My work this semester has concentrated on one sort of technology (network technology) and has praised it. My piece, Visualizaton, reads internet activity on whatever network it is plugged into (for example, a wifi network), and uses the data to drive a visualizer that randomly produces bars of colors and notes from a piano.

Unlike most of the work we've looked at this semester, I did not create this piece with some sort of ulterior political motive. As far as deeper meaning in this piece goes, I simply wanted to show that the internet and the people on it are capable of creating beautiful things. Most other pieces I have seen that were created with the same software I used tend to make a plethora of political statements... mostly having something to do with the FBI, privacy issues, Big Brother, etc.

Because of this difference, I would have to say that my piece seems to be most similar to, say, the work of John Cage. While most of Cage's work was concerned with indeterminacy and the interaction between light sources, my piece is concerned with indeterminacy and the interaction between people (or, visually, between colors). In fact, the method in which I determine which bar and sound shall be played is derived, somewhat, from Cage's method. "Cage might choose a musical pitch from three possibilities. Possibility A could be related to I Ching numbers 1–24, possibility B to 25–48, and possibility C to 49–64. The actual choice of an I Ching number, as described in the book itself when it is used as an oracle, was accomplished by tossing coins or (later) by running a computer program..." (Wikipedia)

Since I do not share Cage's obsession with all things Zen, I've done without I Ching, and rely solely on the computer and other people to make choices within my piece. When the piece is running, it is impossible to say how much network activity will take place during any given second. There could be twenty packets sent. There could be a hundred. There could be none. This is the first random factor. Next, it is (nearly) impossible to say which bar will play. There are 81 bars in total, and a random number generator spits out thirty different random numbers per second. So, a packet received at .1 seconds will play a different bar than a packet received at .15 seconds. Or it could lay the same bar. I have no control over it.

This removal of authorial control is something I have explored in previous pieces. Last semester, I produced a piece which allowed viewers to draw on a digital canvas, using a PC tablet. It scored them on their drawings, saying it was using a complex algorithm to determine the real world value of their piece based on color choice, stroke, brush choice, etc. In reality, however, the value assigned to any action was completely random. Every time a stroke was made, or a color chosen, or a brush changed, the program would choose a random number between -100 and 100, and add it to their current score. Thus, I removed control from all parties involved. I denied myself control by allowing users to create their own art, however I also denied them control by A) lying to them, and B) allowing the program to randomly score them. It's possible that someone could reproduce the Mona Lisa with my program and score a -$2000. It is just as possible that someone could simply scribble all over the canvas in one color and make a piece worth $10,000.

I believe this lack of control and indeterminacy is what makes my piece, Visualization, worthwhile. Like in the real world, people are able to use the internet in any way they see fit. It can produce results which are beautiful and melodic just as easily as it can produce results that are ugly and dissonant.

Chiho Aoshima - City Glow

Chiho Aoshima, a Japanese pop artist, created City Glow, a piece in which she has created a dreamlike world inhabited by living buildings, various types of insects (both real and, it seems, imagined), lush plant life, cites of murder and massacre and more.

Aoshima's work is famous for including all sorts of aspects of Japanese culture, both new and ancient. In her pieces, City Glow being no exception, one can see reference to anime and city sprawl (both of which hold importance today in Japan), as well as other themes that draw on older, more timeless Japanese ideas, such as anthropomorphism, spirits and interconnectedness between various life forms.

The creation of a dreamlike state seems to be a staple in many of her pieces. While none of her work is necessarily representative of real life, it draws on it and mixes it with the unreal, flowing from one impossible scene to the next, much like a dream. She herself states, "My work feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialize." Laura Hoptman, the curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh described her work as such: "She makes these big, big murals and most of them -- all of them that I had seen -- are fantasy worlds. They're mostly these wonderful, sexy utopias with floating young girls in long dresses amid flowers. And they're really beautiful as only highly decorative contemporary Japanese work can be."

This mix of the real and the unreal, modern Japanese culture and ancient Japanese culture, is the basis of most of Aoshima's work.


Links:

Various examples of work: http://www.blumandpoe.com/chihoaoshima/

Chiho Aoshima's site: http://www.chihoaoshima.com

Photos of City Glow installation in the Tube (Gloucester Road station, 25 July 06 - 25 Jan 207): http://www.itravelnet.com/photography/europe/uk/london/cgmwphotogallery.html

Various murals of City Glow in the NY subway: http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/artwork_show?117

Jim Campbell

- Jim Campbell is interested in time. Many of his works are visually similar to futurist pieces (such as Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space). Does the technology which Campbell uses change the meaning of these works at all?

- What role does technology play in Campbell's piece? Does it do anything besides limit the amount of (visual) information we receive? (for example, in his LED pieces)

- Some of Campbell's pieces are also generative in nature. "The End" uses "an algorithm is used to generate all possible video images. Any image you can think of will eventually end up on the screen. The number of possible images is finite with a defined number of pixels. There is a companion piece that generates all possible sounds that are one second long." Is this, then, the same as the other generative pieces we've looked at?






I think it's fairly safe to say that for Jim Campbell, the process through which his work is created (and the processes the pieces use themselves) is more important than the final result. His "Ambiguous Icons" display either blurred images or images constructed by a small grid of LED lights. There's nothing that looks "real" in any of these pieces.

Many of his pieces draw on theories that are psychological in nature. For example, he describes "Ambiguious Icons" as an exploration of the "relationship between information and meaning." At what point, for example, does a shape which we understand as a physical object, lose its meaning? I can see a certain similarity between Campbell's pieces and, say, a Rorschach test. Similarly, many of his other works draw on other psychological themes, such as memory, hallucination, and shock treatment.



Time, another element seen in Campbell's work, plays a similarly important role. One piece, for example, tracks the sun's position in the sky, and displays the percent of the day which is left (for example, at noon, 50% of the day would be left). He also plays with time by creating images which are similar in nature to many futurist or cubist pieces. His "Illuminated Averages" pieces are made up of various pictures taken at different times superimposed over each other. However, again, the process seems more important than the final product.

As he explains it, "Dynamism is a suite of four digital inkjet prints created at Graphicstudio in Tampa, Florida. The artist videotaped movement (his motion) of each object for a specific period of time, then used custom hardware to average the multiple frames into one single image. The result is a blurring effect that gives the appearance of motion." However, the same sort of image could be manufactured in ten minutes in photoshop.

Technology & Art

I have always been interested in new technology and the way it allows us to communicate. When I was in third grade, our school had two computers that were hooked up to the "world wide web," and one of the teachers thought it would be good to invite students who might be interested in learning about it to join a club that would teach them how to use it. Most of the students didn't really care, however myself and two other kids joined, and we spent the next few weeks learning about "web crawlers" (search engines) and how one might find a site of interest on the internet (using a phone book type thing that listed [literally] every site on the internet).

Fairly soon after that my family got internet access, and I spent a lot of time searching out new sites, discovering the internet's more interactive features, etc. Even now, I do graphic design work which eventually finds its way onto the web, adding to that massive phonebook that I used in third grade.

The projects I've worked on in the past and am working on now have all drawn in one way or another from this interest in technology. A past project related to video games and their ability and/or inability to be classified as art.

My current project will focus on communication and the ability of many individuals to work together to create something greater than themselves (drawing on the ideas of swarm technology, the Wiki revolution, etc).

Eno, Fischinger & Whitney - Visual Music

Eno

Interview with Brian Eno (pt 1)


Interview with Brian Eno (pt 2)

- According to Eno, religion says, "You're not in control," whereas the rest of your life is all about "taking control." "Freedom is the ability to take control." We should be prepared to say, "I'm not in control, and I like it."
- Where is the control in this piece? Does the artist, (Brian Eno) have control? Does the piece itself and the code which makes it run have control? Does the viewer have control?

- "If you wanted to be sure of seeing a repeat(ed image), you'd have to watch for about 450 years."
- According to Eno, we could sit in front of his piece, watch for 450 years and never see the same image twice. If this is true, have we "seen" the piece? Have we "understood" it? Or are we perhaps just seeing a part of a whole? (sort of like looking at a 3 inch square of a massive mural)
- Furthermore, is this a work of art (period)? Or is it a theoretical example? (such as "Every Icon")

- Time is extremely important in this piece. And since the images on the screen are apparently displayed at random, could one say that time itself is more important than the images? If this is true, do the images even matter?

- Without accompanying music, is this piece truly "visual music," as Eno suggests?

Fischinger

Study #7


- Is this piece about music, movement, or the interaction between them? We can see by his work with the Lumigraph that he was interested in the interaction between music and light, so perhaps this interaction is more important than the music or the imagery.

- However, we see from other work that he eschewed music and even sound all together. "Radio Dynamics," has no sound at all, but through its "slow pulsating rhythms and astonishing single-frame flickers of painterly images," seems to reference music. Even its name references sonic content. So perhaps the interaction is STILL important?

Whitney

Arabesque


- Whitney's allusion to the linguist tradition reveals a lot about his work. One of the most important "rules" in linguistics is that words in a language are abstract. When I say the word "dog," everyone knows what I mean. But the word itself does not resemble a dog in any way. It doesn't sound like a dog, nor does it look like a dog. However, our brain understands that "dog" means a four legged canine with fur, teeth, ears, a personality, and is sometimes tame, sometimes feral, etc.
- So is Whitney's work really a sort of visual-musical language? Could we watch one of his films silently and still understand the music? Or, like language, do we have to have prior knowledge to understand it? If I had never seen a dog, never heard someone talk of a dog, never heard a dog, (despite the fact that the word "dog" is abstract), would I know what "dog" meant? Whitney's work is clearly abstract, but do we understand it as visual-music?

Moholy-Nagy: the Light-Space Modulator

Hungarian artist Lázló Moholy-Nagy was clearly fascinated with light. Most of his work, it seems, used light as a medium for expression. Light-Space Modulator is a working, light-bending machine designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1930. While the physical portion of the piece is amazingly complex and beautiful by itself (a revolving mass of gears, glass, metal grates, etc.), what it creates is the true piece. Light is projected on and through it, and the resultant shadows and bounced/refracted light creates an ever-changing painting of sorts (his paint being, of course, light itself).

Other examples of Moholy-Nagy’s work also draws heavily on the effects of light. Photogram Number 1 - the Mirror, created in 1922-1928, is an image created, again, by light. By using a looking glass to create shadows and highlights on top of light sensitive paper, and then moving it, he created various shapes which closely resemble mirrors. So in this piece, not only is light one of his tools, it is also the subject. Light-Space Modulator makes use of reflective surfaces to produce its amazing effects, and it seems that Moholy-Nagy was already working with this idea nearly a decade before the contraption was produced. And interestingly, the image on the photogram is somewhat similar to the image created by the Light-Space Modulator.

One of the major departures Moholy-Nagy made from more traditional art was that light was no longer just a piece of some larger picture. Photographers, for example, used light in order to capture an image of physical things. It was a tool, as it was for Moholy-Nagy in his earlier pieces, but the characters or things in their pictures were their subjects. Not light itself. How, then, could one capture light?

Moholy-Nagy seems to have found the perfect way with his piece. If one concentrates not on the jumble of metal and glass Moholy-Nagy constructed, but instead on what is projected on the wall behind it, the effect is quite beautiful and makes one think differently about light in general.

John Cage - One11

"One11 and 103", in John Cage's words, is a film about "nothing." The 90 minute feature consists of various visual effects created by light on walls. Combined with music composed specifically for the piece, the film feels almost like a sort of projected meditation. Nothing happens in the film; there are no characters, there is no plot. The light is just light, the music - just sounds created by instruments. When watching the film, one is drawn into Cage's meditation and understands that just because there is "nothing" in the film, it does not mean there is nothing of worth.