By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at
10:00 am
David Rokeby, Very Nervous System, 1983-
Montreal's art and science organization the Daniel Langlois Foundation announced a new collection of online materials for Canadian artist David Rokeby's work Very Nervous System (1983-), an interactive sound installation that reacts to the movement of visitors. The work has developed over the years, and has exhibited in many contexts. This particular collection of documentation is interesting because they bring in the audience's response to the work, through a series of interviews. You can read more about the project and their approach in the excerpt below from the "Introduction to the Collection" by Caitlin Jones and Lizzie Muller.
This is the second documentary collection that we have created for artworks by David Rokeby. In 2007 we produced a collection for the artwork Giver of Names (1991-), through which we developed a documentary approach to media art that captures the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the audience’s experience or, as we have described it, “between real and ideal” (1). The aim of this strategy is to acknowledge the fundamental importance of audience experience to the existence of media artworks and to create a place for the audience within the documentary record.
We believe this approach offers a productive way to reconcile how media artworks exist in the world and how they are represented in an archival context. In recent publications, we have begun to refer to the product of this approach as an “Indeterminate Archive”: a collection of materials that provides multiple perspectives of the work, as well as multiple layers of information, held together with—but not secondary to—the idea of the artist's intent (2). This indeterminate archive, we have argued, captures the mutability and contingency of the artwork’s existence, creating a more, not less, “complete” account. For a full explanation of how we developed this approach as well as a fuller discussion of the issues surrounding documentation, archives and audience experience, please see the introduction to our 2007 collection for the Giver of Names on the Daniel Langlois Web site (3).
The invitation to produce a second collection for Rokeby’s Very Nervous System (1981- ) came from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz, Austria. This artwork is a particularly interesting case study for the Indeterminate Archive for two reasons. Firstly, it offers an unmatched demonstration of the importance of experience in media art. Very Nervous System is, as many audience members pointed out in our interviews with them, essentially an empty room until someone walks in and activates it. It is a work that is brought into being very literally through experience.
Secondly, it is a seminal work in the history of media art, with a lifespan of more than 28 years. Its celebrity and longevity pose some particularly interesting questions about documentation and contextualisation of media artworks over time and through change. The Very Nervous System’s celebrity makes it a fascinating focus from the point of view of the relationship between real and ideal. The work is, for many, one of the first successful artistic experiments in gestural, embodied interaction. An enormous number of texts have been written about it, and many curators and critics of media art have read about it without ever having experienced it themselves. This notion of an “ideal” Very Nervous System has, therefore, a powerful role within the discourse of media art. This begs the question of how the “real” individual experience of the work, here and now, relates to this powerful ideal.
By
Jason Huff on
Monday, August 9th, 2010 at
10:00 am
"Art and social media" -- this topic is all anyone wants to talk about these days. The discussion extends from the staid -- the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled "Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation" -- to more spicy ruminations on what "social media art" offers as a new category, as in the artist An Xiao’s recent three-part series for Hyperallergic.
On the one hand, this faddish obsession with "social media" is understandable. The Facebook Corp. has begun to wrap its fingers around every other aspect of life, so it is clearly logical to ask what effects social media might have on art-making. But at the same time, I find the chatter somehow sad, as if visual art’s power to inspire passion among a larger audience is so attenuated that it has to throw itself on whatever trendy thing is out there, to win some reflected glory for itself.
So, the question for me is this: Is there any more interesting way to think about the topic than the loose and impressionistic manner that it is currently framed? Maybe it’s worth noting that, of all the buzzwords of the present-day lexicon, "social media" is perhaps the only one that is more vaguely defined than "art." Let’s begin, then, by clarifying terms to see if we can get to a more interesting place.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at
2:30 pm
Commitment Radio examines radio presets and what it means to make a choice. Instead of using unmarked generic buttons, presets on Commitment Radio create permanent marks. Over time, Commitment Radio will become personalized with your changing musical tastes, political leanings, locations, and age.
The functioning physical prototype of Commitment Radio allows you to scan for stations by moving a dial along the tuning strip. To listen to a station, however, you must push the dial into the radio, leaving an indelible mark.
Over time, Commitment Radio will become personalized with your changing musical tastes, political leanings, locations, and age. Because the radio has a finite amount of space, Commitment Radio encourages deliberateness in your choices and actions.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, July 30th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Fold Loud is a (de)constructing musical play interface that uses origami paper-folding techniques and ritualistic Taoist principles to give users a sense of slow, soothing relaxation.
Fold Loud interconnects ancient traditions and modern technology by combining origami, vocal sound and interactive techniques. Unlike mainstream technology intended for fast-paced life, Fold Loud is healing, recovering and balancing.
Playing Fold Loud involves folding origami shapes to create soothing harmonic vocal sounds. Each fold is assigned to a different human vocal sound so that combinations of folds create harmonies. Users can fold multiple Fold Loud sheets together to produce a chorus of voices. Opened circuits made out of conductive fabric are visibly stitched onto the sheets of paper which creates a meta-technological aesthetic. When the sheets are folded along crease lines, a circuit is closed like a switch. Thus, the interface guides participants to use repetitive delicate hand gestures such as flipping, pushing and creasing. Fold Loud invites users to slow down and reflect on different physical senses by crafting paper into both geometric origami objects and harmonic music.
By
Robin Peckham on
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Samson Young, Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 - nr. 14 (Senza Misura), 2010
The exhibition "Resonance" was initiated in early 2010 as an experiment in the conceptual underpinnings and practical manifestations of sound art as a genre and form in contemporary greater China. Growing out of a series of readings and conversations in Hong Kong with artists as varied as Yan Jun, Feng Jiangzhou, and Zhou Risheng, the final exhibition program included two installations by artists Samson Young, an artist and composer based in Hong Kong, and Yao Chung-Han, a sound artist based in Taipei. This selection of artists allows the experiment to step beyond the mainland sound art and experimental music scene, which is largely incoherent in its current free-for-all exploration of new sonic forms--a site of artistic freedom indeed, but also a difficult territory in which to reflect on the modes of sound already in use in the contemporary art community. Samson Young contributed a piece entitled Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 - nr. 14 (Senza Misura) (2010), a series of open circuit boards hung in rows on the gallery wall. Each board houses two LEDs and a speaker, each marking the tempo of a single movement of fourteen of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas. In the second gallery room, Yao Chung-Han installed an audiovisual piece entitled I Will Be Broken (2010), a suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together with power cords that illuminates in a semi-random fashion and emits a prerecorded sequence of sounds. The two pieces engage in a dialogue of light and sound that confronts the tension between sound as aesthetic spectacle and sound as conceptual material, opening a productive conversation between styles and historical developments in the trajectory of sound in art. "Resonance" is on view at I/O Gallery in Hong Kong until September 5, 2010.
Robin Peckham (RP): I’d like to start with our initial thoughts when we set out to put this exhibition together. We were interested in how different cultural labels, specifically including music, experimental music, sound, and sound art, are distinguished in the Chinese context. During curatorial projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we found that artists and musicians working under these different labels all share the same live performance events and even exhibition contexts. I want to ask how the two of you see yourselves fitting into this system personally, and how you have experienced these distinctions in Hong Kong and Taipei respectively.
Samson Young (SY): In Hong Kong there is a circle of people working with, writing, and playing classical music, and that’s a very specific and self-contained scene. Then there’s a set of people outside this scene who also share a series of different and unrelated events, such as William Lane of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and myself. We both come from classical music backgrounds originally, but we’re also involved with other things, learning from different kinds of artists and musicians. The scenes are defined but the content of the work produced in each of these circles is not. As for defining my identity in all of this, I don’t have any strong feelings in terms of being a certain kind of artist working within the territory of sound art. I come out of the classical music world, but I make work that might function as contemporary music in the concert hall or something else entirely within the gallery context. No matter what the work is, it should be evident that my interest lies in a certain set of ideas of music to some degree or another. I tend to resist being labeled as a sound artist because this term is so ideologically and politically loaded. There are so many problems with it that have yet to be resolved. Its aesthetics are still being defined, particularly the question of how to judge a work of art within this territory. The question is very much still under discussion. That’s one problem. The question of how to judge or test a work of art is often mixed up with this other question of “what is sound art,” where these should be very separate questions. A work might emit sound of some sort of sound in a gallery setting, but the strategy of judging it through the criteria of sound rather than as conceptual or visual art is a very political process. It is a value judgment. It is very dangerous to judge the work within or using these unresolved debates over the nature of sound art, because it introduces all kinds of ideological questions. The discussion of aesthetics and the discussion of the identity of sound art should be separated. But now they exist within the same conversation, mixing the idea of a value judgment from the idea of a judgment of quality. We have a conversation and a discourse over these questions, but no sense of definition. If we introduce the question of “what is art,” then the entire project becomes compartmentalized and limited to its own territory without any further possibility of the expansion of the genre. As for how I define my own work, I will do some things within the gallery setting with the materials of sound and music, and people can label it as they please. But I don’t think I’ve answered the question.
By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
H3X3N is a group of Computer Witches who have built an enchanted cube that casts magical spells on computers. This cube, called IX, is a New Media Artwork that will be shown at DEADTECH, an art and technology center and gallery in Chicago, this Saturday May 10. The IX cube casts spells on Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers, hacking and hexing these operating systems. IX combines traditional stage magic tricks and irony as elements of Hacker culture to create an Interactive Installation and Software Art project. IX has been exhibited previously at the Interactivos? exhibition at the Media Lab Madrid in Madrid, Spain.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, July 19th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
Les 400 Clicks is a multimedia project referencing Francois Truffaut's 1959 French New Wave classic, Les 400 Coups (The 400 Blows). The original film has been reduced to 400 still frames taken arbitrarily from throughout the entire film, which can be played through in order by clicking the mouse, 400 times. This action is also synchronized with the film's original title score.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Friday, July 16th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
The setup downstairs at the Silent Barn.
Yesterday Ceci and I went out to Silent Barn in Ridgewood to meet with Kunal Gupta and the other guys who run Babycastles. Babycastles is a DIY arcade space with a rotating set of independent games curated by local artists and game designers. The space is usually set up for play during shows at Silent Barn, but they'll turn the machines on and let you play if you come by any time they're around.
Dismantled laptop for a costume in Babycastles "Indie Game Cosplay Music Video Shoot Machinima" party
When we arrived, the guys were prepping for a big "Indie Game Cosplay Music Video Shoot Machinima" performance/dance party with CHERYL that they are throwing this Saturday, part of Game Play at the Brick Theater. Upstairs they were disassembling old laptops so that could be attached to the costumes of cyborg dancers that would double as playable arcade games. While they tinkered with soldering guns and laptop guts we played a few rounds of Tristan Perich's 1-bit game KILL JET on a small portable TV about the size of a car battery. The game is operated using two buttons, one to move the plane up and the other to move it down. For previous installations the game was played on a larger TV with the buttons attached to the back, so that the player had to hug the screen in order to play. Kunal showed us some of their costumes in progress and discussed some ideas for interactive dancing machinima gifs before we headed downstairs to see the arcade.
Jacob playing Tristan Perich's KILL JET
Glamour shot of Tristan's circuit board for KILL JET
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Nick DeMarco, Too Cool, 2010
"Time doesn't exist when you're... just chilling!" Topping an administrative page on the site of curatorial collective Jstchillin, this slogan rephrases a familiar bit of folk phenomenology: Time flies when you're having fun! But in denying time's existence, rather making its perceived acceleration a metaphor for losing yourself in the moment, the slogan suggests a swap of the trinity of past-present-future for something else -- a sense of time that (until the end of this essay, at least) I will call "chill time." Jstchillin is concerned with the internet, and my description of chill time will be, too. It entails an awareness of parallel threads of messages, ordered by clock-time sequence and subjective assignments of importance (cf. Facebook's feed settings: "Top News" and "Most Recent"), and the knowledge that these messages will wait until you find them (in your e-mail, in your RSS aggregator, etc.) but might be irrelevant when you do if you wait too long. Chill time is simultaneity of the recent past and lagging present, the sum of attempts to track some threads into the past and push others toward the future. Awareness of physical surroundings tends to be fuzzy as you sift through old layers of digital sediment and deposit new ones. Jstchillin founders Caitlyn Denny and Parker Ito describe it like this: "[T]o chill is to live in a constant state of multiplicities, a flow of existence between web and physicality."
Jstchillin encompasses a number of initiatives, including the gallery show "Avatar 4D," but its flagship project is "Serial Chillers in Paradise," an online exhibition that has featured a different artist every other week since October 2009. Chill time, I think, is the central theme of "Serial Chillers," one that many commissioned artists have approached through conventional associations with chilling. Video games were the subject of an illustrated short story/film treatment by Jon Rafman, and Jonathan Vingiano's browser add-on Space Chillers was a game. Ida Lehtonen's contribution folded soothing ocean sounds into a video of exercises that computer laborers can do to stay limber during breaks, while Eilis Mcdonald's sent you scrolling through bits of pat, New-Agey advice and then to a page with equivalent visuals; both artists drew on packaged relaxation. Zach Schipko and Tucker Bennett's feature-length movie Why Are You Weird?, parceled into YouTube uploads, is a story of art-school students who spend almost all of their onscreen time at parties or hanging out in their dorm rooms, rehashing crits.
By
Joshua Noble on
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Rob Ley and Joshua G Stein, ReactiveVOID
One of the interesting challenges in discussing or writing about interactive architecture is the term itself. As its usage has increased so have the potential meanings of what an architecture that is truly interactive might mean. That the building might truly interact, become temporal, transform a viewer or inhabitant into a user and a physical space into an application, is such a tantalizing proposition, one can empathize with the artists, designers, engineers, and architects alike all springing to define and participate in the shaping of the term. Its aims may end up being similar to earlier conceptions of the role of architecture, shaping urban space, defining urban life, but its means will be, not new, but novel. A constellation of concepts, what Farshid Moussavi calls The Novel, that join architectural thinking with computational practices and interaction design strategies, a marriage of strategies for shaping space and engaging users. The notion of an interactive architecture first emerged in the 1960s as cyberneticists and architects Gordon Pask, Cedric Price, and Archigram in the UK, and Warren Brodey, Nicholas Negroponte in the US, all developed similar ideas of interactive environments and spaces that would sense, converse, and participate with their users. Since then interaction design, artificial intelligence, computer vision, environment sensing, mechanical engineering, interior design, have all been drawn into dialogue in different forms, creating solutions, informing practices, generating new ways of creating conversations between users and spaces. Terms have proliferated as well, ‘liquid’, ‘dynamic’, ‘reactive’, or ‘adaptive’ architectures, ‘interactive installation’, ‘cybernetic spaces’; all with a generalized conception of the notion of a space that communicates, that is computationally enabled and that provides a mode of input and some level of appropriate feedback. With the complexity of discourses involved and the range of intents and strategies employed, it’s difficult to discuss a coherent history or diagram spheres of influence but one can see general tendencies: goals, intentions, critical junctures, and points of convergence across a range of practices.
Why now? Why this rapid explosion of interest in interactive architecture? The crisis of urban space, ecological pressures, technological capacity, the exhaustion with and reaction to the iconic architecture of the last forty years all weigh heavily on present architectural practice. An interactive architecture offers an explicit engagement for the user, a de-emphasizing of the architect; allowing anyone who enters the space to become at minimum a collaborator and in some cases a co-creator. The moment of the aesthetic of the collaborative, the utilitarian, the designed and empowering solution has arrived. In the histories of kinetic sculpture, video, installation, performance, littoral practices, there exist historical antecedents for interactive art practices. To the architectural, participating in the computational data rich experience and the interactive, presents a new escape, a new collaborative attitude, and an antidote to the static, extemporal, and spectacular that has dominated architectural thinking over the last 50 years.
The medium of architecture itself is changing, becoming a combination of spaces, networks, and agents both mechanical and organic. We already experience architecture as a shifting array of mediums. Architecture bloggers Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes winkingly named the iPhone as one of the most important architectural works of the first decade of the new millennium, arguing: “urban systems are defined most fundamentally not by structure and infrastructure, but by practice, action, and thought-process; what act has more significantly altered the practices and thought-processes of urbanites in the past ten years than the mass distribution of smart phones?” The Rhinoscript-ing of Parametric Architecture is most certainly, if nothing else, a demonstration that compelling notions of space can be generated by algorithmic processes. Architecture historian Beatriz Colomina argues in Architecture Between Spectacle and Use that the fame of Mies van der Rohe is largely based on photographs of his work. The medium of architecture is already diffuse and complex. The interactive architectural environment simply extends that diffusion, integrating a dynamic system, an interconnected series of structures, situations, and objects that participate in the myriad ways that we consider and shape urban and living space.
By
John Michael Boling on
Friday, June 4th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
The installation "capacitive body" is a modular light system that reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom built module consists of an electroluminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. Through its modular setup it can easily be adapted to various urban spaces.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at
10:00 am
I visited ITP’s Spring Show on Monday, the open house for NYU’s graduate interactive technology program. Like years past, the kiosk-like presentation of projects makes the event seem a bit like a science fair, with artists and inventors on hand to answer questions. ITP’s student body is quite diverse – ranging from web entrepreneurs to roboticists to performance artists and more – and this aspect usually guarantees that you’ll come across something interesting. See below for some quick notes from this year’s show.
This sculpture assembles itself into a mobius strip according to a series of algorithms, and it responds to the movement and proximity of the viewer. When you stand away from the sculpture, the metal crescents within its interior flutter and twitch.
Eighty LEDs light up a large canvas, slowly shifting the color palette into a soft wash. When I first came upon this work, its use of light and color reminded me of James Turrell, an artist Richard cites as an inspiration on the ITP page for Estrella Intersects the Plane.
