OK - some background...
Reading the thread is interesting! My motivation for the 1 Terabyte work was nothing to do with conceptual art, I wont go into detail but originally conceptual art was the idea that art was essentially a practice of examination of the nature of art, see
http://tallervi.pbworks.com/f/Art%20After%20Philosophy.pdf
This is an incredibly important document (though I don’t subscribe to it now) as it poses the severing of art from aesthetics! (which I do subscribe to)
Unfortunately the media then took the term ‘conceptual art’ to mean any art using any ‘idea’ about anything! Which was usually linked with challenging the viewers idea of art etc. or being ‘interesting’ or smart or ‘pushing the boundaries’…
And was based on the misunderstanding of the lack of symmetry in this kind of thing..
1. New art is shocking.
2. Something shocking is new art.
1. might be true in some cases, but 2 does not follow anymore than…
1. New theories in science are often thought crazy.
2. If this is thought crazy its new science.
So my motivation for 1TB– simple
“A man climbs a mountain because it's there. A man makes a work of art because it isn't there.” Carl Andre.
So not a conceptrual work but an OBJECT.
I just thought - could I make a terabyte of noise? I like the discussion about why mp3? The project began many years ago 1990s… using a lap top and VB to write the files. This was so slow that after about 2 days the program would crash… the problem seems not FAT32 but the old VB couldn’t handle files larger than 4gb. Well after several attempts the lap top gave up! Latter of course you see the header of a .WAV file allows for a max of 4gb. (“WAV files are usually stored uncompressed, which means that they can get quite large, but they cannot exceed 4 gigabytes due to the fact that the file size header field is a 32-bit unsigned integer”) So I had two problems, size, and the time taken to write! such a long file. The answer was when I found you can join mp3s and they will play… even using a DOS copy command… copy *.mp3 /B big.mp3 would copy all the mp3s in a folder to one big mp3 – which would then play! (unlike mp4!)
So I created a .vb program (called MUZILLA....) to randomly splice chunks of .mp3s to create large mp3s. The random selection giving different sound files of very large lengths. This would make very big mp3s in minutes not days…. So the project looked possible!
Moreover I found though one can count up to a billion, a trillion is impossible, I am very interested in ‘objects’ which exceed the human. http://www.jliat.com/tg/index.html
http://www.jliat.com/APCDS/index.html
This is bound up with such ideas as infinity, multiverses and a time before and after humans as being the nature of reality. (Speculative Realism) If reality is essentially inhuman – and if art is about our relationship to reality… then I think my work could be considered as being art. Or if not then I’m just messing with what I find in the world…
