"Experimental artist Tony Conrad is known for his innovative works in performance art, music, video, and fine art as well as his contribution to arts education as a longtime media professor at The University of Buffalo. A former Harvard math student himself, Conrad is widely considered to be a pioneer of minimalism, media criticism, drone pop, and noise music thanks to his lifelong dedication to deconstruction, abstraction, and self-empowerment."
(Erin Dennison, cinemathread)
"In the early twentieth century, Suprematism represented a leap into a totally non–representational, non–painterly, tarantella–like dynamic. Basic geometric shapes, isolated or in groups, were being energized, propelled into an optimistic ideal soaring from lower left to upper right, the vector alone suggesting time. The limits of perception and understanding are being questioned. An aura of simultaneous ecstatic concentration and idolatry of the will pervades these works.
Experienced 'in flesh,' these formidable abstractions look 'humanized': slight wavings in texture and color, the crackled paint of the Black Square on white, the subtlest of whites upon off–whites, transport the viewer into a higher, supremely charged, inspirational state of mind."
(Ileana Marcoulesco, Art Lies)
Fig.1 Kazimir Malevich (1915) "Black Circle", "Black Cross" and "Black Square"
"We first got the chance to ascend into Nosaj Thing's sonic dreamworld at our The Creators Project: New York 2011, where he performed alongside some fittingly fantastical installations like Zigelbaum + Coelho's Six–Forty by Four–Eighty and Team Dis–Kinect's motion–mimicking puppet. Engaged in a subtle dance with his MPD32, Nosaj wove together a pounding, wistful set before projected visuals. As surreal as that live experience was, its visual component is nothing compared to what technology artist Daito Manabe has accomplished for Nosaj Thing's 'Eclipse/Blue.'
With support from The Creators Project, and collaborating with Perfume choreographer MIKIKO, Manabe created a dynamic virtual environment to serve as the backdrop for two dancers whose movements across the stage are amplified by the graphics behind them, making each action feel larger and more emotive."
(The Creators Project)
"Famous Turkish sculptor İlhan Koman's boat Hulda arrives in İstanbul, its final destination, after its long journey which began in Stockholm. Hulda was both Koman's home and studio during his residence in Stockholm.
The exhibition consists of the photographs and videos from Hulda's journey, 10 original sculptures such as Whirlpool and Dervish by İlhan Koman and a video –dedicated to İlhan Koman– by young artist Candaş Şişman. The photographs and videos are from the cities Hulda visited during its journey –Stockholm, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Barcelona, Naples, Malta, Thessalonica and İstanbul. The exhibition in Plato Art Space is also the final leg of the activities of Hulda Festival (www.huldafestival.org).
The exhibition is also undertaking the mission of building a bridge between young generation artists and Koman by presenting Candaş Şişman's work. Şişman's video Flux is influenced by Koman's sculptures (Pi, Moebius, Whirlpool and Ogre) and is dedicated to İlhan Koman's inspiring art. The video has a sound design which is also inspired by the materials of Koman's sculptures and is produced by Candaş Şişman.
The exhibition is curated by Yıldırım Arıcı and accompanied by a reader (published by Plato College of Higher Education) and it is featuring texts by Çetin Kanra, Aykut Köksal, Abidin Dino, Ferit Edgü, Burcu Beşlioğlu and a poem by Oktay Rıfat. "
(Plato Art Space, İstanbul contemporary art)
Fig.1 "Flux", Candaş Şişman, Hulda Festival 21 September 2010 – 23 November 2010 İstanbul, Turkey.
"Karlheinz Stockhausen (August 22, 1928 – December 5, 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his ground–breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization. ... Similar Artists: Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schönberg"
(last.fm)
Fig.1 Omnibus (1981). "Tuning In: A Film About Karlheinz Stockhausen", television documentary, BBC1 [published on 13 May 2012 by Thiago Carvalho Fernandes, YouTube].
"Since the extra dimensions beyond spacetime that physicists talk about are all spatial dimensions (or 'space–like' as some prefer to say), thinking about how the simplest spatial dimensions relate one to another gives us tools for imagining the more complex ones. The key to remember with all this is that each additional spatial dimension is at 'right angles' to the one before: so each new dimension allows an observer to see 'around the corner' in a way that was unattainable from the previous dimension. This time, let's work through the dimensions with that idea in mind."
(Rob Bryanton, October 2009)
Rob Bryanton (2006). "Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space", Trafford Publishing.
"Gestalt is a psychology term which means 'unified whole'. It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. These theories attempt to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied."
(Spokane Falls Community College)
"'Visite à Picasso' is a classic documentary by dir. Paul Haesaerts which features the frequently used footage of Picasso painting on glass while a camera films him from the other side. The trick of filming thru (sic) glass allows the viewer to witness Picasso's true genius as he paints his famous Torros with just a few well–placed brushstrokes. Shot in beautiful black and white in Picasso's home in Vallauris, the film is a poetic treatment of the master–painter."
(DocsOnline)
[UK designer Olly Moss revises classic film posters.]
"The realization that the phenomena we confront are always richer than the abstractions we use to explain them is central to a Goethean approach. This realization is the expression of a two–fold awareness or sensitivity that Goethe points to with his expression 'delicate empiricism' (Goethe, 1829, in Miller, 1995, p. 307). First, we experience a phenomenon (a mouse, a wooded swamp, a range of blue hills in the distance, or the clouds moving across the sky) as a kind of fullness that calls forth wonder, curiosity, questioning. We want to get to know it better, or as Goethe states it radically, 'become utterly identical with it' (ibid.). This is empiricism, because we orient all our striving around the phenomena themselves. A phenomenon is what meets the eye but we also experience it is as something more, as a kind of surface that is pregnant with a depth we may be able to plumb. But we realize that we will not fathom these depths with models and theories, which more likely than not will lead us away from the phenomenon itself."
(Craig Holdrege, 2005)
Craig Holdrege Summer 2005, 8.1. 'Doing Goethean Science' Janus Head.
"Maps, as metaphors of reality, may be seen as a natural extension of the organizing principle of human perception––albeit a facet restricted to the spatial percepts. The use of spatial metaphor to define relations between abstract objects or between real–world objects represented in an abstract, hypothetical, space, is so common in digital 'environments' or on the computer 'desktop' that it often goes unrecognized. Such metaphors are too many to be addressed by this paper, which restricts its survey to those commonly found in a cartographic context."
(John L. Old, 2002)
L. John Old (2002). "Information Cartography: Using GIS for visualizing nonspatial data", proceedings of the ESRI International Users Conference.
"Figuration itself is not inconsistent with the Modernist tradition since, even the most abstract of Modernist work makes references to things outside itself, yet, of all the features in Tomkins' work, the distinctive way in which he uses figuration seems to set it apart from the rest. Giacometti–like (although informed by Picasso and Matisse) troupes of figures edge around the paintings always playing some formal role but never solely in virtue of their form, scale, colour or location. Typically they point, both literally and figuratively, to formal elements in the Works, including, curiously enough, each other – but they also fly on trapezes, hold safety nets, dance and strike poses. None of the figures, however, are merely incidental to formal issues and although interdependent with them they have, as well, a life of their own. This invites interpretation, at least to the extent that we find ourselves reflecting on how and why the figures appear to us as they do – like mute vandevillians whose master, Tomkins, having rendered them onto some flattened proscenium, orchestrates their participation in a frozen theatrical tragicomic tableau. However, we cannot know the purpose of such entertainments beyond their capacity to intrigue and amuse us."
(Ted Bracey, 1987)
2) Ted Bracey (1987). Robert McDougall Art Gallery [now Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu].
"The new series, called All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, takes complicated ideas and turns them into entertainment by the use of the vertigo–inducing intellectual leaps, choppy archive material and disorienting music with which all Curtis fans are familiar. The central idea leads Curtis on a journey, taking in the chilling über–individualist novelist Ayn Rand, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, the 'new economy', hippy communes, Silicon Valley, ecology, Richard Dawkins, the wars in Congo, the lonely suicide in a London squat of the mathematical genius who invented the selfish gene theory, and the computer model of the eating habits of the pronghorn antelope.
You can see why Zoe Williams once wrote that, while watching one of Curtis's programmes, 'I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote. ...'
Now he has moved on to machines, but it starts with nature. 'In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self–regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order,' Curtis says. 'The trouble is, it's not true–as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider–people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states.' What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers. But we have paid a price for this: without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers–seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, 'The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened–and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world.'
The counterculture of the 1960s, the Californian hippies, took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics and believed this alternative way of ordering the world was based on some natural order. So they formed communes that were non–hierarchical and self–regulating, disdaining politics and rejecting alliances. (Many of these hippy dropouts later took these ideas mainstream: they became the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who decided that computers could liberate everyone and save the world.)...
He draws a parallel with those 1970s communes. 'The experiments with them all failed, and quickly. What tore them apart was the very thing that was supposed to have been banished: power. Some people were more free than others – strong personalities dominated the weak, but the rules didn't allow any organised opposition to the suppression because that would be politics.' As in the commune, so in the world: 'These are the limitations of the self–organising system: it cannot deal with politics and power. And now we're all disillusioned with politics, and this machine–organising principle has risen up to be the ideology of our age.'"
(Katharine Viner, 6 May 2011, Guardian)
Episode 1: 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace: Love and Power', First broadcast BBC Two, 9:00PM Mon, 23 May 2011
Episode 2: 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts', First broadcast BBC Two, 9:00PM Mon, 30 May 2011
Episode 3: 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace: The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey', First broadcast BBC Two, 9:00PM Mon, 06 June 2011
"In August 2007 Gerhard Richter's new stained glass window for the south transept of Cologne Cathedral was unveiled. The original window was destroyed in World War II and had been replaced with plain glass. Inspired by Richter's 1974 painting '4096 Farben', the window consists of around 11,500 hand–blown glass squares in 72 different colours. Echoing the colours of the surrounding windows, Richter's illuminated abstraction blends a modernist aesthetic with the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of the cathedral."
(Gerhard Richter)
"*_Zu Beginn sind auf dem Bildschirm eine weiße und eine schwarze Fläche sichtbar, in denen Continue bzw. 'quit' geschrieben stehen. Entscheidet man sich per Mausklick für die zweite Möglichkeit verlässt man die Arbeit. Entscheidet man sich für die erste Variante, so verdoppelt sich jeweils die Zahl der Felder. Bald sind die sich stets verkleinernden Flächen nicht mehr als einzelne zu erkennen und mit der Maus ist kein eindeutige Wahl mehr zu treffen.
Continue ist eine minimalistische, konzeptuelle Arbeit, die immer wieder neu die immer gleiche Frage nach dem Fortsetzen des interaktiven Prozesses stellt."
(ZKM)
Fig.1,2,3 Dieter Kiessling (2002). 'Continue', artintact #4/2 in Jeffrey Shaw and Astrid Sommer Eds.'artintact', Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe
[The work progresses from distinct binary divisions identified as 'Quit' or 'Continue' to progressively smaller and smaller subdivisions creating an increasingly cinereous/greyer and more graduated field. In this way the work can be used as a metaphor to illustrate a type of complexity which Basil Bernstein describes as strong classification of discourse where 'the progression will be from concrete local knowledge, to the mastery of simple operations, to more abstract general principles' (2000, p.11).]
Bernstein, Basil. (2000). 'Pedagogy Symbolic Control and Identity, Theory Research Critique'. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
"In 1973, the first graphical user interface was built at PARC, using the desktop as a metaphor. The UI introduced windows, icons, menus, file management, and tool palettes. Looking back at the first screenshots of this first GUI, the designs feel familiar even now. In 1974 PARC developed a What–You–See–Is–What–You–Get cut & paste interface, and in 1975 the demonstrated pop–up menus. The desktop concept was pushed quite a bit further by 1981 in the commercial Xerox Star PC interface, which was an important influence for the PC UI's created at Microsoft, Apple, NeXT, and Sun Microsystems in the 80's and 90's."
(Mike Kruzeniski, 17 February 2011)
"One of the first designs of the information theory is the model of communication by Shannon and Weaver. Claude Shannon, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, worked with Warren Weaver on the classic book 'The mathematical theory of communication'. In this work Shannon and Weaver sought to identify the quickest and most efficient way to get a message from one point to another. Their goal was to discover how communication messages could be converted into electronic signals most efficiently, and how those signals could be transmitted with a minimum of error. In studying this, Shannon and Weaver developed a mechanical and mathematical model of communication, known as the 'Shannon and Weaver model of communication'. ...
Shannon and Weaver broadly defined communication as 'all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another'. Their communication model consisted of an information source: the source's message, a transmitter, a signal, and a receiver: the receiver's message, and a destination. Eventually, the standard communication model featured the source or encoder, who encodes a message by translating an idea into a code in terms of bits. A code is a language or other set of symbols or signs that can be used to transmit a thought through one or more channels to elicit a response in a receiver or decoder. Shannon and Weaver also included the factor noise into the model. The study conducted by Shannon and Weaver was motivated by the desire to increase the efficiency and accuracy or fidelity of transmission and reception. Efficiency refers to the bits of information per second that can be sent and received. Accuracy is the extent to which signals of information can be understood. In this sense, accuracy refers more to clear reception than to the meaning of message. This engineering model asks quite different questions than do other approaches to human communication research."
(Communication Studies, University of Twente)
Shannon, C.E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hawes, L.C. (1975). Pragmatics of analoguing: Theory and model construction in communication. Reading, MA: Addison–Wesley.
Fig.1 Mathematical (information) model of communication.
"The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing."
(W3C)
"I have questions that do not occur in words: questions about space, about material moving in space, and about the intermingling of space and object. I feel that space disguises itself and its nature by its transparency. It is, strangely, this very transparency that makes space opaque to our awareness. This new work uses skinny lines moving in space. Emptying out the volume reduces the visual mass so that more of the space around the work gets implicated in what the work finally is. The space shares in creating, or manifesting, the function of the work itself. This emptying–out of the mass makes it possible to imbue space without occupying space."
(Anne Lilly)
Fig.1 Parietals 2005;
"Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation.
Touch investigates the collective perception of erogenous zones. We asked hundreds of people to rank how good it would feel to touch or be touched by a lover in different points of the body. The resulting images reveal a map of sensual desire with multiple focal points and islands of excitement. Read more about our method.
While Touch examines collective patterns, Look explores individuality and the hidden surprises that each body reveals when bared. Through a process of abstraction, the piece reveals the multiplicity of formal possibilities contained in a single body part. Contours from different individuals are presented in collections that expose both familiar and oft–overlooked patterns, confronting prototypical notions of ourselves. Read more about our method.
Listen investigates the relationship between language and the body. Verbal manifestations of human physicality in music, poetry, and religion are distilled to their basic elements. In a play with language, the 'body rebus' emerges as a visual representation of cultural expressions of the physical in us."
(Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg)
"The V&A has been collecting computer–generated art and design since the 1960s. More recently, the Museum acquired two significant collections of computer–generated art and design, and together these form the basis of the UK's emerging national collection of Computer Art.
The Museum's holdings range from early experiments with analogue computers and mechanical devices, to examples of contemporary software–based practices that produce digital prints and computer–generated drawings. The earliest work in the collection dates from 1952 and is a long exposure photograph of electronic beams on an analogue computer, by artist Ben Laposky.
More recently, the V&A has acquired a large digital inkjet print from 2008, which is nearly two metres long and was created using pixel mapping software designed by American artist Mark Wilson.
The collection consists predominately of two–dimensional works on paper, such as plotter drawings, screenprints, inkjet prints, laser prints and photographs, as well as artists' books, from around the world. Early practitioners of computer art were working in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain, as well as the United States, Japan and South America."
(Victoria and Albert Museum)
Fig.1 Herbert W. Franke 'Oscillogramm' (1956)
"Cameraless film refers to a method of producing moving image where the artist or filmmaker bypasses the photographic process and directly manipulates film stock (either additively or subtractively) with methods such as drawing, collage and painting. Due to the inherent difficulties of generating handmade images on film, direct animation doesn't lend itself to pictorial illusion or linear narratives. The imagery tends to be atavistic, animistic, frenetic; and due in part to this visual proximity to pure abstraction, the conceptual content of this genre has been largely overlooked. Since they sit so ambivalently between fine art and cinema, both camps have historically positioned these films as being principally concerned with formalism and material experimentation. But revising this apprehension, Zelluloid: Filme Ohne Kamera brings together a selection of films, tracing the ideational threads which significantly inform and influence this manner of filmmaking.
In 1935, Len Lye's film A Colour Box was so different in its use of filmic language that the Brussels Film Festival had to invent a new prize for it to win. As vivid and enchanting today as they were visionary and challenging, Lye's animated shapes dancing to the percussion of popular Cuban and African music were a hit with audiences more accustomed to viewing cinema in its industrial, commercial capacity. The very act of painting abstract imagery on film was a conceptual leap in terms of severing film's indexical relationship with the world and using it to explore an abstract, synaesthetic experience."
(Genevieve Allison, 5 August 2010, EyeContact)
"Quayola is a visual artist based in London. His work simultaneously focuses on multiple forms exploring the space between video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print. Quayola creates worlds where real substance, such as natural or architectural matter, constantly mutates into ephemeral objects, enabling the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously. Integrating computer–generated material with recorded sources, he explores the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm.
Working in both the artistic and the commercial field, Quayola intelligently experiment with mediums traditionally perceived as separate. Currently active as Visual Artist, Graphic Designer and Director, he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects. Quayola creates hybrid works blurring the boundaries between art, design and filmmaking."
(Davide Quagliola aka Quayola)
Fig.1 2007/8, Live Audiovisual Performance, 1, 2 or 3ch HD projection | 2ch sound, Duration: 40:00, PTA is a live audio–visual performance focusing on precise synchronisations between sound and image. It is a result of multiple collaborations with various musicians worldwide.
Inspired by waveforms, PTA takes form as a central spine where ever–evolving graphical compositions grow from and within.
Sound by: Autobam, Audion, My My, Peter Spiess, Oliver Hacke, RunStopRestore, JPLS, Hearthrob
"jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.
jQuery UI provides abstractions for low–level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high–level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications."
(John Resig)
"The Representational State Transfer (REST) style is an abstraction of the architectural elements within a distributed hypermedia system. REST ignores the details of component implementation and protocol syntax in order to focus on the roles of components, the constraints upon their interaction with other components, and their interpretation of significant data elements. It encompasses the fundamental constraints upon components, connectors, and data that define the basis of the Web architecture, and thus the essence of its behavior as a network–based application."
(Roy Fielding, 2000)
[1] Cody Fauser, James MacAulay, Edward Ocampo–Gooding, and John Guenin 'High level overview of a RESTful Rails web service'.
[2] Fielding, Roy Thomas. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network–based Software Architectures. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000.
"Richter and Eggeling were among the first creators of abstract film. Although the films themselves were produced in Berlin, the works were grounded in Zurich Dada's experiments with abstraction. The artists originally experimented with painting on scrolls before turning to animated film. Eggeling directly transposed his scroll drawings to film to create "cinematic drawings"; Richter more fully exploited the new medium, abandoning his drawings altogether and filming paper rectangles, squares, and lines of various sizes and shades suggestive of movement and depth."
(The Museum of Modern Art)
Fig. 1 Germany, 1921. 3 min. Film in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2010 Hans Richter
"In logic, we often refer to the two broad methods of reasoning as the deductive and inductive approaches.
Deductive reasoning works from the more general to the more specific. Sometimes this is informally called a 'top–down' approach. We might begin with thinking up a theory about our topic of interest. We then narrow that down into more specific hypotheses that we can test. We narrow down even further when we collect observations to address the hypotheses. This ultimately leads us to be able to test the hypotheses with specific data –– a confirmation (or not) of our original theories.
Inductive reasoning works the other way, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. Informally, we sometimes call this a 'bottom up' approach ... In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or theories.
These two methods of reasoning have a very different 'feel' to them when you're conducting research. Inductive reasoning, by its very nature, is more open–ended and exploratory, especially at the beginning. Deductive reasoning is more narrow in nature and is concerned with testing or confirming hypotheses. Even though a particular study may look like it's purely deductive (e.g., an experiment designed to test the hypothesized effects of some treatment on some outcome), most social research involves both inductive and deductive reasoning processes at some time in the project. In fact, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that we could assemble the two graphs above into a single circular one that continually cycles from theories down to observations and back up again to theories. Even in the most constrained experiment, the researchers may observe patterns in the data that lead them to develop new theories."
(William M.K. Trochim, Last Revised: 10/20/2006, The Research Methods Knowledge Base)
"This display provides an overview of the first decades of the computer's history in art and design. It includes some of the earliest computer–generated works in the V&A's collections, many of which have never been exhibited in the UK before. From the 1960s until the early 1980s, digital pioneers worked directly with computer hardware and software to produce graphic images unlike anything that had gone before. Some artists went on to use increasingly sophisticated software packages, while others continued to work directly with the hardware itself.
The display includes plotter drawings, screenprints, digital inkjet prints, photographs and animations, as well as important documentary material from the time. It features pioneers working in science and industry during the 1950s and 60s, such as Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and Herbert W. Franke. Artists who worked with the computer in the 1970s and 80s include Paul Brown, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnar. The show also encompasses more recent works by James Faure Walker, Jean Pierre–Hébert, Roman Verostko and Mark Wilson
Digital Pioneers offers a historical context for contemporary digital practice, and is scheduled to coincide with the V&A exhibition Decode: Digital Design Sensations."
(The Victoria and Albert Museum, UK)
Fig.1 Herbert W. Franke, Squares (Quadrate), screenprint, 1969/70. Given by the Computer Arts Society, supported by System Simulation Ltd, London. Museum no. E.113–2008
"Decode: Digital Design Sensations showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen–based, graphics to large–scale interactive installations. The exhibition includes works by established international artists and designers such as Daniel Brown, Golan Levin, Daniel Rozin, Troika and Karsten Schmidt. The exhibition features both existing works and new commissions created especially for the exhibition.
Decode is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a contemporary arts organisation operating internationally with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive arts.
The exhibition explores three themes: Code presents pieces that use computer code to create new works and looks at how code can be programmed to create constantly fluid and ever–changing works. Interactivity looks at works that are directly influenced by the viewer. Visitors will be invited to interact with and contribute to the development of the exhibits. Network focuses on works that comment on and utilise the digital traces left behind by everyday communications and looks at how advanced technologies and the internet have enabled new types of social interaction and mediums of self–expression."
(The Victoria and Albert Museum, UK)
Video capture from Recode by Karsten Schmidt for the Decode website, 2009.
"The first step in transforming data into information is to explore its organization. This simple yet crucial process can appear futile, but often you can discover something through it that you had never seen before. It is important to realize that the very organization of things affects the way we interpret and understand their separate pieces. Take any set of things: students in a classroom, financials for a company, information about a city, or animals in a zoo. How would you organize these? Which is best? Richard Saul Wurman suggests five ways to organize everything... Literally everything can be organized by alphabet, location, time, continuum, number, or category...
Often, there are often better ways to organize data than the traditional ones that first occur to us. Each organization of the same set of data expresses different attributes and messages."
(Nathan Shedroff)
"Albert Exergian designt ultra–minimalisierte Serienposter, die schöner und aussagekräftiger nicht sein könnten. Leider kenne ich nur einen kleinen Teil der Serien die visualisiert wurden. Die Serien mir bekannt sind könnten aber grafisch kaum besser reduziert werden."
(Philipp, 23/11/2009, Hundertmark)
"Zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre entsteht mit Op Art und Kinetik eine Kunst mit starkem Interesse am Objektiven und dem wissenschaftlichen Experiment. Fasziniert von den physikalischen Gesetzen des Lichts und der Optik verschreibt sich eine ganze Generation der Untersuchung visueller Phänomene und Wahrnehmungsprinzipien. Die Täuschungsmöglichkeiten des Auges auslotend, setzen Künstler wie Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc oder Gianni Colombo auf die gezielte Irritation. Mit großformatigen Bildern, Objekten und Environments bringen sie aber nicht nur das Auge des Betrachters in Bewegung. Sie lassen den Besucher in Farbe versinken, im Spiegel ins Unendliche stürzen oder bieten ihm poetische Lichtspiele. Die Interaktion zwischen Werk und Betrachter gipfelt in Installationen, die letztlich nicht nur physikalische Wirkungen in Form von Nachbildern, Farbvibrationen oder dem Flimmern von Licht entfalten, sondern auf das gesamte Bewusstsein wirken."
(Martina Weinhart, 2007)
Fig. 1 Op–Art Ausstellung, Frankfurt, 2007
"For as much as I appreciate Panton and Riley, their approaches are hard to reconcile. Panton was a master colourist, and he mined the optical power of subtle changes in hues, shades and values. But foremost, he was a designer, and he approached colour from the perspective of function. 'Using colours is like life,' he wrote in Notes on Colour. 'One must have a goal. The goal can be almost anything – also make the most awful colour combinations.' And he writes elsewhere, 'Choosing colours should not be a gamble. It should be a conscious decision. Colours have a meaning and function.'"
(Grant Wiggins)
"The printing process took fifteen days. On December 5th 1945, one month after his first visit to the rue Chabrol studio, Picasso made a wash drawing of a bull. A wonderful bull, very well rendered, sweet, even. Then we printed the proofs – only two or three, making this first state of the bull an extremely rare. One week later he returned and asked for a fresh stone; he made another wash drawing and quill drawing; then he started again on the 18th. For the third state he changed technique, scraping down to the stone and drawing over to accentuate the contours; the bull became a terrible creature, with terrifying horns and eyes. Well, that wouldn't do – Picasso took the composition to the fourth state, on December 22, and then a fifth on December 24. Each time he simplified the drawing; it bacame more and more geometric, with zones of flat black...
He then made the sixth and seventh states (December 26th and 28th), and then four more between January 5th and 17th – eleven in all. The taureau was reduced to its essential form, rendered in a few perfectly placed lines which symbolized this poor bull with his pinhead and ridiculous horns like antennae. The workers all regretted seeing such a magnificent bull transformed bit by bit into a sort of insect.
It was Célestin who finally expressed it: 'Picasso ended up where normally he should have started.' It's true; but in order to achieve his pure and linear rendering of the bull, he had to pass through all of the intermediary stages. And when you stand before his eleventh bull, it's hard to imagine the work that went into it"
(Fernand Mourlot, Gravés dans ma mémoire, Ed. Robert Laffont, 1979)
1). Pablo Picasso, Les 11 états successifs de la lithographie Le Taureau , 1945.
"A number of key features of the cine–thing begin to emerge from these related articulations. (1) Cinema is understood to grant an expressive and animated life to the normally inanimate thing. (2) These newly enlivened things stand to challenge the usually dominant position of humans with respect to the world of things; they become themselves 'nearly homogenous with man,' 'characters in the drama,' or 'the hero in most any sort of photoplay.' (3) Their personalities or physiognomies suggest an unruliness and irreverence with respect to the audience and filmmaker alike. And (4) there is a sense that cinema's ability to grant life to the thing brings with it a new visual knowledge––that by isolating objects and removing them from their familiar contexts, film allows the viewer experience the usually hidden 'construction and nonhuman life' of things."
('brookhenkel' member of class blog for the spring 2009 thing theory seminar series at Columbia University)
"A 1966 remake of "Visual Thinking", with Kermit taking the part of Harry the Hipster, and Grump replacing Kermit as the square."
(NantoVision)
"An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists."
(Roger Highfield, Telegraph Media Group)
"Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming."
(Chris Jordan, Seattle, 2008)
Fig.1 Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.
http://socialfiction.org
Crystalpunk is a self–invented movement for self–education making itself real. Crystalpunk is a panoply of ideas revolving around the same few Wandering Stars: the Game of Go and the Game of Life, the origin of language and the origin of mind, the suspected but never–realised capabilities of mind, matter, memory and computers whispered into your inner ear by unknown writers and succumbi, the power of abstraction and a melancholy for the noise lost, the BacterioPoetic and the cybernetic writing machine envisaged by Italo Calvino and William S. Burroughs.
"One way to turn the 'aesthetics of everything' into concrete artworks is therefore, to devise mathematical or computational systems for generating art works which are not determined by the artist –– arbitrary artworks, random samples from a large space of possibilities. This literal–minded approach to the idea of faire n'importe quoi is known as chance art –– a genre that was widely practised in the [nineteen] sixties. (Cf. George Brecht, John Cage, Elsworth Kelly, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Peter Struycken, Zdenek Sykora, Herman de Vries.)"
(Remko Scha)
Fig.1 François Morellet (1958). "6 répartitions aléatoires de 4 carrés noirs et blancs d'après les chiffres pairs et impairs du nombre Pi", Georges Pompidou Centre Paris, oil on wood, 80cm x 80cm.
"Six Thinking Hats is a simple, effective parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. And once learned, the tools can be applied immediately!
You and your team members can learn how to separate thinking into six clear functions and roles. Each thinking role is identified with a colored symbolic 'thinking hat.' By mentally wearing and switching 'hats,' you can easily focus or redirect thoughts, the conversation, or the meeting.
The White Hat calls for information known or needed. 'The facts, just the facts.' :: The Yellow Hat symbolizes brightness and optimism. Under this hat you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit. :: The Black Hat is judgment – the devil's advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers :: where things might go wrong. Probably the most powerful and useful of the Hats but a problem if overused. :: The Red Hat signifies feelings, hunches and intuition. When using this hat you can express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves, and hates. :: The Green Hat focuses on creativity :: the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It's an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions. :: The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking process. It's the control mechanism that ensures the Six Thinking Hats guidelines are observed."
(The de Bono Group)
Edward De Bono (1985). "Six Thinking Hats", ISBN 0–316–17831–4.
"Play–Create is an interactive media initiative that sees a vision of publishing entertainment multimedia in the same way that we consume music, film and other formats.
Born out of a principle that computer–game technology need not just pander to superficial violent and hyper–active pursuits, Play–Create poses the hypothetical questions: What is the interactive equivalents of classical music? What is to a plasma screen what paint is to a canvas?"
(Daniel Brown)
"The electronic integration of all communication modes from the typographic to the multimedia particularly consists of (fashion) images and signs. People are increasingly able to monitor and evaluate these images as well as place themselves within the world, both historically and geographically. The more that societies modernise, the greater the ability of knowledgeable subjects to reflect upon their social conditions of existence. Lash (1994) characterises this as 'reflexive modernisation'. In a world of ever–faster change and growing abstraction the process of reflexivity opens up possibilities for the recasting of meaning in work and in leisure and for the heterogenisation and complexity of space and everyday life. Confronted with the increasing cultural content of flows reflexivity becomes aesthetic – a notion for which Lash and Urry argue in their book Economies of Signs and Space (1994)"
(Jan Verwijnen, UIAH. Helsinki)
Scott Lash & John Urry (1994). 'Economies of Signs and Space' : Sage Publications Ltd. 0803984723
"In Free Radicals Len Lye put aside his interest in colour and concentrated on a stark, black and white use of the 'direct' method, by scratching on black leader. He has described the film as 'white ziggle–zag–splutter scratches ... in quite doodling fashion.' The film's title is a reference to modern physics –– 'free radicals' are particles of energy –– but the visual style is still reminiscent of tribal art."
(re:voir vidéo distribution)
"Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows – only hard and with luminous edges – and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said 'my universe': but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things..."
(A Square [Edwin A. Abbott])
"Surfaces dominate in the abstract animated film 'Komposition in Blau/ Lichtkonzert Nr.1' (Composition in Blue / Light Concert No. 1). Colorful geometric figures are set in rhythmic motion. The music from Nicolai's 'The Merry Women of Windsor' is impressively visualized through a blending of form and color. Fischinger created wooden cubes and cylinders as three–dimensional animated models, approximately as tall as a cigarette, some of them painted and others covered with fabric. 'At first the set seems to reveal a room. But then the floor begins to reflect the geometric figures. Cubes perfectly–aligned in a row, forming a flat mosaic–like surface, tumble apart to form a stairway. In this perpetually changing universe, a cylinder pounds at the floor and sets off a series of waves, and a decorative, flat circle flies into the empty space. The beauty of the colored, geometric forms–a yellow rectangle descends gracefully into the frame–escalates to the frenzied magic of the impossible.'"
(William Moritz, Media Art Net)
Source: William Moritz: 'Oskar Fischinger', in: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Optische Poesie. Oskar Fischinger Leben und Werk, Kinematograph Nr. 9, 1993, p. 42)
"What effects is digitisation having on art? What special characteristics are displayed by code–based art? And how does this inherent, uniquely self–determined expressive vocabulary of digital art manifest itself? What consequences will art as code–according to Kriesche, alone the generative answer to the complete permeation of all partial realities–have for the ongoing development of the arts? In which direction is artists' work with new instruments like algorithms and dynamic systems transforming the process of artistic creativity? Or is the concentration on CODE, this focus on the immediate basis of the technological transformation of art, proceeding along the wrong path, and should the confrontation with media art concentrate on social approaches–collaborative, social modes of action, the potential of connective interfaces–without which there can be no productive and uniquely self–determined human activity?"
(Roy Ascott, Richard Kriesche, Casey Reas, Giaco Schiesser, Roman Verostko, 2003, Ars Electronica)
Simultaneous Cities: Tokyo And Los Angeles [126]
"Item 1: Formulation and programming of simultaneous structures in Los Angeles and Tokyo that serve as thresholds to both cities vis–a–vis the proposed 'Mag Lev' transportation tunnel beneath the Pacific Ocean. An investigation of the invisible realm that exists between the two cities.Item 2: Advancements in transportation, telecommunications and the like are certainly in abundance as the century draws to a close. Yet architecture seems little affected by the onslaught of `progress.' Item 3: Tokyo and Los Angeles are two cities emerging as centres of extreme import as we move beyond the 20th century. Although they are by no means the only two, they do epitomize much of the dichotomies and disparities of the contemporary urban condition. Providing such a service between these two places certainly can be viewed as a perversity of a world caught up in the 'instantaneous' and the conquest of desire.Item 4: the self has always been set against an abstraction of the cosmos and that has emerged from reflection on the mapping of our tangible world. Here then is yet a further reduction of time and space as the experiential is all but eliminated."
[Papadakis, Dr Andreas (ed). 1995 Deconstruction III: Architectural Design Profile No. 87, London, UK: Academy Group. 1854902539]
Jane Christie (Gina Bellman), a character in the British comedy series Coupling complains about the inadequacy of official forms. She feels that they prejudice her by not allowing her to fully elaborate on her circumstances – especially when it comes to describing her marital status. She desperately wishes to be married and finds it humiliating to be single.
This example quite humorously highlights the problem of quantifying non–metric data. Official forms like the ones being described here suffer from the misconception that everyday experience can be meaningfully abstracted (and analysed).
Turux.org was a significant force in generative/algorithmic design in the late 1990's. All works in the on–line gallery were created using Macromedia Director. The collection provided dramatic proof of the potential of generative work as a legitimate design concern.Note the following message posted on the "turux.org" site:turux is not available anymore. dextro's work can be seen at d e x t r o . o r g , lia's work at h t t p : / / l i a . s i l . at and at r e – m o v e . o r g