@maniacsicko - Thanks for the constructive feedback!

The different volume thing is difficult to manage without doing a lot of audio manipulation after the fact. The fact is my voice is naturally a lot quieter than my roommate’s and we have only one microphone between us. We put the microphone closer to me so that I could be heard better to try and equalize the volume somewhat.

Personally I actually really like audio stuff and listen to many different podcasts every day that have no visual component. Some of which are just random conversations like this. On average they are 1 to 1.5 hours long a piece. Then again I’m not very inherently a visual person. But yeah I do agree that generally people find visual stuff to be easier and more entertaining. It’s just not something I’m big on.

@The44thHour - @elvesdoitbetter - 

We would be happy to have either or both of you on board in as many of these discussions as you want to be a part of up to and including all of them if you’re interested. If you have ideas about the technical aspects or want to brainstorm about it we can do so via IM or email or wave at any time. Of course if this will be a podcast one thing to come up with is a name for it and I have no clue what to pick for that.  We’ll also need to agree upon topics to discuss before hand. So please start sending suggestions.

I did intend to eventually set it up as a proper podcast with an RSS feed and the ability to download if people liked them or showed any interest. It’s just that for starters I wanted to get something out there quick and Xanga was the easiest way to do that. Also most of the people I know who I’d be interested in hearing this or participating it are also people who read my Xanga so it just made sense to post it here. Even if I use another platform I’ll probably cross post links and summaries to this blog or start up another blog specifically for that purpose. But yeah even when we were first imagining it, we imagined it as a kind of a podcast. And if Xanga had features to automatically set it up that way we would have done that from the start.

Thoughts on what file hosting service to use if you have any suggestions would also be nice. I’m leaning toward OurMedia to start with since it’s free and they strongly encourage Creative Commons.  Only when I tried to upload the mp3 so far nothing has happened so I think there’s a delay or something between when you upload and files become available. Either that or I just did something wrong.

Anyways I hope you’ll participate. We probably won’t post more than one of these a week to start with. And we’ve already got a few recorded so there’s no immediate rush. We’ll be trying to work out the technical issues first and foremost to make the experience more pleasant for people to listen to.

Thanks again for your interest and support! Looking forward to having fun in our upcoming first non-textual communications

*re-adjusts devil’s advocate hat*

@elvesdoitbetter - “I’m going to have to weigh in by saying art
requires artistic intent.” 
“I feel that art has to communicate something.
It needs to be an expression, not just something done really well.”
“In that way, sports like soccer can never be
art, regardless of how amazingly they’re performed. “

Yes but what about… the Harlem Globetrotters?

Have you ever seen them? These are basketball players who as they are playing they play with the ball, do tricks with the ball, do exaggerated motions and otherwise put on a performance. Sometimes they would be playing real games and seriously trying to win but they would also be putting on a show that the audience understood to be an entertainment. It would also have the added effect of frustrating and annoying the other team causing them to make mistakes sometimes increasing their likelihood of winning.

These players their ability to be artists depended on their skill in the game, their level of excellence. And in their presentation of the game they were definitely trying to express something in the same way that comedies express something just by being sort of silly and making people laugh.

But if that’s not convincing we can easily posit the existence of a Poet’s Globetrotters who express other deeper themes in the way they handle the ball. One who is stingy with the ball and doesn’t pass might be expressing selfishness. One who saves another player from a difficult situation might be expressing heroism and courage.

Now that’s the macro level but if you accept that on that macro level that sports aren’t inherently barred from the realm of communication, expression, and artistic intent,  what’s the thing that bars that from existing within sports play at a micro level?

Think about it this way. Suppose we have a super genius soccer player. And at some point in the game he is passed the ball. Now for a normal person maybe 2 or 3 or 6 options occur to him as to what to do and some of those he might try and not even be able to succeed in doing so he’ll pick the option that best helps his team achieve victory that he thinks he is most likely to be able to pull off.

But what if it’s different for the genius? What if for him he sees a thousand thousand options not just half a dozen. Ever so subtle variations on how he can move his body to accomplish the same goals of helping his team have the greatest probability of winning the game. Then can we posit that that player every time he makes a play could be engaging in a form of self expression in order to communicate something? It might not be that even any of the fans grasp the subtle message ever so slightly portrayed by variations in his body language. Or maybe they do grasp it but it’s on a subtle subconscious level. It could be effecting how they enjoy the game, what emotional states watching the players brings them into. To give a simple example say the genius player strikes the ball in such a way as to make it seem like he engaged in a gargantuan effort in order to give the audience a sense of witnessing a hurculean triumph of skill. Other times he might deliberately make his handling of the ball easy in order to express confidence and competence to the audience.

And if the player can do that for even one play then is it not conceivable that they could do that for EVERY play and even be thinking so far ahead as to be creating a kindof artwork as they go? Just in exactly the same way an improvisational musician follows the feel of their music making ever so slight variations of actions in order to create an overall piece that expresses something.

And shearly theoretically mind you, couldn’t it then even be possible for the entire team to be doing that all at once. Could it even be possible that BOTH teams are doing it. That they are all sort of in sync with each other acting out a kind of a dance-in-game that expresses something beautifully artistic possibly without even realizing it?  I mean aren’t there such things as improvisational dance competitions between groups of dancers? Would sports really differ that much from that?

Although I present this as a theory I don’t think it’s beyond comprehension that it could be true.  Two things strike me as potential evidence.

Evidence 1.  The best players of sports, those who are articulate, often when talking to lay people in terms of arts. There are quotes of great players saying it’s like a symphony or it’s like poetry. That’s become so common that it’s entered into the regular lexicon as the kind of language to describe excellence in sports. E.g. the phrase “poetry in motion”.

Evidence 2.  When sports fans like the blogger in the article in the BBC express the experience of watching a truly great sports event they often use the same kinds of terms that people who witness great shows of art describe their experience. And… often… they express even the same views about what they just saw. So a really good game will be universally praised as extraordinary and mind blowing by fans of BOTH teams.  And even a game that makes fans miserable is pretty universally seen as thus. Could it be then that this is their reaction to the artistic intent expressed by the players in the way that they played the games?

“What makes art great is the level at which it
affects the person experiencing it, and the depth at which it
communicates. “

I’m not sure about the depth of the communications but the person experiencing sports often is very drastically effected by the experience. The BBC guy was saying that having seen the World Cup literally changed their lives.  I’m not a sports fan at all so I can’t verify that this is a real thing based on my own experience but surely there must be something that keeps sports so popular and makes games such a growing genre?

“I think the idea of art is that it tries to
find other ways to get at some deeper truth”
“Art is the quest to express the ineffable.”

This I think is your best argument but it’s also really the most vague.  The argument I think is then that no matter how excellent the genius soccer player is and no matter how many variations of expression he can achieve he can’t really engage in real abstraction. He can’t express anything beyond fairly shallow simple artistic ideas. He can’t express things that are difficult to explain in language or express truths that are deeper than basic emotional responses of joy, courage, fear, and competence.

That’s still a tough argument to make. First of all sports fans might well vehemently disagree. In order to explain it in a way that is beyond reproach I think we’d have to come up with some kind of hierarchy of concepts.

Secondly and more problematically though I think any good theory of this kind naturally excludes much more than just sports from the art category. I think it would exclude a LOT of things that we generally consider art. And this then gets quickly into the realms of pointless subjective arguments. I mean I could express to you a dozen respected pieces of “art” which to me in no way invoke any kind of “deeper” truth and you might in turn take every one and say “yes it does”. But just to go into a basic level I think most kinds of popular dance don’t express anything deep, nor figure skating. I don’t think a circus shows anything deep. I don’t think virtually anything on television these days gets at any deeper truths. I can probably come up with only like a half a dozen films in the last decade that seem to be particularly deep. I can’t think of a popular musician whose music expresses anything truly radically deep and ineffable. And of course using this Roger Ebert is right and there are no video games that are deep enough to count as art.  But I also don’t think even most if not all of the great architectual achievements of the planet’s history would count as art. I mean what’s a pyramid? Or the Hudson Dam? The empire state building? Not very deep to me.

The question then becomes are we really willing to have such a stringent threshold for what counts as art? And where exactly do we draw the line at being “deep” enough?  I often suspect in these kinds of analysis and discussions there’d be a huge problem of people “projecting” deepness on a work that was not intended by the artist themselves out of a desire to make the thing qualify as “art”, especially when the artist is no longer alive to defend their work or has an inherent motivation to “smile and nod” and pretend like whatever anyone else is saying about their work is what they intended all along.  In a certain sense I think a lot of analysis of abstract paintings suffers from that. But then that again might just be an impression I have having never really studied closely abstract art.

“The amount of art in a thing is not
contingent in the amount of skill with which that thing was created”

This line interests me but I think I would need some clarification.  How exactly is the scale you are referring to when you say “amount of art”. It sounds like you are saying there’s a continuum of Art-ishness. IF that’s the case then is your argument that “sports” aren’t even on the scale that their artyness is at Zero, or simply that they are very low on the art-scale? So they are “low art”, “high skill”, whereas some other product might be “high art”, “low skill” and something else might be “medium art”, “medium skill”?

*takes off devil’s advocate hat*

*phew* That hat’s heavy.

Actually I don’t think sports or games are art. But I’m not entirely sure why I think that. I just have an instinctive feel that when we use the term “art” for sports we’re kinda overloading language in a not very useful kinda way. But it might be that both games and art might themselves belong to a greater super-category that needs its own word.  Anyway, I’d need to think more about that to flesh it out but that’s where my mind is taking me at the current moment.

Anyway thanks for the comment!

@elvesdoitbetter - What the heck are Argyle Socks?  lol.   At least that’s one thing you and Sheppard don’t have in common: the gift for naming things.  Though I’m not hugely opposed to “Getting Thinky”.  In some ways weird names are good as they can shock people and get them interested.

“I feel like this discussion would have been
accomplished more concisely via a series of Venn diagrams.”

ahhh but couldn’t everything?

Venn diagrams and Graph theory are two of the greatest things mathematicians ever gifted the world. I’m glad Venn diagrams are starting to get more popular.

But my own pet peeve is that we just don’t do enough concept graphing.

Maybe we can create some explanatory visuals to go with some of our podcasts too. Like thought bubbler type stuff.

@elvesdoitbetter - Ah well that explains it. I keep getting lost on my way to Nerd Corp so I had to do my orientation via video conference. I missed out on all kinds of gay paraphernalia. Pocket protectors, fanny packs. I’m kinda impoverished.

@moonlitsage - Cool. Glad you enjoyed it. I’ll respond to the substance of your discussions on art a bit later.

I kinda figured there was a way to download the mp3s on xanga but it wasn’t immediately obvious so I didn’t post a link. 

In the future I intend to post files on internet archive which is free and lets you post lots of files. Then I will create an RSS feed that people can subscribe to and eventually use feedburner to create a traditional podcast if there is interest.

If you want to contribute to future podcasts I can add you to the wave I created where we are discussing and planning podcasts. We haven’t done any yet (except for one more that Mari and I did) but we’ve been brainstorming topics and podcast names and such.