Second Workshop #9

A superb evening! Scott Wayne Indiana's pot roast and home-made bread were fantastic. A great salad from Leslie Miller, and our special guests, Mike Merrill, Jona Bechtolt, and Claire Evans, from Urban Honking, brought a smoky scotch that was exquisite.

The question of resistance was raised. We observed that the evolution of most art forms is determined by the resistance the medium poses to the will of the maker. The writer discovers writing by dealing with the intransigence of language. The musician learns the capacities of her instrument.

We asked our guests, all avid producers of digital culture, whether digital media offer them any resistance. Mike Merrill said, paradoxically, that the resistance digital media presents is the enticement to get drawn in deeper, to be sucked, as with quicksand, into the ever increasing pull of all the possible links and connections and elaborations that unfold as one encounters digital media. Ironically, the challenge digital media present is not to overcome the medium;'s intransigence (as with language and paint and metal and stone) but to demur from its seductive beckoning. The digital artist must engineer an unlikely circumspection, offering only a narrow and limited territory—a set of dead-ends that do not endlessly unfold.

And so, taking that lesson to heart, I will say no more about our superb evening. I leave it to you, Abi Spring, Leslie Miller, Sergio Pastor, Scott Wayne Indiana, Luisa Guyer, Erik Palmer, and Stephanie Snyder, to say what ever more you wish to say about our time together on your own blogs and websites. Do not bother to comment here, lest you rupture our hard-won closure. In two weeks we meet again, for our last class together.