Emersion at the CAA Conference, part 2

As I mentioned earlier, Nishiki Tayui and my Emersion sculpture is being show at the College Art Association conference in LA. Many, many thanks to xtine for curating the Analog Interactivity show and handling all the installation details!

xtine's flickr feed features some photos from the show. This photo in particular evokes a gun shot wound--an aspect of the work that hadn't occurred to me before:

Doodle: I Sing the Body Electronic

I was thinking about yesterday's posting and am still mulling over doing something with automated translation. My instinct that it isn't right for a Firefox add-on remains, but perhaps doing something a little more shaped.

I was thinking of doing a chapbook of Leaves of Grass in auto-translation. Here's the beginning of "I Sing the Body Electric" as Walt Whitman wrote it:

I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

And here it is translated into Greek, then Korean, and then back into English:

I sing the body electric;
Who loved me and that their army engirth engirth;
I could smash them, they do not want to see
And, end with discorrupt and is responsible for the soul.

That's hide the bodies of suspected corruption;
Mutilate the dead and the people who live with a bad case, What is it to clean?
In some cases, the body and the soul does not?
If you do not have the soul and the body, soul What is it?

I think this doesn't work. The problem is that what I like about the auto-translation is the sense of poetry that emerges... Using poetry as the starting point undermines the emergence of poetic language. I'm going to keep working on this idea.

It's Greek to me

Quietdrumming, a Greek blog, has a post about Ben Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba project. Here's the post (in Greek) and here it is translated by Google into English:

Tumbarumba
for various reasons I had 2 years to sit and apovlakotho internet. The relationship I had with that was totally unfair. internet cafe and ruthless downloading. These days in my free time is abundant, I remembered again the magic of sitting in front of a screen and to constantly discover new things. The truth is that most are useless information that simply and jade fill the mind, but there are the others, well, what you live for and to employ long.

the reason for all this, is that just appeared on my screen and as a tumbarumba targeted by the author was indeed the unexpected and interesting sourealistiko.to tumbarumba is the project of Ethan Ham and Benjamin Rosenbaum, visual artist and writer respectively. Game begins by placing a simple extension to Firefox, the extension is not hurry, wait and suddenly will burn As we read in some light-hearted taflandeziki prescription or a review for the new album of Ash Pool. In practice, "tumbarumbas" is the gradual introduction of a pre-history in a literary text to read in your browser. just one day you will realize that what we read does not make any sense and then here you will see changes the cursor and clicking there, you will see that gradually added text that is related to the incomprehensible to be read. few clicks later, and after you receive a majority of the text will go to the homepage and in which we find throughout the history synodefomeni with images from Flickr, the selected random keywords SOME of the keimenou.kalo etsi;

to know that the author mostly target the momentum, to the surprise, so do not be afraid that afflicted in this application.

digital art, the Web 2.0; or perhaps both?

There's something really enjoyable about teasing out meaning from auto-translated text... it's kinda of like reading poetry. I've more than once translated text from English through a bunch of languages and back into English just so I can read the result. I've been thinking about making a Firefox add-on that would do that for web pages, but suspect the experience's charm would quickly fade.

Steve Lambert: YouTube Commentary

Steve Lambert's Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 - YouTube Comments overlays a performance of the symphony with the YouTube commentary as ready aloud by actors.


Steve says:

As much as I like it, more than any other site the commenters on YouTube can be surprisingly, well, horrible. In my research I found this was true even on videos of the highest-of-high culture. Operas and symphonies had the same hostile, petty, and juvenile comments as nearly any other video on the site.

The commentary track I made for this video is literally the commentary from the original Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 video, read aloud by actors.

Created for the Artists' Space WebCast for January 2009. Thanks to Joseph Del Pesco, Scott Vermeire, Cynthia Yardley, Jeff Crouse, and Christina Kral.

See other videos in the YouTube Commentary Project

[via Art Fag City]

Pe Lang + Zimoun's "untitled sound objects"

Pe Lang + Zimoun are a Swiss art-making duo whose works usually involve many small motors that make sound and motion.

I particularly like their "swarm of prepared vibration motors" from 2008:

See a better quality video of the work

Pe Lang + Zimoun currently have work in a show with Tim Knowles at Bitforms. Read more about that show on Rhizome.

Doodle 2: Infinite Subway

I did this doodle as a way to learn SketchUp (Google's 3D modeling tool).

Wikipedia Art

Wikipedia Art is a project in self-realization. The idea is for folks to collaboratively work on a Wikipedia webpage about the project... According to Wikipedia's standards, an encyclopedia entry must be notable and backed by third party sources. And, based on that, the first version of the Wikipedia Art wikipedia page has been deleted.

But for Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, who conceived of this project, that's just a start. If a big enough stink is made (if enough people blog, write about the project, and continue to add it to Wikipedia), doesn't it become notable enough to merit a Wikipedia entry?

On the Wikipedia Art project page Kildall & Stern wrote:

Wikipedia Art is art composed on Wikipedia, and thus art that anyone can edit. Since the work itself manifests as a conventional Wikipedia page, would-be art editors are required to follow Wikipedia's enforced standards of quality and verifiability; any changes to the art must be published on, and cited from, 'credible' external sources: interviews, blogs, or articles in 'trustworthy' media institutions, which birth and then slowly transform what the work is and does and means simply through their writing and talking about it. Wikipedia Art may start as an intervention, turn into an object, die and be resurrected, etc, through a creative pattern / feedback loop of publish-cite-transform that we call "performative citations." Wikipedia Art MUST BE written about extensively both on- and off-line. This serves the dual purpose of verifying the work - which is considered controversial by those in the Wikipedia community, and occasionally removed from the site - as well as transforming it over time. WE INVITE YOU TO DO SO!

In a Rhizome discussion of the project, MTAA noted:

But I can sympathize with the Wikipedians. If these Wikipedia art interventions became a popular game it would become vandalism (the resources to clean them up would become burdensome to the volunteers). But just this one is fun.

[via Networked Performance]

Doodle 1: Dots

Most of my artworks are long-drawn out affairs that I spend months making. So I'm introducing a series of doodles; sketches that take a few moments (or days or weeks) to do. This first one is found art. It's an image file from an online Risk-like game that I'm playing:


Here are the dots in context:

Thomas Thwaites: The Toaster Project

The Toaster Project

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I'm just going to come out with it: I've fallen in love with Thomas Thwaites's The Toaster Project. The project is his ongoing quest to built a toaster from scratch... and by scratch I mean actually gathering iron ore and smelting it, collecting oil and processing it into plastic, etc.


It's an absolutely brilliant and humorous way to explore our dependence on cheap, easily available goods. The extremes that Thwaites has gone through (and will go through) brings to light the industry behind the small luxuries that we take for granted.

I used to make home brew beer and it occasionally occurred to me that there was a slippery DYI slope... I started out using canned malt extract and moved on to using and milling purchased grain. It occurred to me that the next step was raising my own grain & hops, which was enough for me to give the enterprise up.

Thwaites, however, has gone down that rabbit hole. It will be very interesting to see what he surfaces with.

collecting the ore at a mine

attempting to smelt iron using hair dryers

attempting to smelt iron using a leaf blower

successfully smelting iron using a microwave & china

[via wmmna]

Emersion at the CAA Conference

Today I'm shipping off a sculpture that will be shown at the College Art Association conference later this month:That's not packing material, that's the sculpture! The cube of biodegradable packing peanuts is a scaled-down version (20"x20"x20") of Nishiki Tayui's and my interactive Emersion sculpture.

Now that (above) is packing material... the boxed sculpture is packed in a larger box and cushioned using the leftover packing pellets.

When I was bringing the 10 cubic feet of foam pellets home from the store, a small boy on the subway yelled excitedly, "Marshmallows!" Sorry, they're not sweet... but when making the sculpture (by wetting the starch-based pellets so that they'll stick together), they do give off a delicious smell that is not unlike cheese puffs. And actually, I've tried eating a few and they're not bad.

The sculpture is being included in Analog Interactivity, an exhibition that's being shown in conjunction with The New Media Caucus's exhibition at the CAA conference. Analog Interactivity is curated by the media artist xtine and the works in it will also be featured in an upcoming issue of Visual Communication Quarterly.

Edward Winkleman's gallery advice

Edward Winkleman (who owns the Winkleman Gallery) is a must read for anyone interested in the business of contemporary art.

Ed's extremely generous in taking the time to help shed light on how galleries work (and how gallerists think). Recently he made a table of contents for posts aimed at giving advice to artists seeking gallery representation. Read it here.

Betancourt's "Technesthesia and Synaesthesia"

Michael Betancourt has an essay on Vague Terrain in which he puts proposes an idea of technical synaesthesia and illustrates his idea with Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Anthroptic project:

There is an analogous relationship between technological translations of data from one type to another with synaesthetic responses: the transcoding of electromagnetic telemetry by Dr. Donald Gurnett is one a striking and direct example of this type of sonification of non-sound data; however, it is also, in many ways, a non-significant transfer: the data in question are readings of wave-form encounters. The electromagnetic information produced from the Cassini mission, among others, has a long-recognized analogous relationship to sound, so the transfer from light waves to sound waves should come as no surprise—each is a physical phenomenon whose transfer is less dramatic than the cross-modal sensory transfers familiar from synaesthesia.

Read the rest of the essay...

Stephanie Syjuco's "Towards a New Theory of Color Reading"

All the pages (16 total) of the mockup using the "Philippine Guardian" edition

color breakdown:

yellow=text
black=newspaper info,
cyan=photos,
red=advertisements.

From Syjuco's website:

Four-color newspapers printed in edition of 2000 each. Part of the solo exhibition "Stephanie Syjuco: Total Fabrications" at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Dec 12, 2008 - Feb. 22, 2009. Curated by Meredith Goldsmith.

El Dia (Spanish-Language), the Houston Forward Times (African-American), and the Manila Headline (Filipino-American). By abstracting the content of each publication, a new visual fomat was created for viewers to attempt to "read." Three bulletin boards served as a way to display all the pages at once.

[via Ceci Moss on Rhizome]

Seeing Shapes

Christoph Niemann's Abstract City blog on the New York Times's website has a wonderful visual essay about New York City (done in Legos). Here are a couple of the photos:



Go to Abstract City to see the rest.

Average Photos Study

This comes via John Michael Boling on Rhizome. The video was posted on Vimeo by a user named KitschPatrol who wrote:

every day, flickr deems 500 photographs from its database "interesting."

(flickr.com/explore/interesting/)

each frame of this video represents the average of one day's 500 interesting photographs.

in series, the video frames document each day's average interestingness between July 1, 2004 and July 1, 2007.

this video is a study for a larger-scale, interactive representation of similar data.

I believe the artist is Eric Mika, whose KitschPatrol website is a bit overdue to launch (the webpage says to check back on January 17th).

It'll be interesting to find out what the larger-scale project is... I like the concept & effect, but am feeling there might be a better source--something with more evocation--than Flickr's daily interesting photos.