Systems Aesthetics

I think a lot of this reading is relevant today. There were little comments here and there throughout the reading that I honestly didn't understand, but I feel like the gist that I did get still relates today. Through out the article there were little phrases that stood out to me more than others. For example, I liked the sentence:

"The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment." 

I felt like this was incredibly relevant in art today. Artists are constantly trying to find ways to connect to the viewer and have them view things differently and not focus on the materials used or if it necessarily "looks good." Along with that I really liked this passage:

"Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system. Inasmuch as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a "complex of components in interaction," comprised of material, energy, and information in various degrees of organization. In evaluating systems the artist is perspectives considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control."

It's a long paragraph/passage but I felt that it hit a lot of things we've been discussing in class lately. We've been talking a lot about systems and that's exactly what this is talking about. I especially liked the last part where it talks about how the object is almost always set and stone, but the system itself isn't always consistent. It all depends on what happens outside of the system that changes it. I felt like it really related to our chance project. With that project we created a system that had a set object, but because of the "chance" part of the project the outcome was inconsistent due to external conditions.

Overall, what I got out of this reading (from what I understood), I really liked it. I thought it was interesting that a lot of the views they had in the 60's were the same as they are today. Not all of the views are the same, but some of them are.