Foster Response - Lauren

Foster discusses the main difference between intermedia and multimedia, arguing that “intermedia pieces ‘break down traditional art boundaries’”.  His example used talks about the Duchamp “Fountain” which is simply a urinal, and is not considered intermedia by Foster’s standards “because it occupies a place between art and plumbing”.  Foster continues his argument, saying “any number of activities ‘enabled’…is beside the point”.  They way I interpreted Foster’s opinion throughout his piece was essentially that art in general is very ambiguous.  While intermedia may be considered intermedia because of the medium it optimizes as well as its art status, ultimately, I believe art is considered art based on each person’s opinion.  Ruairi’s driving example in this case is very applicable, where most of the general population consider driving to simply be a medium that we can use to get us from point A to point B, while driving as a sport could be considered an art form; the ability to perfect turns, the atmosphere, the optimal timing of accelerating, etc. 

The same could be said for math.  For example this article is about a man, Daniel Tammet who can recite 22,514 digits of the number pi from memory.  In my opinion, math and memorizing more than a few digits of pi is a waste of my time and is not considered art at all.  Tammet on the other hand says what he “did was make a poem or a novel out of pi, and took those colors and those emotions and used them to perceive patterns”.  In this case, pi is an art, but in other cases pi is not – art is simply different for everybody.     

The sound I chose which represented my opinion of Foster’s article was Bernard Parmegiani’s “Du Pop À L’âne”.  This sound contains layers upon layers of musical instruments playing at different frequencies, tempos and volumes for about 10 minutes.  At certain times the instruments together sounded like an introduction to a pop song, while other times it sounded like a very bad middle school garage band.  There were instances where Parmegiani’s sound could have been considered music, (an art form,) and other times it was simply a lot of noise all together (not an art form).  Intermedia, and in this case art, is too ambiguous to label definitively.