Luke Murphy: The New Raw Unconscious

What was Old is New Again. A Meeting of Art and Scholarship |
Conference


Fri, 21.11.2008 – Sun, 23.11.2008


While many artists have employed aleatory elements in their work
including ceramic effects, Chinese ink blot drawing and Cozens'
blot technique, it has been in the 20th century that chance has
become an overt aesthetic or anti-aesthetic strategy. At first
with Duchamp, dada and Surrealism's psychic automatism and later
with John Cage, chance and randomness have become part of the
standard new tool box. But it is the use of random number
generation that marks the dividing line between traditional art
and digital work. Generative programs, sims, data visualization
and other mimetic digital work represent the fountain head of the
artist encountering the ability to simulate nature through
computer generated random numbers. But to move further we need to
examine what is the difference between computer generated random
numbers, which are themselves a simulation and what it is to tap
into the ultimate source of randomness. Concentrating on the
clicks from a Geiger counter brings us into direct communion with
the fabric of time and space. It is the sound of the raw material
unconscious.


Every religion, political ideology, philosophy, and scientific
theory embodies a set of structured beliefs. These belief systems
maintain a symbiotic liaison with the arts. Throughout history,
communal beliefs have relied on music, theater, painting, and
dance in order to propagate accepted doctrines, and the arts in
turn have shaped the articles of faith.
The conference brings together artists and scholars in an unusual
forum. The arts addressed deal primarily with media, the major
art form that has only come to the fore in recent decades. The
scholarship concerns antique matters, such as Sumerian music,
early Egyptian medicine, and the omens, codes of law, and
creation myths of Mesopotamia. The divergent perspectives of the
participants augur well for innovative ideas emerging from this
close encounter between scholarship, the arts, and the belief
systems of early and modern times.