jan freuchen
augmented nature. icons of nature.
augmented nature. icons of nature.
Someone suggested that people look at Edward Burtynsky after posting about Mark Luthringer via the New Shelton. Both are interesting. I have issues with taking photos of trash and sprawl. how can an image talk about waste when it itself such a product and a promulgation of the visual noise that facilitates our disconnection to the implications of these objects? Photographing patterns within the noise of consumer production is more interesting. It calls attention to what we do not see because of it's profusion in a more specific manner. It all still seems kind of jaded though.
Glen Rubsamen - 2006 at Mai 36 Gallery, Zurich
... it is a garbage dump, piled high with the remains of half finished commercial projects, imported vegetation and residential fantasies (and most recently telecommunication towers). The spoiling of paradise creates the continual need for finding it anew.
From "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriad, published by "les Presses du Reel", Dijon, France
2002 english version 1998 french version.
Academism:
1. An attitude that involves clinging to the defunct signs and forms of one's day and rendering these aesthetic.
2. synonum: pompous (pompier)
-And why wouldn`t he do something pompous, if it pays off` (Samuel Beckett)
Aesthetics:
An idea that sets humankind apart from other animal species. In the end of the day, burying the dead, laughter, and suicide are just the corollaries of a deep-seated hunch, that life is an aesthetic, ritualised, shaped form.
Art:
1. General term describing a set of objects presented as part of a narrative known as art history.This narrative draws up the critical genealogy and discusses the issues raised by these objects, by way of three sub-sets: painting,sculpture, architecture.
2. Nowadays, the word 'art' seems to be no more than a semantic leftover of this narrative, whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.
Art (The end of ):
'The end of art' only exists in an idealistic view of history. We can nevertheless, and not without irony, borrow Hegel`s formula whereby 'art, for us, is a thing of the past' and turn it into a figure of style: let us remain open to what is happening in the present, which invariably exceeds, a priori, our capacities of understanding.
Artist:
When Benjamin Buchloh referred to the conceptual and minimal generation of the 1960`s, he defined the artist as a 'scholar-philosopher-craftsman' who hands society 'the objective results of his labour' . For Buchloh, this figure was heir to that of the artist as 'mediumic and transcendental subject' represented by Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and Joseph Beuys. Recent developments in art merely modify Buchloh's hunch. Today's artist appears as an operator of signs, modelling production structures so as to provide significant doubles. An entrepeneur/politician/director. The most common denominator shared by all artists is that they show something. The act of showing suffices to define the artist, be it a representation or a designation.
Behaviour:
1. Beside those two established genres, the history of things and the history of forms, we still need to come up with a history of artistic behaviours. It would be naive to think that the history of art represents a whole capable of perennially replacing these three sub-groups. An artist's microbiography would point up the things he has achieved within his oeuvre.
2. Artist, producer of time.
All totalitarian ideologies show a distinctive wish to control the time in which they exist. They replace the versatility of time invented by the individual by the fantasy of a central place where it might be possible to acquire the overall meaning of society. Totalitarianism systematically tries to set up a form of temporal motionlessness, and rendering the time in which it exits uniform and collective, a fantasy of eternity aimed first and foremost at standardising and monitoring patterns of behaviours. Foucault thus rightly stressed the fact that the art of living classed with 'all forms of fascism, be they already there or lurking ':
Co-existence criterion:
All works of art produce a model of sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed in it. So there is a question we are entitled to ask in front of any aesthetic production: 'Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue [ Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?] A form is more or less democratic. May I simply remind you, for the record, that the forms produced by the art of totalitarian regimes are peremptory and closed in on themselves (particularly through their stress on symmetry).
Otherwise put, they do not give the viewer a chance to complement them.
(see: Relational (aesthetics)).
Context:
In situ art is a form of artistic activity that encompasses the space in which it is on view. This consideration by the artist of the exhibition venue consisted, yesterday, in exploring its spatial and architectural configuration. A second possibility, prevalent in the art of the 1990s consists in an institutional structure, the socio-economic features encompassing it, and the people involved. This latter method calls for a great deal of subtlety : although such contextual studies have the merit of reminding us that the artistic doing does not drop out of the sky into a place unblemished by any ideology, it is nevertheless important to fit this investigation into a prospect that goes beyond the primary stage of sociology, It is not enough to extract, mechanically, the social characteristics of the place where you exhibit (the art centre, the city, the region, the country...) to ''reveal'' whatever it may be. For some artists who complicated thinking represents an architecture of meanings, no more nor less (Dan Asher, Daniel Buren, Jef Geys, Mark Dion) how many conceptual hacks are there who laboriously 'associate', for their show in Montelimar, nougat production and unemployment figures? The mistake lies in thinking that the sense of an aesthetic fact lies solely in the context.
2. Art after criticism:
Once art 'overtook' philosophy (Joseph Kosuth), it nowadays goes beyond critical philosophy, where conceptual art has helped to spread the viewpoint. Doubt can be cast over the stance of the 'critical' artist, when this position consists in judging the world as if he were excluded from it by divine grace, and played no part in it. This idealistic attitude can be contrasted with Lacanian intuition that the unconscious is its own analyst. And Marx's idea that explains that real criticism is the criticism of reality that exists through criticism itself. For there is no mental place where the artist might exclude himself from the world he represents.
Critical materialism:
The world is made up of random encounters (Lucretius, Hobbes, Marx, Althusser). Art, too, is made of chaotic, chance meetings of signs and forms. Nowadays, it even creates spaces within which the encounter can occur. Present-day art does not present the outcome of a labour, it is the labour itself, or the labour-to-be.
Factitiousness:
Art is not the world of suspended will (Schopenhauer), or of the disappearance of contingency (Sartre), but a space emptied of the factitious. It in no way clashes with authenticity (an absurd value where art is concerned) but replaces coherences, even phoney ones, with the illusory world of 'truth'. It is the bad lie that betrays the hack, who at best touching sincerity inevitably ends up as a forked tongue.
Form:
Structural unity imitating a world. Artistic practice involves creating a form capable of "lasting", bringing heterogeneous units together on a coherent level, in order to create a relationship to the world.
Gesture:
Movement of the body revealing a psychological state or designed to express an idea. Gesturality means the set of requisite operations introduced by the production of artworks, from their manufacture to the production of peripheral signs (actions, event, anecdotes):
Image:
Making a work involves the invention of a process of presentation. In this kind of process, the image is an act.
Inhabiting:
Having imagined architecture and art of the future, the artist is now proposing solutions for inhabiting them. The contemporary form of modernity is ecological,haunted by the occupancy of forms and the use of images.
Modern:
The ideals of modernity have not vanished,they have been adapted. So "the total work of art" comes about today in its spectacular version, emptied of its teleological content. Our civilization makes up for the hyperspecialization of social functions by the progressive unity of leisure activities. It is thus possible to predict,without too much risk attaching thereto, that the aesthetic experience of the average late 20th century individual might roughly resemble what early 20th century avant-gardes imagined. Between the interactive video disk, the CD-Rom, ever more multi-media-oriented games consoles, and the extreme sophistication of mass recreational venues, discotheques and theme parks, we are heading towards the condensation of leisure in unifying forms. Towards a compact art. Once a CD-Rom and Cd-I drives are available. which have enough autonomy, books, exhibitions and films will be in competition with a form of expression that is at once more comprehensive and more thought-restricting, circulating writing, imagery and sound in new forms.
Operational realism:
Presentation of the functional sphere in an aesthetic arrangement.The work proposes a functional model and not a maquette. In other words, the concept of dimension does not come into it, just as in the digital image whose proportions may vary dependng on the size of the screen, which unlike the frame, does not enclose works within a predetermined format, but rather renders virtuality material in x dimensions.
Ready-made:
Artistic figure contemporary with the invention of film. The artist takes his camera-subjectivity into the real, defining himself as a cameraman: the museum plays the part of the film, he records. For the first time, with Duchamp, art no longer consists in translating the real with the help of signs, but in presenting this same real as it is (Duchamp, the Lumière brothers...
Relational Aesthetics:
Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.(see co-existence criterion):
Relational (art):
A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.
Semionaut:
The contemporary artist is a semionaut, he invents trajectories between signs.
Society of extras:
The society of the spectacle has been defined by Guy Debord as the historical moment when merchandise achieved 'the total occupation of social life ' , capital having reached 'such a degree of accumulation' that it was turned into imagery. Today , we are in the further stage of spectacular development: the individual has shifted from a passive and purely repetitive status to the minimum activity dictated to him by market forces. So television consumption is shrinking in favour of video games, thus the spectacular hierarchy encourages 'empty monads', i.e. programmeless models and politicians, thus everyone sees themselves summoned to be famous for fifteen minutes, using a TV game, street poll or new item as go-between. This is the reign of the 'Infamous Man' , whom Michel Foucault defined as the anonymous and 'ordinary' individual suddenly put in the glare of the media spotlights. Here we are summoned to turn into extras of the spectacle, having been regarded as its consumers. This switch can be historically explained: since the surrender of the Soviet bloc, there are no obstacles on capitalism's path to empire.It has a total hold of the social arena, so it can permit itself to stir individuals to frolic about in the free and open spaces that it has staked out. So, after the consumer society, we can see the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place.
Style:
The movement of a work, its trajectory. 'The style of a thought is its movement' (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari).
Trailer:
Having been an event per se (classical painting), then the graphic recording of an event (the work of Jackson Pollock with photographic documents describing a performance or an action), today's work of art often assumes the role of a trailer for a forthcoming event, or an event that is put off forever.
Viewser: Because there is no word for the participant who is used in interactive art.
Viewser: Because 'User' sounds like drugs, telemarketing, and microsoft excel.
Viewser: Because Viewers can't touch or move the art.
viewse : [Pron: vee-yooz] –verb (used with object)
1. To see and interact with at the same time. To experience.
Variants:
Vuser: more user than viewer.
Vuying: viewer/user/buyer | ex: I vought a Warhol Brillo Box.
Vooser: a drunk viewser | ex: that dude just voosed all over the place.
Vuice: a genre of art that requires drinking juice to succesfully experience the piece.
Addendum: I didn't make it up. ; (
Maracanã , 2003
Acoustic speakers, microphones (and effects)
Photo: Luiz Zerbini
Autobang , 2002
Maverick 74, auto lift, assorted wooden drumsticks, bronze, hammers, wrenches, iron bars, bones. Pro tools microphones, speakers and video projection.
Photo: Fabio Ghivelder
Nadabrahma , 2003
“Pau Negro” mahogany branches, motor, iron base and electric circuitry
Variable dimensions
Collection Chelpa Ferro
Photo: Barrão
Chelpa Ferro is the name of a group of artists from the fields of visual art, video art and music. With their vivid sound work installations, they range among the most important representatives of the current music and art scene in Brazil.
Every-day, industrial or technical, natural and environmental objects are decontextualized and, in the new context of eletronical music devices (MP3 player, loundspeakers, oscillators, amplifiers, etc.), develop structural characteristics well beyond their customary function. Chelpa Ferro have displayed their creations at many international exhibitions; this year they will be represented at the Venice Biennale.
Moreover, Chelpa Ferro realize their bricolage in musical performances. Collages composed of every-day noises, guitar solos, sound fragments from pieces by well-known pop icons like Autoramas, Yoko Ono, Yes, or Iggy Pop, improvisations, self-designed objects and machines that produce sounds, noises or rhythms, guide the audience through a varified soundscape full of imagination.
Drive In Music, 1967
Plan of broadcast area showing the configuration of antennas (colored lines) transmitting the work's seven sound components.
Passage
The Passage works are situated in spaces where
the physical movement of the listener through the
space to reach a destination is inherent. They imply
an active role on the part of listeners, who set a static
sound structure into motion for themselves by passing
through it. My first work with an aural topography,
Drive In Music in 1967, falls within this vector.
-Max Neuhaus
Public Supply I, 1966
Radio transmission and telephone communication.
http://www.theartgalleryofknoxville.com/neuhausaudio/Public_Supply_I.html
Times Square, 1977
A harmonic sound texture emerging from the north end of the triangular pedestrian island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City.
Originally installed at this site from 1977 to 1992, the Times Square Street Business Improvement District (BID), and Christine Burgin collaborated with MTA Arts for Transit and Dia to reinstate the project in May of 2002.
http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/neuhaus/
Old Friends, 2005
Simon and Garfunkel "Live @ Central Park" DVD timecode for all the places where a liberal reading could indicate tension between Simon and Garfunkel.
http://beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2005/s_g_looks.html
Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" compressed over and over as an mp3 666 times, 2004
http://beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2004/iron_maiden_2004.html
Slim Thug Status Bot, 2005
A chat bot that lets you know if Slim Thug's album "Already Platinum" has gone platinum yet.
http://beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2005/slim_thug_bot.html
Takeshi murata makes short animations that reference the psychedelic in a manner that seems very specific to providence noise scene. A risd alumni, murata uses digital video technologies in a n aesthetic approach that either belies the digital basis, or combines the now classic glitch with a painterly quality that can be breath taking. I'm interested in the intersection of phenomenalogical art and conceptual art, As they have moved in parallel for so long and seem to relate only remotely.
I had a conversation with Melissa about the basis for pheno-art, and we came to the conclusion that because at one point it was new as an idea to strip all concept away from the art object and just strictly look at it for it's power to make a literal phyiscal impression, This was considered avant garde and thus folded into the cannon once people understood it was safe.
Which leaves the question about how pheno art relates to whats happening now. There seems to be a whole psych thing coming back and it definitely seems emphasized here in providence, but is coming out in other parts of the world too. Perhaps, between murata's beautiful movies and e40's command to 'get dumb', we are trying to put ourselves to sleep, given the dystopic state of things. A good question would be whether people feel that things are fucked up or not. And it would interesting to find a good way to gather this information, Outside of a gallup poll or something.
After seeing Murata's work, I became inspired to start doing animations that where phenomenologically driven and had some wierd conceptual basis myself. I came up with the movie below. It's a snapshot from a little mining town outside of my home town and i feel like it's completely indicative of the way things are around where i grew up.
Condon's work contends with the way video games can seep into reality. This work is a rendition of the original wireframe model of a 1985 lamborghini used in the game need for speed. The wireframe is recreated here with abs injected plastic versions of real tree branches.
This work is attractive mainly because of the string of translations. A digital representation of an iconic and expensive object is stripped of it's virtual skin and then remade as a new physical object through the artificial representations of completely unrelated natural objects. The real and natural becoming real and plastic to emulate the non-real and completely ephemeral.
Jordi Colomer, Anarchitekton Brasilia, 2004
Colomer's work is interesting in the way that Gondry's work is interesting. It references a digital facet to reality with out overtly being about digital junk. In this case the photo is about urbanity and maybe the way that individuals relate to utopian or dystopian images and places. Having the same object in one's hand on a stick is a stab at literally objectifying a place. Holding it and having an individual relationship with it. It's a catharsis. "it's mine" "i can take it home with me." Playing with perspective is really trippy too.
75% of interactive art is bad.
it's funny how we all have blogs and we don't ever have time to write in them. at least i don't. i'm too busy drinking my college money away.
so tonight we saw jim campbell speak. he pretty much said it straight. i wasn't as star struck with him as some people where but his work is good and he looks at things honestly. here's the rub tho. really it seems in my mind and in some of our classes, we have been discussing the whole data mapping as art thing and where to draw the line. as far as interactivity is concerned campbell suggests that when you deal with 1 to 1 ratios for translating data, it gets boring... in a different conversation, someone suggested that it wasn't art at all. which i feel has some foundation. so as to not be too wordy and also so i can go to bed this is what i think:
alot of data mapping art, interactive or no, verges on not being art at all. while this is true at the same time that translation of context and information can definitely be art. duchamp's urinal? pure translation. nothing to it. that's art. most everyone can agree on that because of the context. thinking machine 4 by martin wattenberg? i'm not so sure.. yes it charts the proccess of a computer plotting moves for mind numbing number of games of chess, and very aesthetically, but does it have the same intention of truly shifting the viewers consciousness surrounding the experience of it? sure people can be wowed by all the decisions a computer can make, but these are things that sit just under the surface of what we do everyday, and bringing them to light isn't such a drastic context shift as duchamp's choice. i know it's unfair to compare them in some respects, but honestly, between utterback's deal with herman miller and wattenberg's design of the smartmoney java applet, which in turn they licensed to the smithsonian museum, at this point we are talking about technical and innovative information design and craft or simply nice looking vehicles to put marketing goo into. ???
sleep.
ho huum. mcluhan.
i dont' think we ever really got around to anyone asserting whether or not they found mcluhan's ideas of cool and hot media useful. although, honestly i haven't looked at it enough to really understand it. i'm definitely feeling like my brain is full. go figure.
one of the things that we talked about that was interesting is how we are going to filter all this information into an actual functional education. teri suggested that we subscribe to nettime and empire, and yet i feel like just covering the basics of mcluhan and debord and the others in our postpost digital context in and of itself generates enough substance. eh.
i feel like the big three projects of this semester are in no order of importance:
+ building an organ
+ identifying a way to build a database or field of information that is accessible and updateable for my work.
+ writing alot (see above)
+ taking this idea of the celibrity rag as far as it can go
+ tape operations
+ live performance objects
+ sound
+ sound
_ music
_ sound
+ music
you get the idea.
maybe a database is the way to go. i could get a little mysql thing going. i wonder what the maximum cellsize is. tagging your work becomes pretty essential as well. i need to start doing that.
really another part of this whole thing that i've only barely been acknowledging is that it's hard to be in a new environment and properly contextualize information.
mcluhan mentions the environmental stress reaction cycle = 1. anxiety resistance exhaustion? is that how it goes? i don't know but i just found this on google:
http://www.macses.ucsf.edu/Research/Allostatic/notebook/catecholamine.html
figure 1 is pretty interesting. i wonder what striving means.
anyway. i'm definitely going through the initial anxiety of being in a new environment. bill said something at the beginning of the semester about everything being crazy and that's just the way it is. it's good to know i'm not completely alone.
so look for my fully functioning world of ideas soon. i know i will.
wait.
so do the fluxus and surrealist artists want to elevate people's consciousness to a disorriented place in the way that traditional renaissance painters wanted to elevate consciousness to god or the devine?
do computer programs want to elevate consciousness to an experience of maximum efficiency and centralized control of all systems connected to one consciousness?
where do these different things want to put us?
i don't know.
but i've been thinking about it. though. really all that physical computing is, is an attempt to extend the limits of the computer interface. obvious no? but what happens when we really examine how we can extend ourselves to meet computers... and how much we have already. consider people's posture when they use laptops... although they are pretty ergonomic. a term that didn't exist before people started frying their hands working on poorly designed keyboards. things used to be not so ergonomic. at times we strain to eet the design of the machine and dehumanize ourselves in the process. something people have been aware of and have commented on for a while... stellarc for example. but what happens when we make it more positive? or what happens when we try to maintain our humanity but meet this technology in a new way that stretches ourselves? jeffrey shaw sort of paws at this in things like legible city, but i'm thinking more personal and more experimental in the way we connect to the computer.
list time: how do we connect input to a computer?
-mouse (real time 2 dimensional analog input with a single or multiple contextual triggers.)
-keyboard (array of digital triggers that only have one discrete meaning. the off state is communal and has no discrete meaning for each key)
-microphone (real time 3 dimesional analog input (pitch/freq/amplitude))
-fader/knob/lever (real time 1 dimesional analog input)
-button (digital trigger)
-toggle (digital on/off state.)
so is there anything that is fundamentally different than that in terms of the way we can actuallly get data into a computer?
realtime / non-realtime processing (time is the only mandatory dimension?)
analog 0.0 continuum to 1.0 / digital 0 only 1 only (continuum vs extremes)
single input / array of inputs that are correlate and input simultaneously. (the one and the all)
that's pretty much it? no?
maybe... what about william gibson? there is a short story called "the winter market" in a collection called burning chrome that's about (more or less) a machinima editor. the neat thing about the story is that what he edits is data fed straight from people's minds. so what is that? 6 dimensional analog input? (time / space x 3 / color / sound). in the story the content that people generate is just that, content. it's discussed as if it's something you could record on a vcr. but what if you use that data for control? could someone be aware enough of a dream that they were consciously spinning to understand how it would translate into another medium? can you control a mouse with color and time? with location in 3d space in your mind? i don't knnow. i';m not sure if i care either. we shall see.
awesome.
