Stalacpipe organ

The Stalacpipe is a percussive "organ" at Luray Caverns. It plays its notes by striking stalactites. David Byrne's Playing the Building (see my earlier post) is a similar (though atonal & non-chromatic) idea.


[via Make]

Camera/Chimera

I busily pulling together Camera/Chimera, a show I am curating for the Gallery Aferro in Newark, New Jersey.

Camera/Chimera runs September 12 - October, with the opening reception on September 12th, 7-10pm.

Concurrent at Gallery Aferro will be Sound in Space curated by Adam di Angelo and Babble: Recent Works by Sara Wolfe.

Blog vacation

I'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks... Blogging will be sporadic at best.

Popcorn & robots

Here's an excerpt from a chapter I contributed to a book called Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics. I've posted before about Nina Katchadourian's Talking Popcorn.

Nina Katchadourian's Talking Popcorn (2001) translates the sounds of popcorn popping into a glossolalic babble. The sculpture consists of a microphone housed in a movie house popcorn machine. A hidden computer interprets the popping as Morse code and provides simultaneous spoken translation through a computer-generated voice. Talking Popcorn determines the Morse code by measuring the silences between popcorn pops in very much the same manner that radioactive-based hardware random number generators compare the durations between Geiger counter clicks.

Talking Popcorn equates the longer silences as Morse code dashes and shorter silences as dots. These silences are measured relative to the running average speed of the popping so that as it speeds up, the pops don’t become interpreted as an indistinguishable series of Morse code dots. The adjustment of popping speed smoothes out the particular, bell-curved popping cadence of a batch of popcorn and normalizes it into raw randomness. Talking Popcorn removes the real-world characteristic of popcorn building to a crescendo and then dropping off to the last few reluctant pops.

Where some artworks, such as Hawkinson's Emoter, might be editorially classified as random (because the cause and effects are opaque to the viewer) even though it is actually based on chance events, Talking Popcorn is truly random though and through. There is no carryover of meaningful information because the triggering data's patterns have been smoothed out in much the same manner as LavaRnd does with its thermal noise events and the Rand Corporation did with its “frequency pulse” data [in A Million Random Digits].

Talking Popcorn's generation of information is reminiscent of a story that [N. Katherine] Hayles describes in her the introduction to Chaos Bound. The story¹, which comes from Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, can be seen as a parable illustrating the relationship between chaos and information. In the tale, two constructors² are captured by a space pirate who pillages and hoards information. To gain their freedom, the constructors build a "Demon of the Second Kind"³ for the pirate. The demon is designed to interpret the movement of stale air molecules as information. Whenever the motion of the molecules adds up to something intelligible, the Demon transcribes it onto paper tape using a tiny diamond-tipped pen. The pirate underestimates the amount of information contained within the chaotic motion, and he is soon buried in a mountain of paper filled with useless information: all the words that rhyme with spinach, why fan-tailed fleas won’t eat moss, the sizes of bedroom slippers available on the continent of Cob, how Kipling would have written the beginning of The Jungle Book 2, et cetera.

The idea that we can be paralyzed by an overabundance of information seems even more relevant today (with the constant influx of information from the Internet, text messaging, emails, cel phones, and MP3 players) than when Lem wrote the story in 1967 or when Hayles discussed it in 1990 (a few years before the arrival of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser).
Unlike Lem's Demon of the Second Kind, Katchadourian's Talking Popcorn does not filter out the babble. In this regard, it is more like Borges's "The Library of Babel" which describes a universe composed of hexagonal, book-lined rooms. The narrator of the story posits that each book is unique and that every possible combination of text exists. Since every possible book exists, the Library must contain the ultimate truth. There would also be many slight variations on the truth , and even more books filled with lies, and even more variations of those lies. But overwhelmingly the Library contains books of gibberish.

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[1] The short story has the burdensome title of "The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg."

[2] Constructors are magician-like sentient robots who can construct a contraptions (often artificially intelligent) for almost any purpose. The Cyberiad has the universe alternating between being populated by biological and robotic beings--each of whom eventually succumbs to tackling the challenge of creating the other (only to be overthrown by their creation).

[3] The first kind of demon is Maxwell's Demon, a creature described in a thought experiment that challenges the Second Law of Thermodynamics (also known as the Law of Entropy).

Cassandra C. Jones

Cassandra C. Jones, Lightning Drawing 1, 2009

I'm loving Cassandra C. Jones's artwork. The internet is spurring a lot of artists (myself included) to create works that draw on its vast repository of images. Jones's work, however, really stands out. I particularly like her Eventide (2004) which is a sunset patched together from 1,391 found photos.

I'd like the work even if it was built of out images pulled from a "sunset" search on Flickr.com... but it's even nicer that the images were collected from "friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers, image banks, photo exchanges, thrift stores, libraries, private collections, want adds, eBay and the public domain archives of the US Army, NOAA and NASA."

The YouTube video comes from an interview with BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin and is synced to jump to the Eventide excerpt.







[via BoingBoing]