Day 149 @ ITP: Live Image Processing & Performance

Week 2
Assignment #2: Create your own system using Jitter for a live performance

I played around with the video mixer patch from our class GitHub cheat sheet using the cell phone clips I shot from Week 1, and honestly didn't add any new effects to it or alter the patch much, except I changed the parameters mostly on Brightness, Contrast and Saturation, and played with toggling between the clips and using the smoothing functions (though I didn't totally understand what they were doing, but liked the effect) and attempted towards the end to record both audio and video out of Max by adding audio and video recorders to the patch. I got the video footage to record but not the audio, and realized that something was missing in my chain. How could I get it to record audio in the future? I ended up with this crappy audio from my Mac internal microphone. Nevertheless though these videos are a little choppy and frenetic, I did manage to get into some zones with these two combinations while playing with them live that I enjoyed staying in, and I will attempt to recreate them later maybe with internal sound and less choppiness since I now have WireTap Pro again and also maybe will learn how to record sound properly in Max...another question I had was, How would it be possible to make the transitions between effects more smooth or gradual?

It was also fun to play with the relationship between the chopping and screwing of the audio with the movement of the images. I'm not sure how "representational" I want the footage I ultimately work with for the final to be, because I guess I consider this "representational", as well as the sounds, with the gong and the people painting and the grass/birds. but I think it's also nice sometimes to have something kind of recognizable to look at or listen to while having a relatively abstract experience, or that juxtaposition, and the audio element was a nice surprise too (though it sounds horrible in these clips). Also trying not to think too much about it at this point and just explore/play to see what comes up or what I end up wanting to keep or work more with. I would like to continuously be trying new things over the course of the semester because the amount of possibilities seems so vast and I would like to come up with a few chains or tricks that I like to create a formula of sorts after trying a lot of combinations then make a few zones or psychological/sensory "places" that could be phased from one to another...also as I mentioned I have not added *any* extra parts to this cheat sheet yet, and I am planning to come up with some more alterations to make it more customized feeling before Monday.

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Update 2/5: Firstly, I forgot to tag this post as LIPP so this will not show up now, which is right before our 3rd class. I did manage to get some more intricate things going on in my patch, using the presets in the "Vizzie" section. What I am most interested in learning now is how to create a smooth transition between one effect and the next, and between multiple clips, and also to create some kind of audio reactive visual effect that could come in and out or possibly be the central theme. I'm also wondering if there's a way to make it lighter on my computer processing-wise-- because the more effects I added the slower it seems to run...it's a pretty new Macbook Pro, and I was running it with 100GB free and no other applications open. I'm wondering if also that has to do with the size of my files, I looked at them and they're all under 100mb but some are ~50mb. Maybe without using the presets it will work better?  

Day 149 @ ITP: Algorithmic Composition

Week 1
Reading: Exploring The Self Through Algorithmic Composition by Roger Alsop

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<< Freedom and diversity in expression is a requisite of artistic endeavor, but boundless freedom can be confounding. By creating or subjecting oneself to a set of rules, or a set of processes such as an algorithm, one hopes to confine one’s actions to an area of truer self-expression. My approach is to build algorithms as agents that assist me in creating music. By using an algorithm in this way, the composer can make worlds of complex interrelations, generating cascading actions that trigger other foreseen and unforeseen reactions. It is possible, due to the increasing power, elegance and availability of computer hardware and software, to easily preview the results of these interactions. This ease allows me to examine my motives and actions and their results while working, without the preciousness of prolonged, painstaking and single-minded efforts required by more traditional compositional methods. As each action of a composition algorithm has foreseen and unforeseen reactions, one tends to want to be accountable for these reactions. However, this sense of accountability is tempered as the process becomes more practiced and intuitive, much like the sense of accountability for each sound a novice violinist makes is reduced as the playing becomes more practiced and intuitive. At this point of expertise, the building of a computer algorithm becomes equivalent to making an instrument, learning how to play it and creating a composition all at the same time. Therefore the process and its result reflect the composer’s relationship to all three of these activities. Thus, the algorithm becomes a transparent, systematic and detached path of self-exploration. The above questions are continuous and are continually answered. The beauty of this approach is that the answers often come without the questions being articulated—or if they are articulated, they seem of little importance at the time of inspiration. One concentrates effort on building the world in which the music can exist and hopefully flourish. With the completion of a composition comes an understanding of the processes used. This understanding comes about in two ways: firstly, through the resultant music, when the composer recognizes a piece as uniquely his or her own. On listening to the piece, one discovers things about it that are novel, challenging, familiar and comfortable. By asking what results fit these categories and why, the composer increases his or her understanding of their personal relationship to music. Secondly, the algorithm that has generated the music is a map of the composer’s processes in creating the world from which the piece has come. Within this map one can discover the processes and pathways one favors in creating and organizing sound. >>

<< The goal of Guitar 21 and Selectnotes is to make the improviser approach his or her physical gestures in unfamiliar and challenging ways. Rather than starting from an exterior compositional influence, each of these algorithms create different contexts in which to improvise. Guitar 21 removes the gesture to sound relationship of traditional instruments. Instead, the improviser creates a musical context and reacts to it with non-musical gestures. For example, holding the C# note on the B-string of a guitar for half a second may result in a pitch bend of a tritone being applied to all notes on a specified MIDI channel; holding the D# on the same string may change the time period over which the pitch bend occurs. In this way, the traditional gesture-to-sound relationship of the guitar is grossly distorted. In this situation, the improviser cannot rely on any learned actions, as there is almost no relationship between the improviser’s action and the musical reactions generated. Instead, each action results in many possible reactions, all of which have no expected relationship to the actions of the improviser. Here, two or three gestures may generate a whole composition, forcing the improviser to acknowledge the criticality of the minutae of each gesture. Subsequent gestures radically and irrevocably alter the path of the composition, creating new musical environments in which to react. >>

<< The trap of over-protectiveness is especially dangerous when creating with algorithmic processes. There is an endless, almost overwhelming desire to adjust the algorithm in the hope that a better composition will result. This desire must be restrained in order for truer and more frank self-expression to take place. >>

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Day 145 @ ITP: Recurring Concepts in Art

Reading: Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology

I will argue that the 1960s represented a cultural crossroads between philosophies of art-making developed in pre-World War II Europe – when scientific breakthroughs seemed to offer proof of the interrelatedness of all aspects of life and new modes of seeing, the understanding of which could avert future conflict – and those forged in the aftermath of World War II, when the exploitation of new technologies appeared the key to economic and political triumph.

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. (McLuhan [1964] 1994, 7)

My own interest is in continuing that strain of the Bauhaus which attempted to find agreement across a wide spectrum of disciplines – science, engineering, art. ... Our interest at the Center is not only in new materials or technical implements, but in new knowledge. Today the possibilities suggested by new materials are much broader than they were in the days of the Bauhaus. Neither electronics nor the computer existed then.
(Davis 1968, 40)

Collaboration was central to the Center’s philosophy. Kepes envisioned that members of the Center, removed from the pressures of the art market, would work together on artistic “tasks” intended to benefit the community at large. Framing his proposal, Kepes explained that the group of artists should encompass many specialties, from painting and sculpture to film, light-work, and graphic design, and that the community should be “located in an academic institution with a strong scientific tradition” (Kepes 1965, 122). While Kepes’ suggestion that the Center be established in “an academic institution with a strong scientific tradition” indicated his affinity for MIT, it also coin-cided with his belief that artists must be schooled in the scientific and technical idioms of their own century in order to produce authentic and socially responsible work.

The name chosen for the facility, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, attested to Kepes’ interest in the nature of vision – and in visual language – the cornerstone, in his view, of collaborative engagement between artists and scientists. In his published proposal, Kepes reiterated views he had expounded in print since the early 1940s, “Vision is a fundamental factor in human insight. It is our most important resource for shaping our physical, spatial environment and grasping the new aspect of nature revealed by modern science. It is at its height in the experience of artists, who elevate our perception.” Echoing Moholy-Nagy, Kepes continued, “Artists are living seismographs, as it were, with a special and direct sensitivity to the human condition. Their immediate and direct response to the sensuous qualities of the world helps us to establish an entente with the living present” (Kepes 1965, 121; Moholy-Nagy [1947] 1965, 30).

He observed that, “[a]s an engineer, working with him, I was part of the machine. This new availability was largely responsible for the size and complexity of the machine” (ibid.). Witnessing the compatibility of viewpoints of artist and engineer proved an epiphany: “At that point, I realized I could do something technical for artists” (Kluver 1999).  

I am afraid of the consequences of a science which is built on concepts like symmetry, invariance, uniqueness, time and beauty. I would love it if the purpose of science was to create surprise, nonsense, humour, pleasure, and play. (Kaprow and Kluver 1962, 3) 

As Alex Hay told Simone Whitman, “Billy once mentioned that at Bell Labs any scientist who didn’t have a ninety percent failure record on his experiments was not considered a good scientist. I understood this to mean that a good scientist is working on the outer limits of his understanding. That if a scientist who experiments consistently turns out to be successful, it means that the scientist is wasting time [proving] matters which he already knows to be true.” A willingness to take risks and explore new ideas linked artists with their engineer partners.

In the words of Chuck Close: Things very much came out of the idea that the way to liberate yourself from the conventions and traditions of the past was to find a material that didn’t have historic usage and see what it would do. What does rubber do? What does lead do? You wouldn’t have wanted to use bronze, you wouldn’t have wanted to use any traditional art material when the idea was to find a process and go with it. (Storr 1998, 88)

‘Art and science’ has a feeling of fakery to me. ...Art cannot contribute anything to science as I see it” (Kluver 1999). Klüver continued to believe that the theoretical nature of science made it incompatible with the physical nature of art (Davis 1968, 42). Engineering, on the other hand, which engaged with manipulating technological materials, appeared to have a natural connection with artistic activity. Kluver reiterated his viewpoint in a 1968 interview with Douglas  Davis, “The engineer and the artist deal with the physical world and work for direct solutions of problems. The scientist is not trained to deal with and handle the physical world” (ibid.).

But if E.A.T. emulated the organization of industry, the agency did so with utopian ideals in mind. Soliciting the support of industry for the collaborations between artists and engineers promised nothing short of a social revolution.36 Just as Kepes felt that science and art could positively inform one another, so Kluver argued that art could  ̈redefine the goals of engineering, while technology could expand the possibilities of art. An early E.A.T. Newsletter declared: The collaboration between artists and engineers should produce far more than merely adding technology to art. The possibility of a work being created that was the preconception of neither the artist nor the engineer is the raison d’etre of the organization. The engineer must come out of the rigid world that makes his work the antithesis of
his life and the artist must be given the alternative of leaving the peculiar historic bubble known as the art world. The social implications of E.A.T. have less to do with bringing art and technology closer together than with exploring the possibilities of human interaction.
(E.A.T 1967a, 4)

Rauschenberg expressed his pride in the practical ramifications of E.A.T.’s collaborations in an interview conducted twenty years after the establishment of E.A.T.: “Something like nineteen brand-new patents that were direct results of Nine Evenings of Theater and Engineering went to the credit of the engineers of the respective companies. ...The technology that went into Soundings contributed to a cure for deafness that is almost perfect now” (Rose 1987, 70).

Despite Burnham’s disappointment, the affinity of these proposals with conceptual and environmental art, which permitted the creation of “thought projects” with no expectation of physical realization, cannot be overlooked, as Otto Piene has observed...
(Piene 1978).

Although Kepes and Klüver received significant recognition in the 1960s, in a climate of heightened awareness of the social impact of science and technology, their divergent outlooks reflect a coming of age at different moments, Kepes, in the 1920s, when popular interest in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was at its height, and Klüver, in the wake of  the Second World War, as many new materials and electronic technologies were under development. 47 The differences in their perspectives suggest the need for a careful distinction between the enterprises of science and technology as well as between
the conceptual versus material implications of partnerships between art, science, and technology.

At the same time, despite underlying differences in their goals, methods, and motivations, the organizers of these initiatives shared the conviction that art could help shape the development of science and technology, a belief capable of forging alliances between those who advocated revolution in contemporary art, and those who relished a sense of historic continuity.

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Day 145 @ ITP: Live Image Processing & Performance

Week 1
Assignment #1: Collect 10-15 minutes of video clips with a cell phone

I have been thinking about working with just color palettes and meditation, and ended up taking these clips from videos of people painting (which I consider to be a meditative exercise) while listening to music (which will have to be edited out! though it is fun to hear what people are listening to) which I shot from YouTube through a few pairs of different colored sunglasses off of the laptop screen. I'm not so sure about some of the very recognizable stuff like the eyes but also wondered if with effects something cool could be done with it and I thought in general I could do something playful with these as an exercise to learn Max.  I also shot some more color fields using this video as a source, which was made straight onto 16mm film (not by me) -- I shot those through the glasses again holding the phone close to the laptop screen to get a zoomed in effect.

I am thinking maybe for the final presentation in this class I would like to edit some footage to  manipulate for this specifically also. I definitely could have made a bunch more, and questionably should have made some not from the computer screen, though I decided the analog nature of the sunglasses' lenses made up for that somewhat. In general I would like to tie colors and fields with minimal sounds in this class, possibly crossing assignments with Algorithmic Composition to create ~7 distinct sections or audio-visual moods/worlds that ascend or change like gates that you go through.

I also now have a full working version of Max. Excited to see what can happen!

Day 141 @ ITP: Algorithmic Composition

Syllabus

Day 143 @ ITP: Recurring Concepts in Art

Reading: Experiments in Art and Technology

E.A.T. feels that the competition revealed the interest of the engineer and scientist, and showed that artists and engineers artists and engineers can collaborate successfully in making a work of art. The works themselves show a tremendous energy and direct use of material, which indicate the artist's desire to use the new technology as a material and through this to become involved in contemporary society. Some More Beginnings is then a beginning in a process of involvement which promises that industrially sponsored, effective working relationships between artists and engineers will lead to new possibilities that will benefit both the individual and society as a whole.
—Billy Klüver

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_Art_and_Technology

Day 140 @ ITP: Basic Analog Circuits

Reading: Practical Electronics For Inventors

Week 1 - Chapters 2.1-2.16 and 7.3-7.5

Week 2 (no class) - Chapter 3.2-3.2.6                 

Week 3 - Bring tools to class to keep for future classes:

5 - White breadboard

1- Needle nose plier

1- Wire stripper

1- Flush wire cutter 

1- Multimeter  

1- Soldering iron

1- Kester 44 Rosin Core Solder 63/37 .031"

1- Phillips and slot screwdriver 

Syllabus

Day 139 @ ITP: Live Image Processing & Performance

HW: Cellphone footage / Download Max

• Shoot between 5 - 10 minutes of footage with your cell phone (only your cell phone). When shooting this footage think of many different things like texture, movement, light, and color. The goal isn’t to create a composed video but to be open to what you encounter and embrace serendipity. Experiment with how you use your phone camera, what you attach it to, how you move with it.

• Write a quick blog post explaining what you captured and how you captured it. If you feel comfortable doing so, upload the footage as well.

• Download Max 7 if you haven’t already done so. Run through a few of the intro tutorials or patches and familiarize yourself with it.

Souce: Syllabus