I learned yesterday (from a comment by John Baez on an old post about ultrafinitism) that, a few years before the “conceptual art” movement existed as such, the Fluxus-associated philosopher/artist Henry Flynt coined the term “concept art” to refer to a much more radically ambitious project: instead of creating works in in traditional artistic media whose concept is the main work and whose execution is a mere formality, his goal was to create art entirely within the realm of concepts.
He attacks what he calls “structure music” (Cage, Schoenberg, etc) as failing on the grounds of music so you can only appreciate it on the level of structure, and simultaneously having a “limited, impoverished” structure; he appreciates the beauty of mathematical concepts but vehemently rejects the idea of mathematics as a search for truth “discovering” theorems and proofs. Concept art is to generalize both of these (which he conceptualizes as small, limited subgenres of concept art), creating conceptual structures purely for their beauty without any question of whether they’re true or whether they can be incarnated in another artistic medium.
Anyway, this obliquely convinced me to finally try out audio programming, specifically FunDSP in Rust which looks cool for very customizable synth stuff. I’m not gonna do real “concept art” but i’ve been meaning to get into audio programming for a while so now I’m going to try to see if I can make structure music that passes his second critique. Current goal is to make a programmatic translation of dependently typed lambda calculus into sound and make an audio piece out of Girard’s Paradox, which is at least an interesting structure. Various unresolved questions including how best to represent a term with no normal form, whether it’s worth trying to translate the entire calculus into sound or just approach the paradox specifically, and whether I’ll stick with this for more than a few days. But even if I drop the paradox I want to keep on with the audio programming.