Guest Lecturer

As a beginner in the world of digital media creation, I find it intimidating and overwhelming to try to figure out where to begin with my maturation. It seems as though I'm sitting in front of a dartboard littered with HTML, Maya, FinalCutPro, Java, Photoshop...and the list grows exponentially over time. I feel just a tinge of jealousy that Ken Perlin is so comfortable in his knowledge bank of solely computer programming mastery. The industry has sped forward during his career. Artists can now create games and movies that are barely distinguishable from reality, yet Ken retains his genius in simple conceptions such as the google jumping heart or a six-sided shape that, through its gait, seems at times to exhibit anthropomorphic qualities. His ideas still stand strong against even the most advanced stuff out there. Ken continues to inspire delight with his creations dealing with fundamental qualities of humans and the world, while always retaining a level of fun.
I liked how, when talking about the future, he said that it is not so important to figure out how to do things, because we already know how, but rather it is more valuable to have the minds who know what people want and need.

Fusion

Many of the New Digital Media in-class videos have been propelling my ambition ahead to bring art to science and do something revolutionary with digital media. In response I've been keeping my ear closer to the ground in seeking out art projects related to science in ways that I've never seen before.

Microcosmos was real footage of nature as well as cinematic art, though no graphics or animation were involved. In last week's NYT Magazine, I was immediately engaged by a photo spread of futuristic environmentally smart cars and car parts paired with natural elements, such as one car leaving tire treads of grass. Unfortunately, I no longer have the magazine in my posession and can't pull the article up for linking! But here is the website and portfolio of the photographer, Marcus Gaab. The more I browse, the more I love. Many of the featured pictures represent his style of blending nature with modern human culture. As I'm sure you don't have time to take it all in between Broadway shows, here are my select samples:


Note the adorable animal teetering on the edge at the top of the box stack, but there remains something about the NYT photospread that isn't be topped. I need to get ahold of those images.

Today in class we watched digitally animated shorts (with hardly any real footage incorporated) from SIGGRAPH. They were, for the most part, awesome and further inspire me to become better versed in graphics and editing (I came home tonight and set up a schedule for Apple store tutorials). However, the one video that dissapointed me? Definitely the NASA video. As the monotonous narration droned on, I could feel each molecule of air being sucked out of the room. I was embarassed for science! The earth video was gorgeous, don't get me wrong, and the information fascinating -for me. But, the fact is, for people not nearly as interested in the subject matter, it's going to take much more of an active visual stimulus to stand up next to the videos that appeared before and after. I guess the arguement could be made that the science video is science, so it's presented a little differently, then say, a science fiction story about time. But I disagree. I think "science" needs to be jazzed up. The majority of people are not going to be struck by something just from the subject matter. Presentation is most of the battle, and "science" needs to step it up.

In my free-thinking time lately, i've been imagining the junction of real-life footage with graphics and animation. For example, a car speeds past me and I envision a film clips of velocity waves streaming behind it (I just found that Gaab has approached a similar creation, but I envision more energy particles, and a car moving in a real setting). Or taking a film of dancers, maybe one could zoom in and both realistically and animatedly explore their muscular movements. Microcosmos ingeniously captured the world of insects, and the NASA film provided beautiful graphics of our earth--the two dimensions of media representation can be combined. Do you know of good examples of this already done? It reminds me of how Sesame Street made the revolutionary move of bringing together real people and fantasy.

I found a press release of Cory Arcangel's show at Team and am looking forward to going on Friday. See you there!?

Introduction 2 Summary

Lev Manovich provides a short history of the institutionalization of new media, as well as eight reflections on ways in which to define “new media.”
New media can, in one perspective, be very simply be understood as “computer based artistic activities.” These activities, once present in the US periphery, took about ten years to move into the cultural mainstream. Although the technologies may have been introduced first in the US, other countries eventually surged ahead in exploring new media art. Manovich partly attributes this to the phenomenon that new technologies are assimilated quickly in the US—too quickly too allow time for critical refliection of these technologies. Accordingly, while the internet became a fixture in most US homes seemingly overnight, other countries were taking the time to critically think about how to integrate these new technologies with existing art and culture. Progress in new media art was further stymied in the 90’s, Manovich continues, by the low level of public support for the arts in the US.
Ultimately the use new media became omnipresent in the art world, forcing the question, “if all artists now…routinely use digital computers to create, modify, and produce works, do we need o have a special field of new media art?” Manovich answers ‘yes,’ asserting that there are many theororetical questions pertaining to this field that must be addressed, a task the New Media Reader will work toward.

What Is New Media? Eight Propositions
NM versus Cyberculture
• Cyberculture is the social phenomena resulting from the introduction of New Media into society and the interaction of the culture with the New Media.
NM as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
• Media is by definition distributed to a large audience on some platform. New Media is by definition the media which uses digital computer technology as a distribution platform
NM as Digital Data Controlled by Software
• Cultural objects can be digitally represented in potentially many different states by the use of software that can be manipulated. Interesting that the logic of images and texts have different rules; images can be comprehended compositally while text must be linear and semiotic.
NM as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software
• New Media is a mix of already mature cultural forms that are undergoing digitization and novel media “native” to computers. It is the difference between being “gazed at, rather than interacted with.” It is also the difference between a continuous field and one broken up with hyperlinks constituting several regions.
NM as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Comm. Tech.
• Similar aesthetic strategies reappear in media. The moving image as cinema was reinvented on a computer screen 100 years after it was “born.”
NM as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Tech.’s.
• New Media accelerates data processesing, leading to qualitatively new phenonmena
NM as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde
• The new avant garde was concerned with seeing the world in as many ways as possible—existing media became the raw material for artistic innovation. The new media avant guard came up with a new way to package “reality.”
NM as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing

U.S. cultural trends in art and ideas of the past four decades led to the developing paradigms of new media. Non-heirachrchal organization on the interactive web melded well with post cold-war sensibilities.

"Oh yes, and watch where you step..."

Since the conception of MTV’s The Real World, reality television has captured the interest of the public like no other television fad in history has. In 1996, four years after The Real World debuted, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou released a film called Microcosmos that many reality entertainment fans probably missed. Microcosmos gives the audience a real world experience as well, but the film presents reality in a way that no human has seen it before.

Reality in Microcosmos is measured in terms of centimeters for most of the characters, even millimeters for some. The participants don’t squabble over infidelity or the last can of beer. Battles more often stem from territory crossing or attempted baby snatching. Rather than fists or nails, competitors rely on spiky horns or poisonous pincers.

Microcosmos provides an intimate look at the world of insects, where a raindrop can mean death, but a puddle is a cherished landscape teeming with life.

Watching Microcosmos, I was reminded of Disney’s A Bug’s Life and Pixar’s Antz. Of course, the characters in Microcosmos do not speak, and there is no real plot line per se. However, in experiencing the life of an insect so intimately, one cannot help but anthropomorphize and sympathize with their “emotions.” Two especially dramatic cinema moments are when a dung beetle struggles to transport an Indiana Jones-esque boulder and when two snails come together in a rapturous, slimy sex-scene. The incredible opportunity to look into the faces of the living creatures show that they are as animated as any Pixar creation conceivable as they build, battle, copulate, and bear offspring from one season into the next.

The photographers captured the imagery with a camera mounted on a miniature robot. Computerized control of the robot preserved fluidity of the extremely tight shots.

The camera technology allowed the production team to transcend the naked eye and accomplish documentation far beyond anything produced by National Geographic to date. Microcosmos expands the human perception of the world, conveying the fact that the dirt at our feet is not simply a boundary of the human world but is a habitat in a world unto itself. The technology used in Microcosmos is a gift to science and nature photographers. Filmmakers such as Nuridsany and Pérennou can now provide humans with the visual capability to explore the frontiers of our world, in which resides a reality full of drama and entertainment all its own.