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?