Archive for February, 2007
Sleep Labs of the Soviet Empire
[Image: A "garden suburb" outside Moscow. Via Cabinet Magazine].
In the new issue of Cabinet, we read how, following the implementation of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan – and in the wake of food rationing and extended work hours – “the shock-troops of Communism were edging perilously close to physical and mental exhaustion: what they needed was rest.”
Soviet authorities thus “announced a competition to design a garden suburb outside Moscow, where workers could be sent to recuperate from the strains of factory labor.”
Without getting into specifics – for that, be sure to pick up a copy of the magazine, issue #24 – one detail about the garden suburb that I particularly love, and that the article’s author specifically highlights, was a sort of colosseum of slumber. A dream academy.
Designed by Konstantin Melnikov, the building was a purpose-built structure referred to as the “Sonata of Sleep.”
[Image: Konstantin Melnikov's "Sonata of Sleep." Via Cabinet Magazine].
Specifically, we’re told, “the building consisted of two large dormitories either side of a central block,” and the dormitories each “had sloping floors.”
This would “obviate the need for pillows.”
Even more amazing – or is it absurd? – we read:
- At either end of the long buildings were to be situated control booths, where technicians would command instruments to regulate the temperature, humidity, and air pressure, as well as to waft salubrious scents and “rarefied condensed air” through the halls. Nor would sound be left unorganized. Specialists working “according to scientific facts” would transmit from the control centre a range of sounds gauged to intensify the process of slumber. The rustle of leaves, the cooing of nightingales, or the soft murmur of waves would instantly relax the most overwrought veteran of the metropolis. Should these fail, the mechanized beds would then begin gently to rock until consciousness was lost.
While all this certainly sounds ambitious enough, apparently “Melnikov’s original impulse had been much more far-reaching.”
His original dream had been to create an Institute for Changing the Form of Man.
The whole article is awesome, frankly, encompassing the resurrection of the dead, a house designed by Melnikov in which residents felt as if they “were floating in thick golden air,” and further thoughts about how Melnikov “recombined industrial iconography into a series of spatial adventures,” most notably with a building that was “a delirium of gigantic stairways and roller bearings.”
[Image: Konstantin Melnikov's "Leningrad Pravda" tower, as modelled by R. Notrott].
While I’m on the subject, though, don’t miss this page full of Melnikov’s other architectural projects, including the tower, pictured above, where “each floor should turn around the central core,” and this outrageous parking garage, to be constructed as a bridge in Paris, over the Seine. Note the bronze, Oscar-like statues holding up either end of the structure.
(Thanks to Leah Beeferman for emailing me the first two images, hot off the press from Cabinet).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
Interchange Tiles
[Image: Four tiles by Jim Termeer].
“This is a set of 25 ceramic tiles,” artist Jim Termeer explains. “The patterns are based on satellite imagery of major highway interchanges that have been built worldwide.”
So you can decorate your bathroom with the freeways of Barcelona.
[Image: The Barcelona tile, by Jim Termeer].
(Discovered via Mason White, thanks to a tip from Theresa Duncan. If you like these images, meanwhile, be sure to stop by BLDGBLOG’s Return of the Knot Driver and, of course, The Knot Driver).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
The knot driver
Northern Baltimore’s I-95/695 highway interchange is a “topological masterpiece,” and its superb “mathematical aesthetics” might just save it from being destroyed.
[Image: “I was in a web of braided highways." New Scientist].
“In the spring issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Michael Kleber, a topologist at MIT, waxed enthusiastic about [the interchange's] ‘non-trivial braiding‘: while it is possible to just lift I-95 up and away from I-695, the northbound lane of I-95 braids both over, and then under, the southbound lane, making it impossible to pull them apart without cutting one of the lanes.”
However, those simultaneous right/left exits don’t seem to be helping with traffic flow, and the system’s moving circular symmetry may soon be traded-in for something far simpler.
“I don’t want to encourage more cars onto the roads,” the New Scientist writes, “but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late.”
This leads me to wonder, of course, if you could take-over the U.S. Department of Transportation, and rebuild the nation’s highway infrastructure as a massive textbook in driveable knot theory.
Seattle to Chicago, you drive achiral knots; Los Angeles to Phoenix, trefoils; New York to Miami, Brunnian links; while the most complicated ones are saved for a private highway system built between Washington DC and Denver.
All the tunnels of Manhattan, recurved and cross-torqued through themselves, with some so maddening only postgraduate researchers can find their way out of the city.
A new Olympic sport: driving the New York knots.
(Earlier: BLDGBLOG’s Wormholes).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
A brief critique of 31 Days in Iraq NYT Infographic
Over the past few months, the New York Times has produced a series of graphs illuminating different aspects of the Iraq conflict. While most of these graphs are straightforward presentations of the information, the most recent infographic on the past 31 days of the Iraq war represents an highly editorial standpoint, and uses poor [...]
Second Life: the new Disney or vaporville?
Is Second Life the future? Or a cul de sac? At this point, it’s hard to say.
Clay Shirky put a cat among the pigeons when he asked whether the Second Life
numbers were reliable. The SL website now claims 3,350,286 residents
with something like a third of these having actually made an appearance
in the last 60 days. Shirky called earlier estimates "methodologically
worthless." He figures 5 out of 6 new users abandon their accounts
before the first month is up. After 90 days, 9 of 10 "residents" have
disappeared.
Shirky’s skepticism forced a reframing of the
question: "ok, if we can’t prove this argument by the numbers, is there
another way to make the case?"
Shirky is skeptical here too. He believes Second Life
will
remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be
of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try
it. Such niches can be profitable…but they won’t, by definition,
appeal to a broad cross-section of users.
Both Henry Jenkins
and Beth Coleman beg to differ. Coleman says that SL gives us an
important "amplification" of the virtual world possibility. Whether SL
is the virtual world that takes, there can’t be any doubt that some virtual
world will. SL matters, she argues, because it represents a "tipping
point" that releases virtual worlds from their niche status.
Henry
Jenkins calls SL is a "test bed for innovation" for business,
government, education, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers. He
suggests SL offers virtual worlds a kind of "proof of concept" (my
term, not his) For all its failings, SL is perhaps good enough to help
install the possibility (the idea and the potentiality) of virtual
worlds in popular culture.
It’s a niche play, Shirky says. No, say Jenkins and Coleman, that’s precisely what it just ceased to be. Numbers aside, they say, SL just cleared the bar. It is now part of our culture.
I hear both arguments.
an argument for Second Life
I
agree with Jenkins and Coleman. SL makes this much incontrovertible:
it is now technologically possible for a very large number of people to
gather and interact in a visually rich and responsive virtual space.
Incontrovertible and astonishing. It is hard to think of a real world
correlate. It’s as if another Disney empire (Disneyland, Disney World,
Disney Resorts) just dropped from the sky. Um, that doesn’t go nearly
far enough. It’s as if a Scandinavian world was just lowered onto the
planet. At a minimum, we’re obliged to say our culture and our
marketplace just got vastly larger. We would be unwise to dismiss or
diminish it.
We might also risk a bit of filmic wisdom: if you
build it, they will come. Whatever else they are, human beings are
relentlessly curious. Give them a social space to occupy it and they
will fill it en masse. And fill it they did, three million of them.
But
that’s the issue, isn’t it? Yes, they came, but did they stay? Are
they "residents" as SL likes to call them, or the most capricious kind
of tourist? The fact of the matter is that SL churns like crazy. This
could be yet another technology that cannot find a problem to solve.
Yet another hammer looking for a nail. Still, Coleman’s point is a good
one. These are early days. Indeed, television took several years to
find a place in our lives. Why should Second Life be any different?
I have another colleague at MIT who believes he knows exactly what Second Life
can be. Ilya Vedrashko says it is, among other things, the new mall.
All of us shop on line but we can’t drift from store to store, observe
the shopping choices of other people, or enjoy the effects of
serendipity. (We didn’t know we wanted another gadget from Sharper Image the last time, but there it was…at the mall.) Second Life
can duplicate all of this even as it makes it possible to try things on
without the privations or indignities of a changing room. Click on
something and look in the mirror. (Vedrashko makes a larger, more
interesting argument than I can here. Catch it if you can.)
Second Life
also has the potential to change tourism, working like a time machine
in space, as it were. Let’s suppose that someday, the virtual
Lindentown will someday be as different from my usual virtual haunts,
as Miami is from New York City. If I wish to go to Miami, it will cost
me money, time, effort, and inconvenience. But an afternoon in Lindentown costs me nothing more than the click of a mouse.
Second Life could serve as a magnificent platform for the new global university or b-school. Now all that fund raising would be about intellectual content and content providers, and hiring good teachers. Not a penny need be spent on bricks and mortar. Even the reunions can be held on line.
For all we know, Second Life might be the place that consumers go to help create the brands they care about. It would be easy to create open air laboratories equipped with tools for developing concepts and changing prototypes. And this will
matter as marketing moves from "see" to "be." (My "see to be"
model: if you want me to see the marketing you will have to have given
me a chance to be the marketing. (But see my doubts noted yesterday.
It is necessary that I had a chance to be it.)
These are not
small claims. Changing the nature of retail, adding new terrains to
the world of tourism, inventing the new university, creating the products and brands of the future, these would
make Second Life something more than a cul de sac. By
this reckoning, SL not merely part of the future. It will be one of
the things that makes the future.
an argument against Second Life
I’ve done my due diligence as an anthropologist. I signed up for Second Life.
I spent some hours trooping around, poking my head in where it was not
always welcome, pestering people with annoying questions. And on
balance I must hear agree with Shirky. So far there is more smoke than
fire. When people bang the drum of enthusiasm for SL, they cannot be
talking about the present SL.
For most of my visit, Second Life
felt like a ghost ship. I admired the ingenuity of the architecture,
the skill of the coding, the homes on the water, the view from some
properties. But very often I found myself in a world without people.
Lindentown is vaporville. There are lots of buildings. Just no
people. It’s a little like downtown Detroit on the weekend. You can
walk for miles and see not a soul.
Then it dawns on you. (It
always takes the anthropologist longer.) No one lives here. It is fun
to build these spaces but all appearances to the contrary, you can’t
actually live in them. No one goes to their Second Life pied-a-terre
for the weekend. (Pied-a-vapeur?) No one rushes there to stage a
dinner party, welcome the kids home for the weekend, or curl up in
front of TV.
This problem creates a problem. Second Life
is frequently a stage without actors. What is missing isthe small
murmur of activity, the gentle dynamism that other people bring to our
lives. This may be what we mean by "perfect strangers." These
are the people who create movement, visual stimulation, a steady
current of minor commotion without actually ever impinging on our lives
in any irritating way. Second Life has no perfect strangers.
The absence of this dynamism means, among other things, that SL cannot create a new tourism. The existing world of Second Life
fails to capture us for the same reason that Celebration, Florida (the
instant town build by Disney) originally disappointed. The place was
well appointed but it lacked perfect strangers. There was a stillness
to both places that made them unfit, or at least uninteresting, for
human habitation. I am told that Celebration addressed this problem.
We shall see if SL can do the same.
No people, no
anthropology. I ported to places where there are lots of people, to a
dance party or a club. Yikes! I would end up talking to people who
are so preoccupied by political power or sexual congress, so limited in
their vocabulary, syntax, and dramaturgical interests, they might as
well be bots.
This is not a well world. This is a deeply tedious world. No wonder people sign up only then to wander away. Sexual motives can create social universe, but finally, and I think I can risk this assertion,
virtual sex is always going to be a pale imitation of real sex. And
conversation preoccupied with power, well, this is uninteresting in the
real world. And Second Life removes the contexts and consequences in which power plays out. So who cares?
What
I need to make SL interesting is a coffee shop or a restaurant where
people just happen to congregate and just happen to give off those
streams of sound and sight that make life interesting. I need people
to "happen" around me when I am in a virtual world. (And I am
perfectly happy to reciprocate by "happening" around them.) The thing
is I will never go to a virtual Starbucks for coffee. I will never go
take my wife out to dinner at a virtual restaurant. I will go for
person to person interaction and at the moment, this is just not very
interesting.
The other big hit against Second Life is
that it sorts very badly. I haven’t actually met anyone I find
illuminating. I am not asking that my SL network feed my real world
network. I am not as pragmatic as all that. But I don’t want to step
down my standards of conversation and curiosity just because I am on
line. That’s, surely, not what the virtual world is for. If anything
it should allow me to reach out to more people in the world and
increase the chances that I will like the people I meet. But this
never seems to happen. I would like to hear about this one from the SL
supporters. How many interesting people have you met in-world?
I
did have one happy encounter. I stumbled into a magic garden of some
kind. Eventually, I was approach by a rabbit who very kindly gave me a
tour of the garden and an introduction to the actual and social physics
of this world. Blimey, now that’s the way to an anthropologist’s
heart. Here was a nascent culture, that might someday become something
capable of supporting. Who knows what might spring from these
beginnings. It might just be a Pookie festival, but what if Second
Life were someday as productive as New York City in the 20th century?
Right
now, Second Life is not helping me sort. In fact, there is even less
sorting in the virtual world than there is in the real world. When
someone presents themselves as flaming cloud or a bunnie, I have some
measure of their imagination, but all other information is denied me.
summing up
On
balance, there is in Second Life lots to like and lots to loathe. But I believe two
things are clear. We now have proof of concept. And as Second Life supplies
real opportunities for engagement and sorting, this social world will
expand at pace, supplying in the longer term, every kind of cultural
innovation and commercial opportunity.
References
Anonymous.
Economic Statistics. Second Life. Last Updated: Sunday, February 4,
2007. here.
Coleman, Beth. 2007. Second Life backlash: Clay Shirky blows up the spot. Project Good Luck. January 5, 2007. here.
Coleman, Beth. 2007. Beyond Second Life Toward V-Economy. Project Good Luck. February 1. 2007. here.
Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Second Thoughts on Second Life. Confessions of an Aca/Fan. here.
Shirky, Clay. 2006. Second Life: What are the real numbers? Many2Many. December 12, 2006. here.
Shirky, Clay. 2007. Second life, Games and Virtual Worlds. Many 2 Many. here
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Pat Crane for getting me started.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 10, 2007, 4:27PM
Beauty and the death of zero sum
Virginia Postrel has a great post today on Dove’s "real beauty"
campaign (pictured). In her clear eyed way, she takes issue with the notion that
we should consider everyone beautiful. She insists that it is more
accurate, more sensible to see that differences of beauty exist and
that these differences confer relative advantage in the world.
I think this is right, and that it has the corrective effect Postrel
intends. Some heart felt notions about the world render us incapable
of thinking about it clearly. This is bad for many reasons, and
especially because it frustrates our efforts to understand the
operation (and interaction) of factors anthropological and economic.
Advantage and a certain social capital is apportioned according to
relative beauty, and culture decides, to some extent, what this beauty
is.
On the other hand, I think that we may be seeing a general shift here.
If we are rethinking beauty, I think this might be because we are
rethinking value. Our culture is changing.
There are three propositions at work in the world of beauty:
1. beauty contest
The old fashioned one, the beauty
contest notion, says that beauty is distributed with almost perfect
clarity. Relative beauty makes for a single, steep, zero sum
hierarchy. There may be some points of contestation, but generally
speaking, we could line up all the women (and men) in the world, from
the most beautiful to the least.
2. many kinds of beauty
The second proposition says there are "many kinds of beauty." In this
case, we suppose that there many dimensions of beauty and that each of
these may be used to fashion a different hierarchy. If it’s all about
elegance, then one hierarchy results. If it’s all about voluptuousness,
another. And so on.
I think in the real world we oscillate between these propositions.
Ideally, we think of beauty as something absolute. Practically, we are
hard pressed to show why Penelope Cruz should be considered more
beautiful than, say, Aishwarya Rai or Audrey Hepburn. We end up saying
things like "well, it depends, you see, there are different kinds of
beauty."
There is a strong form of proposition 2. In this case, we all agree on
a universe of beautiful women and then we organize this universe into
different hierarchies according to the dimension in hand. Cate
Blanchett takes one contest. Oprah takes another. Angelina Jolie, a
third.
The weak form of proposition 2 says that there are many, many
dimensions, and that it is possible to use them to give most women a
claim to relative beauty. This expands the universe of women
with a claim to beauty, and it expands the number and the kind of
dimensions that may be used to find them so. I hope this is not
demeaning, but I find that women who sell cosmetics in drug stores
often fall into this category. Quite often, they have a feature or two
that are remarkable, and they are otherwise unexceptional. Hippie
beauty seemed to turn on this principal as well.
3. every woman is beautiful
The third proposition says that every woman is
beautiful. I think this is a question of using evaluative dimension in
new ways or adding evaluative dimensions if necessary. The defining
phrase here is "every woman is beautiful in her own way."
And I think this says that if there is no evaluation dimension, we will
make one up. Finally, if this doesn’t work, the proposition resorts to
the notion that all women are beautiful because they are women. The
attack on zero sum hierarchy is absolute and complete.
I like the inclusiveness of this proposition 3. It’s now up to all of
us (and especially every male) to discover the beauty in a female
companion, and this is an interesting, generous and generative way to
proceed. But I agree with Postrel. The notion that "everyone is
beautiful" violates the law of non-vacuous contrast according to which
no assertion may refer to everything in its universe of discourse.
More simply: if everyone is beautiful, how can anyone be beautiful? If it isn’t relative, it isn’t real.
the death of zero sum
But here’s the thing. Zero sum is dying in our culture. The notion
that there is one single hierarchy of any kind is now in question. No
one knows this better than Virginia Postrel, whose pioneering work on
dynamism helps us understand why this should be so. Ours is a
splintering culture. Some of our new social species, punks and hippies
say, arose precisely to take issue with conventional notions of beauty,
and these groups leave in their wake new evaluative standards.
The death of zero sum is especially evident on the internet where it
turns out crowds matter more than elites. The new media emerge and they
create a multiplication of value, a new superfluidity of admiration.
This may be because people are prepared to "pay themselves" in
admiration they do not deserve…but if it works, it works. There is nothing in the
anthropological rule book that says that a culture may not make every
individual an arbiter of his or her own value. (And indeed the American
psychological and therapeutic communities have been insisting on this
approach to self esteem for some time.)
Of course, we have all by this time seen enough delusional American
Idol contestants to know how tragic the outcome of this cultural
approach can sometimes be. Still, it is possible for a culture to
equip individuals with the right of self invention and self evaluation,
and that is precisely what our culture has done, from the avant garde
artist who perseveres with the conviction that some day that the world
will see what he sees to the lonely entrepreneur who insists on her
vision of the world in the face of an overwhelming indifference from
the rest of world. Our culture of creativity depends upon the
destruction of zero sum evaluation. And the more dynamic we become,
the more surely we will and must move away from absolute hierarchies.
As a Canadian coming south to Chicago in the 1970s, this struck me
forcibly. Americans were much more demanding of effort and
accomplishment than my Canadians friends, but they were also much more
prepared to expand the competitive domain to give everyone, or almost
everyone, a place to play. Being the best at something was important,
but it was ok if you were merely taking gold at an obscure bowling
tournament in the rural Midwest (which I am proud to say I did on
several occasions. Kidding.) And that’s when I came to understand the
penalty of being good at nothing at all in America. I sometimes wonder
if this is the unexamined motive of self destructive behavior (drug
abuse, etc.). In Canada it’s ok to be unexceptional. In the US, God save you if this is so.
America has always been relatively generous in supplying extra
competitive domains and evaluative dimensions with which individuals
could pursue the self esteem and social capital that success makes
available. And this was true before the advent of the plenitude and
dynamism made possible by the new expressive domains (zines, blogs,
home made music, transmedia, self made movies) that emerged in the 1990s. But
again Postrel knows this perfect well.
The death of zero sum and the expansion of social capital has potentially explosive consequences for our culture.
Elizabethan England makes this case quite well. The likes of
Shakespeare, Bacon, Sydney, Raleigh, Elizabeth herself made the world vibrate
with new ideas. There are lots of ways to explain this explosive
cultural moment, but I wonder whether it was largely because Elizabethans had
access to a sudden superfluidity of status. There were new ways and
new dimensions for claiming rank. The (relative) decline of a zero sum
social hierarchy had the effect of flooding the world with novelty. Ours is a new Elizabethan age.
summing up
Here’s my argument. The Dove campaign for real beauty and new ideas of beauty may be
seen as a reflection of a larger culture shift. In every domain of
taste, we are seeing a willingness to expand the tools of judgment and
the size of the winner’s circle. Zero sum is dying as the logic of our
evaluative activities. As a result, our culture is entering a new multiplication of
capital and creativity. This is not to say that zero sum is dead in all sectors of our world. It is just subject to new cultural forces here and there that blunt its prevalence and power.
References
Postrel, Virginia. 2007. The Truth About Beauty. The Atlantic
Monthly. March. here.
[this link is good for 3 days beginning February 13, 2007]
Postrel, Virginia. 2007. Beauty is. Dynamist Blog. February 13, 2007. here.
for the Dove campaign for real beauty, go here.
Note:
I promise to get back to the pet post tomorrow.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 13, 2007, 6:00PM
cartographic flow map layout
a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, & flow data between the nodes. flow maps aim to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network.
the advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. most flow maps are drawn by hand & there are few computer algorithms available. this particular technique is inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings & distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another.
see also pivotgraph.
[link: stanford.edu]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Feb 20, 2007, 5:27AM
Interview with Angelo Vermeulen
In December, Yves Bernard invited me to give a talk at Art+Game, a conference and exhibition about video games from an artistic point of view. After my usual little show, a guy came to me, his name was Angelo Vermeulen. He had curated a part of the exhibition with such talent and impeccable taste that i was all ears, i thought he’d want to talk about games. He didn’t. He wanted to give me a CD of his work. Man! Don’t you have a website like everyone? A CD! Something tangible that will meet the same end as all those business cards that people keep handing me: they end up in the bin of some hotel because they just clutter my handbag. I came late to digital data so now i stick to it, if i want to find you, i just google you and that’s it. Anyway, a few days later i was in one of those hotel rooms. There was no internet. I open Angelo’s CD and look at its content. The next thing i did when i finally managed to get online was to ask Angelo if i could interview him. Angelo doesn’t have a website (yet!), he’s way too cool for that.
He wrote part of the interview in NYc, part in Sint-Niklaas and then disappeared somewhere in Andalusia.
Originally trained as a biologist (PhD at the University of Leuven, Belgium), he also followed a photography training at the Art Academy of Leuven. Moved to London to work with Nick Waplington. Back in Belgium he took up post-graduate studies at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Antwerp.
After that traces of his activities appear online. Most notably, his installation Blue Shift [LOG. 1], introduced last Summer at Isea2006, aims to question the status of the utilitarian in art and science and push interactive installation art into Darwinian realms (detail of the installation on the right). A community of single-cell algae, water fleas, fish and water snails is set up in the exhibition space. Visitors induce a gradual microevolution of the - genetically determined - light-responsive behavior of the water fleas. When the system is in standby, yellow lights illuminate the aquaria from the top. The water fleas are attracted to this light and swim towards it. Whenever a visitor is detected in proximity of the installation, blue spotlights are activated. Water fleas, repelled by this color, flee downwards and pass through holes in a false bottom in the aquaria… where fish are waiting to wipe them out.
What can be considered to be a survival strategy in natural circumstances - blue light indicates clear open water and hence potential detection by fish - has quite a different meaning in this set-up: it is exactly those water fleas that do not swim away from the blue light that survive and reproduce. In this way their genes will become dominant in the water flea populations and a “contra-natural” selection will occur.
He has been working on “SKANNER”, a new media project on human fear in cooperation with Tamuraj, electronic musician and mathematics researcher. The audience is exposed to a frightening live montage of video images and sounds generated by the artists and an artificial intelligent computer system. Physical reactions of the audience such as heart rate and blood pressure are monitored. An artificial creative agent uses these data to decipher and simulate the relation between fear responses and sounds and images. The agent functions as a third “virtual” artist. Through the accumulation of empirical data and learning algorithms, SKANNER tries to evolve towards a real fear machine.
Skanner Labtest - Video stills
Angelo is currently busy writing a book on the relation between art, technology and spirituality in partnership with art philosopher Antoon Van den Braembussche. In collaboration with Quebec-based artist Louis Blackburn, he is also preparing several new media projects and a documentary on computer game culture. He and Etienne Van den Bergh, president of Contour Mechelen, will be touring Europe with a series of lectures on games (games & cinema, games & the body).
Angelo, you’re one of the few people who are both trained as a scientist (biology in your case) and fine artist. Do you make a clear distinction between your work as an artist and your scientific activities?
In the beginning of my life as an artist I was mainly focused on photography and I was convinced that my scientific background was something I had to get rid of in order to make good art. It was only a few years later that I discovered that combining these things would lead to much more powerful creations. Now I feel a lot of my work is a layered convergence of rationality, intuition and hyperesthesis. In the interactive cinema project ‘SKANNER’ (2002-2005) and the installation piece Blue Shift [LOG. 1] (2005) I explicitly combined both my art and my science background. Certain aspects of these projects were strictly scientific, while others were purely artistically motivated, and there is evidently a different mindset for each of the positions. Blue Shift [LOG. 1] was created with Luc De Meester, a former colleague of mine and a specialist in evolutionary biology. For this project I had to make a lot of choices about the setup of the piece in a larger art exhibition context. I choose a basement location because that gave the right kind of conditions and associations I wanted; a half-hidden and darkened laboratory with close proximity to a workshop where technicians were running in and out. Once the location was chosen the process started of building up the piece in relation to the space itself. These decisions were primarily artistically motivated: I wanted to create a 3D image that had an immediate and strong impact on the visitor. I have learned by now that such creative choices only can be rationally analyzed and (partly) understood after the piece is ready. When creating an installation I strongly rely on intuition to decide which specific materials to use, where to put things, how to set up the lighting etc. Of course there are also significant conceptual issues related to certain choices, it’s not just a formal process. However, with Blue Shift [LOG. 1] things became even more complex than that; whenever I made a creative choice I had to make sure it did not violate the scientific rationale behind the work. The idea of this piece was to create a work that functioned both as an interactive installation, and as a scientific experiment. A true hybrid work.
Skanner Labtest Z33
SKANNER was a collaboration with musician and mathematician Tamuraj. The goal was to create a live horror movie that would use images and sounds from a database in combination with a live-generated soundtrack. During the performance we monitored the public’s bodily responses as an indication of emotional state, such as heart rate and blood pressure. We then used these data to optimize the live montage of image and sound in two different ways. First, all the data were displayed in real time so that we could actively use the public’s emotional state as a directive for mixing sound and image. Second, Tamuraj programmed an artificial intelligence module that constantly compared output (the live movie) and input (the public’s emotional data). The software then automatically optimized the impact of the performance by making autonomous decisions about the sound sequencing for example. In this way, the soundtrack during our last performance was to a large extent created by the audience’s hearts. In an art project like this, the aim is to create a powerful audiovisual experience that at the same time uses systematic scientific analysis.
Did the art audience react to Blue Shift [LOG. 1] in the same way as the scientific audience?
Both audiences reacted strongly to the aesthetics of the piece; to its visual language and its setup in the space. But each audience also responded very specifically from within its own context; art audiences tended to be fascinated by the conceptual dual nature of the work, while scientists quickly started investigating the experimental design of the project. During the exhibition Luc De Meester invited an American colleague who was visiting Belgium. His colleague was extremely enthusiastic because he saw both a scientific and educational value in the project. We were provoking Darwinian evolution of the light responsive behavior of water fleas through exposure to predating goldfish. Our hypothesis was formed from related observations, and had never been tested before. The project was a way to bring specific research to a wider audience. The feeling that your daily practice gets a meaning for a broader public is very gratifying, but unfortunately, this happens hardly ever for scientists.
Water flea and Blue Shift [LOG. 1] installation view
What makes the art approach interesting in a regular scientific context? Can your artistic explorations be fed back to the scientific frame?
I am not sure that the art approach in general can have a major impact on scientific practice. The last decades it’s been very popular to stress the similarities between art and science. Artists and scientists are “creative and inspired”, the artist studio can be seen as a sort of laboratory, etc. Recently, at an exhibition opening in Los Angeles, an artist came up to me and stated that “scientists are artists”. I personally oppose this oversimplification. There are fundamental differences between both worlds that cannot be bridged. First, the idea that scientists have of the world is completely different than that of artists. According to science, the world is something to be fully understood and modeled and mathematics is regarded as its true underlying basis. Through a process of continuous refinement science is looking for the one universal model that will explain everything. This is a very Cartesian way of looking at the world still. As an artist you have the freedom to reject this, and personally I believe you have to reject the supremacy of such reductionist models to make truly engaging art. Art is about what escapes definition, there is a sort of spiritual element in good works of art that defies any analysis. Take poetry for example; a computer program using artificial intelligence could probably convincingly simulate a poetic style. However, true engaging poetry has an authenticity you cannot artificially create. This may seem like a very Romantic notion of art, but I believe ambiguity and ungraspability are crucial characteristics of art.
A second important difference between science and art is the handling of tradition. In a more traditional view, science is a constant flow of historicide, while art production is a process of reiteration. Through the continuous creation of new subsequent models, science progresses towards a sort of utopian ultimate understanding of the world. Older models are replaced by new ones, hence the concept of historicide. In contrast, art would constantly build on the works of former generations. “Unlike art, science destroys its own past” Thomas Kuhn argued in his Comment on the Relations of Science and Art. I don’t fully agree with this. In the daily practice of science its history and traditions are continuously present. One of the most central aspects of scientific practice is its use of statistics, the universally adopted methodology to analyze data and present insights. If your insights do not comply with the norms of this standardized system, they won’t be considered valid. It’s quite a fascinating system in its own respect and works really well. However, for me this was a major difference when I started making art: in art there is no such inevitable standardized context to work in. Art works do not have to comply with a specific set of rules to be considered “valid”. On the contrary, in the avant-garde/modernist model we use today, art should be questioning, even annihilating predecessing art and should create more pertinent and visionary answers. This doesn’t mean that the contemporary art world is always so ‘refreshing’, quite the opposite. Contemporary art seems to suffer heavily from reiteration, and we see the same things over and over again such as conceptualism, minimalism, pop art etc.
Apart from similarities, both art and science have their individual specificity that you have to handle in their own respect. Like I said before there’s no need to throw away things; combining different attitudes is the most fascinating thing you can do. However, the desire to fuse everything into one ‘model’, into one singularity is a typically Western cultural attitude. This attitude not only has its roots in scientific thinking but has also been shaped by religion and economics. A religion in which everything is reduced to one singular deity, and an economic model – capitalism – which at the root is obsessed with efficiency and hence singularity.
So, because of fundamental differences between contemporary art and science, I don’t believe they will blend again into a sort of neo-Renaissance model. Moreover, in practice science is often only superficially interested in art. Scientists don’t have the need and, more importantly, don’t have the time to indulge in an art practice consistently. However, there are examples in which the scientific community truly shows interest in a complementary artistic approach. In the specific example of ‘Blue Shift [LOG. 1]’ there was effectual feedback to the scientific community on different levels. Luc De Meester was happy to see that his year-long laboratory work finally found a way to a broader public, and that the work resulted in actual data to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Personally, this is one of my favorite aspects of the whole project; publishing an art piece in the world of science through a sort of Trojan horse.
On the other side, a lot of contemporary art does happily embrace science and technology. ISEA2006 (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) in San Jose was a clear example of this. This symposium is organized every two years in a different city, and for the 2006 edition the organizers worked together with ZeroOne San Jose, a festival on digital culture. During a full week in August there were numerous artist presentations, lectures by media theorists and curators, panel debates, etc. All this in conjunction with an extensive showcase of art works and performances throughout the whole city. The art projects somehow always made use of recent technology, both in very simple and in very elaborate ways.
Now, this embrace of technology in art has its own problems. What particularly struck me during the symposium sessions in San Jose was the desire of many artists to drown their work in an academic jargon. It looked a bit like a desperate attempt to be taken seriously and make sure the audience realized there was a “deeper meaning” to the work. I think that by doing this so explicitly you basically ‘kill’ the work, you kill the potential for an open experience by your audience. And then again, don’t forget that clever rhetorics can be used to apply ‘deeper meaning’ to almost anything. Of course all this is a consequence of conceptualism and of the enormous influence of academic discourse in the shaping of art careers. Another way in which the importance of an art project was put forward was through stressing its technological innovation value. Most often this resulted in art project presentations that were basically nothing more than fancy tech demos. There’s more – or sometimes less – to art than impressing with a technological trick developed in collaboration with a prestigious university. It’s the sort of techno-fetishism that is rife in the new media art scene. A new creative technology is presented as an art piece but essentially lacks genuine layers of poetic meaning simply because the focus is on the technology itself, and not on what lies beyond. The medium has become the message; nothing new here.
Spiral & Underground Support System (Television)
You wrote that today (new media) artists are often under pressure to present their work as “research”. What are the pitfalls of such attitude?
I have no problem with research in the arts whatsoever. It’s an interesting evolution that artists don’t necessarily have to produce well-defined (collectible) objects. It’s the art practice as a whole that has come to the foreground; what artists stand for, how artists make their attitude come true in the world, how they communicate their ideas, what other experiments and side projects they’re involved in, etc. Such layered activity and exploration is also valued these days. However, there are some pitfalls in overtly stressing research in art practice.
First of all, research may become an end in itself; the artist’s work becomes interesting simply because it is research. As a consequence some artists start legitimizing their work through some sort of research concept hoping that it will make the work more relevant. Well, it’s up to the spectator to decide whether the research presented is actually meaningful or just a “marketing trick”. Sometimes research even becomes an excuse to avoid making a clear-cut artistic statement or finalized work. The work-in-progress-syndrome. I have nothing against work-in-progress tactics but they should be meaningful in view of a chosen strategy, not a pretext to procrastinate. In some cases artists fall victim to their own endless technical research. This is a phenomenon which you often encounter in the new media scene. People start up a technically complex project and keep struggling with it for years and years, continuously working on the technical and financial aspects of the work. Once again, this is not a necessarily bad strategy but in some cases the artist would be better off picking up some completely new ideas and a fresh new project. Experimentation and exploration seem essential for me.
I also believe there is a strong tendency nowadays to instrumentalize art, especially those art forms that do not sell well. This is of course a neoliberal vision on the art practice; art should somehow financially sustain itself within market forces. There’s a big cultural difference between this in Europe and the US. In Europe, art that has less or no commercial value can be funded by the government, much less so in the US. As a consequence, American artists tend to present their new media work more often as research with a utilitarian benefit for society: it has an academic value, it’s technologically innovative etc. I think this is not always a healthy situation. Art should reclaim its rights to be sometimes… well, not useful at all, not in a directly measurable way. I even think contemporary art should become more irrational. We badly need more “nonsense”.
Is Drumlander a way to, as you put it elsewhere, “reclaim the freedom to play”? How did you get into the game culture by the way?
Yes, Drumlander is exactly that. This doesn’t mean we approach our game-related projects in a casual manner; on the contrary, we are very focused on bringing quality in what we do. Computer games are something Louis Blackburn and I grew up with. I was playing a lot but never really thought of incorporating games into my art. All this changed when I visited Louis in Québec City in 2004. We started talking about games; about the beauty, strength and craftsmanship of our favorite games, links with other media, and above all, approaches to recycle this culture in a creative manner. And that’s how we decided to set up Drumlander. Drumlander was originally conceived as a DJ project with game music, but quickly evolved into a much broader platform to explore the creative potential of games. In the DJ set we mix original game tunes, game music remixes and chip music made with old game consoles. We have gathered a massive collection of game songs and sounds, and depending on the venue, things become more dancy or experimental. It’s undoubtedly a great new experience for me coming from a background of science and visual arts.
Drumlander Art+Game montage
I really liked the games you curated for the exhibition Art+Game organized by IMAL in Brussels last December. It presented the most interesting aspects of video games today: activism, education and fun. Which criteria guided your selection?
Drumlander’s game arcade The Sweet and Violent Underbelly of Game Culture is a showcase of independent games, mostly freeware and open-source. The present-day game industry can be compared to the film industry, with a small group of massive studios creating the most lucrative games, and a widespread scene of independent artists and programmers. For the arcade we consistently look for computer games that show a level of artistic ingenuity. As a spectator, this may not always seem so obvious at a first glance; sometimes you really need to submerge yourself in the game to discover this. There are many different levels on which a game can excel in creativity: its concept, gameplay, graphics, music, etc. A crucial aspect of the arcade is that we are constantly around to introduce people to the games, to play with or against them, discuss the significance of games, etc. This results in a whole different experience for the audience. For many visitors, games transform from a previously misunderstood commodity to an exiting medium with loads of creative potential.
For our last installment of the arcade at Art+Game in Brussels, we also included a personal selection of political games. These are games that take current political and social issues as a central theme. Sometimes in truly activist sense, and sometimes more in an ironic way. Through their sheer subject matter these games possess a sort of documentary value; something I learned during a debate with Eddo Stern and Peter Brinson at Gamezone deSingel in Antwerp last year. I find this a very interesting new way of looking at games.
Drumlander - DJ set in Quebec
I read about one of your upcoming projects that will star mad scientists. It is certainly an ironic idea coming from you. What motivated the choice of that character?
I have a strong interest in cultural icons like the zombie, the alchemist, and mad scientist because they represent a sort of underground science. Each icon has a specific and consistent logic of its own but at the same time clearly transgresses the boundaries of normalized rational thinking. They also reflect people’s fears; both about science and the unknown. The alchemist and mad scientist are figures that operate in an ethical no-man’s-land and use technology without constraints, thus provoking fear. On the other hand, the mysticism which is involved in alchemy and zombies reflects man’s inexhaustible fascination-repulsion for the unknown.
I am currently planning an audio piece using the in-game dialogues of mad scientists captured from a wide range of computer games. The piece will be a multichannel surround installation set up around a central video sculpture. My idea is to create a sort of incongruous conversation piece that in a way reflects the representation of science in popular game culture.
Can you already tell us a few words about the book you’re working on?
The book I am currently writing with art philosopher Antoon Van den Braembussche, is a series of dialogues on contemporary relations of art, science, and spirituality. We met some years ago at the HISK; a postgraduate art school in Antwerp where I was studying at the time. During our first meeting at his home we had a non-stop conversation of more than seven hours. Consequently we thought it might be a great idea to use such conversations as the basis for a book. We approach the rather wide spectrum of the book’s subject through ten different angles: art and science, the virtualization of contemporary culture, computer games and visual culture, spirituality in the digital age, etc. It’s an extremely “natural” project that flows wonderfully well. The discussions are almost always unprepared and lead to the most surprising insights. We also travel around for this project. We go to Spain quite often, to work in isolation in a small mountain village in Andalusia, and we’re also planning to make a trip through Asia to go and talk with local philosophers and Buddhist monks.
There’s already a big interest in our book; people keep on asking me when it will be finished. We plan to have the Dutch manuscript ready by the end of this year, and the book should be out in 2008. After the Dutch version we’ll start working on an English and French translation.
Now two silly questions that I think you deserve!
1. When will you have a website?
In February I will have a brand new web site. It will contain both an artist archive, a blog and a vault for all texts, ideas, scans, manuals that I think might be useful for the community. Until then you can check some of my work on the IBK Visual Arts Database.
2. Is there any talent that you don’t have?
Oh, one thing I am pretty bad at is orientation. I don’t know why but I have a harder time than anyone else to get a clear oversight of a city. In the end I usually get it, but it takes me like 15 times longer than a normal brain. However, in games I do pretty well…
Thanks Angelo!
Angelo Vermeulen can be contacted at angelovermeulen[at]myway dot com
Thanks to Morgan Riles for correcting the English.
All images courtesy of Angelo Vermeulen (except the portrait of Thomas Kuhn.)
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 19, 2007, 9:14AM
Die Stadt
When I worked at Manchester Institute for Popular Culture in the mid-90s, our research papers were generally adorned with images from Franz Masereel’s Die Stadt, a quite beautiful book of woodcuts from 1925, and the choice of then Director, Justin O’Connor. It’s a haunting tableaux, hovering between gothic expressionism and modernism, and has stayed with me ever since. A current resident of Manchester, John Coulhart, on his great blog Feuilleton, pointed at an online reproduction of Die Stadt the other day. I now realise my attraction to similar drawings in some of my favourite comic books on the city such as Tardi, Igort, Hergé, Lutes and Tatsumi. Interestingly, it also reminds me of recent animation Kapitaal, particularly those scenes which expose the richness and density of commercial information in the early modern city.
Originally from cityofsound by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 18, 2007, 2:55PM
Documents and performances
This week, many students presented their thesis projects at the Berlin University of the Arts’ digital media class. Since all of them were quite good, we will cover them over the next couple days.
Lisa Rave has created a beautiful two-fold project which takes a look at the relationship between performance art and its documentation, strongly referring to works like Chris Burden’s Shoot.
For the first piece “Oak Frame”, Lisa cut down an oak tree (which would have been felled anyway) and photographically documented the tree, the process and the void that the tree left behind. These pictures were put into frames which she crafted from the same tree’s wood and put up on the wall. Since the wood is still fresh, the frames will warp as they dry and eventually destroy the panes of glass in front of the photographs, somewhat obscuring the images of the tree.
For the presentation, she got a humidifier from a Berlin museum which was actively working against this process and in a sense stretching the time-span of this part of the performance.
The second piece, “Zählen von 1 bis 3000 in absoluter Dunkelheit” (To count from 1 to 3000 in absolute darkness), plays on a similar idea - it is a photograph of Lisa who was standing still as long as the camera had collected enough light to produce a properly exposed image. The duration of the creation of the performance became the time of the creation of its documentation and vice-versa.
Related: Safari by Lisa Rave.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 6:58PM
