Latest Entries
Making This Post Public, Is It Worth It?
09 March '10 by admin, under Uncategorized.
It seems to me necessary to mention, at this stage, that one of the main functions of this blog are for a personal access to what has become a very large database of ideas and sketches that I have accumulated over more than 4 years. Less than 2% is actually made public on this blog. With how my practice has developed over the last year it seems important to speak about this private function to a tool that seems to be primordially for a public expression of ideas and concerns, and of sharing. My decision to make most of my post private does not come from the fact of fear of my ideas being stolen but of in a very simple way further explore the sense of holding back and symultaneosly (or contradictory to its essense) showing signs of an interface. I feel to some extent that this hesitation, (could be seen as a counter sadomasocistic ritual described by Deleuze and Gautarri when reffering to “Body without organs” whipped into a formless and empty vessle to entice further desire and flow. My concern is mainly a concern over questions of perserving a discourse on subjectivity as such, and not a sense that I think I’m holding back something that I think is too good. This also does not mean that I defend on this conservative notion of sensing a threat on my privacy, or an abuse of my good will of becoming public, I’m not interested in that, I dont think. Other concerns might be linked with the fact that I write very badly, I’m all too aware of my dislexsia and my love for writting sentences with no verbs. Hopefully the quality of writting will increase the more I write and practice. Again this adds to the ideas and general fustration surrounding the lowering of the quality of communication due to the reputation that a “blog” has gained over the last years – exposing (and more and more often forcing) a wave of lazy and badly constructed english. But seeing this in a historical context this has always been an interesting phenomena to observe the fabrication of slang and new ways of writting and speaking. These changes in communication seems to be more and more dependent on the technological structures through which spoken or written word flows, from the telegraph, fax, email to the revolutionary text messaging. The blog is simply another one of those technologies that shapes language into new representations…. But yet, going back to my initial idea: Its more a question of discussing what it means to be who I am, how does that change when someone decides to go the whole mile and do their best to throw up everything they can think of (or not think of)? Are they more themselves than I am myself? Who defines that, where and when are these validations going on?
I’m am in pursuit of a subtle challenge, or intervention, on the actual nature of this system and question its social function(s). To turn its skin around, and to redefine the space of its insertion.
I find it interesting that what lies between me and the world is a lousy (hardly visible) button on my wordpress dashboard that changes posts from private to public with one (unconscious) click. Yes, we could associate this with something like Doctor Strange Love and the whole activity and intellectual production of humankind being boiled down to the decision of pressing the button and destroy the entire planet…or not.
Emma Heddith, for example, is an artist I had the priviledge to meet during my stay at the Wysing Artrs Centre in early February 2010. Her works seems to master this space of hesitation before appearing, with a delicate but precise tone and criticality.
Click here to view some of her interventions, or maybe better described as pre-interventions: http://www.overidentification.blogspot.com/
The title of this blog comes actually from one of her projects called ‘Coming To Have a Public Life, Is It Worth It?’ at ‘Art Now Live’, Tate Britain, London (2007)
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Automated discrimination
14 December '09 by admin, under thoughts.
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same patterns of perception
26 October '09 by ric, under artworks.
Some interesting animations on neural activity from a project sponsored by IBM:
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Lady Ane Angel "ONE"
21 September '09 by ric, under film / photographic, inter-bodies / half-objects, mirrors / displays / frames, videos.
This agent provocateur style short is awefully similiar to my intentions for the tap dancer clip in Lacuna and even more for the “Aquis Submersus” print series…
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Dan Graham – Time Delay Room
14 September '09 by ric, under artworks, bio-feedback / cybernetics, formal / structural / grids, mirrors / displays / frames, video installations.
Time Delay Room
This closed-circuit installation was varied by Dan Graham six times following the same structural set-up as described below:
«Two rooms of equal size, connected by an opening at one side, under surveillance by two video cameras positioned at the connecting point between the two rooms. The front inside wall of each features two video screens – within the scope of the surveillance cameras. The monitor which the visitor coming out of the other room spies first shows the live behavior of the people in the respective other room. In both rooms, the second screen shows an image of the behavior of the viewers in the respectively other room – but with an eight second delay.
The time-lag of eight seconds is the outer limit of the neurophysiological short-term memory that forms an immediate part of our present perception and affects this «from within». If you see your behavior eight seconds ago presented on a video monitor «from outside» you will probably therefore not recognize the distance in time but tend to identify your current perception and current behavior with the state eight seconds earlier. Since this leads to inconsistent impressions which you then respond to, you get caught up in a feedback loop. You feel trapped in a state of observation, in which your self-observation is subject to some outside visible control. In this manner, you as the viewer experience yourself as part of a social group of observed observers [instead of, as in the traditional view of art, standing arrested in individual contemplation before an auratic object].
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Robert Lazzarini's Skulls
01 June '09 by ric, under mirrors / displays / frames, video installations.
“Robert Lazzarini’s new sculptures continue his exploration of compound distortions of three-dimensional objects. The intensity of these works comes from the fact that they linger somewhere in between an image and an object. The distortions oscillate between two- and three-dimensionality, creaing an unsettling spatial paradox. They appear to expand and contract as your vantage point shifts, suggesting something both static and moving.
Within the context of the still life, Lazzarini draws upon the historical relationship between distortion and death and object as momento mori. The sculptures have the impression of collapsing upon themselves, slipping towards their end.
Lazzarini utilizes two-dimensional distortions such as anamorphism (accelerated perspective) and applies them to three-dimensional objects. As the object becomes a projection of the image, the wall becomes a projection of the ground.
All of the works in this group are derivatives of specific objects. The original object is digitized and brought into computer space as a 3D model. Using both animation and industrial design programs, the distortions are applied using a computer workstation. Models are then generated by various means of rapid prototyping (computer-generated model making). The final sculpture is then made using the same materials as the original object.
“Robert Lazzarini’s sculptures are at once rigorously formal and intensely expressive. As distorted versions of familiar objects, they appear in the process of slipping- from three to two dimensions, from
realism to abstraction, from this world to the next. Products of a dense and innovative process, his works seem both real and unreal: their striking immediacy is belied by a quality of ghostliness, as if they were hardly there at all.- John B. Ravenal, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, VMFA, 2004.”
“Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image.”
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The day there was no news
28 May '09 by ric, under artworks, inter-bodies / half-objects, thoughts, video installations.
This was one of my inspirations for making the piece Loading.
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Nicolas Schoffer
06 May '09 by ric, under artworks, bio-feedback / cybernetics, public art.
1961 film showing the cybernetic tower (or tour), work by Nicolas Schoffer from 1961, working, showing the random programme and the dynamic-light show. I love the juxtapostion of stillness and motion that the sculpture has, I wonder if it was intentional.
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How to: Love
08 April '09 by ric, under artworks, film / photographic, inter-bodies / half-objects, stories / dreams, thoughts, videos.
Below is a re-appropriation of an intel commerical and music video using text from a wiki-how article entitled ‘how to love’.
Avolition follows here a similiar line of thought .in terms of emotional response and atmosphere. However, Avolition does not close on it self, leaving the machinic voice develop sort of platonic affair with it self. Lets not forget that Avolition is already conceived ‘visible’ platonic affair and not one which necessarily imposes its ‘platonicism’ on its spectators. Love in this clip however is fundamanetally technologically introvert, we only experience the theatrical suffering offered by the clear positioning of humans and machines (machines as narrator / humans as objects with desires that need administration) – the intangebility of the machine describing love whereas it will never experience it. The spectator in this sense is a passive one (Jacques Ranciere) who cannot enter into an ‘actual’ conversation about the definition and ethics that constitute love, or an empirical definition or knowledge production of such experience. This could be expanded and this is what I hope to have started with Avolition. Love is not intrinsicly human, instead it inhabits inside the relationships and social systems that we produce. “Under this light” (as in the stage set up when passing by Avolition at night) technology might have a place for co-producing the meaning and rules of love. But would this mean that it could also co-consume it as well?
And on another note, how can one make up rules about something as undefinable as love in the first place? It seems to always be an ongoing project.
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Self Sustainable Kinetic Cinematography
25 March '09 by ric, under artworks, bio-feedback / cybernetics, experimental / technical logs, film / photographic, formal / structural / grids, mirrors / displays / frames, thoughts, video installations.
As the third correction to my project proposal for my MFA major project I finally managed to determine a project research area which satisfies me technically, theoretically as well as professionally.
I often think of spatial structures which coexist both physically as well as virtually. I often imagine what would it be like to experience movement in space when we are withdrawn from the core role of viewer/user. If there is some other element in the system that now possesses that role, what are we in charge of?
Kinetic Cinematography for me consists of the act of filming and recording video by means of intelligent, interactive and mechanical systems.
What I would like to develop is a Kinetic Cinematography which tries its best to rely only on itself both subject and object.
It can hold 1 or multiple cameras and its focus on external subject matter, beyond itself, is irrelevant or at least unimportant.
Here the aim is more on how it is filmed and what angle and direction something is filmed in. I want to focus on the kinetic qualities of cinematography without human intervention. The camera is the performer, the documentor and the spectator all at once. So what does that make us?
The self sufficiency and decision making of angles, shots, movements, starts and stops is determined by the machine itself through kinetic or articifical intelligent means.
This is a key characteristic in describing what really the system is reflecting upon. It has a dynamic gaze on itself which is likely to cause a constantly unresolved anamorphic affect.
The use of computer vision can be used here as a metaphor for vision and instinct itself, as a fundamental part of the decision making process. Vision developed as a response to light to help us creatures explore the space around us and the objects in it. But this still is progressive and by all means uncomplete. We might have reached a final state in the physical evolution of the eye in which its biological progression has reached an halt. This does not mean that our intellectual understanding of vision cannot progress and evolve.
The techincal skills I want to gain from this research are:
mechanics, motors and building kinetic structures
C++, arduino
computer vision using: openCV, maxMSP, processing
Books that have influenced me are:
Zizek, S., The Parallax View
Deleuze, G., Cinema 1 & 2
Deleuze, G., Difference and Repetition
Hansen, M., New Philosophy for New Media
Bergson, H., Creative Evolution