Window Poetry

In an era of constantly increasing volumes and volumes of data, data visualizations are a useful way to observe data. Window Poetry is a visualization of poetry: when writing poetry, words combine to form metaphors and new meanings. Window Poetry parallels that process with images.

Made with substantial contributions from Benjamin Chun, Window Poetry is an interactive installation of projected images, reclaimed windows and a typewriter. Words entered by typing call up corresponding images which are displayed in the windows. The participant types into a mechanical typewriter on an antique desk. Hidden inside these analog and tactile objects is a computer running a program that scrapes Flickr for the images entered. Projections mapped to the windows display the images in the frames.

I'm currently fascinated by metaphor, symbol, narrative and the inception of meaning. My interest is inspired largely by philosophy and linguistics. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein closely explores the point at which meaning is created through thought experiments about limited language games. His conclusion (among many others) is that a word's meaning is its use in a language. Window Poetry in a way parallels this property of language: Flickr delivers its "Most Interesting" photos as determined by a combination of relevance of tags and number of "favorites" and comments. Lakoff claims that the way that we understand is with metaphor, so it is interesting to observe the instantiation of metaphors simultaneously in words and images.

In Window Poetry, visual meaning is attempted in the sequential symbol-to-word format of language. Since there is a random element, sometimes a sequence works. But more often than not the image composition doesn't really work with the words, that is, the linguistic metaphor doesn't translate into separate images.

What happens with words when we combine two of them together is different than what happens when we combine two images. This is an affront to a general notion of language where word = thing. We would expect word a + word b to equal thing a + thing b but it does not. And in poetry words and images operate differently.

Hyphae

Hyphae is my most recent work, made with Michael Broxton: a representational algorithmic work in new media.

Inspired by the generative structures of nature and the algorithmic models that can describe them, Hyphae is an interactive video floor that responds to the participants' presence. Mycelia systems grow at their feet in a projected image of dirt while color swirls around them.

DNA can be conceived as a molecular program and an organism's life the process of executing that incredibly complex program. We can see the process of plant or fungal growth as a series of iteration and recursion. While a narrow way to think about growth, it has inspired the algorithmic drawing and behavior of this project.

Hyphae are tubular filaments of mycelium, the metabolic part of a fungus. Mycelia growth patterns such as those imitated for Hyphae can be modeled and studied with fractals, and closely resemble Diffusion Limited Aggregation fractals. Scientist use fractal analysis to describe the behavior of mycelium:

“Fungal mycelia are iterative and modular structures with different branching strategies according to the nature of the substratum and abundance of nutrients... The calculated fractal exponent is a good descriptor of mycelia branching and growth. In nutrient poor environment, the fractal exponent describes foraging type of mycelia branching due to explorative growth strategy (between D= 1.14 and 1.32) while in nutrient rich environment it describes the exploitative growth strategy (between D=1.62 and D=1.89) (Branching Patterns in Fungal Hyphae During the Colonization of Quercu Cerris and Quercus Petraea Litter, by Ecaterina Fodor, Teusdea Alin, Haruta Ovidu).”

Additionally, “...Mycelia differentiate to form a complex interconnected network having a modular and iterative nature (Gooday, 1995)”

The programming for Hyphae imitates this modular and iterative nature and adds behavior algorithms that causes the separate mycelium systems to grow toward other systems, so when people stand on the floor, they grow connections to each other.

Walton and Categories of Art: Implications for New Media

With a dry and reductive approach, Walton in Categories of Art explains how the perception of representation works. He claims that for any category of art there are standard, variable, and contra-standard properties. The representation a viewer perceives when viewing a work of art is determined by the variable properties of the category.

For example: "The shapes of a painting or a still photograph of a high jumper in action are motionless, but these pictures do not look to us like a high jumper frozen in midair. Indeed, depending on features of the picture which are variable for us (for example, the exact position of the figures, the swirling brush strokes in the painting, slight blurrings of the photographic image) the athlete may seem in a frenzy of activity; the pictures may convey a vivid sense of movement. But if static images exactly like those of the two pictures occur in a motion picture, and we will see it as a motion picture, they probably would strike us as resembling a static athlete. This is because the immobility of the images is standard relative to the category of still pictures and variable relative to that of motion pictures."

Obvious? Well yes, but it has interesting implications for new media. In establishing, say, interactive video programming as artistic medium, we must conclude that we must also establish standards for that medium: for a particular work to represent something, it must have categorically standard properties. It is almost by subtracting out those standard properties that the meaning and particulars of the work become apparent.

Outside of the art world, technological things (for lack of a more specific term) are usually put on display only for their technical and functional innovation. And so, often, when people approach a new media work in a gallery, their first reaction is to miscategorize the work as technology and to look for what is functionally innovative and novel. If they don't find anything novel, their reaction might be, "That's been done before."

Perhaps the work's functionality has been done before, but painting things has also been done before. That's what makes a painting a comprehensible, particular, and meaningful object: paintings have certain recognizable and standard forms of representation.

New media will be more meaningful and readily understood when thought of as standard medium rather than technology both by those who view it and those who make art with it.

Depth of Surface: A Review

Depth of Surface is an exhibition of the textile and texture based work of 16 artists currently on display at the SF State Fine Arts Gallery. Exceptionally varied in material and concept, the show was well crafted. As an artist who works increasingly with programming and digital media, I found it refreshing and pleasurable to examine these physical objects of such tactile presence. Textiles are a source of powerful metaphors: the threads of our lives, of meaning, of thought.

Rock Wall by Jennifer Ferre, a tapestry of cassette tape appealed to me because it is woven information. Music is certainly a fabric in my life, I wondered what songs were on the tape. An ex's mix? Cassette tapes are artifacts, this one was remixed.

Julie Chang's hanging scrolls of wall paper-esque prints were vivid and a little absurd. I had forgotten how nice it is to compose prints, juxtaposing graphics like plants and floor plans in saturated colors. As wall paper, it suggests that I think more about the images that make up our social and domestic environments.

Dustin Fosnot had made a cyanotype (a sun print) of his body on a discarded mattress. Mattress Reminded me how textiles are part of our lives, and of the imprints we leave on the city.

Katie Lewis's Intermittent Transmission was coded language: lines of tangled thread arranged like blocks of text on the wall. I thought, if it was text, would I read it? Would I feel it? The arrangement made me think of compressing language into writing by a codec other than letters.

Ali Naschke-Messing seemed to be working with the thread-as-language metaphor with The Art of Storytelling: Ode to Benjamin I appreciated the delicate, tangled, ephemeral feel of the words.

Ironing: Mulit-Terrain Pattern by Mung Lar Lam, as a wall-size fabric installation was a nice contrast of scale to the other pieces. It recalled color fields and some kind of saw-tooth topography. There's a whole genre of art that is showing the subtle beauty of the everyday like the patterned creases made by ironing.

Depth of Surface will be up until March 25th.

Gaze, the TV of Tomorrow and Augmented Reality

I installed Gaze last week for the TV of Tomorrow Show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As a work that views the viewer, juxtaposes intimacy and surveillance and evokes a specter of machine consciousness, I thought Gaze was fitting for the proceedings.

A conference for multi-platform interactive television, the TV of Tomorrow was mostly hyper corporate with talk titles like "Better Monetization through Better Counting: Measurement for Advanced TV and Video" and "Interactive TV Advertising: Who's Going to Click?" Art like my own was mostly there to legitimize that the conference was taking place in a center for the arts.

I did attend a handful of talks, the best being "Augmented Reality Meets TV." Clearly there is a bunch of innovative tech going on and a few advertising firms are applying it to web shopping applications, branding, and Facebook games.

Certainly the most interesting AR applications remain those for mobile phones. The ability to view mapping info (restaurant reviews, closest metro stops etc.) in the phone as augmented reality (AR) is exciting in the way that it creates new ways of presenting and interacting with information. AR mobile games and the idea of imbedding information in space via computer-vision recognizable printed graphics is the thing most desirable to me as artist.

The moderator was talking about AR as total immersion in a brand experience (which is a horrible way to frame it), but I think of it more as another increasingly fluid information exchange, more of a total immersion in information. This kind of interface allows for new forms and systems of user interface and interaction design, certainly a fun set of problems/possibilities.

In the faceless crowd of suits I met another artist, Keiichi Matsuda, a Masters of Architecture student at the University of London, who had been flown in for the event to show his brilliant video, which illustrates all the potential (lovely and hideous) of everyday use of AR.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

He explained to me later that his architecture group explores architecture through film. We had a stimulating conversation about theory, art, etc. I'll certainly be thinking more about post scarcity anarchism, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City and the composition of signifiers through time and space in film.

The Pastoralism of New Media: A Rant About Contemporary Art

We live in a world where the implosion of meaning and the end of history Baudrillaud wrote about so dramatically in Simulacra and Simulation (and which accelerated in the internet era) have now been around for a while. Philosophy, art, literature, in fact, all of the humanities were sucked into a theoretical black hole (which we can blame largely on Wittgenstein and the way that media operates to render information meaningless): meta to the nth.

But here we still are, getting up and going to work (if you're lucky enough to have a job), people in a meaningless, ahistorical world.

But Science, as post-structuralism dismantled feminism, humanism, and all metanarratives, held its ground, upholding it's empirical reductionism like a politician upholding family values.

And in the debris of postmodernism, it remains. Science.

Science, and Science alone retains the subject and the object, the signifier and the signified, the Future and the noble goals of mankind. Science, and not philosophy, will tell us the Truth about ourselves, the world, and through fossils and conjecture about early humans, the Nature of Man.

...Oh, and artists remain, bewildered by the absolute meaninglessness of their art history educations.

And two major trends have emerged: relational art, which represents, produces, or prompts inter-human relations (check out Gabriel Orozco and Miranda July); and art that imitates or employs as its medium science and technology, creating abstracted data visualizations, substituting scientific approaches for aesthetic approaches, using the forms of science to imbue work with meaning. (Check out Gail Wight and the sound-memory neural networks of Debora Aschheim).

As these trends expand there seems to be a sentiment that a given project which is sort-of about science or is sort-of interactive is automatically art, even if it can't satisfy the questions "What does it mean?" or "Why should I care?"

But, back to Science. While some art that borrows from science and technology does so critically or works with the concepts creatively, some are just aesthetic objects inspired by science. And I love beautiful things, I do. I just don't want art discourse to be lost to the pastoralism of abstract, uncritical new media work.

Grad Programs

As I get closer and closer to my Studio Art degree, I think about what to do after graduating. What are worthwhile goals? How do I intend to participate in our complex culture and economy? In parallel to my art-focused goals I've been thinking about grad school, and post some token research last fall, I am looking into a lot more programs.

While my focus on the intersection of art and technology from an art perspective is intriguing and satisfying, I want more technical skills. Digital applications have so much potential for changing society. In a world where there is practically infinite information and computation there is so much room for innovation in applications and usability/accessibility. While I'm interested in computer science, I want to use it for data visualization, interaction design, and/or information systems design. I'm excited by the work of companies like Gesture Tek, Obscura Digital, and Snibbe Interactive.

Here's a list of programs I think look cool:

The Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, with a self-designed emphasis on computer science and information systems.

The Media Lab at MIT definitely has some incredible-looking research groups: Affective Computing, Camera Culture, Computing Culture, Fluid Interfaces, Tangible Media...

Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, which apparently combines artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic. The Stanford graduate Design program there also looks interesting.

Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech is an interdisciplinary program which allows an emphasis in digital media.

U.C. Santa Barbara Media Arts and Technology: emergent media, computer science, engineering, and electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. (Emergent media, I like that) Option of MS in Multimedia Engineering or MA in Visual and Spatial Arts.

I'm also pretty intrigued by the U.C. Berkeley School of Information, which goes with my most recent art theory flirtation, Database Aesthetics.

My approach for figuring out what I want to study has largely been through looking at companies that are producing the applications for the sort of things I dream about with my art, and looking at the sort of qualifications their staff has and/or that they are seeking.

I definitely intend to take a year or two off and see how I can evolve what I do outside academia before going to grad school. I'd appreciate your thoughts and advice.