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Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i'm going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona's International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What's left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition. Sonar's participants' fashion sense was tamer than i expected this year. Hop! Hop! Let's move on to the festival's advertising campaign which have, so far, shown an unconstrained taste for shocking, surprising and amazing. Taxidermied animals, Smiley, people with pee stains on their pants, creatures of worrying genetic heritage, notorious fraudsters and even Maradona have starred in Sonar's posters and promotional videos. Have a look at the photo set of Sonar's most provocative ad campaigns and at the video that the festival created back in 2001. That year, broadcasters refused to air the original video but didn't object to this ridiculously censored version.
This time, the Sónar image is on the safe side but it is nevertheless striking. The heroes of the posters and video are cute majorettes from the world of dreams, who have lost their bearings in the land of the living as a result of calls from a fiendish telephone booth. Follow their 14 minute long adventures: SonarMàtica is actually what usually brings me to Sonar. The title of the exhibition this year was Mecànics. It aimed to give a platform to some of the driving forces behind nowadays' artistic and mostly DIY creation: mostly centres of production based in Barcelona (with notable exceptions such as MediaLab Prado in Madrid) which were given the opportunity to showcase ongoing projects and postgraduate projects but also to organize workshops, tours and open rehearsals. Mecànics is the third and final exhibition in the SonarMàtica XIXth Century trilogy, a research project drawing comparisons between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. Unlike the two previous exhibitions, Et Voilà!, which highlighted the relationship between magic and technology, and Future Past Cinema, which looked at the recovery of pre-film formats in contemporary, Mecànics had a fairly diluted identity/ The reason for that lays probably in the fact that the exhibition was showcasing the best of what Barcelona makes in art production center rather than exploring with brilliance and cohesion a defined theme. The result is rolllercoaster that leads you from gems to strikingly weak pieces.
I caught myself thinking i shouldn't have bothered. This edition of SonarMàtica had decided to write off SonarCinema, Digital à La Carte and also the artists talks and debates i had enjoyed so much last time i was there (unless, damn! i've missed it). A few projects i've (re)discovered in the exhibition made it worth the trip though: The Sounds of Science (los sonidos de la ciencia), developed by Jay Barros during MediaLab Prado's Interactivos?'09: Garage Science workshop, uses off the shelf and mostly recycled equipment to create audio visual remixes of sounds and images captured from the urban micro-environment, to "lay-down" some beats and frequencies that serves as a musical score for a visual display of what exists beyond the realm of our everyday vision. At the heart of the project is a home-made microscope designed with a CCD sensor from a camera and the lens from a CD player. Image processing programs analyze various samples from protozoa gathered in urban environments and turn them into algorithms which provide the basis for visual and sound composition.
L'Orquestra dels Luthiers Drapaires (the Luthiers Drapaires Orchestra) is made of spectacular robotic instruments that have been created out of technological waste found on rubbish dumps and in the street. Telenoika has decorticated the waste and enhanced it with a little help from circuit prototyping and acoustic research. "Luthiers Drapaires" is proof that the waste we generate provides enough raw material to build sophisticated devices. Besides, the growing amount of tools and information available online provide everyone with the possibility to access the knowledge needed to turn rubbish into artworks.
For Sónar, the orchestra was composed of a percussion set made of electromagnetic pistons; a theremin made from two radios; an adapted television which works as an oscilloscope; a guitar made of string, a crate of wine and the engines from a hair removal machine; and a set of automated tubular bells.
Yuri Suzuki brought some much-needed poetry to the exhibition. He displayed some of his charming Physical Value of Sound pieces but also a 2004 piece called Jelly Fish Theremin. The movement of a fish in a horizontal bowl controls the sound, air- conditioning, the visual image and lighting. Small gold fish were swimming inside the instrument at Sonar but the original work used a jellyfish: I used jellyfish as the control center, since jellyfish are made up of 98% water, and I thought that the will of the water would be reflected in the movement of the jellyfish, if only a little. If we were able to create a space controlled by jellyfish, wouldn't it be the ultimate place of relaxation? And if you understand japanese...
Image on the homepage courtesy Yuri Suzuki. |
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In case you forgot that something like 5 months ago i posted the first part of this story, here's a link to it: A visit to UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts, part 1. The department is located inside the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center on the UCLA campus, right next to T.E.U.C.L.A., Richard Serra's 42.5-ton ellipse sculpture. And that's where you should go next week. On May 14, D|MA graduate students are showing some of their work at the MFA Exhibition. I wrote about the projects of David Elliott, Michael Kontopoulos, Nova Jiang, and Justin Lui last time. Here's a few words about two of the other students i met while i was in Los Angeles:
Gil Kuno is doing mostly, but not only, sound-based projects. He recently collaborated with GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters) to develop an application and performance that amplify and treat the sound of an aerosol can to create a live soundscape. The image of the can discharging is projected behind the performers to deliver the audiovisual articulations of erosion and entropy. The performance ends when the can is empty. A year ago, the artist exhibited the most frightening musical instrument i've ever seen: Christo Allegra's work intersects information design, dynamic media and performance. Among the works he showed me, the one i like the best is Phi Two, a series that uses an algorithm to construct a form based on phyllotaxis, the arrangement of the leaves on the stem of a plant. Phyllotaxis was described mathematically as morphogenesis by Alan Turing as part of his final work. Morphogenesis attempts to account for biological pattern formation as documented by phyllotaxis.
In the Phi Two series, the application was rewritten for tracing the nodes of the phyllotaxis as they were generated. For each drawing, 200+ nodes/lines were traced in silver ink on black paper, and 100 drawings were generated. All of the resulting drawings were given away at their showing in return for an explanation from attendees as to why they had chosen the particular drawing. Marks generated in the drawing process were then fed back into the system for redraw. |
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There's a remarkable exhibition running for just a couple more days at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. I wish i could find the time to write a more comprehensive post about it. Instead, i'll just mention the piece i found most interesting:
For Search, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle transformed a monumental bullfight ring in Tijuana into a radio telescope complete with an antenna and a large reflector dish that would search for signs of aliens from outer space. The signals picked up by the telescope created a "white noise" that the artist broadcast to the Tijuana region on pirate FM radio. Realized some 100 feet away from the U.S. border, Search comments also on the constant search along the border for 'aliens' of a more terrestrial kind. Rhizome has a nice write-up of the exhibition. |
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Just a quick video that will hopefully inspire you merry ways to end 2008: Daniel Eatock spent two months in 2007 living and working in Vilnius (Lithuania). He noticed that car alarms were constantly interrupting the peace. The alarms were so sensitive that even a whisper would set them off. One day, out of sheer frustration, Eatock left his desk, found the car whose alarm had been interrupting his peace every five minutes, and waited patiently for the siren to switch on. When the siren sounded, he started dancing like a madman. He made videos of several of his car alarm dances, never touching the car, only dancing to the sound pollutants. Seen at Nowhere, Now / Here, an exhibition that revisits the definition and perception of design. Nowhere/Now/Here runs until Mon, April 20 , 2009 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon, Spain. |
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Alan Dunning, Morley Hollenberg and Paul Woodrow are working since 1996 on the Einstein's Brain, a project that explores how the brain can act as an interface between bodies and worlds in flux, that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through neurological processes. In collaboration with scientists, artists and technologists from around the world the team is investigating ideas about consciousness and embodiment through the realization of virtual environments and the construction of surrogate bodies.
The Canadian collective has a very uncanny and captivating installation on view until mid-January at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. in Gijón (Spain.) Ghosts in the Machine, uses the ideas inherent in Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) to examine ways in which we construct the world and extends it to the visual. EVP is the recording of errant noises or voices that have no explainable or physical source of origin. For some, the voices are subjective interpretations (similar to some form of anthropomorphisation) of what are actually random patterns of sound. For others, the voices are genuinely mysterious, opening up for example the possibility to communicate with other realms.
The installation Ghosts in the Machine looks simple: two large images are projected onto the walls of a room. One projection shows video static overlaid with text and the outlines of bounding boxes, the other shows b&w images of what appear to be blurry and ghost-like images of human faces. Ambient noise fills the space. Just at the threshold of recognition can be heard what appear to be human speech in different languages. A box, encloses tightly a CCD camera, only letting through the video noise inherent in the system. Audio patterns are scanned by a voice recognition system that looks for words and sentences which are then projected as words and played as voice-like sounds in the exhibition room. Face tracking algorithms look for any combination of pixels that form the basic characteristics of a human face. When the software finds a combination of pixels akin to eyes, nose and mouth with a sufficient degree of symmetry, it draws a bounding box defining the area and zooms the area to full screen, its contrast and brightness is adjusted, blurred and desaturated to clarify the found images. More often than not the images produced fail to resolve themselves into anything recognizable. But occasionally, images are produced that are strikingly like a face although in actuality containing only the barest possibility of being so. As the authors of the project explain: It is the very ambiguity and intedeterminacy of the images that allows the brain to reconfigure them as indexical. This work is one of several that examine systems of meaning making that rely on pattern recognition, and the problematized relationship between meaning and the meaningful.
The project examines how we construct worlds, and bodies in worlds, through pareidolia, (when a vague and random stimulus is perceived as significant), apophenia (the seeing of connections where there are none) and the gestalt effect (the recognition of pattern and form). All images courtesy LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. Ghosts in the Machine, produced by LABoral's Projects Office, is on view at LABoral, in Gijón (Spain) through January 12 , 2009. More ghosts this way ladies and gentlemen: Man Machine 2, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Haunted pixels, (don't) Show me the Chip, Ghost by Olaf Breuning, and a vacuum cleaner to capture goblins. |
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Aristote believed that laughter is what separates us from the beasts. Today, scientists argue that non-human species, such as primates and even rats, do giggle, guffaw and burst into laugher. So if animals laugh, how about technological devices, the species we like to surround ourselves with? That's what an Interactivos? two week workshop held last August at the Centro Multimedia - Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico D.F tried to understand.
The event, lead by Zachary Lieberman, Leslie García and Alejandro Tamayo asked participants to come up with ideas and prototypes that engage with a series of questions: What mechanisms lead to laughter? What are the social and political implications? What happens if we understand laughter as a possible form of communication between humans and machines? Can machines have a sense of humour? How can machines make us laugh? What is a machine or software programme's cultural milieu? How can a machine handle the unexpected? What kind of narratives/machines can be built to provoke various feelings related to laughter?
The 8 projects developed over the workshop use hardware and software tools to create prototypes that explore the relations between machines and humour/laughter.
Participants developed computers that tell each other silly jokes once you've turned your back, images that follow you as you walk, an absurdity tracker, a robot that replies to users with media sampled memories, a machine that likes to be tickled, etc. I asked Alejandro Tamayo to give us a few details about the workshop: One of the questions that the Interactivos? workshop wanted to explore in Mexico was ' Can machines have a sense of humour?' Did you find any answer to that demand? I don't think we found an answer for that, instead we came up with more questions and ideas for future projects to explore. For me it seems possible to create machines that understand human sense of humor, as humor follows certain rules it can be abstracted and implemented into some complex algorithms that machines can follow, but creating machines with their own sense of humor is another thing. If we design a machine with a sense of humor it seemed unavoidable that we will inject our humanity into it because it is the only reference about humor we have in hand. On the other hand, humor and true laughter bring lots of benefits in terms of health to us, i wonder how this can also be applied to machines. But any way, if we were to create machine humor, will we understand it? How would we define it as humorous?
In concrete the projects of Jenny Chowdhury (Catty CPU Cliques), Carla Capeto (Sensitive Water) and Leonor Torres (J.A.-J.A. Jockey Action-Jolly Answer) raised questions related to non-human approaches to humor and laughter.
For Jenny, the idea of machine humor was directly addressed because her office computers were to make fun of their users when they were left alone. At the end Jenny came up with funny jokes, for and about humans, being told by computers. The case of Carla was different, she proposed an aquarium that would laugh when being touched, so we were all confronted with the question of how water would laugh. There were many approaches to it and many of us suggested different options ranging from timid laughter to hysterical. As a matter of fact, we are starting to discover that we are not the only exclusive animals that laugh, apparently rats do it as well when they are tickled. Finally, the project of Leonor Torres investigated the idea of a strange piece of metal that responded to tickles. Leonor recorded her own voices and reactions to tickles, so when people touched a rusty piece of metal extracted from a de-mantled car they got the strange reaction of a female giggle.
Leo's project can also drive us to think about the opposite: can we be tickled by a piece of metal? In fact during the planning of Interactivos? we found some early experiments conducted by psychologists in this area: some kind of tickling machine was developed back in 1997, it worked more or less like The Turk: there was a hidden person in a room in charge of doing tickles to other psychology students with his arm and also with a robotic arm. Apparently "the machine" was as effective as a human tickler because the patients couldn't differentiate the robotic arm from that of a human (some kind of a Turing test but for ticklishness!) but there are still some doubts about the way the experiments were conducted because after all there was a human behind.
I followed the workshop from afar by looking at the flickr images of a few friends who happened to participate to the workshop. It seems that there's quite a high dose of sense of humour in Mexico. Can you tell us something about it? Oh i don't know, i think all starts with the metro safety guards. Images of the workshop on the Medialab set and on the ones made by Alejandro and Jenny. |
