1. photographic ontological parallax

project a still photograph of a thing onto the thing itself -

variations :

project a video loop of a thing onto the thing itself

project a video loops of a thing onto the thing itself... make use of locked camera with object moving “extemporally” (i.e. jump cuts, movement in and out of frame non-continuously, etc.)

what this means: it is difficult for people to make the distinction between the representation of the thing and the thing itself. it is also difficult for people to understand the instability of the object defined. when we view an object as itself evolving in simultaneity with its frozen synchronic icon, we understand the difficulty of defining anything as an unconditionally stable self.

body binaries

a series of binary body states - how does the alternation make an experiential shift?

1. polyphasic sleep vs. monophasic sleep - how do your dreams adapt?

2. organic eating/exercise vs. junk food eating/physical inertness - what changes occur in consciousness

3. extended states of extreme pain vs. extended states of extreme pleasure -

4. anorexia vs. overeating

5. wealth creation vs. poverty - is a self-imposed poverty significantly different than an incidental one?

6. sensory overload vs. sensory deprivation

biological aesthetic audio systems notes

1. -place 100 moths into a lucite prism.
-in the center of the prism, place a directional microphone.
-on either side of the prism, place a light.
-alternately dim each light up and down.
-amplify or record the sound of the moths moving between the sides of the prism.
-process as desired.

2. places 500 roaches into a sealed box with a microphone. what sound does their colony make?

3. in a large room filled with birds, open a delay and feedback system containing 4 to 8 speakers with discrete input and multiply panned output. allow the system to develop into a large mass of feedback. discover how the birds produce sound in reaction with recorded iterations of their own sounds.

4. -in a public room, build a very large phonograph cylinder.
- fit the cylinder with three successive play heads and one record head.
- place a microphone on one side of the room and a speaker on the other.
- activate the apparatus and allow it to run for a week or more.
- observe the long term changes in the sound produced.

audio

http://kitsunenoir.com/2010/03/25/zimoun-sound-sculptures-installations/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJj-eMIulZY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHCl4TUdTA&feature=related

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWquNmISmmA&feature=related

विडियो rhizome

Video feedback rhizome notes:

1. Open feedback loop with video projector and camera. Apply some process of servo randomization (or perhaps just constant motion) to zoom, aperture, and focus on camera lens.
2. Project multiple films onto projector surface to introduce asynchronous inputs.
3. Where possible, capture stills from sources and convert to audio in upic… see what the un-synched pairing produces.

“engines” for generative art

this is an on-going series of potential catalytic forces/machines for auto-producing works of art:

non-man-made: organic/physical
1. -gravity
2. -oxidization
3. -electrolysis
4. -alkalization – (i.e. the neuro-chemical effect of any drug (that occurs in nature) ending in “–ine”)
5. -sympathetic vibration
6. -erosion
7. -wind/sun
8. -predictable animal behaviors (circadian rhythms, reproductive behaviors, time or light-based noise-emitting, etc.)
9. -heat/fire
10. -light (bleaching) vs. lack of light
11. -magnetism
12. -photosynthesis
13. -weight distribution of non-dense substances (i.e. air and helium, oil and water)
14. -wave interference/wave harmonization
15. -convection
16. -infection
17. -freezing
18. -crystallization
19. -nuclear fusion/fission (by stars)
20. -singularity


man-made: mechanical/electrical/electronic/human

1. -numbering systems (i.e. random number generators, Fibonacci series, fractals) and computer software designed to employ these numbering systems.
2. -memory
3. -crowd-behaviors
4. -sleep
5. -breathing
6. -reproduction-related behavior
7. -low-friction perpetual motion devices
8. -feedback (audio or video)
9. -Différance/syntagmatic context
10. -A-synchronicity of machines
11. -alkalization – (i.e. the neuro-chemical effect of any (man-made) drug ending in “–ine”)
12. -serotonin reuptake inhibition
13. -hypnosis
14. -vitrification
15. -nuclear fusion/fission (by people)
16. -infrasound

फेस ओने: पोस्ट माडर्न प्सोत स्च्मोस्त स्च्मोदेर्ण

observations about Jean-François Lyotard’s criteria for works of art to be postmodern.

Representation/Reproduction/Legitimation:

“I have broken the blue boundary of colour limits; come out into white, beside me comrade-pilots\, swim in this infinity, I have established the semaphor or suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the coloured sky, torn it away and in the sack which formed itself, I have put colours and knotted it. Swim the free white sea, infinity lies before you.” – Kasimir Malevich

“To appreciate a work of art, we need bring with us nothing from life.” – Clive Bell

Lyotard, in his approach to the crisis of representation, seems to imply that a “picture” and only a “picture” is a means of representation. An imitative picture is pre-modernist. An abstract image is modernist. A work of concept is postmodern. He denies the representative image the ability to extend into postmodernism.

To me, his error in thinking is the notion that conceptualism (non-representative non-visual art) escapes signification. Lyotard traps himself in Platonist “form” reasoning. If the mimetic image is an abomination, an impure copy of a form, then the abstract image is superior but still fails in its representation of “some thing”, then how does a concept, which survives only in second hand description, ephemeral experience/memory, speech or writing, photographic/graven image, or worse, the artist’s imagination escape also being a reproduction. Memories are reproductions. This doubt of the world of the senses betrays the invention of an imaginary “superior” world to which our access if blocked by the limitations of our senses. If this blocked access means access to “objective truth”, then all we have to engage experience is our memory as an imperfect copy of the imperfectly sensed experience.

What Lyotard appears to be searching for is the location of the sublime… the divine/external/metaphysical genius (in the ancient sense of the word genius) of a work of art. This might also be referred to as the “soul” of art. He is searching for a single idea that describes and unites the intention of all art and a definable, unchanging motivation for its creation. Consider the differences between art-brut and corporate art… what different motivations must they have? Does an “artiste-brut” consider his/her audience? Does a corporate artist have an uncontrollable compulsion to create?

The problems of representation and reproduction are bound up together. The act of mechanical reproduction is an extension of multiple processes within the mind that reproduce to represent. That a photograph or video is more capable of “accurately” reproducing a physical form (in some senses) than painting forces painting to change, to redefine what painting as a pursuit seeks. It continues, even as an abstraction, to seek something. When design becomes an easy-to-use mechanical process or cinema provides movement that only painting and photography can imply, works of concept (performance, installation, self-mutilation, meditation, etc.) become the new vehicle for pursuing the “soul” of art, or the sublime. This is civilization still responding to the myth of the fall, asking itself “where did we go wrong?” and chasing its fleeting joy like Dante chasing Beatrice through heaven and hell.

The sublime is not an essence. The sublime is the joy of action, successful intuitive or sensitive problem solving. Its presence is arbitrary. It should not be viewed as a soul but as a pulse.

Lyotard’s postmodernism is as trapped within the language of the modernism he criticizes. His crisis of the ephemeral vs. the tangible in terms of corporate access to art is also misplaced. If corporations can buy flash mobs, generate imaginary money, and, most importantly INSPIRE a break from tangibility in art-making, then “ephemeral” art is BOUND TO corpoations अस well. Business becomes part of the blueprint for the search for the sublime.

And if we are we are to believe Baudrillard’s notion that Al-Quaeda produced the inimitable by the 9/11 attacks, then we must assume that they were not, in fact, imitating/responding to the years of corporate driven “secret warfare” that the United States through the CIA (and, in turn, the Mujahadeen) had been enacting on the third world. If we are to see the truth of this circumstance, corporatism is the model for “the inimitable” work of 9/11. The irony is that the potential for subsequent acts of domestic terrorism on this scale is what provided the Bush administration with the power to convince Americans that their “Uniquely American” civil liberties were purchasable with Bush’s own “political capital”. In this way, it is the Bush Administration who has ultimately succeeded in reproducing the un-reproducible in the consciousness of civilization. Bravo, Neo-conservatives! You have become the true postmodernists. You have captured the sublime by selling our own imagined fears back to us with imaginary money! So why do we not see this great slight of hand as the most successful act of both mimesis and nonrepresentationalism (i.e. the symbol of money is worth nothing more than our faith in it) in history? Why is this NOT considered a great act of art?

This brings us to the problem of legitimation. The Bush administration needed no legitimation as artists to engage in their work, though it is more skillfully theatrical than cinema, more trompe l’oeil than the ceiling Sant Ignazio, and more non-material than Chris Burden. The need for academics and museums and their power of display to legitimize art is rapidly being diminished by the culture of informational immediacy. The museum is replaced by deviant art, the cinema by television and again by youtube and hulu. Though men like George Soros and Thomas Friedman are locked in a bitter ideological struggle with men like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, their ideologies are interdependent. Their money and the effects of their industry on people hold far more sway than their ideological debates over foreign aid, globalization, and the responsibility of the powerful to the powerless. The lack of need for politicians to legitimize their work as art is inversely mirrored by the absorption of punk rock into the corporate form of legitimate music. As music and film as commodities are given away for free in conjunction with ad-space on the Internet, legitimacy is established by proximity to advertising (youtube, myspace music, etc.). As these spaces become tandem with our living and working spaces and as music becomes less a component of ritual and more an element of environment (i.e. USE of music), its presence becomes imitative of cinema. As we are capable of “soundtracking” our lives, we begin moving our presence into a contextual, partially fictionalized narrative. As our lives cease to imitate art and actually become art, it is our own proximity to the tools of context creation that provide is with legitimacy.