Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 12.3
You've Got Bugs!
Screen shot and picture of installation with and without audience
member
12.4
Conclusions
We must now consider why evolution bothered to favor the ability for beat
detection? Firstly, whatever their authors' intention, mythologies are strategies used
for culturally informed development. Any culture will do, none are intrinsically
more or less ideal. This includes both traditional cultures, as well as ones invented
in the course of a game. Nonetheless, we come to learn which patterns in the
environment are significant to other members of that select culture. Ritual teaches us
which artifacts to be revered, and in what ways reverence is shown. Symbiotically,
the mythologist/artist, having assimilated the priorities of a given culture, arranges
words and concepts into an explanation for these prioritized experiences. Random
sounds may be heard by the audience member, but the mythologist-as-musician
having arranged several of these sounds into a rhythm, provides the audience
member with a means by which to discern meaning from chaos. The audience
member can now exhibit solidarity with the culture by dancing, tapping or otherwise
demonstrating the successful application of cultural cues, as appropriate given these
cultural rules. For instance, one might move vigorously at a club in response to
music, but is expected to sit still when hearing “Here Comes the Bride.”
Likewise, the painter may be drawn to the medium of paint, due to some personal
intelligence
, and is provided with tools to embody some otherwise un-articulate-able
problem. There is no possibility that an inanimate tool, such as a computer, actually
“curates” the problem-solving task at hand, creating the mythology. In the same
way, the abacus does not perform mathematics, but embodies a part of the cognitive
process where limitations of the human mind are most apparent. Yet there is clearly
the sensation experienced of animate behaviors and anthropomorphic personalities
attributed to some events on the screen and not others. An audience member too may
then be drawn by a personal intelligence to look at paintings. From the painting, that
audience member culls the necessary clues to show solidarity. The essential trick,
however, is that the painting is not literally an intelligent being with a message.
At the cost of over-interpreting scenes on the computer, or even the printed page,
we can come to submit to cultures, in instances when only scant clues as to the
requirements of membership can be detected from literal, concrete sensations.
