Integration as an Art?

The Metaelastic Fantastic

2006-12-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

I just received my new computer last Friday, and a program I found very enlightening was Photo Booth. With the morphing effects in this program, an immediate body affect distortion appears ( aided by camera in the new Macs). The following is the work completed using this technology I call the Metaelastic Fantastic. The video portrays a character who has observed and absorbed enough to become metaelastic ( a condition easily excited by technological stimuli. Will his condition worsen, or is there already a cure in the works? Only time....and CSI reruns.... will tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5NdUxp-QE

Interviews with Earl Schneider

2006-12-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

Using the alternative personality of the homocidal killer Earl, I attempt to use the body in conjunction with violent video games in order to create a dialouge of what is real and the virtual, and how often the two uncannily converge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRrzOWhp53k

Body Affect Scrubbing "Tea Ceremony"

2006-12-12T19:20:00.000-08:00

This first attempt works with the scrubbing or manual movement of a video timeline, creating a frightenly errie tea ceremony, where ritual and flow are prized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwfA8QcALj4

I'm afraid I can't allow you to do that Mark Hansen

2006-10-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

Didn’t HAL 9000 have a persona engineered so that his human crew could interface with him more conveniently? The digital face, the polygonal avatar, or, to draw on mythology, the sage or guide. These new interfaces will most certainly be a common interface in succeeding generations. From our digital evolution from the simple, yet effective, command line, to the GUI (Graphic User Interface) we use in our ever passing present, we constantly need to connect to our impeccable idiots, and this need will increase exponentially until we attain a perfect sync. Aspects of faciality and the affected viewer intrigued me more than the digital prosthesis in chapter three. The DFI in Geisler’s Dream of Beauty 2.0 used the human face to effectively demonstrate the true benign aloofness of the digital. In a world where futuristic mediated images of computers destroying their weak counterpart, Geisier uses the synthetic human to disarm and show that the data is indifferent, waiting for the user/body to interact and give it purpose and structure. Hansen is very perceptive when seeing that this new DFI will bring a human closer to the computer by connecting to a “preverbal” interaction, where it becomes primal, to connect on digitally mediated visceral reaction…. The affect.

In chapter three, I found the idea of the digital prosthesis to be an interesting method of manipulating the sensory perceptions of both the tangible and digital. Yet when I go to a friend’s house who owns a game system, they embody this joystick and headset to fully immerse themselves in a screen usually no bigger than 30”. For them the world has melted away and there is only the interactive digital cave. Do the works of Jeffery Shaw, once cutting edge, now just another new standard of modern living?

Here is a cool new technology that may help facilitate the DFI.

The Body and information: the Dual Processor

2006-10-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

In our reading of New Philosophy for new media, All is rather right on track with how I have been percieving our escallation to the brave new world of digital. One of my initial thoughts was that Kittler is full of it (both himself and his ideas). The moment I read his formulation that information will soon be independent of the human element, alarm bells inside my head began to go off. I am more inclined to believe Hansen's thesis where the body/mind are key components to the process and processing of digital information. I have overheard tech news wires claiming that the human brain will be digitally mapped in the next few years, yet in many ways this is placing a square peg in a round hole. Our cognitive function and critical thinking comes from our relation to stimuli. I definitely touched the hot plate at my favorite mexican restaurant several times before the pattern solidified in my mind. I believe if the brain is digitally mapped and attempted to create software/hardware to mimic cognitive functions, the early test will end up in the virtual brain's insanity due to lack of stimuli to justify the responses. I feel that one day we will perfect a digital system that will mimic several functions of the cognitive brain, but it still will lack the nuance and structure to be equal to human functions. Returning to Hansen, I believe the cyborg ( the dual processor of organic/mechanic) is the most logical step to accomplish this fusion of wills. The computer today helps us understand the world in ways we could never imagine two decades ago, but without the will of the engineer/programmer, these impecable idiots would not know what to look for.
To tie this back into art, the computer and digital are new media able to change stucture and dimension at will, but there has to be a cognitive will to change it, even random fluctuations in form are pre-programmed in order to have the appearance of random. Even with quantum computing on the horizon, what is considered random, will in fact based on a mathmatical formula (only to grand to master alone). The human affect will most assuredly be apart of the complete package for both art and information processing, and though organic will still be in the loop, and backed up by Francisco Varela, the brain has an almost infinite ability to adapt to new stimuli, despite it being illusion or varied from our general operating standards of reality. SO FUCKING BRING IT ON, OUR BRAINS CAN HANDLE IT!

Un"Real Time", and how we kinda stop caring

2006-10-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

One thing that was overlooked in the reading in relation to the zenoscope and optical illusions, is how they have advanced in recent years not becoming instruments of spinning to illicit movement, but rather patterns catered to the human brain itself, and where the movement only takes place in the nuronal pathways of the brain. Here is a good site to see some of these illusions

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

This really becomes a centeral core of simulacrae, how the external machine only aids in manipulating the mind to complete the connection. Our simulators have gone great lenghts to create this REAL TIME. The reading placed everything in the context of the photomechanical in order to create the REAL TIME situations. But what was not taken into account is the nature of fast processors creating animation so lifelike and an can render almost instantaneously. This rendering of hyperreal computer animated enviroments will most likely be the catylist for Virtual REALTIME enviroments. Heres is a good example of this technology today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DetnKgOxrSI

In the end REAL TIME is a specious buzz word that never truly takes place. The closest thing to REAL TIME is the moment when our individual brain processes the stimulae, therefore when a group is watching a vivid world on Plasma TV all our REAL TIMEs are out of sync and happen whenever they do. So in the end there is a hyperreal element and a warping of time in every unique worldview, and yet we, as a culture chose to not care anymore. Our interface with computers and the photomechanical process has made us sceptical of its authenticity, but after accepting its farce, agrees not to care, and emerse themselves in it anyway. This acceptance is already taking over. Go buy a XBOX 360 and melt with its detail of the worlds. Go to an arcade and play one of the dancing games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hz8gQlkiFA

At the end, due to our acknowledgement of the malipulation, we decide to let go and make it our reality anyway.

A Brief Moment on TIme

2006-09-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

As I write this at 130 in the morning after a hard day’s night, it occurs to me that TimeCode accentuates the preciousness of time, and how it is uniquely our own yet shared universally. Time code also delves into the nature of time-space location, and how the intersecting of timelines gives us, at moments, the shared experience of time, then quickly returning us to our isolated time. As this work takes us through the world of movie production and its operating procedure, this is merely surface. It is simply about time, time shared, time spent in contemplation, time promised, time squandered, time stolen away, time lost, and ultimately time forcefully taken.
In the bustle of Los Angeles Film industry time is warped. Deadlines, meetings, schedules, thousands of individuals spending their time in order to create new time, a warped malleable time in the form of celluloid, possibly to be themselves .....timeless. Yet Borges reminds us that the timelessness of legend is futile.... because his pages could not save him. Our cognitive time is both precious and fleeting, and in the end of the film, the head producer comes to the end where his movies ultimately do not save him.
As my dog, Sammy, is nearing the end of her time due to cancer, time is being perceived in a dread realization. When time is firmly set you begin to measure it in ounces, its preciousness is dumbfounding and its inevitability deafening. Cognitive time is all we have. We frenetically organize it and take great steps to struggle against its end, yet it still seems to remain abstract only until it ceases.

Bruce Nauman, A man of few Words

2006-09-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

Reading "Please pay attention please", demonstrating interviews and personal writings concerning Bruce Nauman's work still remains illusive to me. As his puns and word usage, you can wrap your brain around only a section of it, with another part still just out of reach. It is interesting to see that one of Nauman's major influences was the writing of Ludwidg Wittgenstein, a Viennese philosopher that was concerned with language and how systems of communication illuminate/obfuscate the physical systems associated with them. These concepts of language systems, illuminating and obfuscating the environment is prevalent in much of Nauman's work. Nauman's use of media is also intriguing. Although he started off as a painter in Wisconsin, his loyalty to one media is nonexistent. He incorporates all media in order to propel the concept, and uses the most apt material to complete the concept of the piece. Certain performance pieces are done solely by the gallery, where Nauman calls in the instructions of models and performers, to video pieces of himself performing acts in relation to the environment, and then execute sculptural pieces like "From Hand to mouth" which is wax forming only the hand/neck/arm of the artist, a very disjointed body piece. Interviews I have read by the artist suggest that in most of his physical work in the gallery, Nauman prefers to force the viewer to envision his art, designing the space in order for the individual to not make their own art out the piece (i.e. when in a Nauman space, you are a part of his art not your own).
Words. A word. the word. the good word. Your words. My words. Nauman is interested in addressing the mode of communication we all share, even though have not standardized. His use of words become an exercise in the futile, and the nature of meaning/ or sometimes lack of, behind them. In his more recent video works " I talk You listen", the audience is surrounded by video screens of various people of all backgrounds addressing the viewer by saying permutations of " I will talk, and you will listen" or " You listen and then I will talk" and on and on. The work becomes less of what they are saying and focuses more on how it is said. Some are fairly passive request, while others seem to be very violent in nature. Once the structure of language is broken down, only intention remains. Despite the various media employed in Nauman's work, the prevailing idea of language and words always rises to the top. Some works are simply neon lights with words suggesting or commanding. Nauman's Permutation of grammar reminds me of the work of Gertrude Stein. Although I have had limited exposure to Stein's work, language and the permutation of grammar to synthesize new meaning is dominant in her work as well. Through basic grammar structure and sentencing, it seems that Nauman attempts to stimulate new meaning out of permutation, and sometimes discovering that content and meaning does not exist. His work, like his word games, contain limited illumination, followed by the un-namable or indefinable, the area where words eventually fail.

The Constant Search for the Tangible Non-Linear

2006-09-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

After reading all four articles, a prevailing theme of the non linear became apparent. While Burroughs decided to use paper and scissors, laboriously re-editing previous texts to create new structure, Sukenick demonstrates that the computer and its access to a network creates a new dynamic in which we all (or some) have made our primary means of creativity and communication. Sukenick illuminates the important shift of how we perceive and organize information. Unlike Burroughs, the computer is more an electronic gateway, acting like a scribe, in which we all can reconfigure and re-edit the content with little to no consequence. When it is in this world, nothing is concrete. I have the ability to morph and reconfigure until we reach the technotone of the printer. I refer to technotone as the physical gateway between the digital and the tangible.

So, does the computer and digital technology make us better/ more efficient artist? I say yes to the latter of the two, but very few have yet to exploit the new media in order to accomplish concept. Perhaps it is just still too new. I recently heard (I do not remember the author) that the dynamic is that technology is first invented, then the human element forms to its inherent properties. The Arpanet (the original prototype of the internet) was simply a way for computers to interact with each other. Seeing an interview with one of the original inventors of the Arpanet, it seemed that his aspirations for this emerging technology was rather limited, yet look what the mustard seed has produced.

All three writers shared an inherit desire for the non linear. Non linear seems to be a dream for many avant-guard artist and writers, perhaps because it more accurately mimics the cognitive functions of the human brain. Burroughs had to physically perform non linear editing, while Borges had to compartmentalize his psyche. Did these artist have a premonition of what was to come, or did computerization fill an inherit need of the human. The human brain, in all its complexity, still has raw data limitations. The brain can creatively problem solve, understand and reconfigure complex ideas, whereas the computer is an impeccable idiot. It will do nothing unless we precisely tell it what to do with mere 1/0’s. The digital, through its raw, undeniable logic, has however aided us in its sheer abstractness. Graphical concepts which usually are worked in the mind or on paper, has the ability to manifest itself in a crystal clear, but transitional stage, waiting to be reconfigured with the stroke of a key an a print command. The brain perceives and navigates through raw experience, while the computer is birthed in pure logic, yet we see the two slowly and slightly converging. Is the computer the aspect of our brain we had to Self-forge in order to compliment the human brain/experience? Will the ones and zeros ultimately save us, where Borges pages could not himself?

Another electric birthing..Hello Cuel World!

2006-09-04T23:16:00.000-07:00

Another digital baby is birthed! It is a child! After it stops crapping itself, and can exist on solid food, it will be a gateway into the future.