The Astonishing Prescience of Nam June Paik
zwischenzugs.com
zwischenzugs.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concrète
(The rest of them seem to be not unreasonable claims though.)
They now work on preserving many of these works, which often require CRTs and other now-vintage hardware.
CTL's newsletter and other publications from that era, like Radical Software and Guerrilla Television, have a 2600-style mix of tech advice and social theory. Nam June Paik contributed to many of them.
If you ever go to a museum and there is Nam June Paik exhibit on display, see if you can see the back. There are often interesting tidbits in the wiring and even sticky notes from him about how to set up and troubleshoot the art.
One interesting thing about Paik is that he assumed we would all be more creative with these new media, but unfortunately we seem to have moved back to a 'centralised creativity' world just as before. I guess, as an artist, he assumed more people had his impulses?
I think this is part of the sixties zeitgeist: if people would be freed from capitalistic consumerism, there would be some kind of awakening, leading to a better society.
One of Paik's famous quotes is: "Television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we fight back". The attitude to hope for everybody's creativity is also well aligned with Beuys posit: "Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler" (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-ever...).
All you had to do was be an avid sci-fi reader.
In fact, a lot of the world we take for granted today was predicted by sci-fi authors. Speculative fiction is how the horizon gets brought near.
The realm of generative/interactive/media art is very strong these days, particularly thanks to accessible software like Processing and p5.js.
If you specifically want something in-browser then P5.js will do the job.
But I'm not sure why someone would "refuse to use Java". You don't have to deal directly with Java to use Processing or Quil/Clojure.
there is no good art without suffering.
Religion serves, in a large part, to answer questions for which there's not yet a formal answer. But that's more about getting the monkey off your back than it is accuracy.
You can find comfort from following that path, but you won't get correctness or the ability to develop towards further more detailed discoveries.
1. Physical-world questions, the classic being, "if God is good and omnipotent, why does suffering exist?"
2. Moral-world questions, such as "who is my neighbour?", (and what are my duties towards my neighbour?).
In your phrasing, we'd say that atheism 'serves to answer questions', by answering only: 1. All is randomness, we're here because we're here, etc. 2. None, unless you choose some duty, up to you, etc.
These could hardly involve less thinking (for 1) or subsequent moral effort (for 2), so it's easy to see how 'you can find comfort from following that path'. Perhaps this explains their appeal!
This sounds good, feels good, and maybe is good for you personally, but it's not universal.
Others look at world and infer that the natural order of things is about competition and survival of the fittest. For these people, it's about what's best for them, their families, and perhaps their immediate social group.
Without universals, it's difficult to get others to act collectively so that all benefit, instead of doing what's selfishly best for the individual.
When fairy tales and sky gods are universal for a population, they become the organizing force to make people act beyond their own self-interest.
But without fairy tales and sky gods, what is universal? How can you make the strong yield some power and resources for the greater good?
That probably depends on which sect of Christianity you're talking about. Protestants generally believe that one's actions do not actually cause one to be saved; instead it is faith in Jesus alone that provides salvation. This bothered people for the obvious reasons, with various attempts to walk back the extreme antinomian interpretation, e.g. "one's actions demonstrate that he has faith in salvation".
On the other hand, in Buddhism the escape from samsara is fundamentally tied to one's actions, not simply one's thoughts or beliefs.
YMMV - or, efforts may predict results. Just as there may be 'jobseekers' who have hardly sought, so there may be 'seekers of the truth' who, upon finding that the supreme divinity wasn't physically manifesting on their first command, then decided that the system was bogus, and shut the shop down from then on. But we can still have dogs, which will at least come over on command. (Is this why it's 'god' spelled backwards?...the secret's in the runes?). And dogs are love.
Whereas if one took a different attitude, saying that God > job (crazy, I know, in capitalism), then possibly a similar amount of effort might be expected. Then if a little seeking is permitted, it becomes only a question of trying different entrances. I hear good things about Kierkegaard (e.g. 'Works of love'); but no doubt there are many entrances.