O’Reilly, long considered the definitive technology publisher (I can see 19 O’Reilly books from where I’m sitting; 17 if I don’t turn my head), is increasingly becoming a destination for subversive and insightful technology analysis. Andy Oram’s Stop the Copying, Start a Media Revolution is a good example:
It’s thrilling to enter the cathedral in Rouen, France, and ponder how I am walking the same nave trod by the medieval residents of that town. But of course, my modern upbringing grants me a very different experience of the cathedral from theirs. In fact, if I go back the next day I am not having the same experience as I had the day before. My subjective experience of the cathedral at Rouen changes as rapidly as the light captured by Monet in his series of paintings of the cathedral’s facade.
The new art may be built on an understanding that an experience cannot be repeated. The artist may change it at whim, or build in an automatic form of evolution like the video I used to like at the MOMA. Like the river in Buddhist theology, art will be both eternal and evanescent.
