Saturday, November 19, 2011

Senseless(?) Drawing Bot

I've been reading Maria Gough on Soviet Constructivism, so I've been thinking a lot about mark-making and the relation of the mark to its maker. As Gough states explicitly, neither version of Constructivism she describes can be at all severed from the Communist impulse behind them: the revolutionary state would suppress whichever individualistic impulses it could. But there’s a kind of fascinating tension in a movement that rejects the maker of the mark while elevating the mark itself. It should constitute a dialectical dissolution of the author/artist/creator him/herself, and yet that doesn't seem to be happening in Gough’s version of things, or in So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi's "Senseless Drawing Bot." Take away the rise of the Soviet Union, and I wonder what's motivating the removal of the human mark-maker here. 

Yes, it's amusing to watch. But there's more there.



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