Day 157 @ ITP: Thinking about Algorithmic Composition + LIPP

2/9
I was thinking it could be fun to somehow very specifically link up notes and colors. I don't know how easy that is to accomplish. Something like this below video that I found:

It seems to be mapping the sounds very specifically with the colors. So it is not triggering them through analyzing the sounds on the other end, but rather triggering an associated visual every time a sound is played... So it's not so much audio reactive but "input reactive".. Would it be possible to have a slightly different visual for a range of up to ~127 individual inputs? 

I also would like to somehow trigger light in or on crystal singing bowls when they are played... possibly with projection mapping? Or, the bowls could also turn on a physical light inside them when I hit them with a mallet (though it might make the bowls vibrate sonically to have a light inside them, so would have to think of a way to do it that wouldn't affect the sound). But that would be a different scenario...maybe in tandem with the algorithmically generated music and visuals which are responding to the notes. Possibly the bowls could also be affecting the projections so there is a symbiosis there as well. Here is an example of someone doing something similar (but with lights that change color, and without turning off):

---

Update 2/12 (for LIPP)

I have been reading a lot and thinking about the kinds of systems that I would like to work on in general and using the tools in our class.

I am definitely very influenced at the moment by the Light and Space artists I am reading about for Recurring Concepts in Art, and installations by James Turrell and others who work with perception. I would like to create something in this school or vein but also with incorporating sound, and slowly fading in between a series of "places" that create an arc of experience. So the key word is "slow" - but constantly moving and shifting, maybe with some central focus point that could also have elements be introduced or taken away or faded away rather than flashing in and out which seems to be what a lot of video effects are about...

I also realize that a lot of figuring this out will also be from raw experimentation, and I still need to do a lot more of that. I have been following the tutorial videos for our class but have not worked much more on my own Max patch yet(!), but plan to really get into it over the next two weeks. I still need to work more with the jit.smooth function, I tried to add it but it turned orange, so I was wondering if we could go over this in my office hours appt with you (this Friday from 2:40-3pm)? 

I attended two live audio-visual performances this past week, the one at 3 Legged Dog last Saturday, and one this past Saturday as well at Spectrum in Brooklyn which I was also playing music in, where a video artist did live visuals for each of the 4 acts, and I was wondering if I could do a review of some kind of amalgamation of a few sets from different shows instead of just one event. Other than being a little stuck with Max at the moment I have been feeling inspired by various things in relation to our class!

Bobst library stacks w/ jit.lumakey tutorial

Day 152: Recurring Concepts in Art

Reading: 
Art and Telematics: towards a network consciousness
Roy Ascott

Day 152: Recurring Concepts in Art

Reading: 
How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time
Carolyn A. Miranda

This type of art of the encounter, frequently referred to as “social practice,” has been having a moment in art circles—albeit a moment that dates back a couple of decades. In that time, artists such as Rick Lowe in Houston and Theaster Gates in Chicago have turned urban renewal into an art form, transforming abandoned buildings into thriving cultural hubs. In Detroit, the Museum of Contemporary Art harbors Mobile Homestead, one of Mike Kelley’s final works, a near-exact replica of his childhood home, which now serves as an ever-evolving community center.

Certainly, the notion of participatory art is not new. The Surrealists were staging hands-on events in Paris almost a century ago. In the 1950s and ’60s, figures like Allan Kaprow and members of Fluxus were turning collective actions into art. The ’70s provided all manner of boundary-blurring social projects: from Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse in Los Angeles—which was part art installation, part educational facility, part performance space—to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s pieces involving workers at the New York City Department of Sanitation. (She remains an artist in residence there to this day.) All of these traditions, and many others, have made their way into social practice, a stream of participatory art that tends to display a strong sociological and political bent, often in an effort to draw attention to social ills and conditions. Sometimes, these projects are meant to incite empowerment or change in a community.

Tom Finkelpearl is the author of What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, published last year by Duke University Press. He is also director of the Queens Museum in New York, which sponsored, along with the public-art nonprofit Creative Time, Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, a piece begun in 2010 that resulted in the creation of a community center for immigrants in Corona, Queens. Finkelpearl defines social practice as “art that’s socially engaged, where the social interaction is at some level the art.”

He thinks that the popularity of social practice among today’s artists reflects a pendulum swing away from the art market. “It’s a reaction against the excesses of individualism,” he says. Indeed, with its ephemeral gatherings and activist happenings, social practice generally produces little in the way of salable objects. (Of the artists mentioned in this story, a slim minority have gallery representation, such as Hirschhorn and Gates, who show at Gladstone Gallery in New York and White Cube in London, respectively.)

Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time, thinks that the form is a byproduct of our technology-reliant times. “I mean, doesn’t any kind of human interaction that isn’t on the Internet just feel very special?” he asks. Last fall, Creative Time and the Brooklyn Museum staged Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street, in which 400 mostly female participants decked out in lemon-yellow scarves took over a brownstone-lined block in Brooklyn to discuss issues of gender, race, and class with passersby.

Ted Purves, who founded the program at CCA, explains that these courses emerged out of pedagogical necessity. “If you’re interested in doing work out in the world, you need another box of tools,” he says—tools that go beyond studio practice and art history. “You need classes on social theory, theories of politics, and theories of public space.”

Helguera’s interest in such interactive scenarios emerges from his own artwork. Last year, he created a crowd-sourced Spanish-language bookstore called Librería Donceles at Kent Fine Art in Chelsea, which became an impromptu hangout for Spanish speakers in a city without a dedicated Spanish-language used bookstore. Last month, the project traveled to Phoenix, where it was installed inside a defunct Borders bookshop under the auspices of Arizona State University. “We spend years in art school, where we are taught to explore ourselves,” Helguera says, “but social practice is completely about the opposite thing. It’s about how to listen. It’s remaining engaged with the world in an active way.”

...Caledonia Dance Curry is an artist based in Brooklyn. In some quarters, she is better known as Swoon, a moniker she adopted as a street artist in the late ’90s. Swoon has done intricate cut-paper installations in galleries and collaborated on a series of sculptural rafts that have navigated the waterways of Mississippi, New York, and Venice. A few years ago, she and a team of artists helped build sturdy Superadobe shelters and a community center in earthquake-ravaged Cormiers, Haiti. Currently, the group is in the Rust Belt town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where they are rehabilitating an abandoned church.

“We’re trying to think about how we can regenerate this space so that the narrative isn’t simply about destruction,” Swoon says. To help do that, the group is building a kiln that will fire the bright ceramic tiles that will one day cover the roof—tiles the community will have a hand in making. “It’s not that different from my previous work,” she adds. “My question to myself as an artist has always been, ‘How do I make something that engages my city—that creates art where people don’t expect to find to it? And how can we change what’s valued and how we value it?’” Art is a universe that traffics in these symbols, which means social practice should feel right at home.

Source

Day 152: Recurring Concepts in Art

Reading: 
“The New Visual Literature”: László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film
PEPPER STETLER

Jonathan Crary’s important work, which acknowledges the problem of isolating vision as an autonomous area of study. Crary points out that perception is not exclusively a visual faculty but involves a multisensory involvement with the external world. He argues that a scholarly approach that separates vision from broader perceptual processes—sound and touch, for example—internalizes modernity’s fragmentation and fracturing of the body into isolated and thus controllable sensory experiences.

In the first section of Painting, Photography, Film, Moholy-Nagy resolves that our eyes can no longer be a reliable source of perception.6 In an unabashedly technophilic tone, he declares the human body and especially the human eyes to be ill-suited for direct interaction with the quick pace and simultaneity of the modern world. These new conditions of perception demand that photography be used as a supplement to our own inadequate and atrophied visual facilities.

Photography reveals “existences, which are not perceptible or recordable with our optical instrument, the eye,” and that only “can be made visible with the help of photography.”7 Better equipped to process the visual stimuli of the modern world than the human eye, photography “can complete our optical apparatus.”

Moholy-Nagy argues that not only is photography able to show us things never before seen, but it also represents a mode of perception that is separate from our habitual desire to decipher what we see through association and memory. Because photography stands in opposition to conventional vision, showing us that which is unfamiliar to our eyes, it offers a chance for perception in its purest and most immediate form, freed completely from associations with the past.

His insistence on purity has more to do with photography’s isolation from our instinct to assimilate what we perceive through memory than with the dissociation of vision from other bodily senses. As we will see, Painting, Photography, Film’s photographic material incites an interaction of the senses—sight, sound, and touch in particular—and thereby stages a form of perception based on instinctual response rather than habit and experience.

The sources of Painting, Photography, Film’s photographs are typed in a chart on the book’s last pages, and the sprawling list records an over- whelming variety of subjects: photograms, X-rays, microscopic views of plants, close-ups of animals and machinery, photographs of stars and lightning, a bird’s eye view of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a worm’s eye view of a factory tower, photomontages, split-second exposures and time-delayed images. The sequence presents views and suggests connections to which Moholy-Nagy’s audience in the 1920s was unaccustomed, a Weltanschauung determined by the productive possi- bilities of photography and not yet assimilable through association or memory.

He comments earlier in the book, in regard to photography’s enhancement of the eye, that “some scientific studies, the study of movement (stride, leap, gallop) and the magnification of zoological, botanical and mineral forms, and other scientific research” have made use of photography’s expansion of visual capabilities.23 By including images of scientific study, Moholy-Nagy associates his theory of photographic perception with scientific objectivity and technological advancement.

Performing an early form of multi- tasking, Stone shows how the filing cabinet was far from a means of calm control over the important documents of the modern professional. Rather, it contributed to the “absolute triumph of technology over space and time,” which allows for the accomplishment of several tasks concurrently.58 The filing cabinet also implies a form of attention associated with the modern office worker that is born from a state of distraction. Reading information in a filing cabinet involves visually locating symbols or letters that will guide the viewer to the location of desired information. It is also a practice quite similar to Moholy-Nagy’s description of his search for “good” photographs within the overwhelming quantity of images in the illustrated press— and the intensified form of this practice created by Painting, Photography, Film. These practices entail the fragmentation of the visual field and require the viewing subject to actively sort information into the categories of what is sought and what can be left to the overwhelming field of stimuli. Thus the modern visualization of reading demands the active synthesis of information within a space of potential overstimulation.

Weeding through the information in the file cabinet requires fingers to do the seeing, separating and pointing out the information sought once it is found. At the same time, Stone has the telephone pressed to his ear. Circles radiate like sound waves outward from the phone’s base sitting on the nearby desk. Each wave is accompanied by lines of text shaped to its circular form, making visible what is being said through this otherwise invisible medium. The text transcribes notes about various appointments and conferences: “7:45 telephone with Klara,” “5:45 visit with lawyer.” The fragmentation of information into shortened forms of text allows for the more efficient and productive accomplishment of everyday tasks. Stone stages a competition between various forms of attention but appears to be able to attend to all senses—sound, vision, and touch—with equal care.

Moholy-Nagy describes a form of collection and storage that, like Stone’s filing cabinet, means to organize an abundance of visual information:Such [mechanically produced] images will naturally not be kept as they are today like lifeless room decorations, but rather in compartments on shelves or “domestic picture galleries” [Haus-Pinakothek] and brought out only when they are really needed. . . . Just as today we store the film spools for private cinematographs in a cupboard in the home.59

Day 150: Recurring Concepts in Art

Week 3

Reading:
TAKE YOUR TIME: A CONVERSATION
Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin

Image from Olafur Elisson : Take Your Time exhibition, MoMA, 2008
Source: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/31?locale=en#installation-images

Olafur Elisson : Take Your Time exhibition, MoMA, 2008
Source: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/31?locale=en#installation-images

Robert Irwin installation view

Source

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.

---

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

View fullsize

<< 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. >>

Source

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.

Source