Freedom and tragedy

We can see tragedy as a specific disruption in the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The disruption takes place at the site of art’s "militarization," the point at which the medium and the mechanics of expression divide, not in indifference, but in strife. This conflict marks the emergence of a language that demonstrates its aesthetic and political authority only by undermining its very status as language.

In fact, Schelling's subsequent discussion of Greek tragedy has been viewed as the most important contribution of the Philosophical Letters, often to the point that the passage is read as a complete doctrine in its own right, in isolation from the rest of the work.
With the Greeks, explains Schelling, the hero is punished for succumbing to the power of fate. This fate is an inherently superior power, a power against which the hero fights, but in the face of which he could never hope to be successful .
For Schelling, it is this defeat and this defeat alone that constitutes the recognition of freedom. Only when the hero is lost before the fact, only when he enters into a conflict in which he is, as it were, always-already defeated, does he demonstrate that he is free.

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New forms of art

What do you think of the discussion of the use of virtual realities, of new world structures which are made not only of words but also of images and three dimensional objects? People are discussing whether we are creating new forms of art and even a new concept of aesthetics.

David kolb - I think at the moment it is difficult for us to foresee because these new tools open so many possibilities and it is not clear what are the best ways or even what are the many possible ways to use them. I suspect that just as there is no one form of art which is the print form of art: there is poetry, there are novels, there are diaries, many different things.

So too virtual reality will end up spawning different kinds of art which will have quite different aesthetics. I think in some ways the kind which creates the most interesting problems for us is the kind where you would have abrupt juxtapositions of images and spaces. You might imagine for instance a virtual reality room that looks something like the library where we are now, and I go through the door and I am in the Baths of Caracalla, and then I go through another door and I am at my home in America. And this juxtaposition, this abrupt transition, could be used for artistic purposes. The difficulty is to use it in a way which does not become boring.

The problem of boredom comes when the reader or the experiencer senses that: "When I go through the next door, absolutely anything can happen." That is exciting but there is no playing with my expectations. There is no ability then to surprise me because I expected something else, and so your artistic tools become limited oddly by the fact that you have now allowed absolutely anything to happen.

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Aesthetic satisfaction with programs

One rather curious thing I've noticed about aesthetic satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced when we accomplish something with limited tools.

For example, the program of which I personally am most pleased is an hypertext I once wrote with Profile Maker 1.0 which had only 20 tags of wording, 160 texts per database. It makes a person feel like a real virtuoso to achieve something under such severe restrictions.
A similar phenomenon occurs in many other contexts. I’m not a professional programmer. But
when I learned a little bit programming, it was a popular pastime to do as much as possible with programs that fit on only a single punched card. I suppose it's this same phenomenon that makes APE enthusiasts relish their"one-liners. When we teach programming nowadays,
it is a curious fact that we rarely capture the heart of a student for computer science until he has taken a course which allows "hands on" experience with a minicomputer.
The use of our large-scale machines with their fancy operating systems and languages doesn't reallyseem to engender any love for programming, at least not at first.
It's not obvious how to apply this principle to increase programmers' enjoyment of their work. Surely programmers would groan if their manager suddenlyannounced that the new machine will have only half as much memory as the old. And I don't think anybody, even the most dedicated "programming artists," can be expected to welcome such a prospect, since nobodylikes to lose facilities unnecessarily.

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Approaches to the notion of form

Currently, there are three approaches to the notion of form.

The first is the Platonic, classical definition: collection of perceptible elements which can incorporate the Socratic and Benjaminian ideas of representation and its false implications resulting from mediation, reproduction, interpretation, and translation.

The second is the Aristotelian definition: intelligible elements of nature, kind.

The third is the modernist approach of internal form in association with and contrasting with external form, and especially the formalist principle of a work's form determining its value as art. Used in combination, these notions are interplayed in media theory to combine formal artistic analysis of composition, consideration of aesthetic value, and relations between mediums or forms of art, on a common term.

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