Field Trip!

In an earlier post about my trip to Cory Arcangel's opening at Team Gallery, I begged for a closer look at everything. Admittingly, I probably wouldn't have made a second special trip down to the gallery on my own, but today my wish was granted in class. We took a field trip to Team to have Cory himself explain his works and inspirations.

And, boy did it make all the difference. At the opening, when I had such a superficial experience with everything, I left thinking that it seemed like he just took some old films and screwed around with them. Which is absolutely true, BUT, there is purpose involved. The piece that I was especially frustrated with the first time around was the one featuring the Beatles' performance. Now it's the piece I find most interesting. Initially, it seemed like Cory just distorted the footage. Now I understand that it is an ongoing work of art that actually deteriorates in quality every time it plays. Cory wrote a computer code that instructs the footage to compress a little more every time it repeats. So, the digital footage is deteriorating over time. Sound familiar? I wish I knew more about the whole compression aspect in order understand this project more. I was reading some of Cory's press releases at the front desk. In one interview, he accurately stated that most people don't understand the computer technology end of digital art, so even if one accomplishes something very nifty on the technology end of things, most of the general audience won't be able to appreciate it.

Additionally, I like how Cory described the Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum as being different from his other projects. Instead of screwing up existing material, he added something to existing material. It reminded me of the NYT article Cyberface: New Technology That Captures the Soul, which discusses the possibility of adding addendums to films or co-opting past material for new use using the recently developed Image Metrics technology:

"If we want John Wayne to act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that. We can directly mimic the performance of a human being on a model. We can create new scenes for old films, or old scenes for new films. We can have one human being drive another human character."

There's a saying that goes something like everything's been said before. Well, if everything's been done before in traditional art forms, digital technologies provide the ability to go back and re-express it in a novel form.

Worlds Coalescing

The boundary between the "real world" and the "virtual world" is become ever more blurry. However, I can't decide which world is moving more into the other. "Planet Google Wants You" in The New York Times discusses the many ways in which Planet Google is establishing its dictatorship over us earthly inhabitants. Google's more than a dozen applications include Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Mail. A researcher at the University of California says, "(Google) literally augments your brain. I don't have to remember quite a few things now because Google can remember them for me. Google is an additional memory chip.''

Google is an example, I think, of the internet taking reign over the daily reality of our lives, but Will Shortz' Second Life presents on opportunity for the reverse to occur and reality to jump into the internet. "The Reporter is Real, but the World He Covers Isn't" describes Adam Pasick, a Reuters reporter whose beat has gone virtual, as he is now dispatched as a virtual character inside the world of Second Life. Pasick insists that it is just like being sent to a bureau in a remote area of the (real) world.

I guess that's true. Second Life is comparable to a new territory--the frontier of reality. I wonder if virtual Adam Pasick uses Google Calendar to keep track of his schedule? Maybe if I had a virtual version of myself, and my/her schedule was dictated by an online appointment book, then I'd/it'd automatically go somewhere when it was time, without even having to be reminded...

Timeline Continued

In the early 1960's, Ivan Sutherland developed the Sketchpad system. Sketchpad was a launching pad for modern conversational interface systems. Allowing users to manipulate objects, magnify their workspace, and perform recursive operations, the interface ushered in the future of user-empowered programs. Sketchpad opened up a new digital world for graphic art.

Roy Ascott observed the impending shift in new media art from linear production to audience participation to full two way interaction. Ascott wrote The Construction of Change in 1961 to distinguish the interactive potential of new media art from participatory art such as Allen Kaprow's Happenings. Ascott also references cybernetics, as he encourages the artist to fully understand the science of behavioral experience.

A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate returns to textual possibilities in new media. In the essay, published in 1965, Ted Nelson coins the term hypertext. "Hyper...connotes extension and generality." Nelson goes on to define hypertext as "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper." Though today's world wide web is woven together with a hyperlinking system, we still have not acheived the whole vision of what Nelson meant by the word, embodied in his described filing and listing systems, ELF and PRIDE.

Feeling threatened by the mathematical realism of computer science, the literary field responded in 1961 with A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau. The work invited the reader to cut apart the lines and reconstruct the poem, a style predating refridgerator magnetic poetry. The method attempted to reconfigure "the relationship between reader, author, and text." Later, computers were utilized to break apart and restructure poetic creations, a move that ultimately married literary art with mathematics as artists began looking at the algorithms of possibilities.

Today Eric Rosenthal spoke in class and forwarned us that this will be the century without a history. As each progressive step of technology renders its predecessor obsolete, data will continually be lost. This will occur, Rosenthal claims, because data transfer may be impossible or near to it (hardly anyone has a floppy disk drive anymore), or else the storage medium will be destroyed before transfer occurs. Rosenthal said that the Library of Congress is working at a goal pace of 9 petabytes a day to transfer all of their data to a digital medium. Even at this rate, it would take the Library of Congress 1500 years to reach their goal. Digital mediums simply degrade, too. CD's can be destroyed by bacteria and other contamination, while hard drives typically survive anywhere from three to nine years.

I just read this article on Wired.com about the new breed of massive information storage centers built by Google, Microsoft, and others. I wonder what Rosenthal would have to say about what the article calls an architectural shift from PC hard drives back to massive data centers. The projection for the future of data storage is that everything will move from the PC hard drive and silicon chip to a centralized remote data center. Eric Schmidt from Google says of the plans for the new Google center in California, "When it's finished, the project will spread tens of thousands of servers across a few giant structures"--a "Googleplex" which will ultimately comprise 200 petabytes of hard disk storage.

The article is very interesting, but amidst concerns about the efficiency, size, and cost of the medium of data storage, concerns about the actual reliability of the medium are not to be found. Rosenthal claimed that no one is thinking about the problem of loss of digital information through disentigration, etc. I find it very hard to believe that the companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these facilities are not considering this possibility, but I could be wrong...

Chapters 7 & 8 Summary

"The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" by William Burroughs is a call to arms for everyone to begin experimenting with randomness and recombination in writing. An author or artist can acheive the cut-up method explicitly by using scissors to cut up an original work and paste it back together to create a collage. Burroughs says that this method will introduce "a new dimension into writing." The article was published in 1961, paving the way for Ted Nelson's coining of "hypertext" and the further deconstruction of hierarchical text.

One year later, Douglas Englebert, the genius involved in the development of the internet, word processor, mouse, and window, takes the deconstruction of traditional text much futher in his bookAugmenting Human Intellect, a Conceptual Framework. The framework focuses on the goal of "increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation," or increasing human intellectual effectiveness. Englebert encourages a systems approach to the problem.

He first references Vannevar Bush's conception of the Memex, and expounds upon it to illuminate possibilities stemming from a mechanical card system of organization. Here, Englebert introduces associative linking to connect card A to card B and develop genereal grouping classifications.

The next section discusses an electronic computer based augmentation system. An extensive dialogue is played out in which the subject comes to realize that human intellect does not work linearly like our traditional symbol structures (books, etc.), but rather criss-crosses, feedbacks, and operates with substructures and antecedent links. We should ultimately be able to operate computers in a similar way, by manipulating documents to create links among topics and streams of thought. We will acheive better comprehension if human symbol structures (text) mirror human conceptual structures of nodes, branches, and links.
My favorite comment of Englebert's articulates how valuable such a leap in processing would be:

"I found, when I learned to work with the stuctures and manipulation processes such as we have outlined, that I got rather impatient if I had to go back to dealing with the serial-statement structuring in books and journals, or other ordinary means of communicating with other workers. It is rather like having to project three-dimensional images onto two-dimensional frames and to work with them there instead of in their natural form. Actually, it is much closer to the truth to day that it is like trying to project n-dimensional forms (the concept structures, which we have seen can be related with many many nonintersecting links) onto a one-dimensional form (the serial string of symbols), where the human memory and visualization has to hold and pucture the links and relationships."

Human's naturally think in multiple-dimensions incorporating reversion and association, yet until the 20th century our language and text symbol structures remained as a flat, linear represenation. Douglas Englebert imagined a future where humans developed better mechical and electrical tools in efforts to acheive the great potential of the human intellect.

Chelsea Gallery Hopping

On the subway ride to Chelsea Monday I had a chance to read one of the five or so articles that were handed out in class prior to departure. The article was "iHappenings: Slicing Art Out of Life," the New York Times review of Lucas Samaras' show at Pace-Wildenstein Gallery (pictured: Lucas Samaras self portrait). His became the show I was looking forward to the most and ultimately was my favorite by far.

From the article I learned that his exhibition would include many short films, each about five minutes long, composed in iMovie. As you may know and may or may not remember, I'm intent on sharpening my prowess on all things Mac lately, so the article immediately spoke to me. I love the idea that with enough skills I can create something just between me and my computer and whatever content necessary.

Samaras took exactly this realization and went all over the place with it. Topics range from slicing turkey to ariel time-lapse to the artist himself juicing breakfast. Samaras takes his footage and usually uses iMovie to add some little touch. For example, he runs footage of partiers raining toilet paper rolls down on a parade backward, making the toilet paper rolls look like white snakes slithering back up to the balcony. The highlight of the show features Samaras stripping down naked and assuming different poses in a chair. The added "bump filter" creates a 3-D bulge in the middle of the image, distoring it just enough to allow the 72 year old man's ballet to be a joy to watch. From the New York Times:

"His forearms bulge like Popeye's; his chest swells as he lounges like an odalisque; his belly balloons, as if in pregnancy. Toward the end he regarbs himself and hunches over, head in hands as if aping Rodin's 'Thinker' pose."

At times, recent generations fall under the spell that media art needs to be ever more complex and flashy to be valuable. Maybe it takes a man who is 72 to contribute something so sublimely simple. Although, I must say that I'm not sure anyone younger would get an exhibition out of it!

A Movie of Forking Paths

"Choose Your Own Adventure" style books from my generation's childhood have been reinvented for the silver screen. Well, not quite; rather, reinvented for the computer screen. A New York Times article discusses The Onyx Project, a film released today on DVD that brings the philosophy of Borges to life in the movies.

The Onyx Project is "meant to be an experiment in nonlinear storytelling for the digital age." Viewers navigate their way through 400 scenes, each no longer than two minutes long. Ultimately, NAV (non-linear arrayed video), the software technology that makes the navigation possible, provides each viewer with millions of different plotline pathways. The filmakers intend that no one will watch the same movie, "yet its basic facts, characters, and message will permeate the experience." You can learn more about NAV through the movie's website, linked above.

What I find most interesting about this project is its implications for the future: "(The creators') hope is that future projects built around the software will include documentaries or educational videos with thousands of links that viewers can click to take them wherever their interests may lie." I don't think this is what they are implying, but I can envision software encoded movies could eventually include, within the actual footage, hyperlinks to anything that you want to explore further. For example, if a scene in a war movie included a Stealth flying across the sky, maybe viewers could click on the object and jump offsite to something that tells about the history of the Stealth. A movie may become something that can diffract in a million different directions, whether it be scene selection or information content.

Art

Cory Arcangel's opening was packed! At one point, I felt like I was bobbing for apples as I dug through the barrel of ice and water in desperate search of a Rolling Rock.

Due to the crowd, It was difficult to get a good look, or hear, of some of the projects. I didn't get to listen to the Dazed and Confused Headphones. My friend told me it was translated to Hindi then backtranslated to English. My favorite piece was the one that had (and I think this is what was going on...) the color bands changing with every cut of a movie. I'm not sure what movie it was. In sum, it may beg for another visit so that I can get a closer look at his work.

This week's Science in The City features a Dorkbot event which has some interesting multimedia projects.