in the dust of this planet

Ok ok ... probably a bit off topic and I am not sure how I got here but I thought it relevant, especially the idea of making connections, social-media and recent discussions. If you ever think nobody is listening, that nobody is looking or question what you are doing and why, here is a fascinating story from WNYC radiolab, where the hermeneutics of philosophy, pop culture and the contemporary embrace.

In_the_Dust_of_this_planet

It also left me wondering if our fascination with nihilism could be due to the lack of language for the contemporary or the increased use of machines (technology) to mediate order through knowledge, experience and relevancy; or the use of algorithms and statistics to track and trace us as our identities are being increasingly defined through our online interactions? ... those 'transactions' that occur in the everyday and exist in all aspect of our lives. Does it link into what we value, how we define desirability and the relationship we have with our sense of worth?

We talk nihilism with Eugene Thacker & Simon Critchley, leather jackets with June Ambrose, climate change with David Victor, and hope with the father of Transcendental Black Metal - Hunter Hunt Hendrix of the band Liturgy (retrieved from WNYC radiolab – hosted by Jad Abumrad)

https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/399432

bitflips and battlefields : Hito Steyerl

[image] Hito Steyerl, Is a Museum a Battlefield? was shown at the Adam Art Gallery Wellington - 4th July to the 10 August. http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz

If you have never considered a museum as a battlefield, consider again. In Hito Steyerl's lecture/video installation/performance Is the Museum a Battlefield, she gives a convincing presentation that might make you consider otherwise. Her ‘work’ traces the debris from a battlefield in the mountainous areas south of the city of Van, Turkey where the Kurdistan PKK has been fighting for independence from Turkey. Some of the items collected includes the ‘invisible’ shell casings of a 20mm Gatling gun made by General Dynamics.

Steyerl goes on to retrace the origins of these shells back to their manufactures which implicates various corporate and industrial giants in a technological ‘bit-flip’ linking them to the biggest museums in the world through architecture, software, the 'gentrification of culture' and the corporatisation and sponsorship of art institutions by some of largest weapons manufactures in the world.

Steyerl’s uses the term ‘bit-flip’ to describe the dual use of technology, where it can be both culturally and scientifically important but at the same time can act as the collaborator to humankinds atrocities. This usage resonated with my views on the ‘new and disparate interactions’ which we are enacting through our mobile devices. Technically, ‘bit-flip’ is not a word but it suggests a manipulation of sorts where a 0 becomes a 1, an off an on and vice-versa. For me, it conjures up images of multiplicities where intent is polyvalent, where technologies ‘flip back’ on themselves, masking one of their binate ambitions.

The following video is an edited version.

[vimeo 76011774 w=700 h=393]

Documentation of Hito Steyerl's lecture "Is the Museum a Battlefield", first shown at 13th Istanbul Biennial. Steyerl’s new lecture, pro­duced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, takes as its departure point her March 2013 talk ‘I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production’ and focuses on the arms industry, a phenomenon constantly re-conceptualized by the media through the regular flow of images. It asks the question of how a museum and a battlefield could be related. The question emerges when Steyerl follows the trace of an empty bullet casing which she found in the area where the mass grave of Andrea Wolf and her friends were located in Van, Turkey.

Converstations with Doug Aitkens : artist / interviewer / facilitator

process | patterns | chaos | motion | place

"Doug Aitken was born in California in 1968. He lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Aitken utilizes a wide array of media and artistic approaches to leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts [...] Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, and installations." Retrieved from http://www.dougaitkenworkshop.com/bio/

In this series of interviews Doug Aitken's talks with contemporary visual artists, musicians, architects and socially conscious individuals across a diverse range of topics, disciplines and practice. They discuss processes, inspiration and art making and of interest to me is his interview with artist Aaron Koblin and the underlying theme of patterns. Through out all of the conversations the presence of patterns and systems is touch on, whether they be organic in nature, constructed visually or assembled aurally they exist within all that we do which facilitates our connections to and with our social world.

Station to Station (http://stationtostation.com) is another Aitken's initiated project where a train ride "connect[s] leading figures and underground creators from the worlds of art, music, food, literature, and film for a series of cultural interventions and site-specific happenings. The train, designed as a moving, kinetic light sculpture, broadcasted unique content and experiences to a global audience [...]" which takes viewers on a "journey into the new cultural frontier." Retrieved from http://stationtostation.com/about/

http://dougaitkenthesource.com http://www.dougaitkenworkshop.com http://stationtostation.com

pattern recognition :: Marshall McLuhan

“... You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns. You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds, so the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on – a need for pattern recognition.”

McLuhan, M. (1968) Marshall McLuhan Speaks, Centennial 2011: Pattern recognition [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1965-the-future-of-man-in-the-electric-age/

" ...what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, reiterating, and documenting."

Joselit, D. (2013). After Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (p. 55-56)

“We see and comprehend things as patterns, as meaningful events, because of the way our brains operate and they are made for the interpretation of a certain type of information, a certain type of world.”

Donath, J (2007). The imperfect observer: Mind, machines and materialism in the 21st century. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved from http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/TheImperfectObserver.pdf (p. 10)

"Personal experience is frequently rooted in collective and practical activities whose nature is stable, coherent, and patterned, although constantly, if minutely, in flux."

Coleman, G. (2013). Coding Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (p. 27)

“...participants can discern the relative complexity and orderliness of paintings or patterns after only a single glance afforded by a 50 msec [millisecond] exposure...”

Cupchik, G. (2011). The Digitized Self in the Internet Age. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(4) 318–328. (p. 321)

"The analysis of such massive data sets is an important and challenging task, since researchers and analysts are interested in patterns in the data, including associations, correlations or exceptions."

Keim, D. A., Schneidewind, J., Sips, M. ( 2006). Scalable Pixel-based Visual Interfaces: Challenges and Solutions. Retrieved from: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~msips/papers/scalable_pixel_exploration.pdf (Introduction)

Cover image: Still image from video interview, Old versus new assumptions (1960). Marshall McLuhan Speaks Centennial 2011. Retrieved from http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/electric-age/1960-old-versus-new-assumptions.php

Note: Apologies to Henri Dauman for posting a previous cover image with out his permission. Henri Dauman's career as a feature photographer for Life Magazine has seen him capture some of the most important cultural, political and iconic personalities of the 20th century. He is a master photographer with a unique eye for capturing those decisive moments which defined history. For a better insight into his work visit his web site at http://daumanpictures.com/.

experiments in motion :

abandoned technologies : a lonely construct acts as a sensor, receiving inputs from an invisible source, air and wind activate its function . do these unseen forces intervene? if so, in what? are we complicit? what do we do with the things we leave behind? the things we have ignored? the objects which have been infected, lost their function? ( # )

a critical self analysis of process, intent and outcomes ...

Capturing images from the interface intrigued me and the possibilities that came from those investigations led me to think more about digital corruption/debris and the loss of clarity and intent; of the role of the artist as voyeur and documenter/observer and the possibilities that the screen provides, to not only extend and alter reality, but to also act as a catalyst for dissent and a vehicle for transporting change. // These moving images serve as a platform for further explorations into the interface and the unseen. They require further inquiry and they raise more questions than providing any tangible answers. The space that resides between intent and action, code and cortex is complex and within there lies a mass of unknown and untested possibilities which pass us by without a register or a trace.

preliminary research ::

A Scalable Image Processing Framework for Gigapixel Mars and Other Celestial Body Images, Mark W. Powell, Ryan A. Rossi† and Khawaja Shams, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, {Mark.W.Powell, Ryan.A.Rossi, Khawaja.S.Shams}@ jpl.nasa.gov : http://ryanrossi.com/papers/SIPF-Mars-JPL-IEEE.pdf ( | )

Scalable Pixel-based Visual Interfaces: Challenges and Solutions. Mike Sips, J¨orn Schneidewind, Daniel A. Keim1, Heidrun Schumann2 1{sips,schneide,keim}@dbvis.inf.uni-konstanz.de, University of Konstanz 2 schumann@informatik.uni-rostock.de, University of Rostock . Germany https://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-69112/Scalable_Pixel_based_Visual_Interfaces.pdf?sequence=1

IDL Reference Guide: IDL Direct Graphics Devices http://northstar-www.dartmouth.edu/doc/idl/html_6.2/Devices_with_Scalable_Pixels.html

Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See Through Interface – Eric A. Bier, Maureen C. Stone, Ken Pier, William Buxton†, Tony D. DeRose‡, Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 †University of Toronto, ‡University of Washington : http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=166126

Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM). / CHI '95 Proceedings : http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/top.html

Daan Roosegaarde

Daan Roosegaarde creates interactive projects which blurs the line between art, technology and sense. His team of designers and engineers develop their own bespoke technology and his works encourages users and viewers to interact with the pieces. This interactivity is as much part of the works as is the visual aesthetic and the potential of commercialization is never too far from his intent.  His studio resembles a science lab where his team experiment, observe and investigate and is where "the studio creates interactive designs that explore the dynamic relation between people, technology and space." Retrieved from http://www.studioroosegaarde.net/info/profile/.

Artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde (1979) is internationally known for creating social designs that explore the relation between people, technology and space. His Studio Roosegaarde is the social design lab with his team of designers and engineers based in the Netherlands and Shanghai.

http://vimeo.com/50980092

With projects ranging from fashion to architecture his interactive designs such as Dune, Intimacy and Smart Highway are tactile high-tech environments in which viewer and space become one. This connection, established between ideology and technology, results in what Roosegaarde calls 'techno-poetry'. Retrieved from http://www.studioroosegaarde.net/info/about-daan/

http://www.studioroosegaarde.net/video/dutch-profile-daan-roosegaarde/

Images :

Dune - 2006-2012. Specifications : Modular system of length 100 cm, width 50 cm, variable heights. Hundreds of fibers, LEDs, sensors, speakers, interactive software and electronics; variable up to 400 meters.

Intimacy - 2010-2011. Specifications :  ʻBlackʼ and ʻWhiteʼ dresses, length 100cm, width 40 cm. Smart foils, wireless technologies, electronics, LEDs, copper and other media.

Flow - 2007-2013. Specifications :  Modular system of several meters with hundreds of ventilators, aluminum, sensors, electronics, software and other media.