Aesthetic Possibility Space |
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11.5.01
Music, Society, Education Small, Christopher. Music, Society, Education: a Radical Examination of the Prophetic Function of Music in Western, Eastern, and African Cultures With its Impact on Society and its Use in Educaiton. London: J. Calder, 1977. Small, Christopher. Music, Society, Education: a Radical Examination of the Prophetic Function of Music in Western, Eastern, and African Cultures With its Impact on Society and its Use in Educaiton. London: J. Calder, 1980. Small, Christopher. Music, Society, Education: a Radical Examination of the Prophetic Function of Music in Western, Eastern, and African Cultures With its Impact on Society and its Use in Educaiton. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, c1996. The Printed Word Small, Christopher. The Printed Word: An Instrument of Popularity. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1982. Whose Music Do We Teach, Anyway? Small, Christopher. Whose Music Do We Teach, Anyway?. Washington, DC: MENC, 1990. Music of the Common Tongue Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. Auckland, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing Co., 1994. Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. London: Calder Publications, 1994. Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. New York: Riverrun Press, 1994. Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, c1998. Musicking Small, Christopher. Musicking: A Ritual in Social Space. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1995. Small, Christopher. Musicking : The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH:
Interview with Christopher Small is one of the surprisingly small number of classically identified commentators to suggest any kind of parity between popular music and the operatic-symphonic tradition. In England he was preceded by composer-academic Wilfrid Mellers (Twilight of the Gods, Music in a New Found Land) and critic Henry Pleasants (The Agony of Modern Music, Serious Music and All That Jazz). In America he was followed by Susan McClary, who eventually won a MacArthur Fellowship for championing what is called the new musicology, an endeavor influenced by Small's first book, Music, Society, Education, which explored many of the ideas she'd been thinking through in the early '80s. Small has also been a close long-distance associate of radical American ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, whose Urban Blues was the first book of rock criticism ever published. 10.5.01
http://www.musekids.org/musicking.htmlAritcle by Christopher Small on the Social and Political relationships implicit in Western Music Performance.
http://sunsite.queensu.ca/memorypalace/parlour/music.htmlContains interviews by Christopher Small--Musicking 1.5.01
16.4.01
What is it like to be a bat?
Thomas Nagel
[From The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.] 10.4.01
6.4.01
Noise : the political economy of music / Jacques Attali ; translation by Brian Massumi ; foreword by Fredric Jameson ; afterword by Susan McClary. --
Publ info Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c1985.
Music Library Stacks ML3795.A913 1985
PRE-FLUXUS CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENTS
AND GENERATIVE INFLUENCES
Chapter 1 of
Fluxus: The History Of An Attitude
Colette Gaiter is a multimedia artist and Associate Professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She can be contacted at colette_gaiter@mn.mcad.edu.
Performance Lecture
* Performance survives as a cluster of narratives, those of the watchers and of the watched, and of all those who facilitate their interaction - technicians, ushers, stage-managers, administrators. The same event is experienced, remembered, characterised in a multitude of different ways none of which appropriates singular authority. And these may constitute the traces which theatre that is not reliant upon the exposition of dramatic literature generates, the 'artefacts' it leaves behind; these, and plans, drawings, lighting plots, a handful of photographs...From the 'watched' comes the 'folklore of practice' coloured by aspiration, intention and rationalisation, preserved in memory as anecdote and analect and revealed in discussion and interview and in personal archive as diary and notebook. And from all types of watchers - first-timers, aficionados, critics - springs description, opinion, personal interpretation. Ironically perhaps, performance most often survives in the writings of critics - as reportage, article, thesis - because of their high rate of preservation in libraries and cuttings agencies. By narrative, I simply mean discrete ways of telling, some recognition of the oral nature of performance practice. But if we extend the notion of narrative to cover all orders of information generated by, and around, performance - strategic, operational, observational, critical, speculative - before, during and after the event then we might envisage documentation as requiring an integration or incorporation of these narratives. Performance might then be reconstituted as complex forms of text which integrate image, musical score, technical instructions, dialogue or as second-order performance or as installation or as...Just as performance need not resemble the exposition of dramatic literature, the performance document need not resemble the play script.
* Performance exists in and amongst these narratives. Its record will need to be adequate and appropriate, necessitating creative acts of representation. And it will need to draw upon disciplines, principles, methods and terminologies, other than those of textual analysis, to describe and document itself, approaches taken from sociology and ergonomics, architectural theory and forensic science. Yet we can neither create the authoritative record nor control its reception.
* A theatre archaeology has then the following intentions :
1] To find appropriate and useful ways of describing and documenting what is, or was, going on in performance - with performance as a totality of context, strategy and operation - and not simply the record of the words or choreography of performers.
2] To regard performance as generative of narratives produced before, during and after the event, not only as technical information but as personal experience. 'I think that it means that what we are discussing is a particular way of being attuned to performance and its traces, which involves a form of production. That is, the production of narratives which stand for the past, rather than constituting faithful replicas of the past.'(Julian Thomas)
3] To attempt a synthesis of the narratives of the watchers and watched in non-hierarchical integrations of the written and the remembered. '...polyvocality, multiple texts, fragments, postmodern ethnography and the question of who has the right to impose a metanarrative. An ethnography of performance?' (Julian Thomas)
4] To define the objects of retrieval of performance around notions of space, time, pattern and detail which orientate the attention of the narratives. This will involve discussion :
Of the genesis, delineation and formalisation of performance space and the creation of playing areas through the nature of the action, the placement of the audience and architectural and scenographic demarcation.
Of the effect of spatial restriction and configuration upon the type, nature and quality of the activity and upon the essential contracts of performance - performer to performer, performer to spectator, spectator to spectator.
Of the existence of spatial hierarchies, intensities and stratifications of activity. The reservation of particular locales.
And of the extent, volume and restriction of the 'spheres of influence' of performers and spectators alike which collide and penetrate during interpersonal contact.
And this will require map, plan, section, axonometric projection.
Of the ways in which difference time frames are manifest by performers over time and from time to time in performance, in sequence or in parallel and how they affect the nature of the activity, the expenditure of energy and the application and quality of effort. And the overall dynamic pattern of the event.
And this will require chronologies and time-bases.
Of the explicit structure of performance as set of rules, sequence, route map, montage.
Of the juxtaposition of different orders of material and styles and techniques of performance.
And this will require libretto, list, image, graph.
Of the dramaturgical detail and the equal importance of kinesic, proxemic and haptic signification: of signs, distances and body-to-body contacts. (After Marcel Mauss, it may be interesting to select a limited range of activities -walking, sitting, falling - and discuss their particular articulation, their stylistic diversification, within this performance, this genre. Equal attention might be given to the nature of meeting and physical contact.)
And this will require diagram, drawing, photograph, video.
Rise Up Like the Sun: Performance in the British Folk Club
Expectancy is especially important in folk music, for one of the primary concepts behind folk listening practices has been a 'knowledge' of historical performance 'givens' concerning levels of socio-musical democracy and de-staging; around a concept of a non-audience and an equally valid participatory listener. Performance must unfold within this spiritual mode, just as it was entangled in it 'in the beginning'. The radical 1950s concept was that of unfixing performer-audience relationships. A model performance became an inscription of cultural coherence and, together with a concept of the performer as a 'specialist', incorporated abstractions surrounding the importance of listening space [the club] and a vigilant listener/receivership [the 'folkie']. The organisation of performance space had to include the serious listeners for they were regarded as equal to the performer in every way. This is a good principle as long as the receivers do not come to dominate that space physically. If they become torpid and/or remain the most significant feature of the performance process, if their methodologies remain unchallenged by performers simply wishing to support the principles of the listening process, an aural hierarchy is created. A real democracy in performance may only persist if that democracy is constantly brought under pressure. If the democracy slips too far into the hands of the receiver, the power of the performance dialectic is diminished, thus producing a musical stalemate. Consequently the music, as a kinetic practice, ceases to reflect external challenges and pressures, adopting internal rhetoric and modes of associative and acceptable behaviour. The maintainance of stylistic listening processes becomes rigorous and strict; relationships are re-fixed. This is especially true in the case of musical movements that have expressed their culture through forms of resistance, such as the folk revival. Under these circumstances musicians have to be especially powerful if they are to alter internalisation and institutionalisation of musical reception. Dialectic processes suffer if there is no contemporary material to challenge the listener, and a long [perhaps unending] selection of traditional material perpetuates a canon. The less a performer uses contemporary material, the more the establishment remains cemented. The longer the process continues, the firmer the cement hardens so that the democracy becomes a form of musical fascism. Musical performance becomes sanctioned from the floor and the hierarchy of a folk club becomes based around that sanctioning of musical performance. Policy is dictated to a musician; limits are set on repertoire via an 'internal communality' determined by the echelon system within a club. Thus canon formations cease to assume flexibility, employing a priori points of generic departure.
Niall MacKinnon [1993] and Hazel Fairbairn [1994] have identified performance in club and session as encompassing a necessary and unique element of social identity. MacKinnon's approach is especially positive and his use of expressions such as: 'de-staging', 'destruction of performance', 'listening as engagement' and 'informal participation' are benevolent. However, if the social location and thus identity of the folk club audience has undergone important changes since the early days of the revival, performance and related strategies could be described less magnanimously [strictly regulated and musically demarcated]. MacKinnon fails to take due account of the social hierarchies that have been created via reception in a club, together with the shifting social status of his 'folkie' in society during the history of the revival. In fact he declines to regard the revival as historical [subject to mutation via social changes], deeming the folk club all-pervading in an ever-changing world - surely an illusion of disparate activity and otherness. Fairbairn, in discussing the ubiquitous session as an example of de-staged performance democracy, also fails to fully consider the social echelons involved in folk performance [related hierarchies, social mores, 'spontaneity' and expectancy]. She blithely assumes that every folkie wishes to play, when, quite clearly, many people find equal enjoyment ['crack'/'craic'] from listening. In fact Fairbairn relegates 'passive' listening beneath 'spontaneous' performance. All this, despite conceding that the session is a relatively recent construction [1940s]. Both MacKinnon and Fairbairn are typical example of internalised perspectives. This chapter offers itself as a displacement from internalised narratives.
28.3.01
Radicals of Presentation in Persistent Conversation Going forward from Northrop Frye, we derive from genre literature the idea that radicals, i.e., root characteristics, of persistent conversation exist and can help define important aspects of such conversations. We identify from longitudinal interviews with members of a distributed, computer-supported learning environment three dimensions of interactivity that revolve around speaker-audience relations. We propose three "radicals of presentation" in persistent conversation: Visibility, the means, methods, and opportunities for presentation, addressing primarily speakers' concerns with the presentation of self; Relation, the tie between speaker and audience, and among audience co-participants, addressing the speaker's concerns with the range and identity of the audience, and audience members' concerns about relations with each other; and Co-Presence, the temporal, virtual, and/or physical co-presence of speaking and listening participants, addressing concerns about being with others at the same time and place, and giving and receiving immediate feedback. We conclude with implications for social and technical design. 27.3.01
9.3.01
28.2.01
MY FINGER'S GETTING TIRED: Unencumbered Interactive Installations for the Entire Body The perspective of this paper is that the experience of interactive art should be an aesthetically pleasing experience not only for the mind, but also for the body. This goal can be obtained only when the human manipulation of an interactive system becomes physically enjoyable and also conceptually relevant. Related to the aesthetic experience of interactive art is the social situation surrounding the experience. Art forms are typically experienced by groups of people in galleries, museums, theaters and festivals. The reason for this group experience is probably related to humans being social creatures who need and enjoy interacting with each other. In contrast, most users of the World Wide Web and of CD- ROM's are probably undertaking the interactive experience while being physically alone. The remainder of this paper will expand on the unencumbered interface for the entire body, interactivity as content, and simultaneous interactivity for multiple users.
From Telematic Man to Heaven in the Net
Another contributing factor to the cognitive ease of extending your body in this telematic space is the semiotic complexity of the bed that preoccupies the mind whilst the process of sensory shift takes place almost unnoticed. The telematic communication experienced is heightened when the technology involved is secondary to the primary point of importance - being the bed - i.e. the videoconferencing technology is deemed invisible by the sign of the bed, and users are often reluctant to enter Telematic Dreaming due the potential interaction that is being signified by the bed, and in a public space. So entering and exiting Telematic Dreaming are the most uncomfortable points for the audience. After the initial embarrassment has passed the audience member lying on the bed becomes less concerned with their local body and far more concentrated on their distant telematic one - and just as hard as it was to enter, it is to exit - in breaking your concentration and returning to the concern of your local body, in a bed, surrounded by other people, in a public space. Coincidentally many people who have experienced the installation found it extremely lifting in a psychological sense - well, transcending cultural and political obstacles in western society that prevent us from embracing complete strangers, whilst avoiding the dominance of a physical body does have its benefits and appeal. 21.2.01
A study published in Science magazine claims that trained computers make better designers than untrained humans in producing creative adverts. The study found that computers programmed with procedural rules of cognative psychology produced adverts which were consistently rated by a team of experts as being better than those produced by non-professional designers. Before you get worried and change career to merkin combing, the authors also note that ads produced by professional designers were better than computers, and that the very best creativity involves a spark of randomness which cannot be built into procedures. There's more at the BBC.
20.2.01
GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM ---
One of the founding members of the Quicktime team is now the head of Generic Media, a company that hopes to help bridge incompatible streams in formats from Real, Microsoft, etc.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine: World Wide Wunderkammer.
In their new project, WonderWalker: A Global Online Wunderkammer, Walczak and Wattenberg apply this old metaphor to the Internet. The results are fascinating. WonderWalker is a visual map of icons. People create icons and lay those icons in a place that is appropriate on the map. 19.2.01
As Sherry Turkle puts it: "Many of the institutions that used to bring us together -- a main street, a union hall, a town meeting -- no longer work as before. Most people spend most of their day alone at a screen of a television or a computer. Meanwhile, social beings that we are, we are trying (as Marshall McLuhan said) to retribalize. And the computer [and new media] is playing a central role." 8/97
k.i.s.s. of the panopticon gives people a quick, user-friendly, one-stop shopping guide to new media literacy, as well as cultural/critical theory and its relationship with communications and new media, including the Internet. It might also help to get people thinking and maybe, just mebbe, provide a fresh perspective on how this stuff really affects our lives.
15.2.01
"The Brain Opera and Active Music," by Tod Machover
Thirty years ago, the great pianist and essayist Glenn Gould published an article on the future of music recording (High Fidelity, April 1966) in which he said: "In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption...The audience would be the artist and their life would be art." As someone with many of the usual "professional" music credentials, I was surprised on rediscovering Gould's article recently that my own work in music and technology has evolved in exactly this direction. In fact, I now believe that the highest priority for the coming decade or two is to create musical experiences and environments that open doors of expression and creation to anyone, anywhere, anytime. To accomplish this without producing numbing background music - but music that enhances the senses and stimulates the mind - is the real trick! I believe that such "active music" could be one of our most powerful tools for discovering the unity and coherence that underlies the chaos and complexity of everyday life.
My view of technology has always been that it should respond to human intentions, rather than simulate or replace them, and I started developing Hyperinstruments at the MIT Media Lab in 1985 towards this end. The first generation of hyperinstruments was designed for virtuosic professional musicians, such as Yo-Yo Ma. These hyperinstruments measured many nuances of performance expression, using this information to enhance and expand the instrument's capabilities. Starting in 1991, we began building hyperinstruments for non-professional music lovers. Our Joystick Music system allows a piece of music to be steered, modified, and shaped by manipulating two videogame joysticks. A Sensor Chair, designed for magicians Penn & Teller, uses an invisible electric field to detect body motion and turn it into sound. Such instruments are easy to learn but difficult to master, with enough depth to make them worth practicing and exploring.
5.2.01
Warren Neidich: Deconstructing The Infotainment Machine
Artist Warren Neidich began to reach a widespread audience with the publication of "American History Reinvented" by Aperture Press in 1989. To examine the way that photography generates our ideas about history, he had actors dress up in historical costumes from different periods and re-enact tableaux, which he photographed. For one series, he employed historical data about the existence of middle-class communities of color throughout Long Island, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century, startling viewers who knew nothing about this hidden history. For another series related to Japanese-Americans in relocation camps, he appropriated vintage news images and their original accompanying texts. A picture of women playing softball in white starched blouses was accompanied, for instance, by an interpretive caption proclaiming that the new lives of the interned showed that they "were still swinging at the wild ones." En masse, the works in this series are slyly disturbing meditations on power.
A cultural and historical commentator, Neidich, not surprisingly, soon turned his attention more directly to the mass media. In 1995 he created an extensive series of photographs about the physical and ideological apparatus of the media's saturation coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial-cum-spectacle, work which has lately been generating renewed interest through a number of international exhibitions. Far from an extended diatribe, the series' allusive title — "Beyond The Vanishing Point" — points to both the transformation of the media's mission from the presentation of news to the production of entertainment and to the physiological basis of seeing. (Neidich is a former ophthalmologist and neurological researcher.) Thirty of these handsome images will be exhibited February 22-April 28 at the Gandy Gallery in Prague. MediaChannel Media Arts editor Robert Atkins recently spoke with Neidich about media, culture and cognitive science. Robert Atkins: Has the mass media subsumed everything we think of as culture today? Warren Neidich: That's a big question. Let's begin by defining a few terms. First of all, there is a culture of the media. By this I mean that there is a set of sociological, economic, political and technological relations that interact to create the media itself. They constrain, maintain and derange the traditional notion of "news." Secondly everything is so porous now. The boundaries of disciplines — including art — have become more and more fuzzy in our postmodern world. Let's look at art. Whether we look at it in the modern way, as a developmental process in which the object moves through different forms related to its predecessors, or we take a more current view of development as a series of starts and stops, jumps forward and switchbacks into an indefinite open model isn't important. RA: Why not?
WN: The fact that artists are affected by the history of art lays a groundwork for a separate culture. Consider the Surrealists. In the past what they were doing interested a small group of insiders — viewers, patrons and critics. The effect of Surrealism was powerful, but it took years to diffuse out into the general public. Today the situation is quite different. What is in the galleries one day is on MTV the next. Madonna is a perfect example of an artist who borrows from visual art, encodes it into a digestible form and disseminates it through culture. A recent Diesel clothing catalogue featured a model squirting water out of his mouth as Bruce Nauman did for his "Artist as Fountain," which had been inspired by Duchamp. Today I saw artist Sarah Lucas' "Cantaloupes" adorning bus shelters. The point is that what was once a long process has become simultaneous. This is one reason that art is considered so dangerous by right-wingers in the United States. Its effects are felt in the culture at large through its instantaneous dissemination. RA: Let's turn to your work. You had a recent show of photos at the Bayly Museum in Virginia called "Camp O.J.," which will soon be seen in Prague. What was that about? WN: "Camp O.J." is many things. I think you have to understand the accidental way I got there first. I was making a work entitled, "Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media and Myth in America." I'd decided to follow Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac's main character in "On the Road," on a journey across America. With the book as my guide I drove the same route to see how the postwar myth of the "on the road experience" had shifted. For instance, there really aren't any hitchhikers anymore, the two-lane highway has become the six-lane superhighway, the small towns have been replaced by shopping malls. But if you get off the new highway and onto the older route, you're confronted by the eerie feeling of emptiness and abandonment on a road dotted with billboards in disrepair. Without getting nostalgic for something I never knew myself, the experience seemed almost virtual. That is, perhaps the superhighway of the online experience was replacing the material world with the immaterial. At the end of my trip, I mistakenly came upon "Camp O.J." [the mini-city base camp of reporters covering the O.J. Simpson murder trial] while driving — lost — through downtown Los Angeles. I was awe-struck by the media encampment. As I got out of my car I swooned and experienced a kind of vertigo as I tried to take in the whole site. It was like I had come across a huge mountain range emerging out of a flat plane, and it took my breath away. As an artist I knew I had to make a piece here. RA: How did you proceed?
WN: Like every project it went through changes. At first I was interested in the platforms, the lighting and all the apparatus that seemed borrowed from movie production and rock 'n' roll concerts. I felt that there had to be a link between the machines that determine the possibility of cinema and those that determine media. I was interested in the technological advances in the production of cinema and its early roots in 19th-century Zootrope, phenakistascope and the like. I was also interested in all the things in a picture that we normally don't pay attention to — the "latent" images and forms and content, to borrow a term from Freud. Standing in front of the great media complex of Camp O.J. one could only imagine the Erector Set parapets as a kind of architecture of a media unconscious. A flimsy construct of relations ready to tumble down. I was there for four months, and what eventually became the focus of the work grew out of my initial impressions. I became aware that the O.J. Simpson trial had another life beyond the culture of media as it was expressed in the physical site that was Camp O.J. The life of the story was growing and glowing on the millions of TV sets that were transmitting the story to the millions of onlookers. Part morality play and part docudrama, OJ was now competing with soap operas for America's attention. News had morphed into entertainment. RA: But was that really so new in 1995? In 2001, it certainly seems like a commonplace. WN: I think Camp O.J. was a pivotal moment in pushing the envelope of acceptance. It wasn't the first instance of this intensive media scrutiny. The Gulf War and the emergence of CNN's 24-7 operation and the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building were antecedents. But in those situations, the traditional definition of news was upheld. The media still acted on the post–VietnamWar myth of itself as the fourth branch of American government alongside the Supreme Court, the congress and the presidency — a delicate game of checks and balances. Somehow all this changed as the media became complicitous with the event itself, driving it forward in the ever consuming desire for ratings. RA: So you see the creation of the news-entertainment spectacle as a product of the mid-nineties? WN: Exactly. No longer ashamed of its ties to money, prestige, power and global capitalism, the media was transformed by entertainment conglomerates into a global influence machine that advertiser would pay big money to be part of. The ever evolving infotainment genre of "Entertainment Tonight," with its factious focus on stardom, competed with the straight news programs for the small bits of information emerging from the Jell-O–slow, O.J. trial. The straight news programs mutated as well, and soon Geraldo Rivera was acting like an anchor man. And there's a personal side to this, of course. I was at a party the other night, and a young artist was discussing "generational" differences between herself and her ex-boyfriend, who was 15 years older. They had a whole different set of memories that had to do with television programs, teen shows, cartoons, even favorite advertisements. The construction of her subjectivity was completely different than his. I call this system of networked relations "inter-pop-ular" relations, as they bind members of the same generation together. These generation-specific memories also affect the kind of art that this artist produces. For example, gestalt psychology is used by media and entertainment to create more provocative imagery to enlist the consumer's gaze. Artists, whether or not they even know anything about gestalt psychology, unconsciously learn these strategies from advertising or from other artists' work. RA: So the artist is another audience being targeted by the infotainment makers? WN: Well, at least they're being affected, like everybody else. The audience that is responsive to the kind of art we're talking about is also specific and responds to the strategies and symbols of this generational discourse. The aesthetic of Silverado Levis ads and Wired Magazine is aimed at one part of the e-audience. Targeted audiences are nothing new, but this is different in the sense that this phenomenon is not predicated on narrative and symbolic fetishes but actual stylistic formations — some would say ideologies — that are embodied in software like Photoshop, which constructs space in the limited field of the LCD screen and programs the viewer. Notice I said "programs the viewer." Never before has a tool like this been used so broadly in the aesthetic and commercial realms. RA: If you're not Madonna or Damien Hirst it takes a while to get work exhibited or re-exhibited. What have you been doing since "O.J."? WN: I did the "Camp O.J." series about six years ago, and since then I have been interested in what I call "The Cultured Brain." This work came out of my desire to embrace my background as a research fellow in neurobiology and as a medical doctor who specialized in ophthalmology. Prior to 1997 I had always focused my work on cultural criticism and cultural history. After "O.J.," I decided that by bringing these two interests together I might be able to make something very special. At my recent exhibit, "Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media and Myth in America," I tried to do this. I painted the gallery space at the Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville with three-inch-wide black and white stripes. This created an optical illusion in which the viewer the stripes move and undulate. Neurobiologists, using gradients not unlike these stripes as tests, have come to believe that this is caused by the way the visual cortex, that part of the brain used for seeing, processes this kind of information. At the same time, the stripes also have art historical references. On one hand they relate to the optical paintings of Bridget Riley and on the other to the Situationist strategies of Daniel Buren, who painted abstract stripes on walls to debunk ideas about art's secular nature. When you walked into the Bayly space you had to look at the photographs because the wall was visually swimming and disorienting. This forced attention is a metaphor for the way that media constructs what we look at and makes us look at it. And the exhibition space itself is ideological, or at least value-laden, if you consider its history and function as a repository and display for artworks and artifacts. So the stripes of the neurobiology laboratory become part of the history of aesthetic devices, like perspective, which illuminate and determine how we see. RA: So it's not just the odd coupling of media and art but a ménage with cognitive neuroscience, as well. WN: Exactly. 26.11.00
19.11.00
9.11.00
We are going to present the Open Source solution for live QuickTime streaming on the PC machine, under Windows or Linux operating system. Live streaming solution for Macintosh is very well known and available as a commercial video codec (and proprietary)
Sorensen video. 22.10.00
Mark Madel is a conceptual artist who has been producing interactive electronic objects and software since 1980. Throughout his work, Madel has charted shifts in the social value and context of art objects brought on by the information age, as well as transformations in the interrelationships of people and technology. Exhibitions in the USA and Europe since 1982. He currently lives, works, teaches, and kills time in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 12.10.00
Links to 3D and Spatial Sound related resources on the Web. Reference, Research, Educational,Tools, People, Commercial Systems and Products. Links to other 3D related and general Audio Lists and Patent Resources
streamingserver.org
is your one-stop site for information about Streaming Media Servers and
information. We will keep you up to date with information about your choices in providing streaming media to your visitors. 4.10.00
from Interview with Boris Groys archived here by geert lovink
I try to show that every cultural product is an explanation of its own presence and multiplication in the first place. So I practice some philosophical, phenomenological epoch. It is a very traditional gesture, indeed. But this gesture seems to me to be most appropriate for the investigation of the cultural movements in the open space. Until recently I was preoccupied with the processes taking place in closed spaces like the museum. In that case, it is possible to formulate a theory because there is a institutionally secured position for the external observer of the cultural processes. In open spaces, there is no such secured position. This is why the phenomenological epoch becomes necessary. It is a way to introduce a position of a spectator into a field where this position is not given from the beginning. Topics like trans-humanism, trans-gender or body-machine do not interest me in this particular context because these discourses believe to have answered the question "What is behind being human" in a very traditional way of "crossing the borders" between the human and non-human. That is, of course, O.K. But the question of the spectator remains open here. Is this spectator human, or non-human, or placed beyond this opposition? And in any of these cases - how does this spectator knows about his or her own position in relationship to this opposition between human and non-human? The only way to know such things is to believe in your own theoretical discourse. But I cannot believe in my own theoretical discourse - and I also cannot believe in any other theoretical discourse. So the only way for me is just to investigate why, how and under which conditions other people believe in various theoretical discourses. 3.10.00
1.10.00
+ the electrica site (http://electrica.leonid.de): interesting interfaces and
use of the Beatnik audio format, which allows for very high quality and yet
highly compressed audio files. This has nothing to do with the streaming
elements of your project, but it could be useful for thinking about interface
design (particularly, looking at the "Resonator: Drag and Drop tonalities"
section). 29.9.00
Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative SystemsSteve Harrison* and Paul Dourish+ Abstract Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of ``space'' and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between ``space'' and ``place''. While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of ``place'' which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how ``place'', rather than ``space'', can support CSCW design. esp. Check out section 8 "Hybrid Spaces" http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/members/dourish/papers/place-paper.html22.9.00
Angela-
Please take a look at this mac-based game. The interface is the kind of thing that I was envisioning with my piece. A very bare-bones, virtual-reality kind of thing.
from http://www.lab404.com/dan/
Where to look for fresh design ideas: These experimental styles are already pervading the web design community. As surfers become more used to the web; irony, humor, and self-deprecation will become valuable marketing assets. Many TV commercials these days mock the fact that they are TV commercials. Many of these experimental sites do the same, taking the limitations of the web, and exploiting them rather than trying to mask them. The results are hip and refreshing. Lets take a look at the near future...
B. Wireframe Icon School:
C. Lo-Fi Grunge School:
D. Paper Bag School:
E. Mondrian Poster School:
F. Pixelated Punk Rock School:
G. 1950's Hello Kitty School:
H. HTMinimaLism School:
I. Drafting Table/ Instruction Manual School:
J. SuperTiny SimCity School:
"Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign." Paul Valery 16.9.00
from The next wave of format by Art Kleiner Television, for its success, depended (and depends) on the half-hour slot, the situation comedy, the studio audience, and the game show formats. If television show runners had to invent new formats all the time, they would be too exhausted to conduct their real work: portraying something meaningful about human relationships. (To be sure, they don't succeed very often, but 90% of everything is crap, after all, and when they do succeed, they succeed very well.) Fine art depends on the rectangular canvas and the gallery track lights; performance art exists, in part as a way of tweaking the established format that makes it easy to be an audience for fine art. But even performance art had to develop its own formats, including the willingness to occur at a particular time and place. Node of Access Grid in Boulder, CONational Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
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from interview with Igor Stromajer, Aug. 2. 2000 by josephine bosma archived at: http://www.nettime.org
JB: How long have you been making net art? Igor Stromajer: Since 1996. That is when I first saw the net at a friend's appartment. I am a theatre director by education, and at that time I had been working in a theatre for three years. I found out that theatre is not the right medium for me. I wanted my work to be more intimate. I wanted to be very personal. I wanted to go one to one in artistic communication and I couldn't do it in the theatre. Maybe I did not know how, or the theatre is just not the right place for this. When you are part of a theatre audience you are sitting in the darkness usually, depending on the type of theatre, and nobody cares about you. If you would not be there at this performance, then someone else would be at your place, but the performance would be the same. When I discovered that the internet is much more intimate then the theatre I knew it was the right medium for me. Here I can talk one to one: me as a creator of something on the net, and the person sitting behind the computer somewhere is usually sitting there alone. JB: Does it in this case matter then who is behind the computer, who is the audience? IS: It matters that the audience is a single person. As a single person you can go through the project as you like it: with the speed you like, the options you like, you exit the project and come back the next day... you very much decide how you watch the project. As a group audience you do not have this opportunity. JB: What do you think of internet art works exhibited in larger spaces then? IS: As far as I have experience it I do not like it. I think that virtual or digital art should stay on the net. There is no need to put it in a gallery or real space, because it has nothing to do with it. You can -translate- the work though. I was trying to translate a net art piece into the real space when I was singing the HTML structure of one of my projects. That is what I would call a translation of one medium to another, but you have to keep in mind it is just a translation: you then have two seperate pieces which are completely independent. JB: That is how you see it: that they are independent. It does not sound very independent to me... IS: A net art piece or any other art piece could be just an inspiration to do another work of art. The translation made the project so different that only the basic topic was the same: a kind of intimate communication. Otherwise all the structures I used for the singing and everything else was completely different. I think the people who view notions that the Internet is a kind of 'global brain' with suspicion are absolutely right to do so. It isn't. And the internet isn't the collective unconscious either - or even a manifestation of it. So I personally don't view these ideas on the relationship bewteen psychology and the internet as mystical at all. The Psychic Interface text was finished in 1998 and the ideas stemmed from 1996-97 when I was at the ICA in London in a New Technologies Research Post first grappling with the internet and what kind of changes it might cause. I held onto the text, being given a cool and somewhat negative reception from people in draft versions - being and feeling very out of step with most of the dominant theoretical ideas at the time. The text seems more relevant now. To deny that the internet isn't beginning to have a psychological effect on global users is unrealsitic. The most obvious example being in the realms of sex and identity, for example. That in turn has consequences as to how individual people act and react in real daily life, what they can discuss, who they are, what they feel like and so on. Essentially they become slowly conscious of apsects of their Self, through confidence, repetition, exploration on line etc. I think the idea of a psychic interface in relation to analytical psychology is a starting point. There are psychic interfaces in all sorts of cultural products and media: architecture, art, film, music, sound and literature. The key difference with the internet is that the users relationship with the internet is ongoing, daily, not static and completly fluid. Each persons conception of what using the internet feels like, is defined by the choices they make - which sites they visit in public, which sites they visit in private, with each person defining the material they look at by a daily, shifting, on going series of choices and agendas based on need, desire or curiosity. All these choices are merely manifestations and reflections of conscious or unconscious mental activity in the user during that time. I'm a film maker and artist and I'm applying these ideas to some of my work, rather than writing about them, with all the most recent work being offline in the form of film, digital video, DVD or learning projects. Pete Gomes http://bak.spc.org/numinous19.8.00
"I am fully convinced (that), if music be not allowed to grow, if it's denied the privilege of evolution that all other arts and life have if (in the) natural processes of the ear and mind it is not allowed (to) grow bigger by finding possibilities that nature has for music, more and wider scales, new combinations of tone, new keys and more keys and beats, and phrases together -if it just sticks (as it does today) to one key, one single and easy rhythm, and the rules made to boss them - then music, before many years, cannot be composed - everything will be used up - endless repetitions of static melodies, harmonies, resolutions, and metres - and music as a creative art will die - for to compose will be but to manufacture conventionalized MUSH..." -Charles Ives (1874-1954) 7.8.00
from Swarm Smarts: Engineers Find Solutions in Ant Colonies
Heavy Lifting Another ant trick that has inspired Dorigo and Bonabeau is the way the insects team up to carry improbably large objects up steep slopes. Human movers carrying, say, a couch up a stairway might handle such a problem by talking each other through the task. But ants communicate through the object they’re carrying. "They don't exchange information directly," says Bonabeau. "Instead, if the item needs realignment, ants will sense that and reinforce the weak side." The same idea has now been applied to robots that are designed to move large boxes. The robots are able to manipulate boxes and move them efficiently without actually communicating with one another. 5.8.00
from A M E R I C A, by Jean Baudrillard (1986)
[Translated in 1988 by Chris Turner from the original in French, Amerique] ... This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it [end 35]operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition. Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen.
from Baudrillard on the New Technologies:
An interview with Claude Thibaut
Some people seem to be excited about videoconferencing. How can this desire to see each other to communicate be explained? In a real face to face encounter, there is a complex relation, in which each person is an actor at once both present and absent. In on-screen discussion, there is only an alternating presence of one and the other. Expression is more targeted, more functional and completely disembodied. It is doubtless suitable for professional kinds of conferences. No doubt, the videoconference offers the attraction of fighting against this disembodiment. It's a way of adding to the presence.. Do you think, as Monsieur Virilio does, that there are very great risks in developing the Internet? Monsieur Virilio is right that there is a risk of the subject being taken hostage, in a way, by his own tool. However, I do not see a doom-laden phenomenon there. I would side more with Leo Scheer, when he says that virtuality, being itself virtual, does not really happen. To make the network operate for the network by a machine whose end is to operate at all costs, is not to give it a will. One lives in the very Rousseauistic idea that there is in nature a good use for things that can and must be tried. I don't think that it is possible to find a politics of virtuality, a code of ethics of virtuality because virtuality virtualizes politics as well: there will be no politics of virtuality, because politics has become virtual; there will be no code of ethics of virtuality, because the code of ethics has become virtual, that is, there are no more references to a value system. I am not making a nostalgic note there: Virtuality retranscribes everything in its space; in a way, human ends vanish into thin air in virtuality. It is not a doom-laden danger in the sense of an explosion, but rather a passage through an indefinable space. A kind of radical uncertainty. One communicates, but as far as what is said, one does not know what becomes of it. This will become so obvious that there will no longer even be any problems concerning liberty or identity. There will no longer be any way for them to arise; those problems will disappear a little below the horizon. The media neutralizes everything, including, in a way, power, and virtuality itself is not able to turn itself into a political power..
from In the Post: or, the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Simulation by Brian Baker
The "post" is a mark that implies failure, particularly in self-definition, and the collapse of the "New"; a collapse, as J.G. Ballard once suggested, of the future onto the present. The proliferation of "postmodernisms"--death of the master narratives, schizophrenia, simulation, problems with space and mapping--is an attempt to define a loss, a lack. The "post" is a presence signifying an absence, a foil stopper clapped over the abyss. [...] The concept of simulation has become part of the cultural matrix. It has become part of the "'representation' of the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser 153). Althusser's formulation of Ideology was made before the universe of simulation, of course, and so he could make the distinction between "real" and "imaginary." It is the first of Baudrillard's "orders of simulation," wherein representation masks reality. Such a distinction has been problematized in the age of the "post," but here I want to insist on the economic processes of production and consumption which still negotiate our involvement with "postmodern culture." [...] Media representations are "virtual" in the sense that they have become a free-floating sign-system, Baudrillard's fourth order of simulation. This condition becomes a noun and an expression of self-identity in the phrase "I am a virtual," which is proclaimed by the digitized mask of Kirsten Geisler's Dream of Beauty 2.0. The face looks like Persis Khambatta from Star Trek: the Motion Picture, who was, ironically enough, an irresistible "Deltan" assimilated by one of humanity's own machines made go(o)d, the prodigal V-Ger. Is this a coincidence? A microphone dangles from the ceiling, and spectators are invited to speak into it to elicit a response: "ask me a short question and I will respond with a gesture." This gesture may be a pout, a wink, a smile. In this case, what does "virtual" signify? There is simulated interaction, but the participant must play the game, decode one of a finite set of pre-programmed facial movements as "communication." 3.8.00
Mutually Assured Deconstruction (((({{{¿!?}}})))) The actual space is mirrored by a virtual space--people can move through the virtual space--hear the instruments and feedback to the performers in real time. Is it essential that people only view the work remotely? Part of the idea--the democritization of the performance process--is that the musicians and audience occupy the same space at the same time. Doesn't this mean that live audience is an essential element? Can an audience inhabit a space virtually? Will there be the same degree of affect if no one is "there." Is it important that there is a there there?
from David Gelernter's The Second Coming: a Manifesto
7. "The network is the computer" — yes; but we're less interested in computers all the time. The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, not telescopes. The real topic in computing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers we use as telescopes and tuners. 8. The software systems we depend on most today are operating systems (Unix, the Macintosh OS, Windows et. al.) and browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator...). Operating systems are connectors that fasten users to computers; they attach to the computer at one end, the user at the other. Browsers fasten users to remote computers, to "servers" on the internet. Today's operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probably never did). They want to be connected to information. In the future, people are connected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos — also known as the Swarm, the Cybersphere. 34. In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today they deal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time — time made visible and concrete. Chronologies and timelines tend to be awkward in the off-computer world of paper, but they are natural online. 51. A well-designed store or public building allows you to size up the whole space from outside, or as soon as you walk in — you see immediately how things are laid out and roughly how large and deep the space is. Today's typical web site is a failure because it is opaque. You ought to be able to see immediately (not deduce or calculate) how the site is arranged, how big it is, how deep and how broad. It ought to be transparent. (For an example of a "transparent" web site, Mirror Worlds — figure 7.6.) 2.8.00
Interview with Kodwo Eshun When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form. 20.6.00
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A. Gothic Organic School: