Crafted in Stages

fields share many elements, such as changing vocabularies, needs of skill distinction. As a technology -market ages, it crosses boundaries, unseen until appearing in the the rear-view.

software engineering needed to become, for some, for awhile, Craft.

New imperatives are constant during the changing — their decline means that the edge of the field has gotten into the commercial-culture complex to such a degree that it can be done by any enthusiast. For decades, software advanced through the actions and interests of drawing upon people form other fields — At one point, during early Object adoption, Borland keynotes featured a drag and drop build of a spreadsheet application. It was thought that software tools could be built that would make it so easy to write programs the market for applications would decay.

The front, the first way is always driven by optimists. Succeeding waves become more pessimistic.

We begin with one definition of a word, and end with another, perhaps an opposite meaning. It is the way of language change driven, modulated by the technical commercial complex. It is that way is photography as a chemical process, and certainly that way in imaging as a software system.

Engineers learn math as meaning. Artists learn meaning as math.

At successive stages of skill needs, words distinguish qualifications. Amateur is a keyword in knowing where a field is at.

Walead Beshty: RA4 process

Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, U.K.) Walead Beshty was born in London, United Kingdom in 1976 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at Bard College and received his Masters in Fine Art from Yale University in 2002.

https://www.thomasdanegallery.com/exhibitions/174/works/artworks4495/

“I tend to think of my work in terms of constraints, whether that be context, convention or material, and use their logics to generate the work. I guess that’s because I see life as an improvisation within constraints, and affirmative notions of selfhood, autonomy, freedom, etc., arise through the active negotiation with restriction.” Walead Beshty in Conversation with Hamza Walker on the occasion of Equivalents, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2018

Notions:

Objects are given meaning through use, and over time certain uses become naturalized. Through the accumulation of patterns of use, certain conventions become standardized. Painting, for example, has developed a certain set of base conventions (e.g. canvas, rectilinear form, wall as support, portability). These conventions form the starting point for a dialogue, an agreement regarding the nature of the communication that will be taking place. For example, if a painting has a ‘conventional’ relationship to the wall on which it hangs, we would be acting in bad faith if we were to discuss the paint on that wall as part of the work. In art, these conventions designate what is inside and what is outside of the work. The boundary between the work and its surroundings is manifest through its adherence to convention. [from: https://www.actionstakenunderthefictitiousnamewaleadbeshtystudiosinc.com/lesson-notes-for-an-introductory-lecture ]

YT: 2020.

june ’23 auction: Lot 17, Walead Beshty, Six Magnet, Three Color Curl (CMY: Irvine, California, September 6th 2009, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C) (WB06709), 2009, estimated at £15000-20000, sold at £44450