Re: Is IF art? (was Re: Gareth's competition comments)


20 Oct 1995 02:17:02 GMT

In article <465u5r$7mt@boris.eden.com>,
Nick Montfort <montfort@eden.com> wrote:

>"Scrabble" is a game in which players read and construct texts, but
>Scrabble doesn't seem literary. So the mere involvement of text isn't, in
>my opinion, enough to suggest that the medium has the potential for
>literariness.

Different people mean different things when they say "literary." (The same
is true of "art," of course, which is a problem with threads like these.)

I'd argue that any medium in which the author can communicate ideas with
words has literary potential. I wouldn't call Scrabble a medium, simply
because a Scrabble board offers nothing that a piece of paper with ink on
it can't. So why call Scrabble-board-text a separate medium?

"Mere involvement with the text" doesn't necessarily make something
literary, or art, or noteworthy at all. To my mind, this whole issue of
what art is, and what it can be, revolves around form and content. What
does the supposed work of art try to communicate? (Communication isn't
necessarily linguistic, of course.) Does the form of the piece make it
interesting for some reason --- for example, did conceiving such a form
alone require great thought? Does studying the work over a long perios of
time still yield new insights into its form?

These are the kinds of questions we have to ask about art, IMO, and we can
ask them just as well of interactive fiction and coin-op video games as we
can of paintings and operas. Most of the time, regardless of medium, the
answers to the questions will be "doesn't communicate much" and "is
structurally simple," because it's *hard* to make something that is
otherwise, and easy to believe you have when you haven't.

I think you can even ask the same kinds of questions of bridges, or
computer programs, or shoes. It's harder to communicate effectively
through the medium of shoes (to be utterly silly here), but *impossible*?
I doubt it. And the act of playing a game of Scrabble could certainly be a
"literary event;" it would just be extraordinarily difficult, and quite
limited by the size of the board. It does sound like something that might
happen in a Calvino story, though. :)

There are so many ways to communicate --- particularly as of this century.
I think this realization is in part what has motivated many of the 20th
century's misunderstood artists (the dadaists being the obvious eample).

Dave Baggett
__
dmb@ai.mit.edu
"Mr. Price: Please don't try to make things nice! The wrong notes are *right*."
--- Charles Ives (note to copyist on the autograph score of The Fourth of July)