


This blog holds my thoughts about art, theory, technology, and lines of inquiry into the aforementioned. These are bits of my own projects, my responses to other artists' work and whatever else I find relevant or interesting.
IR eye from Mary Franck on Vimeo.
In San Francisco's Union Square would be installed as an ephemeral monument Passing Conversations. This would me a monument the lives of everyday people who pass through the square, represented in the random ephemeral phrases of their conversations captured by the microcontrollers and projected as text on the surfaces of the space. This reflects the dynamic, shifting aspect of our public spaces and translates to a visualization how people and language pass through space.
“Within the rhythms of a city, monuments become like a strobe light: they have the capacity to freeze moments of time, capturing the vectors of our experience for our examination and contemplation. Monuments have the capability to pass on, from generation to generation, memories and events that have transpired, and thereby contribute to the creation of a collective cultural consciousness.”
As a transitory monument, it passes on digitally captured experience to the next passerby, the experience a trace in the sand which fades relatively quickly. It is a monument on a compressed timescale, collecting moments and their, re-displaying them as a trace of their presence.
The microcontroller would record sounds above a certain volume threshold, transmit them wirelessly to a nearby computer where sound would be analyzed with speech-to-text programming. If the recording was what it determined to be language, it would be converted to an image of the text and transmitted back to the microcontroller and stored. These bits of conversations we will call language strings.
After dark the microcontroller would project language strings from the day and continue to collect more strings. At night when it received a new string, the new string would be immediately projected. Giving passerbys the satisfaction of automatic feedback and thereby making it clear what the project was. This would encourage people to leave messages for future passerbys. It would do this in many languages. Each microcontroller would have the capacity to store about 100 strings, and would write over them randomly, so most strings would be from that day, but some could conceivably remain in memory for a week or more. Each unit would cost about $400, plus the cost of the main computer, so an installation of ten of them would cost $4,200.
This monument is inspired by Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, the work of Krzystof Wodiczko, The Sixth Sense by Pranav Mistry of Media Labs, and “Microphones” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
This is Improbable because the technology is not quite here yet. Specifically speech-to-text in this situation would probably have low accuracy, which could only be partially filtered by programming. Microcontrollers are not used to give images to projectors.
Nicolas Bourriaud's theories of relational aesthetics are an important approach to contemporary art. His claim that art has departed from the conceptual traditions of the 1960s and '70s and begun something entirely fresh has created a stir in art theory. I read his book Relational Aesthetics which comprised a collection of articles he had written about art. They were all over the place, so for this class, I will respond to “Screen Relations: Today's Art and Its Technological Models.”
“Our age is nothing if not the age of the screen” (66). Art galleries today are full of screens, which allow for unprecedented combinations of text, image, video, interactivity and an abstraction of site via the Internet. Digitalization creates another layer of remove from the signified, another layer of simulation to the image, but also extends the mechanical reproduction discussed by Walter Benjamin into a new dimension. “... It is actually now possible to produce images which are the outcome of calculation, and no longer of human gestures. (69)” Which takes us from mechanical reproduction to mechanical production.
Bourriaud asserts, “art creates an awareness about production methods and human relationships produced by the technologies of its day. (67)” He goes on to claim that “the main effects of the computer revolution are visible today among artists who do not use computers...(67) ”and of those who do to create, for example, “computer graphic images:” “at best, their work is just a symptom or a gadget...(68)” I do not entirely agree with him. Making “computer graphic images” or models of flocking or what have you, is participating in technology. Using technology in the place of traditional mediums cements its momentous primacy as experiential medium. This participation will not garner recognition as an original, individual artist, but it is worthwhile to look past individuality.
What he argues is that, rather than creating representations, technology should be used in art to simulate and represent behavioral patterns and to “decipher the social relations brought by [technology]. (68)” Specifically, “art's function consists in appropriating perceptual and behavioral habits brought on by the technical-industrial complex to turn them into life possibilities... [or] reverse the authority of technology in order to make ways of thinking, living and seeing creative. (69)”
Relational artists, he continues, construct “models of sociability suitable for producing human relations. (70)” In my mind this is not unlike a program which produces an image.
How I would relate this to my own art practice is to use interactive technology to construct sociability models. To start with, the computer is intended to be used by the individual, perhaps as a portal to a social configuration, a medium by which we interact with each other over the Internet or a network. I am interested in rearranging those social format structures by allowing many people to interact with a single computer at once and through less conventional methods. i.e. by video-captured gesture rather than using a mouse.
The Internet seems to me like an incredible tool for collapsing space and site in real time. What's more, it renders antiquated the broadcaster/receiver dichotomous communication model of T.V. or radio by allowing for simultaneous broadcast and reception by all communicators. Working with that as a medium is great as long as it is interesting an not too abstract. I intend to use it to create remote access to the object of interactivity and direct control of the interactivity parameters wirelessly, in the presence of the object. I am also interested in the ways that programming and the Internet can function as time-sensitive channels of dialogue with participants.
The trick to all of this, if one cares to involve other humans, is for the art thing to be engaging and accessible.
"Feminist critiques of scientific culture have expanded the discourse around scientific history, practice and theory since the 1960s, while offering new possibilities for artistic investigation. Discussions include how male-gendered language has dominated descriptions of biological and other scientific processes, and whether there are sexual differences in approaches to the study of living organisms and systems.
The ways in which contemporary female artists employ digital and electronic technology to explore scientific themes and issues is fascinating to me. I'm intrigued by their uses of interactivity and humor, their interpretations of “relational aesthetics,” and their morphing of traditional feminist concerns into often subtle yet powerful critiques of patriarchal structures, gender politics, and established assumptions in technology and science. I'm particularly intrigued by their approaches to the biological sciences."
Tanner asserted that these strategies served to morph feminist strategies by countering the historical narrative of Science as objective and free from cultural bias and by co-opting and re-interpreting male-created technologies.I visited Root Division for its recent Algorithmia exhibit before the actual opening. I'd been there before for Sound Device, a fascinating sound-art exhibit that was highly interactive. Expecting similarly smart, contemporary work I visited the gallery on a Friday afternoon.
I enjoyed a piece with goldfish in what appeared to be a maze. Fish Predictions
by Vita Mei Hewitt had real goldfish in some water in a wide shallow tank. Painted on the bottom of their tank were numbers. A paper on the wall instructed the viewer to choose a goldfish with which they identified, and note the number, explained on more paper. Each number was connected with an animal, which was your horoscope and related---according to the artist statement—to one's reincarnation. This was lovely to look at (fish are pretty) and amusingly absurd.
There was a piece with fur on objects, documented with three large photographs Phone, Mailbox and ATM and installed as fur wrapped around a keyboard on a pedestal in the gallery, the work of Emmanuelle Namont Kouznetsov. This stood out formally but did not engage or appeal to me. “Using rabbit fur, Namont's sculptures invoke the visceral to bring back our corporeal presence and question our oblivious subservience towards technology and the power of the machine.” I am not convinced.
I was excited when I saw Plumb System by Ryan Jones, composed of fifty plumb fixtures suspended from the same ceiling fixture. I immediately thought about multiplicity of centers, lack of a single objective reference, and other postmodern hype. I love interactive art, and with a sweep of my hand, sent them to swing, collide, and tangle, which would play into my preconceived meaning that much more. The gallery attendant stopped me and I disentangled them. It wasn't intended to be interactive after all. Unlike Kouznetsov, who over did it, Jones included no theory or conceptual explanation for his work, I wish he'd said something.
I met Lauren Scime, who had an interactive video piece called Video of the Future, a collaborative effort with Bryan Hewitt. A walled area of the gallery contained a wall of projected video. Viewers were supposed to enter and exit through separate doors and the number of people in the room determined which videos were played. The video content was eclectic: jellyfish, people on the street, plants in the wind.
I am always pleased to meet other interactive video artists and see what they are using. She had sonic range finders in each doorway to count the number of people coming in and going out. A good example of simplifying and controlling events to be able to use minimal sensors for an otherwise complex thing to sense-- the number of people in a room. and was using some free mac programming environment to do low-level video file selecting.
Using pre-recorded video content is something I have been considering; as it is I use only video captured in the installation. It was great to see what someone else has done with this. It has lead me to think (along with the ideas of my friends who do interactivity design for video games and whatnot) that having content that would create meaning and that would relate to the audience and their participation would be more engaging.