Mars in Crayons

Back from my honeymoon! Starting today I'll be blogging at my normal pace (e.g., about 3 posts per week). Here's an interesting story that I originally came across on Boing Boing Gadgets posting... but the real details were provided by a comment by Dan Goods in response to the BBG post.

Dan Goods wrote:

Howdy... I co-curated the "Data + Art" show that this was in and interviewed Richard Grumm who is the one who made the image (his initials "RLG" can be seen in the lower right hand corner). The original JPL description is a little outdated...The story is that mangers for the mission were unsure if the tape recorder on Mariner 4 was working correctly.

After the flyby of the planet it would take several hours for the computers to process a real image. There had been some anomalous errors pointing towards the tape recorder so everyone was a little freaked out that they were not going to get any images. So Mr. Grumm, who oversaw the tape recorder, and his crew decided to prove one way or the other. The engineers thought of different ways of taking the 1’s and 0's from the actual data to create an image and decided that printing out the digits and coloring over them was the most efficient.

So Mr. Grumm went to a local art store and was looking for a set of chalk in different grays. The art store replied that they "did not sell chalk" (as that was too low for them, only convenience stores sold "chalk"), but they did have colored pastels. Richard did not want to spend a lot of time arguing with them, so he just picked them up, printed out the 1's and 0's and his team colored them by their brightness level. Though he used a brown/red color scheme the thought that mars was red did not enter his mind. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anway. It is uncanny how close to the actual colors of mars he was as they look like they came right out of current images of the planet. I've seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!

Continue reading on Dan Goods's blog.

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]

Credits Neverending

Li Xin and Eirik Fatland's Credit Neverending (2006) is a television show that has been repeatedly broadcast on Finish televsion. From Fatland's site:

You turn on the TV set. What appears is a list of credits, indicating that some movie or show has just ended. But as you wait, the credits keep on scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling... If you read them, you notice that some of the names and titles make little sense. And if you read them carefully, you eventually find the URL of a website, where you may add your own credits to the list.

Having been an undergrad film production student, I've seen many student films where the credits were longer than the film with the auteurs crediting themselves in every possible way using lingering text.

So this project had me at neverending credits. Perhaps I'm jaded, but the interactive aspect of it doesn't really do anything for me. I'd actually prefer it if it created it own truly never ending credits by seeking out peoples' names from the internet.

By the way, Eirik has an interesting formatted, data visualization-esque CV... though I'm not 100% sure what light green is intended to represent (perhaps it simply that the work experience is in alternating shades of green? blue, I gather, is education). A legend might be a good addition.

[via John Michael Boling on Make]

Grande Reportagem's "Meet the World"

Grande Reportagem is a Portuguese news magazine known for its photo-journalism and investigative reporting. Since January 2005 it has been running a series (developed for them by the ad agency FCB Publicidad) called "Meet the World" where national flags are used to graph a social/political issue specific to the particular country.

China

Somalia

Icaro Doria, a member of the concept team, said:

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

(quote via BrazilianArtists.net)

Brazil

I do wonder a bit if all the above details are correct... a cursory google search on "grande reportagem" didn't turn up the magazine's website, just blog postings about the flag project. Likewise, I saw references to FCB Publicidad, but didn't find their site (again, I didn't look too thoroughly). I did a check on snopes (the urban legend debunking site), but nothing came up.






Related: Yukinori Yanagi's flags

All the news

Martin John Callanan's I Wanted to See All of the News From Today displays the front pages of hundreds of newspapers.

I find the title interesting... "See" is the right verb, not "Read." Very little of the text is legible--either the type is too small or the language is unknown.

I initially found the project interesting, but was a bit frustrated that I couldn't click on a front page and get a closer look at it. Wondering if this was an artistic choice or a technical limitation I took a closer look to see where Callanan gathers his images from, which led to Press Display.

For a reader, Press Display's interface is much more useful than Callanan's collaging of it. On Press Display the reader can look up particular newspapers, blow up the page so that it is readable, sort on language, country, search on a particular word or phrase, etc.

Perhaps the "I" pronoun in the title is significant. Is the project a whimsical thing thrown together to satisfy Callanan's visual curiosity? Or is there an intention beyond that; something that he wants to provide us viewers? Maybe just the awareness of news coverage beyond the few outlets we choose to use? Perhaps forcing us into being viewers, not readers?

John Luther Adams's "The Place Where You Go to Listen"

Alex Roth has an article in the most recent New Yorker about John Luther Adams's generative music installation. In a nutshell:

"The Place" translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

From Roth's description it seems like Adams did a very good job of data visualization (or rather, data auralization). The listener has a sense of what the music represents:

The first day I was there, "The Place" was subdued, though it cast a hypnotic spell. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain that the sun had come out, I left "The Place," and looked out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.

When I arrived the next day, just before noon, "The Place" was jumping. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, "The Place," if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Even more spectacular were the high sounds showering down from speakers on the ceiling.

"The Place" sounds like a very compelling work and a real accomplishment... however, Roth's article does seem a bit naive in regards to how the installation fits into the tradition of generative art. Roth writes:

["The Place"] is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. On the other hand, it is a deeply personal work, whose material reflects Adams's long-standing preoccupation with multiple systems of tuning, his fascination with slow-motion formal processes, his love of foggy masses of sound in which many events are unfolding at independent tempos.

Fair enough... but the same contradiction is inherent to almost every generative artwork. It's almost like waxing poetic over how a particular sculpture seems to be dealing with issues of form in space. Uh, yeah... that's what sculptures do.

I was also struck by this quote of Adams's:

"Actually, my original conception for 'The Place' was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea--tuning the whole world--stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth."

I spent part of last summer doing investigations with generative music and sound (and I hope this summer to bring this work to fruition). I discovered that it is fairly easy to create a process for making reasonably convincing (if not wholly compelling) music. What is much more difficult is having that artwork capable of generating a variety of distinct pieces.

I think Adams is being very upfront about how the installation is tuned to the Alaskan environmental variables in particular. If he had done a more generic tuning--one that would work in any given place--he probably wouldn't have been able to achieve his "unique sonic signature" idea. Each place would probably end up sounding very much like all the other locations.

Golan Levin, in an interview with Carlos Zanni, argued that interactive and generative art is about "creating an illusion of control: the sense that the 'artist' has relinquished authorship to the user, or to some clever algorithm. In fact, this is a myth."

What Levin is saying, I think, is that the artist/composer has complete control over how the triggering data is framed. Often the truly defining characteristics of generative artworks are the elements over which the artist maintains control rather than the aspects determined by the stochastic input. For example, Adams said he tuned the installation to that place in particular. He determined that earthquakes trigger the Earth Drums and he undoubtedly adjusted it so that the average level of tremors generally sounds good. This is very much like when I saw guitarist Elvin Bishop at a blues festival--at one point in the set he had an audience member strum the guitar while Bishop continued to finger the chord changes. It was fun and a neat trick, but the strumming no more determined the direction of Bishop's song than the tremors determines Adam's.

These issues of illusion and control remind me of my childhood interest in stage magic. I used to learn tricks and read up on magicians until I eventually realized that stage magic would always be unsatisfying to me because I'm not interested in the illusion of magic, what I really wanted was real magic. I have similar feelings about generative art... I play around the edges of it, but I'm not interested in presenting the illusion of machine creativity.

It is a step in the direction for generative art to be based upon chance--that is based on something unpredictable yet representational such as the brightness of light, the amount of carbon dioxide in the room, etc. Ideally the originating chance occurrence can be sensed by the viewer (in the same way that Roth deduced the change in light based upon the shift in the music's mood). It's hard to say what level of illusion is in "The Place," but it does seem there is a reasonable transparency between the sounds and the real-world input that triggered them.

The Ebb and Flow of Movies

The New York Times has a cool interactive graph of movie revenues since 1983. It very noticeable that revenue spikes become choppier as time progresses--the hits become higher, more individually defined peaks. That's probably related to inflation (as the movies become more expensive, the revenue differences become more extreme), but perhaps it also reflects a growing addiction to a hit-driven model.


[via Leisure Guy]

Reading clouds: Vihreä Pilvi

A some of my readers interpreted an earlier post as a general condemnation of data visualization art. It wasn't intended as such... my point was that data visualization art as an artistic practice needs to step up its game. It isn't enough to simply make a pretty graphic--if the goal is art, then there needs to be an intention beyond effective data communication.


Vihreä Pilvi is an interesting data visualization/manifestation artwork. It's a Finnish temporary art project that ran from February 22-29, 2008. Each night the Salmisaari power plant's vapor cloud was illuminated with a laser. The less power being consumed by Helsinki, the larger the cloud illumination, which seems counter-intuitive. I guess the idea was to reward conservation with a bigger light show, and perhaps the green color of the laser's light is considered to signify green in the environmental sense (though green is also the stereotypical color of toxic sludge in movies, comic books, etc.).

I love how Vihreä Pilvi combines aesthetics, an environmental agenda, and ostranenie. I do wish that it had equated higher energy consumption with a larger cloud, but maybe that is nitpicking.

Note, the videos below have a playback problem for first few seconds, but it quickly clears up:





[via Pall Thayer's post on Rhizome]


Not that it has anything to do with Vihreä Pilvi, but I highly recommend David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: A Novel.

feelings

We Feel Fine is an interesting data visualizing project with a heart that comes by way of Harrell Fletcher.

From the We Feel Fine website:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Coffee, knitting, rice and data visualization

I hope I write a coherent post this morning... just now I almost spooned the cat's breakfast into my coffee pot. Oh well, I'm sure I'll wake up once I have a nice hot cup of Iams.

The photo above shows the News Knitter project by artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir M. Yavuz (it comes via Turbulence's Networked Performance blog). Kurbak & Yavuz write:

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period.

My sweetie is learning to knit, so I've been thinking about knitting based art recently (I missed it, but about a year ago the Museum of Art & Design had a Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting show). When I read about the News Knitter I wanted to find the work compelling, but honestly I don't. I think it runs into some common problems in technology-based art:

Data visualization. This is one of the more common approaches for making Internet art. The Internet gives access to tons of information and it makes sense that artworks using the medium want to investigate its particularities. However, since this well has been dipped into so many times, one needs to think twice before having data visualization be the center of an artwork. At the very least, the result should have some point beyond "jeez, isn't this a neat looking graphic?"

Novelty art. I'm still trying to come up with the most pithy description of this problem. Novelty art is the best one I've come up with, but I had been thinking about demo-art as well. Essentially this is art which is most compelling in how it shows off a cool new technology. The way I put this in my "Teaching Philosophy" essay is:

Working with technology, particularly new technology, has the danger of resulting in art that is more focused on demonstrating the potential of the medium than on transcending it.

I worry about this alot in my own art because I think it's an easy trap to fall into. But the result is empty calories... you get a confection which might taste sweet for a moment, but ultimately isn't satisfying. Plus, once that technology is more wide-spread, the novelty-artwork loses all appeal. It's great to explore new technology, but the resulting artwork needs to be able to stand on its own... the fact that computerized knitting machines are nifty isn't really good enough.

Another data visualization/manifestation project is the eRiceCooker. Here's what it does:

eRiceCooker tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice. Whenever there is a new report about GM rice, a quarter cup of rice is dispensed into the cooker. When the cooker has enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically to the rice and the cooker is switched on. When the rice is done, an email is sent out to inviting people to eat the rice.

The more news reports appear, the more rice is cooked, the more often invitations are sent out. The project is designed to create awareness to issues surrounding genetically modified organisms by producing excessive amounts of cooked rice and attempting to feed people with it.

Currently, eRiceCooker is doing the following google news searches: GMO Rice, Gen-reis, GMO.

The eRiceCooker was made by Annina Rüst at MIT, and as student work it is very nice. But there's some aspect of it which prevents me from fully enjoying it. Here's what I think it is:

Why? In the case of the News Knitter, why tie it to the news? Is there some resonance at work there? There doesn't appear to be... it seems a random connection. News about genetically modified rice and the rice cooker is better connected, but still not fully satisfying to me. Towards the end of this post, I'll more fully explain why.


I bet you thought the coffee in the title of this posting was about my problems making it this morning. Nope! The third artwork I'd like to discuss is Benjamin Brown's News Brews.

News Brews is Brown's 2007 thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University.

The News Brews device is an exploration of the possibility of creating a beverage which provides information about the daily news. News Brews connects to internet news feeds and parses them to determine the relative frequency at which different coffee growing regions are mentioned. It then brews a cup of coffee from freshly ground whole beans which contains relative proportions of beans grown in the regions in that day's news.

On a side note, the project does have a design flaw: the coffee simply pours out as the news arrives. If there isn't a cup there, or if it is filled, you get a mess. This is a nice--though unintended--metaphor for being overwhelmed with news saturation.

News Brews is basically the same concept as the eRiceCooker, perhaps to a fault... Brown looked a bit chagrined when I gently mentioned the similarity. Setting aside the issue of originality, there is something about News Brews that works better for me than the eRiceCooker. I've been mulling over why I prefer News Brews. Here's what I have come up with:

News and coffee seem to go together... I read the news while drinking coffee in the morning. While "news about rice" is, of course, tied to rice... news in general doesn't seem to relate. So why GM rice? Why the news? My suspicion is that eRiceCooker began with the idea of automating cooking rice and that the genetically modified issue was grafted on later. Adding to this is the problem is that the eRiceCooker is political art, and (in my opinion) political art really needs to be perfect--there's not the room for looseness that might be acceptable in other works of art.

The eRiceCooker is ostensibly about GM foods... so what exactly is the connection between news reports about GM rice and eating (presumably) non-GM rice? The artist's description above seems to tie an abundance of news articles/cooked-rice to GM crops producing larger yields. She refers to "excessive" amounts of rice, which seems a bit off-message. Larger crop yields is a good thing, but presumably the artist feels GM crops are not. Perhaps a tighter conceptualization would be to borrow News Brews's idea of a news blend. The cooker could mix rice (representing articles about rice in-general) with some bittering agent such as quinine (representing the GM news articles)... so that the people eating the rice are eating a representation of how GM foods are corrupting our food supply.

Thoughts (i.e., comments) on the matter are certainly welcomed!