Literature Review

Temporal Reference in Artwork
Almost any artwork that was created without the implicit expectation of object fixity can be considered a reference to time, in the sense that its creation must anticipate the changes that will occur to it in the absence of human intervention. All artwork makes some expectation of its audience and their ability to decode visual or symbolic messages.

Some artworks manifest an expectation of decay or mandate its effects. Others make use of the temporal nature of the audience's encounter with the work by incorporating motion. Works that are the result of elaborate procedures can provide some element of further signification given a knowledge of the process of their generation. The complex interface of photography in particular provides a rich source of temporal encoding in its artifacts.

The most striking works for this investigation will be those at two extremes. On one hand, there are the works whose interpretations are most likely to undergo the most drift over time. In other words, those artworks who make the most assumptions about their audiences. These are in one sense the most fragile: even if their material form is preserved they retain the least of their original impact. The other extreme consists of those works who make the most explicit reference to time, by compressing its effects into a static display or by referring explicitly to our metrics of time. These works are often agnostic to social evolution since they are working to expose social considerations of time and changes in these considerations serve merely to amplify the power of the artworks' statements.

Decay, Drift

• Robert Smithson
  
• Andy Goldsworthy
  
• (Other Land Artists...?)
  
• (plastic art) Naum Gabo [http://www.slate.com/id/2221963/]
  
• Eva Hesse
  

Durational Experience

• Pol Bury
  
• Alexander Calder
  
• Jean Tinguely
  

Elaborate Procedures

• (Gutai Group)
  Kazuo Shiraga's "Challenging Mud" (1955)
  N7429.W45 1997
  
• Adel Abdessemed: Helicoptere
  
• Jackson Pollock
  

Photography

• Alfred Stieglitz
  
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
  
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
  
• Michael Wesely
  

Fragile Interpretive Frames

• Josef Albers
  
• Kazimir Malevic
  
• Michelangelo
  
• Egyptian Heiroglyphics
  
• Primitive/Native Artwork
  

Static Displays of Time

• Etienne-Jules Marey
  
• Harold Edgerton
  
• (Slit Scanning) George Silk [http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/]
  

Reference to Metrics

• On Kawara
  

Final Report Introduction

Abstract
This thesis will propose a framework for interpretation of artworks across large durations. It will explore the effects of time on artworks, and the ways that duration is inferred by observers of the object or experience of the artwork. Given this interpretive setting, the thesis will examine a set of specific artworks through multiple narratives at different temporal interpretive perspectives. These will be synthesized to give a sense of the lifecycle of each artwork, and ultimately to generate broader conclusions involving artworks of various media.

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Introduction
With the late 20th century movement toward performance and social artworks, the encapsulation of artwork within objects has been severely problematized. The object d'arte has given way to the documenting artifact, and the transition points to a more fruitful way of analyzing works of art. The movement can be summarized as the recasting of art objects into the role of art experiences. Such a dramatic shift in our interpretive frame indicates the local nature of artistic intepretation, and generally suggests the need for a broad framework for this kind of thought.

Artwork & Object

Art objects fade into oblivion. Their slide into the past is the subject of significant social fear, fear of loss, fear of physical forgetting. Marc Auge suggests that "Oblivion is a necessity both to society and to the individual. One must know how to forget in order to taste the full flavor of the present, of the moment, and of expectation." (Auge 3) But he laments the omnipresence of the fear of forgetting. If forgetting is a precondition for true appreciation, then the current prevailing aesthetic frame is profoundly warped.

Philosopher James Walton gives a founding definition for aesthetics: "Aesthetic value arguably consists in a capacity to elicit in appreciators pleasure of a certain kind, pleasurable experiences," (Walton 12) and so ultimately our fear is of losing future access to these artistic experiences. So in some sense the fear of time's effects on art objects is the fear of disembodying the artwork, of removing its ability to impact future individuals and society. We attempt to maintain the stasis of these artifacts through time in order to retain and encapsulate the brief individual experience of encountering and engaging with the artwork.

What this attitude neglects is the context-dependence of cultural objects; as the ambient musician Brian Eno describes at a conference on long-term digital preservation, "most objects of culture are very much [...] embedded within context and these contexts are embedded within other ones as well. So a characteristic of cultural objects is they're increasingly context-dependent. And they're increasingly embedded in meta-languages." (MacLean & Davis, 51) Even if we attempt to retain the object, the social experience of the artwork will undergo significant changes as society evolves around it.

Nevertheless, our prodigious interest in the fields of museum and library preservation sciences and especially in digitizing cultural artifacts are indicative of our society's dedication to maintaining the physical state of these objects.

In so doing, we choose one form of evolution over another: we ask society to evolve while attempting to fix the set of cultural artifacts that document its past. We demand that objects remain static so that what changes in artistic interpretation over time is not due to decay and material loss in the art object but rather due to human society's attempts to engage with a universe for which it maintains fixity. Norbert Wiener describes the human process as follows: "The organism [...] seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible." (Wiener 67)

Sadly, in our attempt to fix the objective context of our social artistic discussions, in trying to perpetuate the superficial objective qualities of the art document, we neglect the powerful experience we might otherwise have of aging alongside our artworks. We are attempting to achieve the impossibility of repeating experience at the cost of a much longer-term coevolution with the works. We intentionally deny ourselves the comprehension of universal movement through time, perhaps because it indicates our own mortality through identification with the mortality of the artwork. Indeed, we constrict our experience of the artwork to a least common denominator, limiting it to only that which can be experienced by all time.

The Body of Work
The intentional artwork has much in common with the human body. It is, according to philosopher Joseph Margolis, "inseparably incarnate in the physical or biological or similar materials of the natural world; [...] being alterable as a result of historicized interpretation, its attribution affects what we should understand as the 'nature' of anything so characterized." (Margolis 92: http://library.mit.edu/item/000883095) In other words, though generally inanimate, the artwork is perhaps best understood as an embodied intentional act, one that has effects through the audience that encounters it. Its material form empowers the intention.

Sculptor and body theorist Antony Gormley restates this position: "art might not pertain to what is contained in the institution or within the unique object, but within the dynamic between the living and its surrogate body." (Gormley 223: http://library.mit.edu/item/001665328) It is useful and powerful to provide ideas with a conceptual body, since "via our bodily senses the environment enters into the very shape of our thought, sculpting our most abstract reasoning from our embodied interactions with the world." (Johnson & Rohrer 49: We are live creatures, ibid) An art object is the physical shape that results from the intent of an artist made physical. The artwork is the interaction of the body that shape defines with both the artist and society.

The artwork emerges from the interaction of three sets: the artist, the material environment, and the social environment. We can consider the material and social environments to be

The Life of Work
Once we accept the artwork as embodied intention, we find that it has a temporal progression not unlike a human's. There is an emergence, the birth of the artwork, from the interaction between the artist and the environment within which he works. The environment is always partially social and partly material, with a recent drift in artworks away from material as a primary focus and toward social constructs as their media.

Encoded in this process of creation is an interface or set of interfaces between the artist and his environment. The artist necessarily uses pre-organized materials and pre-existing social organizations to create the work, and these devices amplify intentions that the artist has toward embodiment in the environment. Encoded within this initial creative set is a prescription for the future physical evolution of the artwork. We can categorize and name these types of changes. The physical universe guarantees that the material of the artwork will carry forward in time predictably in the absence of social forces.

Our current social environment seems to be one of frenetic preservation, in the hopes of eliminating these predictive material changes. But ultimately the social environment is entirely unpredictable: as much as there is a present and relatively longstanding desire to keep artworks as static physical objects, there is no guarantee that this institutional mandate will persist in the future. Moreover, as we saw earlier, there is a huge amount of context that the observer brings to the experience of an artwork that unavoidably fluctuates over time.

So while we can construct the prototypical life-cycle of an artwork consisting of birth/creation, feedback, exhibition, discussion, preservation, and so forth on into decay, we can hardly be sure of the furthest reaches of our analysis. We know that the continued integrity of old works was hardly assured at their inception, and given the constant changes of the artwork's social setting, predicting its long-term future with any degree of certainty is impossible at this stage. Our best guess is still decay and decomposition of the artwork's material constituents.

Observation and Assumptions
Given this apparent mortality of the artwork, perhaps we can see the value in a holistic approach to the artwork by looking at a number of different interpretations that might arise. In other words, fragments of the artwork's body, as it arises through time and as it emerges from social and material co-evolution.

As the proposed social perspective drifts further from the artist's creative perspective, a corresponding deconstruction of the initial interpretive assumptions will take place. The artwork, we will find, becomes less and less legible or aesthetically valuable; therefore, it will be more and more a gesture in a broader social dialog. It will appear as fundamentally human: a temporary bundle of physical and social messages.

Term's End Notes

African Fractals:

http://library.mit.edu/item/001267457

In african designs, "the central peak of spiritual power is analogous to the central peak of compuational power in the Crutchfield-Smale complexity measure." (174)

"pattern creation through group activity is supported by conscious mechanisms specific to self-organization as defined in complexity theory." (174)

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Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity

http://library.mit.edu/item/000931310

Brian Eno: "Since I'm interested in cultural objects, the question that most interests me is: What is the difference between preserving data, with things like tax returns for example, and preserving cultural objects? [...] To give you an example of a cultural object that's extremely difficult to store in digital form, there's a painting by Kazimir Malevic called White on White[...] in 10,000 years time you'd finally dig deep down [...] and you see that. It is absolutely meaningless without some sense of what it was a gesture towards. [...] I would contend that most objects of culture are very much like that, they're embedded within context and these contexts are embedded within other ones as well. So a characteristic of cultural objects is they're increasingly context-dependent. And they're increasingly embedded in meta-languages." (51)

to read: Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

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Norman Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings / Cybernetics and Society

http://library.mit.edu/item/000773556

"In connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase." (47)

"The organism is not like the clockwork monad of Leibnitz with its pre-established harmony with the universe, but actually seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible." (67)

Kendall Walton - Marvelous Images

http://library.mit.edu/item/001501024

"Aesthetic value arguably consists in a capacity to elicit in appreciators pleasure of a certain kind, pleasurable experiences. [...] 'aesthetic' pleasures include the pleasure of finding something valuable, of admiring it.

Life of a Photograph

The common photograph is a snapshot: a Kodak 'moment'. It is perceived primarily as a representation of a perspective in time and from space, not necessarily as an artwork or even as primarily an object. But the photograph is always an object, and whether or not it is thought of as an artwork, the photograph has a trajectory through time.

The camera is the foremost interface that enables photography: the lens, the shutter, the film or sensor, the enclosure, and sometimes, the flash. This encapsulated system, however, is not independently able to produce a photograph. Though it is the icon of photography, the camera requires a context of both light from the scene that it depicts and a method of reproduction to be a functional intermediary. It is the locus of the greatest control in this process, but it is by no means the exclusive one.

What is it that the camera enables or demands that we do? The use of the camera is an investment of time by an entity in space. It demands time in its preparation for use, in its setup and configuration, in the act of exposure itself, and in the retrieval of the represented image from the device. Retrieval of the representation is an emergence from the camera and the beginning of the process of reproductive printing, which carries its own demands.

The preparation of the camera consists of both the construction of the device and of its media, and of their acquisition and combination by the user. The act of photography would not be possible without the collection and organization of these material goods into a system that enables the representation of light in a physical medium. This is often the most social stage in the production of an artwork, involving the work of countless individuals other than the recognized artist. The physical form of the camera ultimately and completely defines its function. Perhaps because of our inability to locate responsibility in the mass of influences on the device, the other participating members of the design of the camera and film are commonly neglected, and indeed the contributions to camera technology are too vast to include here.

Even if the artist creates her own camera and film, she will necessarily use materials that are manufactured: chemicals, screws, lens glass, etc. It is sufficient to recognize that the artist implicitly and invisibly must rely on a huge set of assistants in the preparation of the camera system. In any case, it is clear that the artist is responsible for the choice of medium and enclosure, and this choice powerfully shapes the resulting representation and reproduction of the image.

The artist or creator is also responsible for the arrangement of the camera and subject in space. The scene can be constructed or spontaneous, but in either case there is a history to the placement of the camera in opposition to the image to be represented. This setup takes place in conjunction with the configuration of the camera and lens. The exposure time, and any change in configuration that occurs during it, determines the amount and position of light that is incident on the sensitive medium.

In considering the object of a photograph, we can see the combination of camera and film (or camera and memory) as one in a series of confluences that enable its construction or affect its objecthood. There are three broad actors at play: the society, the artist, and the material world. Broadly, the interaction proceeds as follows. The society and physical environment are the roots of the photograph: as discussed, society shapes the physical material into the tools and media necessary to conceptualize and begin the photographic process, and the artist's life is shaped by her social condition.

Within the tools and physical media of photography, the photograph's birth is controlled mainly by the artist, though it is of course a physical process. The scene is a physical scene, and the light is reflected within that scene and is incident on the camera's sensitive medium. Upon retrieval of the image representation from the camera, the growth process begins. This is often an iterative process, where the artist creates a physical print in a lab, receives feedback from friends & colleagues, and repeats until conceptually fulfilled. Society, material, and artist are all at work in this stage.

The next stage is that of exhibition, where the work receives public criticism and is displayed or stored publicly. The cessation of growth is marked by the intentional 'completion' of the artwork, at which point the work begins to degrade. Degradation is simply the natural process damage and aging that the artwork incurs due to its existence as a physical object. Reproduction and restoration are some social attempts to prolong the lifespan of the artwork, but ultimately the work will die and decompose into its material constituents. Past the initial public presentation, the artist is often limited in her control over the death & memory process. The artist's only power is to give instructions to the owners and conservators of the work, but these can be either heeded or ignored. Social commentary is even harder for the artist to control.

Perception of the artwork at various points in its timeline is a matter of reconstructing a projection of the work's timeline from that perspective.

Poster

Methodology

This paper will discuss the temporal nature of the artwork, situating its value to the individual and to society within the era of its interpretation. It will discuss the nature of that change through time, and make clear the implied time processes and formal assumptions implicit to interpretative discussion.

The paper will present a series of oppositions, loose theoretical axes of consideration which will be used to categorize and characterize a set of relationships between artist, artwork, and society.

This presentation will be followed by an outline of the life cycle of the artwork:
from the empowering and informing of the artist
to the artwork's conception and construction and exhibition
through its gradual decay and loss within society

The life cycle will be accompanied by a graphic timeline used to generally denote the interplay of artist, artwork, and society, and to make clear the relative time investment in its conception, creation, display, and consideration. This will also provide a structure to convey events of interest -- travel, disaster, discussion, etc. These events, when possible, will be considered relationships between artist, artwork, and society, and will thus invoke the earlier series of oppositions.

With the theoretical framework settled, the discussion will move to individual artworks. The emphasis will be on photography and artworks that make explicit reference to time. Subjects will include Michael Wesely, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Etienne-Jules Marey, Pol Bury, and On Kawara. For each of these artists, a specific artwork will be chosen and described within the timeline/lifecycle framework.

The investigation will begin with a hypothesized normal reference interpretation, making reference to some social discourse surrounding the work. Assumptions underlying this standard interpretation will be successively identified and rescinded, in order to broaden the perceptive frame. In specific, knowledge of the social environment that gave rise to the artwork's creation, and knowledge of the tools used to create the artwork will be disputed. The discussion will consider temporal specificity an assumption of the retrospective evaluation, and will situate the observer at various moments to contrast their assumptions and perceptions.

These examples will be instructive in crafting a larger argument concerning the critical dependence of artworks as temporally encoded messages and in the situation of photography as a medium.

My personal artistic additions to the project will include works meant to frustrate the canonical conceptions of time, and to blur the distinctions made in the oppositions the paper presents.

Joseph Brodsky - [1994] On Grief and Reason
"when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, [...]. If he encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law [...]. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up." (1036 lit&writers)

http://library.mit.edu/item/000926877
Unobtrusive measures / Eugene J. Webb
"there are the erosion measures, where the degree of selective wear on some material yields the measure. [...] On the other hand, there are accretion measures, where the research evidence is some deposit of materials. Immediately one thinks of anthropologists working with refuse piles and pottery shards. The trace measures could be further subdivided according to the number and pattern of units of evidence. We might have two subclasses: remnants, where there is only one or a few indicators of the past behavior available, and series, where the is an accumulative body of evidence with more units, possibly deposited over a longer period of time." (36)
-- powerful categories of marks: they seem to be discussing primarily non-intentional acts, but they would apply equally well to intentional aspects of artwork

"physical evidence is, for the most part, free of reactive measurement effects" (50)
-- that is, since people generally ignore its presence, they usually do not think to falsify it.

"With accretion measures, there is the question of whether the materials have selectively survived or been selectively deposited." (50) In other words, whether they are "durable artifacts." (Naroll 1956)

Among other discussions, Webb et al. point to the various effects of social activation through time on the physical surroundings, giving example inference studies. These inferences rely on a foreknowledge of the type of interactions that could take place between the individual participants and the material objects of record.

For instance, in assuming that the erosion rate in the tiles around various museum exhibits is a rough indicator of the popularity of the respective exhibits, we make the assumption of a very limited set of events that affect erosion rate. If there were unknown water damage, or someone who wanted to frustrate the data and eroded ground around certain exhibits, the data gathered would be inaccurate. Critically, there is a major assumption being made: that we can comprehend and enumerate the set of possible effects that can occur to this material object.

If we cannot, or do not, then we can be deceived. Falsification of otherwise innocuous effects of social erosion and accretion provides a fascinating set of possible projects in this realm.

They also discuss methods of simple observation: "exterior physical signs, expressive movement, physical location, language behavior (conversational sampling), and time duration. [...] they are 'simple' only in that the investigator does not intervene in the production of the material." (116)
-- clearly, this is the position of a witness to non-participatory artistic practice: when we speak of interpretation of a work, we are alluding at first to the interior experience of it. When we attempt to clarify and elucidate that experience, we are almost invariably reduced to the kinds of observational discussions Webb &al consider here.

regarding time duration: "The amount of attention paid by a person to an object has long been the source of inferences on interest. [...] the longer the time, the greater the interest" (134-5)
-- why is this only accurate when directed by a person->object? seems to work just as well for attention paid by society: ie, in measuring the interest of a society in a given work of art (see citation web, Stefaner 2009, etc.)
-- indeed this could be thought of as an operational definition of interest: the amount of time given to something (attention is perhaps closer)

often, "the critical behavior is variable over a day or some longer time period. [...] behavior may shift as the hours or days of the week change." (136-7)
-- another fallow ground for a project to frustrate the expectations. self-aware installations that flower only when there is no movement?

"Both [random] time and locational sampling should be employed if possible, [...] population varies over time, and the content of their behavior similarly varies. If one can broaden the sampling base, he can expand the character of material available for study." (140-1)
-- powerfully integrates with the concept of artwork as individual subject of investigation: the 'behavior' of an artwork varies over time in its effects on its environment (people). The character of the material artwork grows in proportion to the attention it receives from society and the locale it affects.

"From symbols and shadows to the truth" - Cardinal Newman (187)

Pollock & Persona
If we take the assertion that Pollock's transitional canvas, Mural was merely an overgrown billboard personal ad, we can reaffirm the closeness of his work and personality. Here we continued to have the pop culture icon, the individual who cultivated a mystique and historicization of his own existence... As persona becomes increasingly important in the arts, we find a fundamental shift in the focus of the historical and perceptual consideration: first pointing towards the work and society that produced it, later solely to the individual (removed from their context). Perhaps the removal of context is inevitable as we attempt to bring the experience into a universally accessible space.

Early Photography

Etienne-Jules Marey
Etienne-Jules Marey : a passion for the trace / François Dagognet
Marey, seeking to characterize the body of animals in motion through time, found inspiration in the new field of physical transcription devices: literating blood pressure, sound, etc. Photography has the disadvantage of not being aprismatic in time, flattening their entire exposure into a temporal blur.

"Marey made it possible for the avant-garde to become receptive to new values: instead of escape into the past, the unreal or the dream, there was the double cult of machines and their propulsion [...]" (148) inspiring Giacomo Balla & Luigi Russolo, Marinetti, and ultimately Duchamp (1912 Nude Decending a Staircase)

"He was obliged to revise his recording methods (myographs, hodographs, dynamagraphs, simultaneous polygraphs, and so on) until he arrived at "optical-electrical capture," which gradually replaced the "mechanical" kind." (175)

"Mareyism contained within it, perhaps unwittingly, the foundations of the modern world it foreshadowed: the signals and fluxes, the multiple tele-inscriptions, the long-range controls and sensitive recorders and, more obviously, travel in the air (airplanes) and underwater; the capacity to preserve traces; abstract art and the crucial domain of audiovisual communication." (163)

-- it was the unique ability to encode and transmit huge amounts of information that allowed for this powerful compression that foreshadowed the whole of the modern world.

Contrast between two horse images: "A track was painted with light crosswise bands alternating with wide black areas. These divisions helped locate, measure, and assess distance traveled and speed, since the time taken was known (chronobiology)." (104)
-- What is really at stake here is the measuribility of discrete time in the photographs. He has already, by discretizing the exposure, provided for the segmentation of the image; this applies labels to that discretization.

Picturing time : the work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) / Marta Braun
Points to the telephone (1876) and wireless telegraph (1894), and the Prime Meridian Conference (1884) as prior transformations in the consideration of time. (p. 278) "And while Sigmund Freud investigated the importance of the personal past and its existence in the present, an even more direct access to the past was given through photography and the phonograph." (Braun 278)

"Underlying Marey's need to grasp and measure was a view of reality as constituted by discrete functions, invisible matter that could be probed and analyzed by the instruments he devised. Bergson's view was, of course, just the opposite: the solid contours of the closely knit images we call the material world, he said, are only a necessary invention of our senses. In reality, matter is in the flux of constant becoming." (279)

Bergson: "But with these positions, even with an infinite number of them, we shall never make movement. They are not parts of the movement, they are so many snapshots of it; they are, one might say, only supposed stopping-places. The moving body is never really in any of the points; the most we can say is that it passes through them." (280-1)
-- this is a fallacious argument: from elementary analysis, we know we can derive continuous functions from the limit points of compact sets. The critical error is a misunderstanding of the concept of an "infinite number" of such positions.

"artists who wished to give form to the new experience of time Bergson so articulately voiced were drawn to Marey's pictures. They were an irresistible and particularly fecund visual source. For artists the attraction of the photographs lay in one important particular: they were the first images to effectively rupture the perspectival code that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. Marey's pictures depicted chronological succession within a single frame. Chronophotography provided a language for representing simultaneity - what was popularly understood to be Bergson's idea of time." (Braun 281)

Others influenced by Marey: Frantisek Kupka, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and finally Antonio Giulio Bragaglia: "With photodynamism, we have freed photography from the indecency of its brutal realism, and from the craziness of instantaneity, which, considered to be a scientific fact only because it was a mechanical product, was accepted as absolutely correct." (299)

Some Conceptual Reflections

Jean Tinguely - [1959] "Fur Statik" (Manifesto For Statics)

Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts of time. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. LIVE IN TIME. BE STATIC - WITH MOVEMENT. For a static of the present moment. Resist the anxious fear to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop insisting on "values" which cannot but break down. Stop evoking movement and gesture. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present; live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality. (March 1959)

These manifestos were dropped from a plane over Dusseldorf -- though they landed outside the city, in the surrounding countryside, frustrating his nominal plan for their reception.

Peter Selz on Homage to New York (1960) "movement and gesture are demonstrated - not merely evoked. Being very much part of his time Tinguely uses machines to show movement, but he is fully aware that machines are no more permanent than life itself. Their time rubs out, they destroy themselves." (137)
Indeed they can be made to be ultra-mortal, as Tinguely does.

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Pol Bury: "We can see that slowness not only multiplies duration but also permits the eye following the globe to escape from its own observer's imagination and let itself be let by the imagination of the travelling globe itself." (Lee 121); in response, Eugene Ionesco: "For Pol Bury there is constant anguish originating from the basic intuition that everything might collapse under us at any moment." (121)
It would be more correct to say that the collapse is precisely the process of movement forward: that the decay of the external objects of the cathedral constitutes the life that it embodies.

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Robert Smithson - [1966] Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space
& http://library.mit.edu/item/000173982

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Andy Warhol - Empire (1964), Sleep (1964); Kawara:

both are deeply methodical in their temporal operations, and both speak to the logic of the bad infinity. A system with its own laws and limitations is put into place, and we, the audience, are made to watch and to wait. We are made to wait for some figure to emerge from its repetitive ground; to detect the small, almost infinitesimal, incident against the yawning relief of duration. In short, we are made to anticipate, even hope for, the temporal fallout of this bad infinity. And in this perpetual present both gestures stage, they cast a critical eye on the future of the future. (Lee 278)

Hegel has: "This infinity is spurious or negative infinity since it is nothing but the negation of the finite, but the finite arises again in the same way, so that it is no more sublated than not." (Hegel, A. Quality, Encyclopaedia Logic)
~ Deleuze's "Repetition with difference"... we are waiting for the difference...

Kawara's "Title" (1965): "confronted with three laterally organized canvases, done up in hot, hot pink." (Lee 289)
- Lee takes time much for granted here: The hot pink we are seeing is yet a tiny slice of the life of the work. The fading of the pigment will coincide with the fading of the day's memory. Catastrophic events might leave their mark powerfully and indelibly, either in the physical or intellectual realm: a fire in the museum; a drift from human physical presence on Earth; the devaluation of the painting as a mode of artwork/expression/social-trace; the loss of the Gregorian calendar as a meaningful relativistic measurement, etc. But we know, at least, that the pink will fade, and that those who saw his day will die.

On Kawara

On Kawara exists in time. His existence is destined, it seems (and perhaps he would hope), to be condensed into space solely as time. His traces are purely temporal. His accumulations are all with reference to the temporal absolute he supposes.

His work is fundamentally faithful and optimistic. He accepts and acknowledges chance, but does not force the subject. By working completely within an abstracted quotation of time, he would initially seem to disable any of the more fundamental human connections he might make -- certainly he seems to disavow the material focii that have characterized painting for centuries.

If we agree that the image of painters in prior centuries have required a sense of human form and context, Kawara distills another set of assumptions. He trusts not that the visual image of a human will be referentially valid in the future of his work, but that the context of absolute time and the potential for agency will exist. He seems to assert, moreover, that they will be continuous with the current incarnations of these constructions. He gives very little by way of context; these works are fragile.

But in some sense he does not: Pollock never required his audience to know what paint is, and Kawara never requires his audience to be able to place our temporal system relative to their own. If Pollock requires only the presence of visual perception (only the ability to decipher the wavelengths of light coincident at a point), Kawara requires only the ability to decipher his glyphs.

He performs time at many levels: the powerful positioning of himself as a temporal historian (as in One Million Years) is less pronounced in the short term than his personal narrative. As current humans, we approach his work with the knowledge that he is human, that he is existing at these times, and that he is carrying out a complex and continuous personal process. All of his work makes reference to his existence in society. We empathize with his postcards (__) and find traces of his physical presence in all his works.

These traces often contain more subtle nods to the temporality of the work, and his own mortality. He necessarily works within space, encodes within space, and interfaces with the physcal world through objects. His actions specify objects, and these objects are challenged by their aging. With his Nothing, Something, Everything, we glimpse only "Something". The title, his birth, and his mortality, point to the rest of the work. Something, that which we see, is fading, and fading fast. Cracks are appearing. We know it was constructed, by his mind and hand, and there is a sense of exhilaration in our perception of the vastness of the work.

Perhaps we can find that in the aggregate, his conceptual leaps are not so impersonal as they seem. We extend ourselves into his position, and get a powerful picture of what the self is.

Topic (3)

When we consider a work of art, we treat it as a cultural artifact to be interpreted. The work of art as a physical object is a curious entity: it acts as a symbolic representation of the artwork as an active entity. More and more, the interpretation of artwork tends towards their recognition as active in time. As this happens, we tend, more and more, to infer the temporal effects of physical processes from the physical marks made on the object. The interpretive process is fundamentally a placement of the artwork within a greater temporal context.

We place the artwork in time in four ways:
1. We are aware of its physical construction as an object
2. We are aware of its social construction as an artwork
3. We are aware of its personal and intentional construction by the artist
4. We are aware of its symbolic references to time

We approach all physical objects with the knowledge that their present state is entirely informed by their physical history. We see time folded onto the present through the physical history of the object that we infer from the its spatial properties. This is especially true when we attempt to unravel the construction of a sculpture or building and when we consider the unconscious layering of a painting, or the background of a photograph. This can also be what we see when we encounter the effects of aging on the object. Any effect that we do not consider intentional should be considered part of (1).

The artwork is highly dependent on a less immediate sense of the history of a work, namely its social context (2). Interpreting, or assigning a meaning, to an artwork requires a knowledge or at least a conception of the social framework surrounding it. Even considering an object to be an artwork or a part of one requires a social context. This is, of course, a moving target, both through time and across individual perspectives.

We cannot discount the intentionality of the work, especially as it is the source of most of the artistic discourse. Intentionality seems to be the motivating factor that distinguishes artwork from non-artwork, and this requires us to place the work in the biographical context of its author. Intentional marks, the involvement of the work in a biographical context, and other references to the author constitute (3).

Finally, we are often faced with symbolic time (4), both in artwork and in daily life. This is the metered and measurable progression that we see on a clock's face or in the shadows of a film over the course of a day.

My thesis will attempt to show how current work is conscious of these interpretive processes, and how it exists relative to them. I will be considering current photographers and visual artists, showing how their works can be considered objects of physical and social construction, and drawing insight into their meaning from these arguments. I will also be producing and presenting smaller projects of my own that will attempt to challenge, manipulate, and expose these components of the interpretive process. I hope to find new meaning from their reception.

Project Description (2)

When we consider a work of art, we treat it as a cultural artifact to be interpreted. Works of art can be either physical or they can consist of an action, but in either case, a large part of the interpretive process (that which is not directly related to experience) attempts to fit the work into a physical and social context.

We approach all physical objects with the knowledge that their present state is entirely informed by their physical history. We see time folded onto the present through the history that we infer from the object's spatial properties. This is especially true of artwork, when we attempt to unravel the construction of a sculpture or building, when we consider the layering of a painting, or the setup of a photograph.

In artwork, however, there is a less immediate sense of the history of a work, namely its social context. Interpreting, or assigning a meaning, to an artwork requires a knowledge or at least a conception of the social framework surrounding it. This is, of course, a moving target, both through time and across individual perspectives.

My thesis will attempt to show how current work is conscious of these interpretive processes. I will be considering some current photographers and visual artists, showing how their works can be considered objects of physical and social construction, and drawing insight into their meaning from these arguments.

I will also be producing and presenting a number of smaller projects of my own that will attempt to challenge, manipulate, and expose these components of the interpretive process. I hope to find new meaning from their reception.

Onians, John. "A Brief Natural History of Art." Compression vs. expression. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.
In this short piece, Onians discusses the evolution and emergence of prehistoric art. He begins with prehistoric artifacts, finding biological justification for their aesthetic resonance with early hominids. He rationalizes the emergence of sculpture and the protection of sculptural objects with the following argument:

• Early hominids needed to be socially attracted to the facial features of their tribe and sexually attracted to the secondary sex organs of their potential mates.


• Neural network design reinforces repeated positive stimulation.


• Those early hominids who collected biologically sculptural objects would be more likely to interact sexually and socially with their tribe.


• They would therefore have greater reproductive fitness.

He thus roots the objectification of the body in an argument for the reproductive fitness of early hominids.

This argument he extends to the uniformity of rectangular architectural forms and their influence on aesthetics through the ages.


Le Fur, Yves. "Displaced Objects On Display." Compression vs. expression. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.
This article stood out due to its enumeration of the ostensible reasons for bringing together the artifacts of the world into formal museums:

The goals are not only to further research on various cultures and their history and to foster exploration of values of identity in collaboration with people of the five continents, but also to displace existing categories in order to offer elements for reflexive attitudes to all the various publics and to create a dynamic place that is always open to questioning. [10]

Indeed this seems to be a common practice among avant-garde artists, but at what expense? The collaboration seems to be eternally one sided, and closer to appropriation. Is the exotic historicism mirrored in the perceived facture of the object or is it forgotten?

Summers, David. "World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism." Compression vs. expression : containing and explaining the world's art. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.

This brief article is a summary and response to criticism of Summers' book, Summers, David. Real Spaces. 2003, New York : Phaidon.

He begins with his largest and overarching premise, that the visual arts have been subsumed by what he calls the "spatial arts":

Post-formalist art history replaces the "visual arts" with the "spatial arts", the former having been relegated to the modern Western history of representationalism. Given this change, there is a further distinction between real space and virtual space. Real space is the space we share with other people and things, and in these terms, sculpture is the art of personal space, fundamentally significant relative to the conditions of our own physicality. [222]

This construction is helpful in reconsidering the effects of spatial and societal context on the interpretation of a work of art.

He supports the recontextualization of the discourse of artwork as a progressive evolution from existing modes of thought rather than an evolution *towards* some ideal objectivity. In so doing, he introduces the concept of facture:

Facture is the evidence in a work of its having been made, and it is insistence on this principle that makes the fundamental intepretative change from quasi-symbolic interpretation based on the analogy of texts to indexical reference. [223]

This powerful concept is precisely how we as an audience infuse non-durational artworks with the concept of time. We know that they are made, that they carry general intentionality, and that their form respects their temporal progressive creation.

Moreover, he continues, their physicality (ontic nature) is precisely that which is unambiguous. While we can consider and reconsider our interpretations of the objects, and any distinctions we can draw within them or between them and other social constructs, we are tightly bound by the presented material truth.

Stonehenge may or may not be an elaborate observatory, and it may or may not have been used for one or another purpose, but it does tell us unambiguously that stone was quarried (that is, cut squared) and transported, and that more or less specialized and collective labor was necessary in order for the site to have been made and remade, from which we may infer certain general kinds of social arrangements.[223]

We infer these arrangements, he implies, by the social construction of architecture:

Artifacts are integral with their first spaces of use. [224]

This approach, of course, when extended into the modern painting apparatus, helps to show the extent to which paintings are defined by their galleries and the commerciality of their distribution infrastructure. This argument is drawn out in John Berger's "Ways of Seeing".

Summers ends by encapsulating the more global conception of the art world as a secondary persuit, encouraging a reconsideration based on the pervasive use of the visual as a distinguishing characteristic.

[The standard Western attitude] obscures or conceals the absolute importance of ornament for the definition and distinction of persons, artifacts, and places in major traditions, including our own. [224]

After all, without distinction there could be no individuation, and in this attitude, then, the West finds itself ultimately masochistic.

Margolis, Joseph. What, after all, is a work of art? 1999, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.


Margolis' writing is extremely dense, logically sound, unfocused, and yet still profoundly worthwhile. He generally aims to characterize the work of art and the circumstances surrounding its criticism. Noting the contemporary inflationary attitude towards the definition of art, he writes:

Any theory of art worth its salt must accommodate at least one condition: namely, that whatever is said to be a painting or a work of art -- or, in general, a cultural denotatum -- must count among its properties the salient property of being a historied artifact. [...] for it signifies that (1) cultural entities, but not inanimate natural objects, possess, as an intrinsic property, as part of their "nature", a certain historicality; (2) such historicality can not be sensorily discerned in the way in which purely physical properties can be, (3) the perception of historicality is sui generis to the analysis and understanding of the cultural world; (4) the perception of art and history is an extension of human self-perception, the understanding of oneself and one's society, and (5) The perception of cultural phenomena is inseparable from the perception of physical phenomena. [34]

His work is threaded together loosely by his concept of Intentionality:

[...] artworks possess, where "mere real things" do not, Intentional properties: all representational, semiotic, symbolic, expressive, stylistic, historical, significative properties. If that is granted, then of course artworks cannot be numerically identical with "mere real things." [34-5]

Intentionality is closely tied, then, to the human element in artwork. It is ultimately and precisely what distinguishes artwork from mere object. The meaning of artwork is, by the Intentional act, no longer the meaning of the mere real thing.

Intentional properties [...] designate meanings assignable to certain structures or meaningful structures as a result of the various forms of culturally informed activity (speech, deeds, manufacture, artistic creation), such that suitably informed persons may claim to discern these properties and interpret them objectively. [55]

He continues in an attempt to reconcile this definition with relativism. Critically, informed parties need only *claim* to interpret and discern objectively. Their objectivity is not an absolute objectivity, but a socially sanctioned objectivity: by merit of their existence within a society that considers the work Intentional, they have the power to set forth interpretations of the work that help to carry the meaning of the work.

[...] the very nature of cultural entities and phenomena -- artworks, histories, sentences, actions, societies, persons -- are such that, for obvious ontic and epistemic reasons, they cannot support any objective description or interpretation confined exclusively along bivalent lines. The decisive point is that no one can even say what the logic of criticism should be, unless she or he can also say what the nature of a poem or painting is, relative to discursive and interpretive truth-claims [60-61]

In other words, it is naive to attempt to apply temporally derived objective truth value to the interpretive frames of other time periods. He continues,

Intentional properties [...] cannot be determined criterially, algorithmically, evidentially, except in ways that are already subaltern to the consensual (not criterial) tolerance of the apt agents of the collective practices of a particular society. [62]

---

We begin to move towards a broader discursive frame when the prior denotation of artworks is applied to other social constructs. He begins to draw Intentionality into additional complex phenomena: persons, actions...

[...] artworks, (like persons, actions, and sentences) are not fully determinate but are, characteristically, interpretively determinable in Intentional ways, for Intentional properties are not fully determinate. (Only if meanings were properties and at least as determinate as the properties of physical objects would Intentionality be determinate at all. But Intentionality, remember, is a fluxive artifact of history, inherently subject to interpretation and reinterpretation under the historicized conditions of human life.) [65]

The instability of the broader society brings the situation to a head...

It is a perfectly acceptable way of practicing criticism to offer a reading that collects plausibly relevant resources within an interpretive tradition, without attempting (or even being able) to come to terms with the entire history of interpreting the work in question (or related works). [84]

In other words, a critique of a work of art does not necessarily need to involve all past interpretations of it. One would never be able to encompass *all* prior viewpoints on the work. This holds in everyday interpretation: the vast majority of the audience for any given work will likely be unaware of many interpretive frames that have been constructed to consider the work in the past.

Nevertheless, they come to some manner of understanding about the work, and this understanding is nonetheless necessarly a constituent of the work's meaning. And we find that the work that is understood is in fact relatively constant through time, though the reasons for its consideration as artwork often are not.

[...] under interpretive conditions, artworks may change in "nature" without risking a change in "number". [...] the conditions under which they are individuated (and reidentified) as particular denotata are informal enough to secure (without losing descriptive or interpretive rigor) the constancy of their numerical identity, despite debated (interpreted) changes in their "nature." [84]

This constancy, he asserts, is equivalent to their historied nature (not facture) is due to their Intentional properties.

Cultural entities have historied natures, or are histories, because Intentional properties, which form their natures, are themselves historied and alterable as a result of the ongoing practice of reinterpretation, under the condition of historically changing experience [88]

(The historied nature that Margolis brings into the discussion is different from Summers' facture in that it is an epistemic rather than ontic property. The physical construction of the artwork is represented in its facture; its social construction is represented in its history. History requires Intentionality; facture requires interface.)

Margolis ties interpretation not only to temporal set but also individual perspective and milieu;

The valid practices of interpretation are themselves consensual, collective [...], effectively constrained by their own local histories but capable of drawing into their conceptual space indefinitely many diverse traditions [...].[88]

In response to future projection, we find that

No natural telos or ideal asymptotic limit or singular range of tolerance is assignable to the interpretive process itself. [88]

This seems at first glance a questionable assertion, but ultimately it bears out: we assign validity to all interpretations carried out within human society, but are left with the question of the extent of agency in that society (babies' gurgles are an interpretive response, but so are the algorithmic musings of a digital sensor), and the question of who or what can profer an interpretation will be, in turn, as unbounded as our agency.

---

He considers the body of the artwork.

[The Intentional is] inseparably incarnate in the physical or biological or similar materials of the natural world; [...] it is sui generis[...; It is] intrinsically interpretable, which is not true of non-Intentional predicables; the distinctions it collects are, peculiarly, artifacts of cultural history and subject accordingly to historical transformation; and [...], being alterable as a result of historicized interpretation, its attribution affects what we should understand as the "nature" of anything so characterized. [92]

Again this is discussing exclusively the social construction of the artwork, not its facture.

---

Meaning is the accumulation of all interpretations of a work, both through time and across individual and institutional perspectives. Interpretations are informed by raw experience, by factural inferences, and by historied contextualizations.

In other words:

What [...] is the "meaning" of the arts? [...] overcoming, without quite succeeeding and without quite failing, the ephemeral history of the whole of Intentional life. We build and rebuild the dense structures of our artifactual world, partly out of memory but, more vitally, out of imagined possibilities read as perceived potentialities. We Intentionalize the world, not merely by piling artifact on artifact but by creating and deciphering the intrepretively reflexive (the endlessly reinterpreted) history of that same undertaking. You will find the evidence already in ancient Egypt -- for instance, in Ikhnaton's deliberate redefinition of the temple precincts in the name of his reform: hence, in our productive memory of the enabling precipitates of his own [...] gradual [...] failure.[126]

Finally,

In the midst of obvious flux, we risk the loss of present meaning if we cannot repossess by interpretive fiat [...] the reinterpretation of our entire artifactual past. We need no necessary fixities here; none exist, in any case, to be recovered. Flux is the medium of our life: all that is needed is that change should not be too rapid to be grasped or too slow to fire our vision. The whole of art is, so to say, a society's homeostasis under fluxive history.[126]

Art is an attempt to perpetuate society through compressed symbolic repetition and reconfiguration.


(Kouros' ruinscapes are especially powerful in this light: the fading long tail of intense artistic embodiment.)

Just as selves are embodied in the indivuated members of Homo sapiens, actions are embodied in physical movents; words and sentences in uttered sounds; and sculptures [...] in "uttered" stone. [129-30]

---

Consciousness of Generation

When encountering everyday objects, places, and people, we always have a choice between two options. Either we take their appearance for granted, or we allow ourselves to infer a history from the sensory information presented.

If we attempt to generate a story from a given situation, we rely on our past associations about that object and the ways that it can change: we assume that the objects we encounter conform to our prior experiences of the ways that objects change over time. In so doing, we apply our understanding of the range of possible time-based manipulative processes. With humans, we attribute a generative past to their existence; with places, we can infer past events.

Similarly, in visual and sound art, much of the perceptive experience is an attempt to recognize and interpret the birth of the artwork: the tools that enabled it, the time that was required, and the experience/performance of the artist that created it. This storying of the artwork is either conscious or unconscious: modern humans do not allow for spontaneous generation in their storying of material reality. The level of consciousness of this process is highly variable: in art objects, what manipulations and aesthetic decisions discourage or precipitate this thought process?

When considering artworks that are durational, requiring a time investment on the part of the audience, what properties encourage analogous consciousness of the creative/constructive process? Abrupt cuts in movies, for instance, flagrantly display the disjoint nature of the medium, and much of the challenge of editing is to disable structurally focused modes of interpretation. What aspects of installations (projective, museum, etc.) draw attention to the artwork's construction? What aspects of performance artwork have these effects?

When our interpretation of the textual content of an artwork is disrupted by such a surface interpretation, how does our perception of the work change? How does such a transition recontextualize artwork as a whole, and how have mediums shifted trends in the past in order to encourage or discourage the consciousness of their creation and generation?

Kanarick - AIDE locative/temporal automation
http://library.mit.edu/item/000669591
This thesis asked whether and how a computer assistant system might be able to streamline the graphical visual display of information. It surveyed prior theories of time-based data display, and implemented a basic example-based expert system coupled with an interactive data computer display environment.

Though I was skeptical that the resulting software would be particularly helpful, the literature review was informative. The overarching challenge in this problem is to provide evidence for a story given existing data; since the computer cannot generally simply be told what the story is that the data should be made to fit, it cannot generally be able to find the proper method of laying out the data. A designer armed with the theoretical tools outlined herein, however, would be much more able to do so.


Larkin - Statements by Aromas
http://library.mit.edu/item/000408529
This fascinating set of experiments shows the challenges, frustrations, and ultimately powerful experiences that arise from using the sense of smell as a medium in artistic endeavor. The author seems frustrated in the attempt to specifically pair visuals with olfactory sensations in varied multimedia installations, but is able to have compose "smell poems" with great success.

The distinction seems to be that the multimedia installations try unsuccessfully to separate smells in space, whereas the poems distinguish smells through time. Much as with sound, the air as a medium allows individual sources of sensation to blur together spatially. Air currents, though, are as adept at washing away sound and smell through time as at deindividuating them in space.

Smells, he finds, are powerful: he attempts to perform lone actions that involve smell. The effects of these actions would only be visible then, in their temporal aftermath.


Kouros - Ruinscape
http://library.mit.edu/item/000539934
This marvelous thesis compares the ruins of ancient architecture to those of ancient poetry: focusing on the mark and the possibilities it leaves to our imagination, he compares the objects of spacial and linguistic demarcation. He finds similarities between the semiotic assumptions we make in reconstructing the unweathered state of both.

His rich philosophical discussion is paired powerfully with imagery of both aged poetry and architecture; his construction and explication of the "fragment" as a psychological concept is enlightening.

In his section about Rineke Dijkstra, Fried discusses mainly the comparisons and contrast between Dijkstra's imagery and that of Diane Arbus. He emphasizes the moralization famously leveled against Arbus by Susan Sontag, and inquires as to the differential between Arbus and Dijkstra. He notes their similar frank and potentially brutal nature, and their use of full-body imagery and often wide angle lenses to present an inescapable surveillant force.

He notes that contemporary criticism of her work is far less harsh than was the response to Arbus; he does not consider whether this might merely be a function of temporal emergence, of coloration, or of any fundamental sociological differential.



Instead the main contrast he posits is that of subject psychology; since the subjects of Dijkstra's photographs are apparently more comfortable in their own skin, we become more comfortable with their image. But this is not the whole story: as he points out, the subjects are not entirely at ease with the photographic set, and their own unconscious awkwardness is made apparent in the unprepared placement of limbs.

Rineke's subjects are the universal unprepared, as Fried outlines, whether they be immediately post-natal mothers, young soldiers, or children perhaps not yet fully aware of their surroundings in the setting of a beach. He considers how they all share a fixed gaze on the camera, and points to this as an amplification of their inadequate situational unity; superficially, the flash Dijkstra uses isolates the subjects from their background and puts them apart.

Though he does not make the connection, we could easily imagine Sugimoto lurking behind the beach subjects, bringing their lack of exuberance in line with the relative permanence of their environment's procedural progression.

Fried, Michael. Why photography matters as art as never before / Michael Fried. New Haven : Yale University Press, c2008.

Questions

1. How does the creation of an artistic object imply performance, tools, and interface between agent. How do these semiotics vary?
2. What axes can artistic tools be characterized on? How do they vary by the amount of amplification they provide? precision?
3. What historical figures have theorized visual media with the word amplification?
4. How does time factor into the mechanics of various visual media? sculpture, painting, photography, video, digital still...
5. How do methods of visualizing other sense data engage with / condense time?
6. What methods of time-compression of video exist? What temporal perceptive frames do they induce?
7. Why is it more difficult to compress time from visual media?
8. How can a sense of preparation be explicated from visual scenes that are either apparently random or apparently clean. What distinguishes these? How have our conceptions of clean and random and natural been challenged in the past?
9. How does context affect the storied nature of an object: can environmental change imply different amounts of prior human attention?
10. How can the aging of digital objects be simulated?

Brief Proposal:

This thesis project aims to explore the temporal compression that allows an action through time to be condensed into an object that can either be reproduced or displayed. It asks what contextual knowledge individuals provide in order to create narrative settings for the material objects, signal transmissions, and people they encounter in daily life.

It asks how these assumptions can be co-opted to encourage false conclusions, and how the perceptive frame of interpretation of past events given current evidence can be precipitated by media exposure. It will present media to accomplish this end along with a presentation of the conceptual background.

The author discusses the relevance of Sugimoto's photography mainly as it relates to the paradigm of landscape photography exemplified by Ansel Adams. He is quick to note, of course, the similarities between the equipment of the two photographers, but their products are all but independent. He considers Sugimoto's work a commentary on the formal expertise that has continued from Adams' time but as an indicator of what he feels has been lost in photography, art, and society since the earlier works: some sense of spirit.

The author begins with a surface description of the image, and brings up a series of social associations with the location given in Sugimoto's title, and relates these to the image loosely, with no claim that the imagery produces them. Rather, he notes, the image serves as a seed for a set of internal human analogs and in its presence invites us to meditate within our current state and its roots. He takes note both of the title and author of the piece, clinging, apparently, to those last sharp crags of text which accompany the image, those last vestiges of structure that Sugimoto's postmodern minimalism otherwise disintegrates.

He connects the seascapes with Sugimoto's earlier works, claiming that they continue his earlier encoding of lifelessness within facades of life. In earlier wax work, he commented on the constructed emptiness of historical personas; here he brings us face to face with the abyss. If the beach seemed normally a frabjous place, he turns its life eternal and in so doing has it embody fear.

Wilsdon claims that Sugimoto's imagery, among others, "inoculates us against everything in Romantic Art that is no longer meaningful". He unconsciously equilibrates spirit with variance and bemoans its loss of meaning and absence from current life. Ultimately though, the subtle ripples of Sugimoto's stasis bring us about face from the variance and toward a unity which has been left untouched for too long. He recommends not the discard of multiplicity but its pause, its consideration.


Wilsdon, Dominic. Hiroshi Sugimoto - Aegean Sea, Pilion 1990. Singular images : essays on remarkable photographs / edited and with an introduction by Sophie Howarth ; essays by Darsie Alexander ... [et al.]. New York : Aperture, 2005.

Lee discusses the emphasis of stories in our valuation of objects and points to the importance of audio in this process. The author affirms this even given objects that are ostensibly non-aural in nature (the concept of photographs as placeholders for storytelling from memory is a particular example). The author questions the techniques and heuristics used to evaluate sound formally in search of relevance and value.

The historical value of objects is discussed, mainly as pertains to historically relevant persons (notably, ourselves). The author encourages design decisions to be made on the basis of considered use of the object in question over time.

In the visual arts, the author brings a lively discussion of provenance and its importance to art collectors, and characterizes and classifies different types of changes/uses that affect an object: (some annotated, some not) [33-34]

• Transactions of Utility: How am I being used?
• Transactions of Equal Standing: How are we doing today?
• Transactions of Memory: How is my life changing?
• Transactions of Emotion: How do we feel about each other?
• Transactions of Time: Do you believe in me?

The author goes on to consider human expectations given sound artifacts and how various systems have manipulated these for various effects.

In considering design as a whole, the author discusses the ability for objects to communicate their utility, and transitions into a transactional model for denoting the expected inputs and outputs of a designed object. The granularity of recordings is discussed as it pertains to the various methods of material perception employed (highly relevant to interface questions).

Interfaces, of course, are the interactive layer between designed objects and their employing agents. Lee attempts to anthropomorphize the experience from the perspective of the tool or object, with reference to the various systems enabling knowledge visualization and perceptibility developed at the media lab and in analogous communities.

The author conducted a number of brainstorming workshops to determine perceptions of time, and identified narrative as the connective tissue in this fabric. The project they implemented was a constructed bench that attempted to computationally model the human evaluation of temporal events into a coherent narrative through various algorithms, and played back its ‘condensed’ series of events for comparison with those experienced by the participating human.

The project seems severely limited in scope and rather absurdist in conception. The bench is not designed with long term effects of environment in mind, but is rather an extremely temporary installation piece, leaving much of their earlier analysis fallow. The results are interesting but seem to be more relevant algorithmically than aesthetically or specifically.

Lee, Hyun-Yeul, 1974- Storied objects: design thinking with time / by Hyun-Yeul Theresa Lee. c2007.

As I return them to the library today...

• Fairchild, Mark D. Color appearance models / Mark D. Fairchild. Chichester, West Sussex, England ; Hoboken, NJ : J. Wiley, c2005.
  
-- ch2, psychophysics -- human perception of color, supporting studies

  -- ch6, color appearance phenomena -- non-intuitive adjustments that need to be made

  -- rest, how existing models take these adjustments into account

  -- ch17, testing color appearance models -- standard testing procedures

  largely non-mathematical

  
  
• Color imaging : fundamentals and applications / Erik Reinhard ... [et al.]. Wellesley, Mass : A.K. Peters, c2008.

  -- 2.9 -- modelling geometry & atmosphere

  -- 9.2 -- illuminants etc
  
noise, displays, testing methods, some alternative methods

  basic mathematics, straightforward

  
  
• Colour engineering : achieving device independent colour / edited by Phil Green and Lindsay MacDonald. Chichester : Wiley, c2002.

  -- lots of gamut maping, icc profiling, implementation
  
  
• Hunt, R. W. G. (Robert William Gainer), 1923- The reproduction of colour / R.W.G. Hunt. Chichester, West Sussex, England ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, c2004

  -- materials and devices

  -- lots of subtractive chemistry

  -- ntsc & pal

  -- images somewhat low-res
  
  

The authors describe in mathematical rigor a computer simulation system for the stroke of a calligraphic brush. The examples provided are extremely accurate to the traditionally created analogues they attempt to render.

The key innovations of their simulation system, beyond the shape drift of the brush ellipse given changes in pressure over the course of a stroke are their simulation of ink uptake and release by the brush, and their ability to simulate the brush’s splitting under realistic pressure and ink level conditions.

They include a number of example images that they created with their tool, showing largely traditional chinese artwork and characters.

They reference
C.J. Curtis, S.E. Anderson, J.E. Seims, K.W. Fleischer, D.H. Salesin, Computer-generated
watercolor, Proc. SIGGRAPH 97 (1997) 421–430,
another very thorough system for simulation of watercolor, though it is far more paper/ink interaction based rather than brush focused.

The interfaces for all these systems are very software focused; the control is not manual but rather on cumbersome software settings; ultimately the mouse and keyboard are all that are used to control the movement of the brushes.

This indirect control enforces a rather extreme time commitment for very basic results; there is very little motivation to use the tool over its physical inspiration.

The cohesion of the various fibers of the calligraphic brush given purpose through ink is a rich material phenomenon that parallels the unity ideal that forms a strong thread within the oriental aesthetic. It motivates tracing the evolution of calligraphy over time.

Canonically, though, this software is more enabling to the automation of calligraphy-like imagery than it is to the continuation of traditional calligraphic forms into the digital age. What computer data might we transliterate into this newly manipulable medium? What kind of information begs representation in the fractured but coherent strokes of a calligraphic pen?

The authors use a 6-dimensional simulation state machine for the brush: are all of these dimensions transparently encoded in the output? Are they responsible for our attribution of complexity to the brush strokes?

Songhua Xua, b, Min Tanga, Francis C. M. Lau, and Yunhe Pana. Virtual hairy brush for painterly rendering, sciencedirect.com 2004.

“Is there a way to make an impression upon the medium which will endure long enough for us to contemplate it?”
Makes the implicit assumption that contemplation is a requirement for sculpture, and therefore supports oblivion of memory in the visual arts

Discusses clay at great length, steel and metal casting, wood, various plastics; mainly focuses on methods of studio construction/planning/use in 1960s/70s modern artistic practice.

Beautiful summary of late modernist sculpture and its methods, but little critical analysis; extensive focus on the tools of various media: pp. 47, 97, 100, 118+, 151, 168, 192+, 230+

Suggests inquiry:

• comparative look at the tools of various media: handheld vs. mechanized, large vs. small, etc. amplification, accuracy/reliability, precision
• emergence of clay sculpture and initial enabling of permanence in physical art objects
• characteristics of various types of clay, affects on possible processes
• history of casting and its possibilities (IE: leonardo da vinci’s sculpture, etc.)
• steel and heavy metal industry -- what prerequisites in materials?
• history of plastics
• history of stone carving through time

• Computer Assisted Hand Loom (TC-1) -- Lia Cook 2002 Traces:Wonder
• Warp & Weft painting -- Polly Barton 2001 Antiphon 3 -- Hiroyuki Shindo 1998 Hemp and Cotton Banners
• Shibori technique? -- Frank Connet - 2004 - Spiral Square 3
• Ikat Weaving -- Ulla-Maija Vikman - 1994 Kainuu

references to look at

• Susan M Pearce - 1995 - On Collecting, an investigation into collecting in the european tradition
• Sheila Hicks - Constantine & Larsen - Beyond Craft

A photo essay looking at modern fiber art collections, and the rise of the use of fiberous materials in modernist art. Very little historical background. Begins with the use of cloth based signs in cubism and as mere materials in dadaist works in the early 1900s, follows through the 1950s with Rauschenberg’s use of trash or other found materials as mere material.

The essay draws some strength from the conventional consideration of fiber arts as low class or poor materials, and their acceptance today into very high-class dwellings and collections. Traces the use of fiber in various connected genres (feminism as a signifier, etc.). Good discussion of visual/tactile synesthesia or close association. Can there be tactile sensations with visual uniformity? Is the tactile associated merely with the rhythmic in vision?

“Fibrous materials recall what our bodies feel like from the inside and also from the outside as we reside in space - an intertwining of physical and psychological unity. And because they remind us of our modest place - as just one among many perishable beings in the material world, they are radical, a far cry from classical Western philosophy which located aesthetics and perception as a singular discourse of the ‘higher’ abstract mind, not within the totality of the ‘lowly’ body and the physical world in which it resides.” - Polly Ullrich, p.11

Partially accurate; the traditional enclosure of the body within a cloth cocoon mirrors the past century’s encapsulation of fiber within a high-art frame. The sculptures presented seem universally flexible: presented here, they come across as an integral tradition in high art production and training since the 1950’s, but at a crafts fair their meaning and value would be far more vague.

The essay is compelled to focus on the recent trends in collecting fiberous arts, seemingly necessitated by their commonplace. The textual accompaniment allows for a focus not on the interminably banal and ancient interfaces with the material, but with the avant-garde modifications of the methods and process that allowed for minor tweaks -- we see the results of these works not as within a tradition but as critical of that tradition.

Indeed, perhaps this is a more general observation, that minor but chaotically important distortions of process generate the apparent complexity of form and emergence from common media traditions which give rise to the acceptance as artistically relevant of the post-modernist obsession on material and method. How does this parallel the procedural flexibilities used in the emergence of other sculpture? Paint as material in modernism?

Ullrich, Polly. Material difference : soft sculpture and wall works / by Polly Ullrich. Western Springs, IL : Friends of Fiber Art International ; Seattle, WA : distributed by University of Washington Press, c2006.

When John Philip Souza wrote in 1906 bemoaning the arrival of the phonograph and its impact on the musical profession, he questioned the ability of the ‘soul’ of a piece of music to be transmitted through a reproduction. In 1936, Walter Benjamin formalized this objection in the application of photography to the visual artwork. In his essay we see the concept of a work of art’s ‘aura’. The changes that occurred in both of these fields were complex -- while the initial media themselves did not change, another medium brought forth second order effects that forced a transition of context to both of these media. In so doing, these second order mediations ultimately became the target of the original acts, and therefore dramatically changed the direction of the artistic fields.

Prior to the recorded sound, music was a transitory phenomenon; its seat through time lay only in the human brain and as sheet music notation paired with instrumental traditions. Its reproduction was cumbersome and manual, requiring space and skilled human labor. The mechanization of sound reproduction allowed this storage to be collected into a paired device with physical object of memory. This redirected earlier performances of musical scores into mere production of sound to be recorded onto condensed physical media.

A working definition of soul will allow us to evaluate Souza’s skepticism regarding its transmissibility through recorded media. Let us assign ‘soul’ to refer that aspect of a human that carries informational content, a position consistent with our intuitive historical concept of soul within a deterministic universe. The soul of music is then precisely that which the mechanical reproduction intends to maximize: not, perhaps, its temporal concentration, but surely its overall human impact, and the distribution of its effects into the neural memory of humankind.

Given this context, the field of performed music evolves into a precursor for the recorded object; the restrictions are to that which can be transmitted through a mechanical apparatus for sound recording and generation: the accepted definition of music expands dramatically, and, as Mark Katz explores, so does its aesthetic.

Turning to Benjamin’s essay, we can reconsider the concepts of aura, exhibition value, and cult value. The soul of a work of visual art seems to be that information which is to be transmitted. Aura refers to the information transmitted solely through the context of a work, especially through its uniqueness and thus cult value. The exhibition value is more closely aligned with what can be considered the artwork’s soul; it is what is, and what is denoted. It is the life of the work itself, regardless of its material composition or location.

In the visual arts, the tradition of photography has allowed the concept of a visual artwork to transcend restriction by the physical and cult aspects of its material basis. It has encouraged a drift to focus on soul, on the pattern of its organization rather than the material itself. This drift is one that allows eternity to apprehend the arts and permanence to enliven their context. Once a physical painting is meaningful only as support for its visual stimulus, the artwork consists of the stimulus, and is something that is at least theoretically irrespective of time.

This in turn promotes the consideration of artwork as a spatio-temporal entity: something that unfolds through time can nonetheless be represented outside of time. We have seen this, notably, in recorded sound, but it is also strongly apparent in the emergence of performance art: postmodern expressive acts, in general, imply both a physical and temporal presence, and therefore rely on a contemporary consideration of recording for their legitimacy as artwork.

What is it that is fundamentally projected onto a physical spatial media? In what ways do the methods of projection impact the sources of expression that target that physical instantiation? How do the limitations of their action constrict the expressions that are represented? How are these limitations overcome, and with what varying reliance on pre-existing semiotic conventions?

How can interfaces and media be classified and considered to best evaluate their constrictive or restrictive effects on the artworks that rely on them? What would an ideal interface consist of in the visual arts? Ultimately, how has the evolution of interfaces over time changed the output of soul in art, and how might this evolution progress and continue to challenge recorded work in the future?