"State Change" - asserting presence in a mall with organized sounds

State Change
...cellular automata in real time and space
...the reclamation of "privitized" public space

Time / Place:
March 1 (Saturday) / 11:30am - 12:30pm / Time Square, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
March 12 (Wednesday) / 7:30 - 8:30pm / Festival Walk, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Artists:
Hector RODRIGUEZ
Joao PAIVA



For direct link to video on YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0nDAtG80r0

My view on the performative force of State Change:
Here is an example of a sound work (organized noise) which plays upon its performative force to break in and open up via inserting the individual bodies and the collective sound sheet into a space that is controversially public. State Change's cultural politics comprises of taking a scholarly concept -- the idea of cellular automata, and the intention to democratize this notion via a live performance -- and playing it out in the city's best known shopping malls. Its tactics lies in both the design of voice performance to illustrate cellular automata, as well as in bodily presence in a carefully chosen space and time. The occupation of space via organized sound and collective movement via the building's most mobile architectural installation (escalator) opened up the event for the accidental passers-by. The work's performative power therefore lies in turning passers-by into potential participants. The most beautiful moment of State Change, for me, as documented on the video, was when the security guards at Time Square started to step on the escalator and point his finger at every single person he passed by. In that moment, the security guard became part of the performance, adding one extra alien code to the 1 and 0. The security team's paranoia and scare was not planned, but was precisely a demonstration of the work's power to knock through the facade of friendliness, pleasure and prosperity to invoke the hidden discipline and order. The unplanned, unique in each of the two shopping malls, was the effect of the work's performative force.

A few views on "media archaeology"

Eric KLUITENBERG describes “media archaeology” as more than just another branch of media theory and history. Researchers in this new area “choose to document the lineages of the media machines themselves.” [1]

Erkki HUHTAMO seeks to describe the multi-layered strata of media machineries to detect their occurrence, disappearance, and recurrence. In his view, media archaeology is “a way of studying such recurring cyclical phenomena which (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history and somehow seem to transcend specific historical contexts.” [2]

Siegfried ZIELINSKIZ says, “I shall now launch a few probes into the strata of stories that we can conceive of as the history of the media in order to pick up signals from the butterfly effect, in a few localities at least, regarding both the hardware and the software of the audio-visual. I name this approach media archaeology, which in a pragmatic perspective means to dig out secret paths in history, which might help us to find our way into the future...” To Zielinski, digging up the past is closely tied to the effort to retain a utopian potential for contemporary and future media cultures. [3]

Thomas ELSAESSER, one of the “New Film History” theorists/historians who had revitalized the study of the cinema’s origin, argues for a new historiographic model, which he calls “media archaeology, to address the turn-of-the-century multimedia conjuncture.” In his view, the field of audio-visual experience needs to be re-mapped so that our understanding of the issue may overcome the “old-new” binary pair. The following terms require clarification:
Embodiment / Interface / Narrative / Diegesis / Non-entertainment uses of the audio-visual dispositive [4]

[1][2][3] Kluitenberg, Eric, ed. Book of Imaginary Media: excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium. Rotterdam: NAi Pubishers, 2006. 12-14.
[4] Elsaesser, Thomas. "The New Film History as Media Archaeology," in CiNeMAS, vol. 14, n. 2-3: 75-117.

The missing links of automatism & the quest for systems (2)

Dutch artist Humbert de Superville's treatise (around 1827?) provides a systematic description of abstract lines. To him, there are THREE directions of lines: the horizontal, the V-shaped, and the A-shaped, and to each he assigned specific colors and emotions.

The missing links of automatism & the quest for systems (1)

In my visit to the "Turner-Hugo-Moreau: the Discovery of Abstraction" at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt last month, my interest was immediately drawn to the genealogy of automatism, the drive to allow chance to direct art-making in many different forms. Another aspect that caught my attention was attempts by art educators in the past 3 centuries to draw general principles in picture-making by abstracting famous painters' works into rational principles (or systems of rules). My intuition told me that there's a strong connection between chance-based automatist art-making and the notion of machine. Perhaps the affinity lies in the appeal to rationality, which Hector Rodiriguez describes as "random machines," a kind of machine that provokes randomness of the rule of its operation.

Here's a quick list of artists and works I spotted:

"Klecksografien"
= axially symmetric prints made by folding
The name comes from German "Klecks" which means blots.
18th-C techniques: had been used for ornamental purposes
19th-C: practised by artists and writers independently
Example: Justinus KERNER (1786-1862), Swabian writer and doctor

Alexander COZENS (1717-1786)
*English landscape painter and art teacher
*Systematically combined teaching composition with an aesthetic interest in "chance"
*Adopted the concept of the "blot" to describe the composition of a painting...
*He painted random, abstract-looking blots as a source of inspiration when preparing drafts for landscape painting.
*He treated that as new method of assisting the invention in drawing original compositions of landscape.

Gustave MOREAU
*A few of his sketches on one page were exhibited, something he developed for teaching...
*"Composition of Various Masters"...summarizes a few masters' principle style and approach of composition in line sketches

Frank HOWARD
*Three extracts are on display from his book COLOUR AS A MEANS OF ART: BEING AN ADAPTION OF THE EXPERIENCE OF PROFESSORS TO THE PRACTICE OF AMATEURS (London, 1838; private collection): "Turner's Principles," Ruben's Principles" and "Another of Titian's Principles"

Herman RORSCHACH (1884-1922), psychiatrist
*He published his EXPERIMENT IN INTERPRETING CHANCE FORMS in 1921. He used "klecksografien" for tests in personality and pathology studies.

Coffee stain images from the Coffee Stain Album [kafeeklecks album]
*The images were produced in Berlin around 1847-50 by Wilheim von Kauerbach and his assistants, Michael Echter and Julius Muhr...; published in 1880 as collotypes. Some doubted whether the stains were actually from coffee, but so far no one has taken theworks for a chemical test...

George SAND (1804-1876)
*She developed her own methods for producing chance iamges in color. They formed prints (1st layer, 2nd layer...) as end products.
*Images in her prints look like fossilized stone formations, which geologists called "dendrites" (streaks)

Mary MAGDALENE
*She is an example of painters in early 17th century working on "ruin marble"...
*The marbles used were usually quarried in Tuscany, which carried marks and were cut into slabs... The patterns found on the slabs resembled some kind of landscape. All artists needed to do was to add figures to these "pictorial stones." The "ruin marbles" were themselves the basis for painting.

Victor HUGO
*One leitmotif of his abstract drawings is "the chance shape."
*1830s...He would draw with any formal instruction...
*1834-35... He recorded his impressions of travels with lines and then cross-hatching.
*He then turned to imaginary landscape and the play with non-traditional drawing material (many of them everyday objects)...

Image 1: Justinus Kern's self portrait: Klecksografie (Selbstbildnis), 1857 (klecksografie and pen in brown)[owned by Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach]

Image 2: an example of "ruin marble" turned into landscape


For official article on the exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle-Frankfurt:
http://www.schirn-kunsthalle.de/data/news/1189519756_presse_turnerhugomoreau_engl_1.pdf

Wrapped time & space

Another fine contemplation on time, space, city ruins and the insertion of subjectivities...
To play, to rest, to get lost, to find oneself...
A prototype of my student TAN Xue's MFA thesis, a work-in-progress:


WRAPPED (January, 2008)

Some thoughts on the work:
I appreciate the attempt to explore the soundscape...minimalist, which works well with the image...
I like the set-up of varied movements spinning off around a still centre. The piece has a very consistent mood and a distinct personality.

The piece deserves more contemplation on the actors' actions. A minor change in activity may result in a totally different world. It is very pastoral now, perhaps a bit too pastoral... There is room for more personal thoughts -- about the city, urban ruins, youthfulness, the loss of youth, the sense of loss, femininity, and many things that have impressed the maker as a human being and as an artist. I don't mean one should stuff a work with messages. I mean artistic sensibility always finds its root in our everyday experiences and existential presence, and they often find their way into our art work as small fragments, truncated, elliptical... even when the art work itself has other manifest purposes.

The musicality of the piece can also improve via more carefully considered orchestration of the different components, especially performance... Varied speed in different actions strung together or juxtaposed results in dynamics. Image composition and action can be thought of in terms of (dance) choreography.

Location as a STAGE... This is a great location. The skyline in the background deserves more attention rather than just being set aside as a significant background: it has a defining presence/function for the identity of the space chosen. Without that background, the location would only be an ordinary piece of disused land. In a way, the presence of the skyline of a bustling city enhances the foreground as "ruins." I could not help imagining/seeing minute changes in the background. Now I have the feeling that by chance or by mistake, some changes were accidentally captured in the harbor -- sometimes there's a ship, sometimes there's no ship...

The masking effect brings disruption to the surface of the image especially to the background. Defects can be used creatively.

The material form of a wandering flow, a prototype

A project by MFA student CHEN Lei, which I supervise, seeks the interflow between the concrete and the abstract. Abolishing visual hierarchies, the impermance of perceptual states took over representation.

Here's the link to a prototype of the work-in-progress:


Some thoughts on the work:
...The attempt to blend the work via water and its flow would necessarily create tension with the pursuit for multiplicity in an intensified mode of attentiveness to images and to the world. The former suggests unity, the latter suggest clashes, conflicts, paradoxes, which could be closer to the philosophical exploration of cognition/perception... Even when the city is the same, we attend to different details differently. When we see the same thing twice, we see very different things.

I agree with the intention to stick to the "appearance" of things and stay away from hermeneutics or representational values. The idea of "energy" in the Chinese context is perplexing -- it is not about material, nor is it about emotions/feelings or ideas.

There is definitely the need to start thinking about sound -- NOT MUSIC! -- or to decide from the very beginning that there would be no sound. If it is decided that the piece is silent (-- silence is a form of sound!), then building in silence or unheard sound into the visual work should be a contemplated choice. The absence of sound should be a deliberate, active absence/presence.

The language of collage in stop motion: from a home-kitchen

NEW SOUND WANTED...

An interesting home-made stop-motion animation, Butterfly Effects, created by a few of my current and former students because they want to carry on with creative activities... The beauty of free association... It invokes the langage of children which is a lost source of inspiration, a lost platform of creative approach we want to revisit as grown-ups.

This is meant to be an MV, but I recommend to watch it without sound to really understand its charm...

Venda Lee and "7" are the two main creators, assisted by other friends and family members who helped cutting the photo characters which are in bulk quantity. They spent over 7 months to complete the entire project.

"They are very selective members as we demanded high cutting skills HAHAHA. To me the hardest part of the project
is spending weekdays evenings in shooting..." said Venda.

Here’s a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yd1uZfvk9Y

My quick remarks to Venda on the work:

"It is really cool work and highly imaginative. And honestly I think this work has much greater potential to be an experimental animation than for MV. For MV, there's a certain grammar you need to follow...MV works upon structure and repetition... This work may have to be re-cut for that purpose. However, this work is far beyond an MV that is subservient to the melody!!! I really think it would be good if the sound can be reconstructed as an autonomous soundscape. Give one more layer of sound and a different world, and you'll discover many great things you have already put into the work that you are not aware of..."

Jean Tinguely's writing machines

(above) Jean Tinguely's "Meta-Matic No. 6" (1959) making random curve lines that gradually form a pattern that resembles a huge finger print of the thumb.

(below) This is a machine that keeps repeating the same pattern like someone signing continuously; Tim Lewis' "Auto-Dali Prosthetic" made 2000)



Met once again Jean Tinguely's works early January at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt's "Kunstmaschinen, Maschinenkunst" (roughly, "art-machine/machine-art). (There's always something exciting going on every time I visited Schirn. Also on was a show "Turner-Hugo-Moreau" which has one of the best display notes I've seen.)

The "machine' exhibition also featured works by more than a dozen of other artists such as Damien Hirst, Olafur Eliasson, Angela Bulloch, Rebecca Horn, Lia, and so on.

So much I'm obsessed with "writing machines," for me it is not so much the individual works that matter, but more the exhibition's general persuasion to the public. The introductory synopsis (curatorial statement) contends that even when machines are involved to do a lot of the job, it's the artist's ideas that make the machines work.

While being sympathetic with this intention (which would probably have worked with the Writing Machine Collective exhibition that I completed), the rhetoric reminds me of many mainstream US movies such as "Artificial Intelligence" (and many many -- emphasized), in which the narrative arguement is to state -- at the end of a whole film's showing off of science and technology -- that it is humanness that rules... If there's a more superior robot, it is one that has started to shed its machine quality and begin to feel and act humanly. I often feel frustrated with this kind of reductionist compromise. I am not anti-human (though I'm critical of of humanist rhetoric), but I think the courage to fully embrace machines and allow our hypothetical thinking to touch the limits of our imagination for the capability of machines is one form of moral courage. What What I am wondering is: do we always need to rush to settle back on the grand finale of human superiority in such a great hurry? Can we slow down, take more time to engage viewers/audience/visitors with the paths of automatic process and its components, the complexity of the evovlment, as well as the amazement it generates?

This leads to another level of discussion -- the role and meaning of "automatism" in arts. In the machine-arts/art-machines I saw in the exhibition, there is a distinction to draw between machines that work with the logic of mechanical repetition and reproduction of the same act in huge quantities, and those that follow a range of randomness with constraint, producing more or less unpredictable steps within a certain range of set patterns.

Many of the works shown in the exhibition were from the 1950s and 1960s, before computing art became a prominent category. These "machines' are about mechnics. "Assembly line," the metaphor for factory works, is the material form of a few works. Another session of the exhibition shows computer code-based programmed works. The first half is informative: the idea of randomness, "art at the push of a button" and other features we now attach to computer programmed works are now in place. For the second half, highlighting interactivity, the works are actually rather simple for those who write codes to generate graphics on the computer. Something is missing for me -- the kind of complexity I expect the computer would bring. It is surely the problem with the selection of works. The computing session does not really demonstrate the leap or the qualitative distinction between mechanical machines and digital (computing) machines.

an intercreative tool for composition and sound projection at Berlin's Tesla

A project at Tesla's Open Studio this past May.

In an open studio, Daniel Teige and Martin Rumori are further developing their installation 16:9 into a universal tool for composition and sound projection. new content is created for the 60 channel matrix of loudspeakers with flexible interface control.
American composer Douglas Henderson, a guest of the DAAD berlin artists-in-residence program, presents a piece which he specially created with the matrix of speakers.

To listen to Daniel Teige's sound work:
http://www.dafoot.de/
Martin Rumori's projects
http://www.rumori.de/

***Tesla is berlin's laboratory for media art, for the exploration of the relationships between art and science, old and new, analog and digital media, for open and process-oriented artistic and technological research, for a dialog with current forms of artistic practice, and for the development of collaborations and networks. http://www.tesla-berlin.de/

See original posting at Tesla's web-site...

The work 16:9

A Collection of Chairs...

MMK, Frankfurt
Robert Watts, Chair (1962)






MMK (Museum of Modern Art),Frankfurt
Walter De Maria, Pyramid Chair (1966)



DOCUMENTA 12, Kassel
Ai Weiwei, Fairytale (2007)

A sound work in Kassel

Here's a small clip of a sound work by Saadane Afif, titled Black Chords Plays Lyrics (2007), I saw at Documenta 12, Kassel, on June 24, 2007, afternoon.

Simple delay in sound to the approach of visitors to each guitar caught by the sensors...creating a chordal ensemble. I find the set up full of potentials, but thoughts given to sound and its richness are a bit preliminary. There's so much one can do this fine set up. I consider this a good work of interactivity, but lacking in sophistication of sound art.

Filling in the gaps...May to June

I have been constantly traveling in the past two months...
10 days in Melbourne in May, 17 days in Germany and 12 days in Spain...

The posts in the coming days will be my new sound- and language-related collectibles...

Here's a rough video journal of a work, a machine-automated writing hand from the "Man-in-Machine" feature exhibition at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany)

A writing machine: