Terms/ideas: Collage, montage, iteration, feedback, chance, indeterminacy – the use of technology in the creation of art – McLuhan’s medium is the message idea. Technology as an extension of the human senses. But, once outside the senses what can it do?
Is it a question of technology enhancing or altering perception?
Is it a question of technology affecting the creation of artistic objects/performances?
It is a question of the movement from employing technology to utilizing technology to run by itself?
Would the trajectory be from exploring these ideas philosophically and historically to hands on exploration of technology/creation?
Is this the type of project where we might be able to get a grant money to get a hold of some of the more contemporary gadgets like the viditar, kaos pad, or scrambled hacks? Something CDI might be interested in? Keenan?
I understand that there are screenwriting programs, for example, that will help shape a script according to a certain format – I am less interested in this kind of formulaic use of technology and more in the question of what I can I make it do.
Do we ask – what is this technology designed to do and what can be done with it? A laboratory class VS a seminar or lecture class? It would need to have a limited number of interested students.
Philosophical ideas:
Marshal McLuhan Walter Benjamin – The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction Landow and hypertext Vannaver Bush – As we may think Donna Haroway - Cyborgs Postmodernism – Hassan, Baudrillard, Lyotard Poststructuralism – Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari - Rhizome. A clumsy way to do this, but here is a quick definition from Todd May's Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction
Dialogism -- Plato, Prigogine and Stengers, David Bohm, Martin Buber, Bakhtin Nondualism -- Thich Nhat Hahn Psychology -- Sherry Turkle, Patricia Wallace, Carl Jung Distributed intelligence -- Roy Pea Artificial intelligence I have this great Smithsonian article on artificial bugs (one of the scientists was featured in the film Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control) Science Fiction? Heinlein's short stories are great. I am currently working through Asimov's Foundation books - which seem to be all about dialogues.
Artists/ideas:
Dziga Vertov – The Man with the Movie Camera Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Nam June Paik Bill Viola Gary Hill Laurie Anderson William Gibson – cyberpunk fiction Alvin Lucier – I am sitting in a room and music made with brain waves Steve Reich - early work like Pendulum Muisc, Come Out, and Its Gonna Rain The Flaming Lips Zaireeka William S. Burroughs – cut up Dadaists Eadweard Muybridge John Cage Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York Gustav Metzger and the idea of Auto-deconstructive art Stockhausen Samples – rap and Hip Hop Glitch The Kaos Pad The Viditar Scrambled Hacks Mimi Ito Instructors and students Christo (who seemed to fuse environment, social-mediation, process, and product)
What strikes me about Barney's work is his idea of Hypertropy - muscle develpment through resistance. His work is about tension - which seems very dialogic.
Dean, Just a quick non-sequitor -- may need to drag Rick into this. I'm wondering about calling this neo-nondualism, in the sense that this assumes there has been in the West anything like an initial nondualism! When I took my required year-long history of philosophy way back when the Greek mythopoetic era was introduced as a kind of originary scene, but I don't remember if it was labeled or associated with nondualism.
Two more additions to the artists/ideas list: Brian Eno - 77 Million Paintings: Eno Link Billy Kluver - who worked with Tinguely on Homage to NY and Cage and Cunningham on Variations V. History of Multimedia (I can't articulate the connections between all these ideas yet - but I have a sense that it exists)
The 'yet' in your parenthetical statement conveys the optimism we need here :) I think the Eno and Kluver adds are wonderful. They in turn remind me of the HASTAC organization, whose mission in part reads: " A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, and engineers, of leading researchers and nonprofit research institutions, HASTAC ("Haystack") is committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology. Our primary members are universities, supercomputing centers, grid and teragrid associations, humanities institutes, museums, libraries, and other civic institutions. Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects." At risk of being reflexive in my use of tech metaphors to talk about tech, if our aim is to in effect construct a circuitboard then having the relevant points plotted is the important part, such that we may not have connectivity until the class actually gets underway. HASTAC is online at: http://www.hastac.org/about
(Addenda: HASTAC may be a latter-day version of Kluver et al's E.A.T. organization -- Experiments in Art and Technology)
Which raises another reminder that I want to put in this text: part of the reason dialogue makes sense to me as a theme or pattern-of-points-plotted is that in a distributed tech paradigm (it seems particularly okay to use that word since we have recently met Thomas Kuhn's daughter, no?) dialogue is literally the glue that holds the paradigm together. Very different from a centralized paradigm in which the difficult thing is to get things to come unglued. So dialogue and digital media kind of grew up together as I see it, and Web 2.0/social web only represents the newest, most mature form of this ongoing, close relationship.
I am reminded of something called the Chaos Game in which you randomly generate points on a surface within a specific area. After many itterations the surface is not covered, but a pattern begins to emerge.
I have some images in my archive that overlay circuitboard imagery on a 3D map. (I just read the Eno article on Generative Art where he compares Steve Reich's early tape loop compositions with moiré patterns)I will try to dig these up and post them... I also have a very short video on the first experiments with chaos using computers at the Santa Fe Institute. Reminding myself here to post this as well...
What is frustrating, although exciting, is that I am working on an article on post-semiotics that is depositing me right at the doorstep of these course ideas. I have to resit the desire to scrap the whole article to focus on what appears in the last two paragraphs. Rarely have I had one project lead so clearly into another. For some reason music it taking my lead here, perhaps it is listening to all this Glitch stuff. But lurking behind this listening is the question of how to apply these ideas to visual and performance forms.
I'm delighted you bring the music/sound side since my archives and thinking tend towards imagery. To wit, find below a selection of the circuitboard/3D map overlay imagery mentioned above. The last image with the red cones could provide a basis for beginning to visualize at least some of what we are talking about in terms of plotting points and making note of sites of emergent order. SketchUp needs to be mentioned here; it is the Google-owned, free 3D modeling program that we may want to introduce in the class we are talking about. It's very powerful and you can do things like make 3D constructions and park them in Google Earth. So we would be into mashup-world in a way. The organic diagramming images mentioned re: Eames, etc. may also take us further into visualization, but for what it's worth here is a start/sample. (Note: the video about Santa Fe Institute mentioned above has a few too many megabytes in it to post here, so I'll have to figure out another way to hook that up)...
Thanks for posting the book Rick recommended. I am just adding a further note here that part of the 'argument' I think we can make for digital nondualism is similar to the one Sherry Turkle uses in her Life on the Screen book; namely, that digital media is an instantiation (not an argument per se) of postmodern thinking and/or (in our case) nondualism.
Banking on McLuhan's already-noted insistence that we focus on the electric ontology of media, the reality of digital media is already both something and nothing, and defies nondualism in a way. So, electrical/digital media circulates an 'argument' for nondualism but it does so in a quasi-material/quasi-cognitive, hence nondualistic way. We may look for evidence of nondualism in philosophical terms in the West and in the process blind ourselves to the nondualism right before our eyes in digital media and, beyond that, in science (which combines thought and action, mind and body). Science's nondualism may in part explain the West's deep ambivalence about it. The ambivalence about digital media seems to run in parallel.
The idea of technology as an extention of the human senses always seems (to me) to be discussed as primary (senses) and secondary (technology) - one being an extention or magnification of the other. This seemingly chronological hierarchy disolves once in use - where do my eyes end and glasses begin if this is how I now see the world? The looping back of technology as it affects the sesnes disrupts this linear process even more - in writing I now feel a bit like a cyborg since the computer - as an extention of my ability or need to communicate in written form - is now inextricably linked to how I write. In fact, when faced with having to write anything beyond fragments the "old fashioned" way - I simply can not function (this, of course could be traced to the typewriter, pen, pencil, stylus, stick). I wonder about these moments in human history when the technology so affects the process that it would be difficult to proceed without it. Ultimately the affect is not just on product, but on process.
I am also struck by the non-western influence on such things as non-dualism (and postmodernism and deconstruction).
What you write about the feedback loop reminds me of Bruce Mazlish's work. He is a historian who has written about the deep history of humans and tools, automata, etc. I put his book The Fourth Discontinuity: The co-evolution of humans and machines in the Materials list. In this book Mazlish makes an interesting argument, based mainly in anthropology, that even basic things about human evolution (pelvic structure and so forth) happened in interaction with tool-use; rather than humans 'picking up tools' as fully formed beings, the argument here is that the human form was being shaped all along by tool use. So your examples above are very pertinent, as is your pointer to the main effect on process.
RE: nondualism. I would also want to explore the ways in which art, like science, is nondualistic. If art and science are both nondualistic, I guess that leaves academics and religion as dualistic? These would be the conservatories of dualism perhaps?
This project just keeps getting more and more interesting - check out The Reactable.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the inventory of possible tools to include in the discursive space we'll be constructing for the class. I've posted a few new links in the Resources section to tools and tool-related matters.
I'm also intrigued by the possibility that we are on the cusp of a new era in working with computation, one that represents a move away from a horseless carriage approach. If Lev Manovich is right about his "principles of new media" it may be that the keyboard was, like the horseless carriage, designed to mimic or simulate a previous technology (in this case the typewriter). Manovich cites numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding as the key elements for computational technology, so the extent to which an application or interface embraces or makes these principles accessible to users and inter-operable with other applications or devices is the extent to which it takes advantage of the unique opportunities that new media provides. Arguably to a large extent many current computing applications strive to make all of the principles Manovich identifies invisible and/or inoperative. BUT we may now be seeing applications including the Kaos Pad and others that attempt to foreground the general idea that a computer may best be appreciated as a box of water with a tiny electrical charge running through it.
From your email; didn't want to lose this:
Generative Art: A technique in which the artist establishes parameters for a work, but employs a mechanical or computer driven process to randomly arrange the pieces.
Eno on Generative music: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/eno1.html
Eno cites Steve Reich’s work with increasingly out of synch tape loops on such early pieces as “It’s Gonna Rain” as the inspiration for this process. One of the first generative pieces Eno created was Discreet Music in 1975. As he points out, “I have gravitated toward situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part” (Liner notes for Discreet Music). For this piece, which Eno claims to have inhabited the roles of planner and programmer and then audience listening to the results, he set up a long delay echo system and then chose what sound to input. Basically, these pieces consist of two or more simple melodic cycles of different lengths separately repeating and overlaying each other arbitrarily. He points out, “it is a point of discipline to accept this passive role, and, for once, to ignore the tendency to play the artist by dabbling and interfering” (Liner notes for Discreet Music).
Post-digital: Post-digital is a term gradually coming into vogue to describe artistic processes that do not focus on the digital tools themselves, but ask what possibilities these tools open up artistically. It is not an abandonment of digital for analogue ideals, but like the post-semiotic, a movement from one phase to another. The term has recently been used to define a style of music that developed around the turn of the century called Glitch. This is a form that uses intentionally damaged or manipulated CDs that produce the clicks and beeps associated with malfunctioning or “skipping” disks as raw material for compositions.
Kim Cascone's article is here: http://www.earlabs.org/text/text.asp?textID=22
The widgets came up on my mac while I was reading on Derrida and the Aesthetics of Interruption and I had a thought about fragmented text. I copied a snapshot of a page of the article I was reading and pasted it onto the tile game and let the computer chop it up and rearrange it. The widget game was too small to see the result, although magnifying it made for an interesting pixelated image. So I found a game I could expand - attached is one result. Nothing special, but a generative example of Burrough's cut-up technique. It would be interesting to generate performance material this way with the intent of interpretation by actors and designers. Basically begging the question - how do you approach a jumbled text?
As an afterthought on the text jumble - it would be interesting to do the same thing with digital sound and digital video. I don't know if a program exists to do this - but it is worth looking into. I ran into a recording by Milan Knizak who worked with the Fluxus folks. He sectioned records and then glued the pieces together creating a skipping mix of sound - not unlike the glitch stuff - but like 20 years beforehand. A great application of chance to a specific technology.
Dean, I'm enjoying the experiments you are doing with text-jumble and related tools, and also enjoying getting my mind around Glitch. This particular convergence of experiments and ideas is giving rise in me to a need to construct something of a taxonomy of generative art (can't help this impulse, it's in my instructional design training :)
Idea-generation. Just thinking through this. One category or type of 'device' (could include software tools and/or procedures) seems aimed at generating initial ideas or fresh perspectives. Legend has it that Leonardo gazed at the patterns in stained walls. This would be one type of device. I like to turn a painting I am working on 90 degrees every so often because doing so jars me out of my usual patterns of looking at composition. Many visual artists look at works in progress in a mirror reflection in order to see composition and form differently and perhaps generate new directions. Arguably devices like viewfinders can be used in this way. I'm much less familiar with how poets or actors work, but perhaps text-jumble is an example of this category of device? Anyway, this is crude but I'm sure you get the point.
Elevation of process. The next type of generative device in my taxonomy might include devices that raise the values of process in a way that encompasses the value of finished/polished products. The example of Richard Diebenkorn deliberately leaving traces of 'underpainting' --traces of mistakes really in some sense although this begs the question-- is indicative of this type of generative device, wherein a full revelation of process = product. To some extent Glitch, from what little I've read and gathered from talking with you thus far, seems to live in this category. Recouping that which is routinely edited-out (whether edited by machine, by an internalized oppressor, or what have you) and including it directly in finished aesthetic objects seems to be one key. Likely there are others I'm missing. I wonder if Japanese aesthetics has terms for this. I have been told in the past that there is a Japanese term for "the beauty of worn and weathered things" -- perhaps there is process-sensitive terminology we can borrow from Japan or elsewhere?
Release of control. Finally a third category or type would be generative art that includes the device in the generation process in a kind of uncontrollable way. In other words the artist is not retriving or recouping artifacts from previously completed processes, but is rather feeding off of such artifacts in a dialogic fashion in real time so to speak, and relinquishing some control over the resulting artwork(s). I think again of Diebenkorn's work --I think he might say that he is in dialogue with the canvas and thereby is partnering with it in the creative process, yet it remains a critical difference that he has the final word in such dialogues, whereas what this latter type of generative art enacts does not even really allow for a final word. Thinking here the Eno 77 Million Paintings and beyond: the beyond being that live-feed video from randomly selected places, combined infinitely with words, sounds, images, etc. would move away from the remaining high-touch, artist-selected elements that Eno works with (namely his initial dataset of hand-painted visual elements, mixed in with a few artist-selected photographic elements). This is where I think Manovich's principles of new media might come into play. If artists are integrally using numerical representation, modularity, variability, automation, and transcoding in their work then it perhaps makes the work qualify as 'new media' rather than a part of a historical continuity of using devices to generate ideas or elevate process. The iterative part of chaos/computing still strikes me in this connection as perhaps the most essential of essential new elements because the intent and result is not to use chance as a wacky principle but rather to use sensitivity and networking/connection-making to take part in chaotically-emergent order. I tend to think the Dadaists were more about using plain-old chance, and pure deconstruction might be vulnerable to this pitfall as well unless it is connnected to some form of constructive activity. The Surrealists might be an interesting historical variant in that, via the psychoanalysis connection in part, they were not attempting to explore chance or nonsense but rather sense of a different order, which is more akin to emergent order.
I like the idea of the categories. I have been thinking about post-generative art (I can’t get the posts out of my head – I love hybrid words) and your first level – of Idea-generation – Leonardo gazing at stained walls – seems to fall into this category. The artist lets the system (computer) create sound or images as something to react to or against. This is then raw material for further artistic development. The process stage seems similar to the postmodern idea of meta-art or the inclusion of an awareness of the process in the “product.” The third level – that of relinquishing control – comes right out of the avant-garde – as you point out – Dada and Surrealism – of course with a difference of intent.
I have posted an article by Manovich on the Avant-Garde as Software. He concludes that when computers are used to create “new media” they very often create something that looks like old media – his point is that the collage and montage aspects of the avant-garde are replicated by the structure of most computer software (multiple overlapping open windows). He also states that both software and postmodernism naturalize the radical aspect of the avant-garde. I think it is for these reasons that I find the glitch idea (in sound and image) so fascinating. Disrupting, crashing, and subverting that which naturalizes the radical in art is perhaps one of the few radical gestures left – at least until that also becomes naturalized, or at least co-opted by the consumer process. This makes me wonder about the radical gesture of generative art (I am still convinced of the connections between glitch and generative art but haven’t worked them out just yet). Despite all of the technological and aesthetic development that has been made since the 1920s it is still a revolutionary gesture to give up artistic control to a system that is out of your control.
Yet there is persistent discourse about the creative process involving a kind of state of dissolution of self --as if the work resulting from a creative process is in some ways not claimable (or controllable) by the self. But what you say may still hold; relinquishing any measure of creative control to a system of any sort, technological or otherwise, remains a revolutionary gesture. In some ways Glitch may have aspects of paradox in this regard. It pursues the breakage of the systemic aspects of computing, but then re-assembles them using a different system. Creativity launches at the level of system, which is a different version in a way of programmers as the new artists.
Just a quick note: we may be able to create a direct bridge from generative art to complexity/chaos theory by talking about how computers were key to the formulation of the theory itself in the first place. In other words, it's an example wherein tools and ideas were intertwined, and in some ways the tools produced the ideas, or at least produced artifacts that made the ideas visible. Scientists in effect entered into dialogue with phenomena computers were generating, whether strange attractors, fractals, etc.
I ran into this quote in Michael Nyman’s book on Experimental Music – it seems like an apt description of generative art: “The importance of Cage’s chance methods of the early 50s, according to Dick Higgins, lay in the placing of the ‘material at one remove from the composer by allowing it to be determined by a system he determined. And the real innovation lies in the emphasis on the creation of a system’ (or process.” (page 6).
A beginning list of some of these systems of processes:
Generative – with the focus on process or system – set into motion.
Chance – See George Brecht’s pamphlet listed in the Resources section.
Indeterminacy – which inevitably seems to include the idea of compartmentalization.
Feedback – which leads toward chaotic systems.
I'm thinking also of Andy Warhols serial
images, where it's not just the variation in color combination that
makes the things purr but also the inevitable imperfections in the
silkscreening process itself that he chose to leave in (whether he
pursued these deliberately or just left them in when they occurred I
don't know).
Kandinsky says in Concerning the Spiritual in Art: "At such a time art ministers to lower needs, and is used for material ends. She seeks her substance in hard realities because she knows of nothing nobler. Objects, the reproduction of which is considered her sole aim, remain monotonously the same. The question "what?" disappears from art; only the question "how?" remains. By what method are these material objects to be reproduced? The word becomes a creed. Art has lost her soul." The "what" as opposed to the "how" seems like a major element of what we have been talking about.
I honestly think we should consider exploring these ideas from a 'Pataphysical perspective - see Shattuck pdf link in the Resources section.
Pataphysics strikes me as applicable. It also strikes me as somewhat Buddhistic. Thich Nhat Hahn writes of the goal of "moving beyond all notions" --presumably this includes moving beyond metaphysical notions.
I was thinking about this over lunch. If I had to identify a student for this class I think I would opt for one that is restless. One that is well trained, but sees the limits of that training. One that has mastered the skills in one particular area, but wants to see what else is out there. One who is frustrated by the boxes of a conservatory model. In short, I guess I I agree that chaos/complexity theory is in at the ground floor or implicate layer of gen art. What you've said before about the associative aspect of the web reflecting a natural way of thinking also applies to chaos and creativity I think: chaos just seems to provide a less 'lossy' description of creativity in its natural state than other types of systems do. Part of this may because these things call our attention to process. Somehow we notice the process of web-searching, in part maybe because it so often leads us astray or to the proverbial long way home, we can't help but notice it. Chaos similarly seems to reveal the order-within-process more so than the order of finished products. Dynamic phenomena like weather don't really finish, they just change. Along these lines we might want to add Heraclitus to our reading list to provide a Western philosophical foundation to ideas about process and change. Maybe also a bit of the Lao Tzu to provide an Eastern foundation to such things as process and change. OK - so I found a bit of info on that artist that uses wind to draw - Rikou Ueda - here http://www.1847.dk/Engelsk/arkiv/wind.htm. Here are the notes I took – kind of fragmented, but give the general idea. I have also attached a rough draft of the syllabus – feel free to change, delete, alter, add, dispute, etc anything there. It seems very draconian after the nonlinear discussion. Dates and times have a way of doing that. OK - so I love coincidences. I looked over our web conversation and in the passage on the rhizome is the term "machinic" - apparently some post-structuralist deal. I open Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus book (I bought it a while back but it is one of those things I might have for years before reading). The first part of the book is called "The Desiring Machines" - and it goes off on all kinds of machines. HMMM. I keep thinking about this idea and even though D&G make a point of describing the human as a machine that breaths, heats, eats, shits and fucks - it is the external almost completely objective nature of the machine that I like. To describe art with machinic terms seems to remove the passion - the romantic allure - all the slippery stuff that no one wants to talk about but just "feel." But the machinic approach allows you to take a step back and discuss structure, construction, functionality - even to the point of addressing emotion. I mean, honestly, aren't Hollywood action movies just adrenalin machines? Aren't Hallmark cards just "aww" machines? Aren't pop songs just rhythm machines? I have used architecture as a metaphor in the past to discuss structure - but never machines. I like the machine idea so much better because it is both fixed (it has an essence) AND it moves though time. HMMM - I got some thinkin to do over the break. I agree completely that 'machine' is one of our sparkplugs if you will. It's a very rich metaphor. I'm recalling that little chaos movie-clip I'm so fond of --the one where the guy describes how just putting just three items in interaction can generate an entire world. 'Machine' would seem to be one of our three items. 'Generative' might be another. 'Sample' might be another. This is where I am kind of headed with one of the diagrams for a visual of syllabus. We start up our engine and then add fuel of various kinds depending on how the thing runs. We just need pools of various kinds of fuel. I have been pondering the idea of “machines” – I have a growing list but will wait to post until after the first class as I am sure it will continue to grow. However, in looking over Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus I ran into this quote about Levi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage: “the possession of a stock of materials or of rules of thumb that are fairly extensive, though more or less a hodgepodge – multiple and at the same time limited; the ability to rearrange fragments continually in new and different patterns or configurations; and as a consequence, an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result achieved. For Levi-Strauss (The Savage Mind, 17), “the bricouleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with whatever is at hand.” I am not sure how, but this seems to relate to generative art and the idea of building machines. The idea of machines – based on reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.“Machine” is not merely a metaphor but a process. One of the things I wonder about regarding Generative Art is whether the idea of unresolved tension(s) is central. Is this what causes the interest – the process of simply watching? It is not merely about what happens next or what happens if I do this, but the fact that these type of works do not fit neatly into a little pre-planned narrative package. So – Steve Reich sets two tape loops running against each other. They go out of phase and create aural tension. Eno does the same thing with short loops that occasionally come back into synch. His pictures in 77 Million Paintings do not re-synch. Collage is built on tension. Barney’s work is all about tension. Even those little robot bugs are about tension. Hmm – I am still a wondering. |
|
|
Archived Conversation |
