Note: this is a ghost site, not being maintained. It reflects some of my Web activity between 1996 and 1999. I keep it up for Historical Interest the convenience of those who continue to cite it, though I no longer uphold many of the technical opinions expressed here, and other things are broken.
So here we are, whether we like it or not, in the realm of necessity. And yet which of us has ever heard talk of art as other than a realm of freedom? This sort of heresy is uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outside the bounds of ordinary activity. Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible.
My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength....the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
"It is evident," writes Baudelaire, "that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrranies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rhetorics kept originality from fully manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true."
Igor Stravinsky - Poetics of Music
Agitprop is an experimental space at Metrius (formerly Verso), featuring items of interest to Web developers, particularly with regard to typographical design support. Comments to Todd Fahrner.
OBJECT element. Requires a modern browser to see the point. View source to see what's happening.