On the Download

In a world where faster is commonly construed as better, the Long Now Foundation stands out in the stream of convenience-store consciousness, fostering patience with majestic undertakings such as the 10,000 Year Clock and the Rosetta Project (already the biggest collection of linguistic data on the Net). To raise money and further cultivate long-view optimism, the foundation presents regular seminars on everything from the potential of "free culture" embedded in Wikipedia's design to the thousand-year-old legacy of Balinese rice-growing cooperatives. This month's lecture by Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais attempts to redefine art in the language of the electronic frontier by placing culture jammers such as the Yes Men in the company of online artists such as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and JODI. According to Blais and Ippolito's book, At the Edge of Art, computer games, digital art, artificial intelligence, and hacktivism not only meet and shatter the old criteria for art, they may serve as a social antibody -- perverting code, arresting normal operations, revealing latent meaning, and executing new instruction for more than our computers.
Fri., Dec. 14, 7 p.m., 2007