dismissive of the metaphysical magic that is computing.

A lot of art is about "the process".

I mean, the resulting painting as done by Pollock or Mondriaan is pretty silly. Just splash some paint in a canvas, or draw some lines and use the "fill bucket tool" to create colored squares, right?

Yes, sure, it's about the process and about the inescapable context with postmodern conceptual art. Whether it's mere splashes I will leave aside, but Pollock and Mondrian precisely brought the consideration of the process to a new light, that's part of what makes them significant figures. Mondrian didn't have mspaint.exe, those geometries meant something different at the time. Also, I don't think Picasso would have been so infatuated by cubism if computers with triangle mesh rendering and solid modeling had been around.

> but Pollock and Mondrian precisely brought the consideration of the process to a new light, that's part of what makes them significant figures.

Oh. I thought people saw something I couldnt.

Linguistically, the art is the process, and the result is a “work of art”. One of my favourite misunderstood language quirks.

> to achieve things could be presented in other ways with minimal effort

You could imagine the art piece with minimal effort: no effort spent in making it. So in a way that's the purest form of art by your criticism. If only there was some way to achieve this, we'd be done.

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