Friday, August 26, 2011

ISTA 301 Blog: Authorship

While the question of what constitutes "art" is a topic of constant debate, few would argue that all real art involves an act of creativity. In circumstances where multiple individuals or entities are involved in the realization of a work of art, it is not always easy to single out one individual as the author of the piece.

2011 is the bicentennial of the first performance of Beethoven's 7th symphony. But in hearing this music performed, are we listening to the London Classical Players? Or are we listening to Beethoven? The orchestra merely executes a set of instructions. While there is certainly artistry in the actual performance, the actual content of of the symphony is the work of Beethoven, not the orchestra. 

This is not as clear-cut for other art forms. What of the theater? Here it seems that creativity is more evenly distributed between the author and the performers. A modern production of King Lear may have been modified by the producer of the play, and certainly there is more room for interpretation on the part of the actors than there is in the performance of an orchestra (or is there?!)

The common thread between music and theater is that both are art forms in which the artist's creative act and the actual realization of the work are separated, linked only by the passing of information (be it a written play or a book of musical notation). 

In the field of information science, entropy is one way of measuring the unexpectedness of a piece of information. For example, a coin toss has 1 bit of entropy because there are two possible outcomes and they are equally likely. Random, in other words. 

While there may be tens of thousands of possible combinations of Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game)  over the course of a few dozen bars of music, given that we know all the building blocks in advance, each note of music is not particularly unexpected. In fact, we only need to know the first two or three notes of each bar for the remainder of the notes to be predicted with 100% accuracy. In the parlance of information science, the entropy of a given note in musical dice game composition is quite low. While this may seem somewhat nitpicky, it is meaningful to point out that we can represent ALL of the new information that is introduced at the generative stage of the Dice Game with only a handful of bits, simply because there are a very limited number of possible building blocks. Certainly, the dice contribute much less information than the composition itself did. So, beyond the fact that the musical dice game itself is quite a novel idea, it's not as if a lot of unique information is being generated by the dice--the creative credit still belongs to Mozart. 

This same concept applies to the Sol Lewitt's Arcs and Lines piece we discussed in class. While the instructions do allow for an element of randomness (or creativity) at the time of the their execution, the finished work can still be described as a unique arrangement of a relatively small number of pre-defined building blocks. Again, the creative work is primarily in the hands of Sol Lewitt because the amount of new information that is introduced at the time of the execution of the instructions is minimal compared to that of the building blocks themselves.

A more technical example would be any algorithm that incorporates a random number generator. It is trivial for a programmer to create code that produces results that are random, but they are always predictably random. What I mean by "predictably" is that a coinToss() will return either heads or tails at random, but it will never return anything else. Similarly, it would be easy to create a program that generates a unique instance of Arcs and Lines, but no matter how many times you run it, that same code will never generate Beethoven's 7th Symphony. It is only "generative" within the framework that is defined by the instructions the artist provides. And since that framework was created by Sol Lewitt, no matter how many unique instances of Arcs and Lines my program generates, he is always the artist. 

But where do we draw the line when the instructions become increasingly open-ended? Karlheinz Stockhausen's Richtige Dauern is extremely suspect in this regard. It doesn't take much of a leap from Richtige Dauern to say that I can claim ownership of any creative work by simply issuing the instruction to "play a song." The range of possible outcomes from that instruction is so broad that it would be ridiculous to ascribe any creative credit to the author of the instructions. Even if I say "Play a song in the key of C, 4:4 time, and make the lyrics about falling in love," I can hardly claim ownership of whatever the final outcome is. Heck, you can play dozens of pop songs with the same chords! And yet there's no denying that each of those songs is quite unique.

What I'm getting at is that while I think Arcs and Lines is an interesting concept from start to finish, I think the "art" happened when Sol Lewitt conceived the instructions, not when the instructions are executed. The uniqueness of each implementation is novel, but the particulars of the implementation are not what matters. I also think that the most credit  Stockhausen deserves for a performance of Richtige Dauern is to credit him for inspiration. 

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