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DPChallenge Forums >> Challenge Results >> What you should know about low votes.
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10/24/2013 08:05:26 AM · #1
Low votes from genuine trolls and dickheads are one thing, but lower-than-popular votes from a considered source are something else, and ought to be celebrated.

Here's a short monologue by musician and artist Brian Eno. Refocus it just slightly into the context of photographs and discover why a few low votes on ribbon-winning photographs is a healthy, vibrant thing.

Evolution is driven by genetic diversity, by the tiny positive differences the freaks make. 'Perfection' is stagnation.

Heaven is indeed a place where nothing happens.
10/24/2013 08:09:04 AM · #2
Question is: how do you distinguish a dickhead from a "considered voter"?
10/24/2013 08:24:13 AM · #3
Originally posted by Garry:

Question is: how do you distinguish a dickhead from a "considered voter"?

lack of a companion comment ;-)
10/24/2013 08:59:51 AM · #4
To be quite frank I always wondered why people competing were allowed to vote at all.
10/24/2013 09:31:12 AM · #5
lol
10/24/2013 09:41:07 AM · #6
Originally posted by Skip:

Originally posted by Garry:

Question is: how do you distinguish a dickhead from a "considered voter"?

lack of a companion comment ;-)

I would agree with that.
10/24/2013 09:42:25 AM · #7
Thanks. Brian Eno is one of my heroes. What he said is easy for any artist to appreciate.

I think photography attracts people who are attracted to the illusion of control. So, it follows that they would want control over the voting & commenting.

I often feel bullied by peer pressure here & I don't hang out here as much any more. Challenges go by without any votes from me.

And though I don't enter challenge very often anymore, either, I am still using my camera.

I think I fall into the cowboy category. I'm in it for the adventure & discovery. I like not knowing what might lie over the next hill, what the result might be. I like the process more than the product, the journey more than the destination. When I post the end result here, the adventure is over. I've let go of it (the product) & it's on it's own adventure.
10/24/2013 10:14:57 AM · #8
I'll take a one over a five any day.
10/24/2013 10:16:18 AM · #9
Friken hell, the new guy is imperfectly right
10/24/2013 11:27:56 AM · #10
Originally posted by ubique:

Low votes from genuine trolls and dickheads are one thing, but lower-than-popular votes from a considered source are something else, and ought to be celebrated.

Here's a short monologue by musician and artist Brian Eno. Refocus it just slightly into the context of photographs and discover why a few low votes on ribbon-winning photographs is a healthy, vibrant thing.

Evolution is driven by genetic diversity, by the tiny positive differences the freaks make. 'Perfection' is stagnation.

Heaven is indeed a place where nothing happens.


Thanks Paul. Intelligent. But I object to the word "perfection", to the "sound of perfection" in the context of art. What are we talking about?
Leonardo said it the first:
"A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned"

As to the desperate rush to create the new, the unusual, the aggressive, to provoke when there is no time for "noting when something is about to happen" ... this is the mark of our times and the urgency of the unusual is more often then not stifling.

Heaven is indeed a place where nothing happens - this is something we are yet to experience if we are lucky. Perhaps it's just a symphony in permanent evolution and development. We'll talk about that "later" if still necessary
10/24/2013 11:29:55 AM · #11
Originally posted by pixelpig:

I'm in it for the adventure & discovery. I like not knowing what might lie over the next hill, what the result might be. I like the process more than the product, the journey more than the destination. When I post the end result here, the adventure is over. I've let go of it (the product) & it's on it's own adventure.


+1
10/24/2013 12:02:09 PM · #12
Originally posted by tanguera:

Originally posted by pixelpig:

I'm in it for the adventure & discovery. I like not knowing what might lie over the next hill, what the result might be. I like the process more than the product, the journey more than the destination. When I post the end result here, the adventure is over. I've let go of it (the product) & it's on it's own adventure.

+1

+2
10/24/2013 12:45:06 PM · #13
Thanks, Paul. I also read "The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them" (1995 interview).
At first Eno talks about classical music and I was put off by his generalization about it being bit too "perfect", but he really does make sense...
We need stimulation .. we need whole body experiences.. we need to look at each new challenge as an opportunity to explore.
Just think .... the people who are not so in control, who refuse to reward "perfect" with a ten, well, they might just be doing you a favor.
"Distortion is character". I like that.
10/24/2013 01:35:02 PM · #14
Anybody tried mastering the art of doing nothing ? Heaven is not so easily obtainable, Maybe Byrne was right on a relative level and maybe he was also right on an absolute level, so relative perfection is stagnation and absolute perfection is just nothing, that nothing being absolutely everything. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
10/24/2013 02:33:26 PM · #15
Originally posted by pixelpig:

Thanks. Brian Eno is one of my heroes. What he said is easy for any artist to appreciate.

I think photography attracts people who are attracted to the illusion of control. So, it follows that they would want control over the voting & commenting.



I think Eno is one of the great minds of music of our era. He certainly loves to play with chaos, but does so in a very controlled way,re-thinking, re writing and tweeking his idea of being a cowboy until it is exactly what he wants. Many moons ago, I went to a lecture he and David Byrne gave on world music, especially African multi-layered percussion and polyphonic rhythms and was fascinated at how those two took the rough organic sound of tribal music and shifted it into a crystalline precision that was at once similar to, but to my mind, sucked the juice out of the source material through their need to impose control over a holistic sound. He is not a man at home in sloppy chaos.

Of course these days we don't hear much Eno on the airwaves. Music is no longer something that is delivered to us through the airwaves as it was a few decades ago. In those days we would have to listen trough various songs of different styles in hopes of hearing something we liked every six or twelve songs. Now we only hear music we have selected, or follow a narrow cast Pandora stream aimed at a very narrow variety of taste.

So it is a hard realization in a place like DPC where we have no commonality of aestetic, that people have different tastes. If we were used to listening to a radio station that played Korn, Kanye West, Kiss, Kate McGarrigle, Toby Keith, the Black Keys and the Dead Kennedys we might already know that not every artist is going to resonate with every listener, even if they are making very good music within that particular style.

Stepping out of a community of shared taste and into the wider world carries risk and rewards. Many people will reject what you like and choose to produce, no matter how well done it is, because they can not or will not make the effort to judge it on it's own terms. On the other hand, if you stay in the hothouse of a shared set of preferences, you starve yourself of expanding your own tastes or discovering new styles.
10/24/2013 05:25:36 PM · #16
Originally posted by ubique:

Here's a short monologue by musician and artist Brian Eno.


I watched this video several times, and something odd happened. No questions immediately stampeded through my mind. No philosophy struggled to unfold from the depths of my generally shallow and unartistic heart. Rather, I felt a few moments entirely at truce where all my polarized points magnetized together into a simple breath of fresh air.

Thank you for that, Paul! ::beams::
10/24/2013 06:08:59 PM · #17
Originally posted by pixelpig:

Thanks. Brian Eno is one of my heroes. What he said is easy for any artist to appreciate.

I think photography attracts people who are attracted to the illusion of control. So, it follows that they would want control over the voting & commenting.

I often feel bullied by peer pressure here & I don't hang out here as much any more. Challenges go by without any votes from me.

And though I don't enter challenge very often anymore, either, I am still using my camera.

I think I fall into the cowboy category. I'm in it for the adventure & discovery. I like not knowing what might lie over the next hill, what the result might be. I like the process more than the product, the journey more than the destination. When I post the end result here, the adventure is over. I've let go of it (the product) & it's on it's own adventure.


I like that philosophy.
10/24/2013 09:24:46 PM · #18
Anyone care to summarize the message, for the deaf ones among us?
10/24/2013 09:42:00 PM · #19
Robert, there should be a transcript icon next to the section just below the video panel. Just select which language. The translation is entirely accurate, as the last word is "characterless", not "characterised this" there are others but you can correct them in context.

Message edited by author 2013-10-24 21:45:35.
10/24/2013 11:05:33 PM · #20
Originally posted by daisydavid:

Robert, there should be a transcript icon next to the section just below the video panel. Just select which language. The translation is entirely accurate, as the last word is "characterless", not "characterised this" there are others but you can correct them in context.

Right, never knew about the "transcript" part, which is good: but it's a transcript of the automatic captioning, which of course I do know about. But in my experience the captioning on most things is absolutely worthless, so I hadn't checked it here. I actually WAS able to get the gist of it from the transcript, so that's cool. Thanks.
10/24/2013 11:10:18 PM · #21
Um that was supposed to read 'the translation isn't entirely accurate' sorry about that.
10/24/2013 11:21:06 PM · #22
Originally posted by daisydavid:

Um that was supposed to read 'the translation isn't entirely accurate' sorry about that.

I figured it out in context :-) (We deaf people are good at that, actually: lipreading is 75% contextual extrapolation)
10/25/2013 05:51:13 AM · #23
I suppose all little groups suffer from the founder effect to some degree. The only problem I have with Eno types is in their frame of reference. Imperfections in their consideration are sometimes a lot more subtle than my degrees of imperfection, especially those that I can recognize or have the capacity to acknowledge. But, disregarding his musings given the benefit of hindsight, I agree with him. A huge artistic intellect.
11/04/2013 10:35:25 AM · #24
Originally posted by pixelpig:

I'm in it for the adventure & discovery. I like not knowing what might lie over the next hill, what the result might be. I like the process more than the product, the journey more than the destination. When I post the end result here, the adventure is over. I've let go of it (the product) & it's on it's own adventure.

I agree wholeheartedly.....

My adventure is done with the entry. Though I do like to see how an image will do, I've done what I wanted and needed to do to the image for it to be my rendition of the image I created in my mind's eye when I was inspired to take the shot.

It's why when it comes to comments, I want to know from the viewer what his/her thoughts and impressions are relative to my offering. I really don't want someone's idea of what they want me to do to "fix" my image, though I do appreciate that some people genuinely try to be helpful. That's why my ideal entry gets both 1s & 10s......I want to move people to have strong reactions at both ends of the spectrum.
11/04/2013 12:45:18 PM · #25
Originally posted by pixelpig:

I like the process more than the product, the journey more than the destination. When I post the end result here, the adventure is over. I've let go of it (the product) & it's on it's own adventure.

Someone once asked Jerry Garcia why the Grateful Dead let people make "bootleg" recordings of their concerts (often setting aside a special section for them!), to which he replied along the line of "once we've played the notes we're finished with them."
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