S03 Commenting on Leaves

During John Cayley's presentation in class the other day on electronic literature a student brought up an interesting concept that I thought about for the next few days. Someone asked if he ever felt limited by the different programs he was using, and his response was ,"of course". But then I thought to my self why use a medium that you can't exploit and utilize and feel completely satisfied? And this I concluded momentarily is where digital art merges with our previous concept of artwork. For the most part artist remain unsatisfied with a piece for an extended period of time, and rework that piece continuously until the product is one to their liking. This same method seems to be applied to John Cayley's electronic literature. Cayley could code and code continuously until his program did what he wanted to do. However there arises two conflicts. First, there is with his piece "The Speaking Clock" almost a play on the reworking of an art piece as the words on the screen constantly change. It's almost as though you see the artist's thoughts change directly in front of you, and therefore furthering the viewers connection with the piece. Second, I want to go back to his statement of unhappiness with the medium. What I deduced from this emotion is that maybe some of his ideas had to be changed based on the programs he was using. All in all I feel the unhappiness exemplifies and even further lack of control. Where Cayley expresses the lack of control in electronic art, we can think about the amount of control you have when you paint. I feel that there is definitely more control over what you are expressing in a painting then say a computer program. That last statement contains tons of irony. Technology arose out of a desire for freedom to be expressive as well as control dream like thoughts. So the fact that Cayley felt limited in a medium that was suppose to be parallel to a frontier, highly contradicts itself.