abstractmachine

Ragnar has been invited to the tropical seaside resort of Helsinki for the Prix Möbius Nordica 2006 where he is presenting his webwaste project. A former post on the webwaste can be found here: link.

We weren’t really expecting anything, and I don’t really know how all this came about, so just being invited means that Ragnar got a free trip to Helsinki. I’m trapped back here in the lovely weather of Aix-en-Provence, working, and with a stomach flu, so I couldn’t have gone. That said, I wan’t invited either ;-)

It’s not really public (ooops! too late!), but you can read the notes to Ragnar’s presentation, where he was apparently asked to defend the project a bit like a businessman makes a 5-minute pitch (ouf).

Of course we didn’t win the “grand prix”, that went to the Habbo Hotel which I kind of expected. I should also note that the very-busy Juha Huuskonen was there (along with others) with the Public Opinion project. Juha is the director of the Pixelache festival, which is currently making a stop in Paris, with the odd title Mal au pixel. If you’re in Paris, it should be interesting.

Ragnar did get the “prix creation”, but since it looks like everyone walked away with something…

I remember the Prix Möbius from the 1990, I always took it for a hold-over from the CD-ROM days. I was invited back in 1998 for another project (yes, I used to do CD-ROMs), but the organisation was pretty sloppy back then, and the invitation somewhat ambiguous, especially from a commercial standpoint (sorry, I don’t know how to sell a product). I think I eventually declined. Whatever the case, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps it has changed since then.

You can probably tell by my tone that I don’t take such prizes all that seriously. A least I try not to.

Just a quick note that I just updated my ³ music synthesizer. Some people had written to mention that it was down — for once it wasn’t my fault ;-)

Shockwave and its xtras are of course a moving target, and have complicated matters once again, requiring me to finally house the xtras on my own server, since the provider’s server looks terminally down. It was an easy fix, but annoying. I have better things to do with my life.

Further complicating matters, the squencer xtra I use in this program has this horrendous licencing scheme which was not in effect when I started using it. But when they were bought out by Sibelius, the latter asked me to pay royalties, even for free downloads of my own software written with it. Are these people totally insane, or what? We started trying to find an amicable solution some time back, but they suddenly went silent. So I’m still in limbo on this one, and don’t even mention what is going to happen with the switch to MacIntel, which is already in effect for some users. Ugh.

I finally took the time out to fix this because I’m developing a full scale terminal for this machine, which should be ready for ZeroOne San Jose (August 2006).

I’m participating in a minor debate with some friends over at Metazimut (great name by the way). There are several points we’re debating, all surrounding the political, artistic and ontological nature of blogs. It started with one of the best French web-theoreticians, Etienne Cliquet (an even better name ;-) reacting to some militant positions I had recently taken with respect to standards and web aggregators over at CEDAR. Here is his original post with our comments: Feed me, feed me!!!.

Since Etienne and I are quite clearly squaring off around the role of pingbacks, I thought I would give him a tip of the hat over here with a ….pingback. He really does set himself up when he claims that in a popular blog pingbacks can be shut off whereas comments cannot. He obviously hasn’t been attacked by blog spam yet. While technically he might be right, the power of blogs comes from their links and not from their comments, which are the domain of forums by the way. In fact, many blogs have shown exactly the opposite logic. Régine Débatty was at our art school the other day and spoke about her politics concerning comments. Her blog has obviously become a force through pingbacks, links, trackbacks, call them what you will — and not through the comments which are heavily moderated. It was the inter-blog linking by the way that got her where she is now. In fact, we call it a blogosphere because of the links, not because of the comments. Many blogs even get their “voice” from the choice of links they prepare every day which acts as a proxy for commentary, especially when connected up into a network of interrelated links.

Back to Etienne’s post, I can see three major points of disagreement:

• 1) the political nature of standards
• 2) the media model used to define blogs
• 3) the importance of separating the semantic layer from the presentation layer (xhtml + css)

In an eye-opening accusation, Etienne claimed in his original post that my positions on web-standards were in fact apolitical. Woah. I was expecting quite a few reactions but not that one. I suppose I’ll never win over here: I’ve been accused of being apolitical for years, and when I finally do take some obvious political positions I’m told they’re apolitical. Ho hum. But more seriously, I think the problem here is assuming that we chose to move into open-source and open standards for merely technical reasons, and not political or critical ones. Even worse, that we did not have artistic motives, merely technical ones. I have been teaching in a fine arts school and not a technical trade school precisely because I am interested in a critical exploration of technology, avoiding above all instrumentalization. The common french argument against technology is that people use it without a critical eye. Resistance is everything for the French — it’s in fact what I love about them. But being unable to identify the resistance of others is a common French problem.

A more interesting debate surrounds the use of previous media models to define the medium itself. Etienne claims that blogs are subject to the ideology of “audience”, inherited from television, and to a lesser degree the press. While I agree with the press idea, his original emphasis was on a televisual model. My main opposition to this idea surrounded the distinction between synchronus flux (television) and asynchronus flux (press). Blogs, like newspapers, are dated. But blogs go further and add the minute itself of the post, which is what sometimes confuses it with a synchronus medium. During disasters where traditional communications go down, blogs are nowadays the first to get the news out. But the web, and all TCP/IP based communication, is fundamentally asynchronus and therefore needs to be distinguished from the television’s need to eternally populate its flux with rumor in the Heideggerian sense. RSS is fundamentally a publication medium, and was designed as such. It even works with media that wasn’t originally designed to be archived, searched, or aggregated. In Bruce Mau’s Life Style, he states:

“Postscript’s principal innovation was the invention of a “page description language” used to describe any point on the surface, whether it was text or image. There is no longer any distinction between text and non-text, image and non-image. The entire surface is now described in one language. Everything is now image.” - Bruce Mau, Life Style, p.65.

What I find interesting about RSS is how it reverses this logic : anything can be trapped into an RSS feed, even a synchronus flux. This ultimately re-textifies media objects, transforming them into discrete, modular, exchangeable and archivable entities. This is why the web, and blogs, can “watch” television, feed off of it, and then use to make new feeds, as is currently happening with You Tube.

The final point of dispute is the problem of creating a face-off between “content” and “presentation”. I knew this would create a debate in my original post (my web classes are based on this separation), precisely because so much French thinking is based on Foucauldian and Deleuzian theories that precsiely identify this kind distinction as an ideological trap. So I wasn’t suprised when people accused me of falling into it. But what amazed me was that precisely those who inspired me in this move, were those those that missed the point. So many local teachers (and many usability-fascists, by the way) think that CSS has become the new dogma, a new æsthetic imposed onto us like yet another politically-correct way-to-behave. Many who have recently questioned us on our move to Processing have the same misconception. The hilarous thing about this complaint is how far off target it is. In fact, the idea of moving over to CSS was precisely a strategy for putting behind us obsessions over presentation, and espousing — elegantly — the vanilla flavor logic of the web.

A case in point. Here is a recent post on this blog, entitled Diagram, Procedure, Algorithm that you can see in all its abstractmachine regala; I’ve chosen the background, the font family, the links colors and so on. Now go look for the same post, over on the vanilla-flavored processing blogs. Notice any difference? It’s presented using the default interface for WordPress, which is actually pretty close to my presentation, but obviously could be much much different; for example if I was reading it in a feed reader, or reading it in a terminal.

So for me, espousing the use of XHTML and CSS was less of an issue of making fancy webpages with my students (we don’t, ours suck) and getting them to focus on the logic of aggregators, and recontextualizers of all sorts currently taking over the web.

Oh, and focusing on this issue was — ahem — a politically motivated shift.

So last week I presented my research on “Abstract Machines : Art and the Age of the Algorithm” to the LEI and ARI labs. An interresting debate ensued, with my thesis director Jean-Louis Boissier heading the charge, mostly around what I suspect will be further debate concerning the ontological status of programmed images. While we both apparently still refer to my old mentor Raymond Bellour and his fundamental work on cinema and semiotics, it looks as if we have an emerging debate around the status of the image once it has been seized by the processor. Precisely where we place the “entre” of Bellour’s Entre-Images is probably where we still have some issues to discuss. I propose a strange concept more or less revolving around the idea of a Frankenstein process in which the image re-negotiates with the processor at each iteration in a discrete disembodied process, whereas for Boissier it looks as if the algorithm works at the temporal edge of the image, between images, but acting on the image as a whole. I might be misrepresenting Jean-Louis here, so I’ll quit while I’m behind, but I thought the distinction interesting and look forward to debating this issue in a future session, perhaps during the defense itself.

As for the rest, I began the talk with an easy distinction: separating the algorithmic layer of computers from their computational layer — an idea that many reading this would probably already take for granted. Indeed it is not a new position, however it is one I’ve been working with for quite some time, and it is the object of this thesis. On this subject, Marius Watz over at Generator.x has a recent post subtitled Your new procedural lifestyle where he mentions Michael Mateas’ Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner, which from my quick scan deals precisely with this issue.

However, once we got to the meat of the thesis — and the part I’m having the most fun with — i.e. the theoretical “diagrams” of various artistic and commercial machines, the discussion veered into a strange ideological debate, yet again leading us to the pros and cons of using Processing in artistic practice. Ultimately, I’m building these diagrams with Processing because it represents a common pedagogical and artistic platform and allows me to easily share the code for anyone willing to take the next step. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that it would probably be a good idea to have access to working code from a thesis exploring the relationship between art and code. Processing is far more open for these needs, while still remaining accessible to anyone willing to make the effort.

But Processing is still a tough swallow apparently for many that have an artistic past steeped in other environments. There is also a (somewhat justified) fear of visually (and procedurally) formatting the art to a specific school of thought.

There was also an interresting observation my collegue Jean-Michel Géridan made, i.e. that as curators become more and more interested in code-based works, artworks are increasingly chosen based on preconceptions about the environment and compiler they were programmed with. In this respect, Processing would currently be “in”, whereas other environments like Director would be “out”. So true. The number of times people have sort of sighed when they discovered that my complex fancy interactive generative gizmo was programmed with Director. Ah bon? Director? as if the work suddenly took on a less true or real quality. The red-meat quotient suddenly draining from the work like some flatulent gas. This is of course silly, especially since we actually choose interpreted languages even if we work with more difficult compiled ones. And, for the moment at least, my work with Director is far more interesting artistically than my work with Assembly Language. But there’s still that cool-factor…

I’ll post more about the advancement of the thesis later, for the moment I have an installation to prepare for ZeroOne (more on that later as well). So with those two projects don’t be suprised if I disappear again for a while.

Ok, let it hearby be known that if one more person cites Picasso’s “Je ne cherche pas, je trouve”, they will be shot.

So I ended up speaking last Thursday at the Assises Nationales des Écoles d’Art. If you don’t know what that is, here is a post from a few days back (Assises Nationales des Écoles d’Art). Ohmygod, who the f##k came up with the idea of locking into a large conference hall a couple hundred french artists and intellectuals!@#¡¿? Actually, I found the whole experience pretty comical, and in the end damn cool to see how firey the whole thing could get and — gasp — passionate. But, as with many things French, the passionate side reveals a darker intrigue, mainly what in French is called le brassage de l’air, i.e. waving your arms about and making lots of noise in order to merely displace the oxygen in the room. Usually one displaces air in order hide an ulterior motive, namely to maintain the status quo. For there was sheer terror that could be felt in that room, sheer terror at the very idea of … change.

In our section of the Assises, we were supposed to be discussing research, and the official introduction and defense of research within our art schools. It might be worthwhile to contextualize that, for the introduction of this debate on “research in the context of art schools” is highly charged politically. There are several versions of the story on why we’re discussing research at this particular juncture, but I see three.

The first is simple : Europe has just introduced a new diploma standardization (that’s what Europe does : standards) requiring all higher education to enter into the logic of “Licence, Master, Doctorat”, 3/5/8, or “LMD”. And in order to meet this standard, curiculum has to be defined and credits have to be assigned according to concrete teaching-hours. Since what is actually taught in an art school is so experimental, and some would say (although we should be careful with this) obscure, French art school teachers are terrified and running around “ with their hair on fire®™ ”. The mere idea of writing down what they teach is for them the ultimate insult, as they see it as a judgement on the quality and quantity of their teaching. Recent fallacious accusations from idiots in our local city government would actually justify this fear, as would the official reasons cited by the mayor of Perpignan in his recent decision to close that city’s art school. Arists/professors also see it as the first step in the standardization of the subject-matter itself, followed by the sectioning-up of French art schools into various niches, i.e. instrumentalized art trade schools.

Leading us to the second reason I see for the current debate on ”research in art schools”. And this one is interesting for me because I can go either way on this issue, depending on how you frame the debate. On one side, when French politicians speak of more ”visibility” for French art schools, they mean more “applied” activity, populist, and “closer to the people”. It‘s demagogy, and of course bullshit. What they want is to instrumentalize art schools, and in their dreams at least, pander to the voters’ desire for immediate and short-term satisfaction. The result would be catastrophic and implode, but it’s what they desire, because they don’t understand long-term thinking. But that said, there is some truth to the idea that art schools should interface better with the larger community, and I would even say, the growing socio-economic context of the new millenium.

The final issue, a positive one, is the possible collaboration between art schools, universities, research labs, cultural groups, and private industry in the context of “new media”, i.e. digital media culture. This one is a no-brainer, because everybody wins. It’s also not a new idea (except for the French, of course). Industry discovers new ideas and unimagined publics; Art Schools find new sources for funding and even new technological artefacts, methodologies, and collaborators; and universities get their hands dirty with a pragmatic just-do-it (or production-based) approach that only an art school can provide. It is also a dangerous proposition, of course, hence the need to debate this issue seriously and develop strong protections for the smallest link — art schools — but a fascinating one, a constructive debate if you will. I have rejected publicly, and on several occasions, the idea of “interdisciplinary” art-science research. It’s a top-down model, and totally misunderstands the pragmatic and productive nature of artistic activity. But I debate this issue, as well as the problem of industrial forms of instrumentalization (we’re sandwiched between political and industrial desires to instrumentalize us), as a “chance” for art schools, and a possible new form of interfacing art production of the emerging digital culture. And nothing says that we have to interface only with industry when we get out of the education/museum context. We could work with political groups, foundations, etc., and develop art-technology projects with them. The “chance”, which can also been seen as an “excuse”, is the accident that happened to art with the introduction of computers and modular networked machines into its pratice. In other words, we are, thanks to the strange new artifacts before us, being offered an excuse to ask questions that we are not usually asking, and to collaborate with people we would have normally avoided. The desire for legitimzation is temporarily held at bay, just the time required to allow a new field to emerge.

This is of course already the freedom of art schools, and it is truly the beauty of the system; I have seen it in Aix : the patience they afford me to experiment with new questions, just the time required to develop a new field for the atelier, just as we have done with Antonin Fourneau with Gameboys or Pierre-Erick Lefebvre with our strange version of Rock n’ Roll. How then could this model be opened up for political groups, industrial partners, university and scientific researchers, without at the same time instrumentalizing the art school, politically and/or economically?

This is the question I tried to ask at the Assises Nationales des Écoles d’Art. I even asked these very questions at the round-table they invited me to, dedicated to the question of “déplacements”, or the displacements of art schools into foreign territories. And what response did I get? None. A Big Fat Silence. In fact, the forum quickly knee-jerked itself, and fell back to the brassage de l’air that had caracterized the two round-tables before it : art schools are great, we like things the way they are, we don’t need the LMD because we’re art schools damn it and to hell with you if you want to understand whatever it is we do. In fact, it even got worse : it was suggested during my round-table, as had been suggested earlier, that universities are looking to swallow whole the French art schools (perhaps, I have no data either way), even that Nicolas Sarkozy wants to shut down the entire Ministry of Culture itself, and that the big bad enemy is not only the Ministry of Culture but the Universities that would like to eat our budgets (a joke if you actually saw our budgets). Don’t get me wrong, I think there is some truth to these fears, and we have to remain lucid about their possible reality — but I am now convinced just as strongly that maintaining the status quo is precisely the best way to make these conspiracy theories a reality. Obsessing about the university system is perhaps the fastest route to bringing it upon ourselves. If we spend our time screaming that the sky is falling, someone might indeed profit from our distraction and eat our lunch. This is not the way to take an issue head-on.

The frightening thing about this detour from the debate-at-hand was the momentum it built up within the Assises, and resounded as a sort of intellectual mantra at all levels our discussion, squelching anything else. Frightening, because it was proposed by representatives of the university system, but terrifying above all because the force of their arguments were built precisely using the force of the University Verb. Arguments, screaming matches, ironic jokes, and off-colored remarks made by artists were mostly that of the manifeste, a certain political stance or artistic ethical position. The university intellectuals, on the other hand, were more sophisticated and used to their advantage their institutional superiority at manipulating the verb, the citation, and the dialectical structure. Hence it was via influence that they tainted our discussions, and led us ironically into a tautological closed-circuit argument on why it was we should avoid the institutions that formed them. This had the effect of a tornado where calm could only be found at its eye, staying close to the mantra (“confiding in the university is like giving your car keys to someone who wants to do you harm”) for fear of being pulverized by anything outside of this central core.

I also spoke of recent difficulties we’ve encountered trying to find out how to negotiate with industrial partners. Open source? Patents? Restricted use? Public domain? Sure, we can negotiate these issues one by one with our partners. But what sort of political platform exists to protect us during the negotiations (for all negotiation is a question of correctly assessing and amassing force)? I also spoke of the juridicial void as to how we can actually get this money into the school once we’ve signed these ellusive contracts. Does the money come directly to the school? No, for the moment. Does it go to a non-profit? This is apparently illegal, even if many do it. Et cætera, et cætera. Can I get paid overtime, or as a supplement to my current teaching, in order to work on these projects? No, for the moment. So we’re in a legal void.

But did this interrest anyone in the forum? Nope. Well, actually, after I railed at this general inertia, and eventually stormed off stage, quite a few people came up to me in private to express their support, but only in private of course. Hence the “Great Schism” : those that want to move French art schools into new territories, and those that see it as a form of active-minoritizing force that needs to be protected as is, as an a-topos or heterotopia (cf. Foucault). Strangely enough, these two positions are not incompatible, in fact one might even require the other, only in different strategic contexts. But we’re not there yet.

Research in art schools, some sort of political protections and economic means for us in these wonderful institutions we so desire to defend? New perpectives opening up onto critical uses of the powerful but frightening new social model? I guess that’ll be for some other day.

Here’s a crappy photo I took of the best moment, when two young students appeared onstage and sang our various manifests back to us in full royalist garb and manner. They were flanked by all the art school students who had also made the effort to come to the event (and were left silent, by the way).

On a happy note, I was given a lovely room at the last minute at the Hôtel de némours. If ever you’re looking for a nice place to stay in Rennes, this is your spot. The interior was apprently redesigned recently by a belgian architect, and reminded me of a pleasant stay at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, but cheaper (since I didn’t pay for it, but also because it’s cheaper ;-). Usually hotels are so amazingly ugly that it was nice to see a simple adjustment to a typical small european hotel come out so nicely.

Why am I speaking about some nice but minor hotel when there were more important issues at hand? Well, you have your answer right there.

Just a quick note that this week is the Semaine thématique sur l’édition at the Aix-en-Provence Art School, i.e. another one of these week-long seminars we organize four times in the year. This week’s theme is « Édition », or publication, which ranges from fanzines to blogs and wikipedia. Josué Rauscher, Jean Cristofol, and I organized this series, although Josué ultimately had the final word as this subject directly concerns his Atelier Édition Numérique.

This morning we had a sociology doctoral canditate discuss his research on Wikipedia, then some artists in the afternoon speaking about their print-based magazine using an open-contributions model. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking very briefly before introducing Pierre-Erick Lefebvre and Cuicui (yeah! kick ass man!). And tomorrow afternoon Régine Débatty of we-make-money-not-art — very cool — will arrive to check out the school and talk about her blog on wednesday morning. And finally we’ll have Isabelle Vodjani of Agglo and Denis Chevalier from Éditions è®e.

A busy week which will also include a jury meeting from Arborescence and a first presentation of the spéctacle psychorotatif the second year students have been working on. I have only been doing some minor collaborations on that last project, so I’m in the dark as to how it will turn out. But so far the object itself looks pretty ominous, and I like ominous…

• Seminar: Esthétique des nouveaux médias
• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Presentation: Machines abstraites : l’art à l’age de l’algorithme
• Date: 12:00-14:00, April 5, 2006
• Location: ENSAD, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratives
• Room: 122
• Links: Laboratoire Esthétique de l’Interactivité, Université de Paris 8; Atelier de Recherches Interactives, ENSAD

It’s a private seminar, but I wanted to mention it here because I will be presenting the current status of my research for my doctoral thesis. I still have a lot more work to do — this is why I’ve been so silent recently — and the writing system has been somewhat tricky to finalize as the entire system is relational and recursive. I find it easy to get lost when writing recursive systems. But the foundation is more or less set, at last the overall idea, the rest is at the tweaking stage, and a first list of artists and works has been entered into the relational database which I’ll be working off from here on in. Yes there will be lots of Processing sketches with source code. I love the idea of writing a thesis on algorithms within an algorithm, and most of all that one of the components is a ”linearizer”, allowing me to push a button and print : Presto! Insta-thesis!

Here is the original french announcement:

Douglas Edric Stanley fera l’exposé suivant : « Machines abstraites : l’art à l’age de l’algorithme »

« Mes recherches portent sur l’algorithme dans l’art, et plus précisément sur la façon dont les structures et logiques de la programmation informatique influencent aujourd’hui la création artistique. Il s’agit non seulement de proposer une analyse d’oeuvres qui engagent la question de l’algorithme, mais églament de repérer des figures - appellé ici des “diagrammes” pour accentuer leur aspect fonctionnel - qui animent ces oeuvres depuis l’intérieur. »

After this I’ll be heading to Rennes to stay with my step-daughter and hang out at the Assises nationales des écoles d’art. Then it’s back to Paris on Friday to see Servovalve’s performance at the opening of the Festival Némo. If you’re around…

• Conference: Assises Nationales des écoles d’art
• Location: Rennes, France
• Date: 6-7 April, 2006
• Schedule: Programme (in french)

Oops, it happened again. I open my big mouth and end up getting dragged yet again into a conference where I probably won’t have anything to say. I was politely debating with a collegue from another art school on the subject of research, art schools, and the university system, when it turns out that he is one of the organizers of the big art-politics-education shindig in Rennes. I’m still not to sure what to think of this issue, it’s still pretty obscure for me as it’s steeped in the French political context, although I definitely have some positions on the difficulties of conducting research in our current situation. Whatever the case, I haven’t prepared anything, and I haven’t even read over the resumé of the last meeting on the subject I’m supposed to debate. I suppose I’ll have to cram on the train.

I will be debating in a round-table context, which is just about the stupidest configuration I can think of. I hate round-tables. People sit on a stage and give their opinions on things while other people watch. I much prefer moderated open debate. Or out-and-out speeches.

I insisted on mainting “une réserve de silence” if I do not have anything to say.

I originally was planning to go to the Assises as a spectator, and to participate in the next meeting of CEDAR for which I definitely have things to talk about.