Rick Austinson
Despite the interesting amount of art displayed around my room, I’m going to pick out one of the last thing’s you’d expect to see defined as ‘art’: my computer. Now the amount of art it contains, in the form of pictures, movies, and music, is immaterial, for the moment we are focusing on the machine itself. Two processors, perfectly synchronized, hyper threaded, and installed with the utmost care. Four sticks of memory totally three gigabytes, timed to precision, matched and passively cooled. Three optical drives, DVD, CDR-RW, DVDR-RW. Three hard drives, 80 gig on a mobile rack for a quick getaway, 2 more in the chassis in raid zero. Formatted, zero filled, purring like a pair of digital kittens. One motherboard, every circuit lain out with precision, every conduit shielded, every standoff tightened, every chip, every solenoid, every capacitor, in place. One high-end raid card, Promise FastTrak 2000, nothing but. Sound card, Audigy 2 Xgamer, the finest there is. Video, 512 ram, double speed GPU, deluxe cooling. In all, 12 active fans humming to keep the system at a smooth internal temp. It burns hotter than hell but that can’t be helped, that much machine will not be kept from boiling by currents of moving air. Every wire, every component, every spring every bolt every tiny detail has been turned by my own hand, tuned to precision, and assembled with love. This machine has more than silicon and gold inside, I put everything into it, a piece of my soul. Now I’m using it to write this paper.
This is more than just a machine, this is art. Even though it looks really ugly. It’s hard for people who walk into an electronics store and buy the cheapest thing they can find to understand what a machine like this means to its user. To me it means everything, it is part of me. I guess one could say that this is Art for the Spirit, given how deeply I, the user, feel my connection to it. I can tell the speed of the fans how it’s running, when it’s sick, and what is wrong with it. I wake up in the middle of the night when the pitch changes, I know my machine that well. So great is this contraption that I have given it the name of the greatest epic hero of all time: Beowulf. It was a close tie between that and Chuck Norris.
This could fall into several categories, but to me it is Art for the Spirit. Many people would not consider a computer to be art, unless you count the case-modding work people have done. But case modding is a different form of art entirely, must like sculpting, and in that case the inner components matter less than the external beauty. Externally my machine is damn ugly, but that’s only what people who aren’t me say.
To call any particular form of art not art is a violation of our most basic human right; that is the right of perception. You cannot call something that someone else thinks is art not art, without shattering there entire perceptual set. You can, however, call it stupid.
Freedom of perception is a basic
inalienable right, and so is the right to think things are stupid. And since
here in
This has been another work of RickAustinson.Com
http://www.rickaustinson.com/aboutme/rickipedia/Art%20Thoughts.htm