abstractmachine

Vincent Cogne found some time (between evaluations and the whatnots of end-of-semester madness) to put up the source code to the solution he found for creating stereoscopic Processing sketches [link]. We tried a few different solutions before this one (well, to be honest, I just made teacherly suggestions with a lot of OpenGL theory and Vincent did all the work). This was all while Ben Chang was here teaching us his solution using Ygdrasil. I think Ben has done great work on making a viable solution, but I just cringed when I saw all the hackery-clickery that had to be done just to set the environment up. I figured there had to be a better way.

The advantage of Ygdrasil over Processing/OpenGL is that it’s higher level, so you can just say « put this model here, and that model there » and the thing takes care of it for you (sort of like Shockwave3d in that sense, but on a more serious foundation). But on the other end, from an artistic perspective, I actually prefer to work closer to the bone — screwing around with the OpenGL directly because you get more visually interesting results (= easier to make pretty mistakes). But that’s just me. Anyway, with Vincent’s solution we were able to play around with the basics of stereoscopic imagery very quickly, and in the little hour I found to fiddle around with it, I saw the power of working this way rather than the higher-level stuff. You can iterate the designs so much faster this way (thank you Processing). I wish I had more time to play with it, but ultimately that’s the great thing about running an atelier : you can follow several different directions simultaneously.

As a side note, we also noticed very quickly that the stereoscopic images really pop out of the stucture better if you work off of a black backround. In other words, if you lose the « image » reference, and even lose the frame, and work off of the structure as if it were an architectural element within the room and not just a big TV screen. This is the mistake most « Virtual Reality » environments make (god I hate that term). They make a huge effort to get stereoscopic images, and then project it onto a conventional surface.

Oh, if you don’t know how to make a stereoscopic image, it’s actually very similar to how to make a Hypertable. But in this case, you need two projectors, with polarized filters, and a rear-projection screen that respects the polarization. (Huh? That’s not much of an explanation) Oh, just ask Vincent, he’ll explain it to you. He’s quite brilliant at everything 3d-programmable, so go bug him. I just got off the plane for @&#§$*@#¡ and I need some sleep.

And while we’re on the subject of 3d engines (see that? it’s called the bait-and-switch), John Klima just finished a two week workshop at the school showing our students how to use the Torque Game Engine. I didn’t have the time to hang out with them as much as I would have liked, but I got enough of a glimse to know that it’s an even better soluton than XNA which was really bothering me because of the licence, the Microsoft-centric aspect, etc. Whereas Torque is Mac/PC/Linux/Xbox. Pretty impressive. So like XNA, you can make Xbox360 games with it (and even distribute over Xbox Live Arcade, although that’s far more complicated because you have to go through the Bill, even if Bill does give you a good cut).

Jack Stenner took some time out at ISEA2006 to walk me through Torque as well and I had left with a good impression. We were exhibiting next to one another and often up late plugging things in, so I got to see how the system worked for him. As with everything, there are some wonky aspects, but so what, it’s open-source and cheap. And I think that’s really cool that there is a viable open-source platform for gaming. In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that we will not have a true massive gaming culture (on the same scale and deep influence as cinema, for example) until the platform becomes truly open and open-source. No one has a patent on 24-images-per-second, so too should it be for game platforms.

Enough techno-art-geek soap boxing for tonight. Zzzzz….

• Workshop: Livecode
• Artist: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Location: École supérieure d’art, Mulhouse
• Date: February 26 - March 2, 2007
• Public performance: March 1st, 2006. Time to-be-announced

When I get back from California, I’ll have a short week writing at home, and then it’s back off to yet another workshop. I had already planned this workshop quite some time ago with Jeff Guess, so I couldn’t put it off any longer. It should be fun. We are going to explore some of the ideas brandished about by the livecoding movement (?), or, uhhh, style (?), ummm, tendancy (?), errrr method (?). We’ll be using Processing, not because it’s the best environment for livecoding (although it’s possible) but because I always figure that workshops should also give its participants some tools they can walk away with. At least the students will have some basic notions, and since most of the participants will have already been working with Jeff in Flash-coding, I figured Processing would be a nice complement to their arsenal.

There will be a public performance on Thursday evening March 1st, so we will be preparing for that from day one. My current idea — although this might change — will be to tag-team livecode in competition with a film (livecode vs. film), probably something cheesy like Wargames, although I might find something better for us to battle before then because that film is just a little bit too litteral for my tastes. Maybe Scanners? Any ideas?

Here’s the announcement (en français) of the Workshop:

• Douglas Edric Stanley
• «Livecode»
• Enseignant référent : Jeff Guess
• du lundi 26 février au vendredi 2 mars 2007
• Etudiants concernés : Design graphique, semestre 6

Eloigné de l’Action Painting et du Performance Art, le Livecode réintroduit pourtant l’action, la performance et le corps dans ce que la création numérique a de plus cérébral : la programmation informatique. Lier la difficulté à programmer un ordinateur et l’exigence de produire in situ font coexister deux vecteurs opposés que nous appelons le Livecode.

Le Livecode naît dans la reconnaissance que les performances numériques sont plutôt obscures pour ceux qui doivent regarder un performeur derrière son ordinateur sur scène. Pourquoi ne pas montrer ce que fait ce personnage étrange sur sa machine ? Et puisqu’il s’agit forcément de la manipulation de programmes, pourquoi ne pas voir ce performeur fabriquer, ligne par ligne, l’ensemble de son programme devant un public ?

Ce workshop tranchera dans le débat sur la posture à adopter face à la machine. Assis ou debout, peu importe, pourvu que nous fabriquions quelque chose. Ouvrons les machines, ouvrons les environnements de programmation et regardons tout simplement ce qu’on peut produire avec. Le Livecode nous permet de se positionner avec une posture pragmatique mais décalée – une posture drôle, absurde, tout en restant engagé avec ce que la machine produit de contraignant et de libre.

Dans ce workshop, nous explorerons principalement l’environnement de programmation Processing (cf. http://www.processing.org - une plate-forme open-source et gratuite, conçue pour et par des artistes/programmeurs avec une philosophie pédagogique claire et évolutive. Les participants au workshop ne doivent pas avoir de connaissances particulières mais doivent venir avec le moins d’a priori sur la programmation et ses «utilités» artistiques.

First let me write this in French for all my students who have been sleeping in English class:

Antonin Fourneau vient de publier sur le site de l’école un tutoriel sur l’utilisation de Processing Mobile. Si vous voulez savoir comment (en français) passer de Processing à Processing Mobile, voici le pas-à-pas qu’il vous faut pour démarrer rapidement. [lien]

So, back to English. Antonin Fourneau has just published on the Atelier Hypermédia section of the school’s website a tutorial on how to use Processing Mobile (en français). If you speak English, it probably won’t help you all that much because similar things already exist on the Processing Mobile website, but we have our own way of doing tutorials, with lots of screenshots and a minimum of text. Unfortunately our screenshots will go out of date as operating systems get updated over the years and little details change on where to click and whatnot. But from the friendly mail I get, a lot of people apparently like our current tutorials.

But I’m above all thrilled that others are starting to participate in the writing of the actual on-line classes (now if we can only get current students to write some ;-). For one, the Atelier is designed as a collective space for sharing code and ideas on code, so from that point of view, it’s great. But also I’m currently too overloaded to actually finish all the courses I had hoped to put on-line. I have in fact prepared several classes that we’ve already run through en locale — classes on webcams, Arduino programming, Wiimotes, lists, objects, just to name a few —, but it does take time to get the documents and code cleaned up enough so that a beginner can run through them error-free from the website.

Which brings me to the following short meditation on teaching…

Without the appropriate means, we’ve built up the Atelier Hypermédia over the years as a mini-lab and an extended network, following the idea that the participants would little by little take it over and reshape it. Current students are always asked to teach each other within the Atelier, which might sound like a strange method but it works. Why I insist so much on students immediately turning around and teaching other students is because the fastest way to learn something really well is to explain it to someone who doesn’t understand it yet. This requires a certain esprit de synthèse as they say here — i.e. you have to put all the pieces together correctly and understand their interrelations.

This can also be said of my position within the Atelier. While some suggest that I appear to master a lot of complex subjects, in fact it is quite the opposite : you are simply watching me learn these subjects in real-time. For me a teacher is a localization from which a student watches another learn. While it is true that I am developing a theoretical corpus within the Atelier and constantly falling back onto its lexicon as a sort of foundation, I am nevertheless always doing so at the limit of my knowledge and understanding. To those I who claim, « those who can do, those who can’t teach » I would respond : oh, you have no idea! I am in fact at my best when I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about!

Chris O’Shea over at Pixelsumo posted info a few days ago about the new Arduino Bluetooth Module which is finally available from PCB Europe for 80€. You program it through the Arduino interface and then upload via Bluetooth. Then of course you can communicate between your mobile phone and your new toy using Processing Mobile. More detailed information can be found on Massimo Banzai’s blog [link], which is now part of his new company Tinker.it!. Good news. Very good news. Keep on truckin’ Monsieur Banzi. Just keep on truckin’ !

So, Steve Jobs, being the kinda guy he is, has decided to post his personal thoughts on Digital Rights Management in an open letter. It’s an eye-opening read. As usual, he turns the whole thing ass-up, claiming that in fact he would rather just get rid of the DRM, while still maintaining that Apple’s DRM does not in practice tie users to their iPod since only 3% of users have DRM’d music on their machines (hmm, how to you say « bullshit » in Norwegian?). He also claims that there is healthy competition (here comes the smoke and mirrors) because other competitors (he names Sony and Microsoft) are also locking users into hardware-content configurations. So we are perfectly free to choose who locks up music that we have paid for in machines that we have also paid for, but that we do not entirely own.

But the best part comes at the end. According to Steve, it’s the record companies who have his $#&§@, because they’re scared $#@!§%§# of opening up the floodgates to illegal filesharing and are basically !§&#@%§ all over themselves. Calling them a bunch of $%#@& in public, he reminds us all that these same record companies hypocritically release non-DRM’d content through their own channels (CD’s), and that anyone can easily upload those to the Internet. In other words, stop $%§&##§ on us, start $%§&##§ on the record companies. This is the whole reason he wrote the letter, and as usual, there was a strategy: to change the dynamic in the debate and throw the ball into the laps of the record companies who indeed are pretty unsavoury characters and not really the types you’d want to meet in a dark alley (especially when they have a pen and contract in their hand).

If you haven’t been following, Apple is currently up against the wall, with Europe now on their doorstep. Lately, American businesses have been very scared of having Europe on their doorstep (see Microsoft) and seem to be listening. Since America has apparently abandoned applying the very economic model it pretends to sell to the rest of the world — namely market expansion through fair competition —, it seems that Europe now has to do the dirty work of keeping their own markets open for them (instead, America is currently embracing massive market consoldiation, especially in media markets where dominance equals delegated control while maintaining the gloss of democracy). Now it’s Apple that finds itself in Europe’s crosshairs, with Norway threatening to open up Apple’s DRM for it by the end of the year if they don’t find a solution. Norway has also been joined recently by Germany, the Netherlands, with France bringing up the rear (when they were supposed to be the ones leading this fight).

This is actually all great news. It’s good news for Apple that Europe is giving them extra leverage to go back to the negotiating table with the record companies, and it’s even greater news that Steve Jobs has gone on public record stating that Apple would remove DRM from their technology « in a heartbeat ». It looked like Apple was heading down a different path, and European public policy might just now reverse that. This also means that Apple still wants to remain a technology company, and just licence content for distribution, which is an interesting turn as well. This would make Apple a very different company than Sony, even if Steve Jobs does sit on the Disney board.

Now if Europe could get around to opening up gaming platforms, especially now that France has just passed a tax credit for game developers. I don’t mean by that that game platforms should, like cinema’s 24 frames-per-second, be technologically homogenized. I just mean that if we shouldn’t be locked into Sony-distributed music to play music on our Sony digital walkman, why should we be locked into Sony-licenced games on our Sony Playstation? Especially if, as Sony says, the Playstation is a computer, and makes us pay computer prices for it. Sounds like a Sony-tax, just like the Apple-tax Norway is trying to remove.

I was working on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the « egg » this afternoon when I stumbled upon this cachet of notes I had apparently stored at the back of my copy of the 1981 edition of « Logique De La Sensation ». They revealed a series of conceptual diagrams I had made of each chapter of this amazing book.

I had totally forgotten these notes as they were part of a project I had to abandon for legal reasons. Basically what happened was the copyright holders at Bacon’s estate turned out to be just too darn stuffy to work with. At the same time the French publisher was being equally difficult. Deleuze was too sick at the time to be troubled with getting his editor to open up his book (he was coming out of yet another failed lung surgery), so I had a doubly impossible situation. If I remember correctly, Deleuze threw himself out of a window to end his physical suffering just about the time I was trying to get this project off the ground, which pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin of this project (yes, that’s an intentional bad joke, but one should always show irreverence for one’s heros ;-). So I moved on to other things and eventually forgot all about the 12 months I had put into this project. Until I found these little notes.

There should be some digital documents and software lying around, as I just recently re-arranged a whole library of CD-Roms of the dozens and dozens of failed projects I’ve explored over the years.

What I find fascinating about this book is the quality of Deleuze’s portrait using the pigments of philosophy. Rather than building a philosophical treatise on the possibility of painting or the ontology of artistic practice (yawn), Deleuze instead focuses his magnifying glass (and scalpel) onto the Bacon-machine itself as his object of study. This makes the entire endeavour more intimate, because it requires moving into the working of the machine itself and seing how it functions. Hence the « logic » of Bacon’s art-production-machine, which is to be understood more as its blueprint, or diagram. Indeed the logic of the « diagram » is essential here not only in his discription of Bacon’s re-invention of perspective, but in terms of Deleuze’s method of analysis itself. (Even a cursory glance at my current theoretical work should show the influence this method has had on me).

Unfortunately, the re-prints of this book make it difficult to follow his analysis of the paintings (which are quite in-depth), as there are no longer the same plates he referenced in the original edition. But it’s still worth it. His chapter on « athletics » and « hysteria » is worth the price of admission alone, with or without the pretty reproductions. And if you’re interested, I stole my concept of « éffort » from those two chapters, although I somewhat re-worked them for the then-popular context of interactivity (re-yawn, snore). Therein the recurring idea I have worked with for years to describe interactivity — that of extracting from production the object produced and seeing what remains —, can be localized in those two chapters of Logique de la sensation, although somewhat more implicitly than explicitly. And I love the way he alludes to Kafka’s famous quote on swimming: « I can swim like everyone else, only I have a better memory than them. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, my ability to swim is of no avail and in the end I cannot swim. » This refusal to master swimming (or productivity in the case of interactivity), to retain a lack of mastery in mastery, is a powerful idea for artistic practice, even if it does risk sounding a little too cliché (I’ll take that risk, thank-you-very-much). Whatever the case, in Bacon’s paintings the idea is perfectly appropriate, because indeed the figures are in a constant state of making figurative that which desires formlessness. And finally, this was one of the ideas that finally cured me of any residue of 80’s postmodernism, and opened up a whole series of artistic methods for me personally.

And while I’m rambling, it just occurred to me that my last admission might explain the distinction between my own position on artistic activity, and those of many of my collegues who emerged from more official channels of art education, steeped as they are in a sort of negative-dialectics of the Kantian sublime. That’s a mouthful (and a pretty nasty accusation now that I think about it), but a pretty accurate mouthful that I am perfectly willing to stand by. I remember quite a few debates with some very heady artists at the time I was working on Logique de la sensation who complained of Deleuze pulling art back down into the morass of sensation and perception, and basically re-pictorializing art, or sending it back the way of impressionism. I actually agree with them, and cringe at a few passages in What is philosophy? wherein D&G limit art to the production of « percepts ». But I still retain that art has throughout its history had an intimate relationship with plasticity, form, figuration, landscape, portrait and what-have-you, even in the midst of the peak of 60’s and 70’s conceptual art. Sure, it’s hard to see much of a political position in Bacon’s refiguring the defigurative — without sinking into some lame ode to the arts as the last form of political resistance —, but who the hell needs an all-incompasing definition of art anyway?

As a philosophical treatise, La logique de la sensation (« The Logic of Sensation ») was not one of Deleuze’s massive cultural bombs such as Difference and Repetition, and his books written with Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus, Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus), and What Is Philosophy?. In those books, seminal concepts such as the rhizome or the corps-sans-organes are introduced. In contrast, The Logic of Sensation is a smaller book, less ambitious than those works. Logique de la sensation would never have the global influence that those books did, nor did its concepts dislodge themselves from the book and travel about in the cultural landscape like so many little memes. This is not to say that Logique de de la sensation does not invent important concepts — to the contrary, the book is an endless stream of inventions. The aforementioned concept of « éffort » would probably be the most important offering from this book, as well as the concept of the chute, which I used at the time of Deleuze’s death to comment its « critical reception ». There’s a beautiful section on animality and the becoming-animal. And finally, there is a significantly different version of his concept of the « diagram » from the version he proposes in Foucault. So there is some important writing here for people working outside of the field of painting, or art for that matter. What I mean to suggest is that this is a minor work that creates it’s own territory that works on you locally, albeit intensely. It requires its own study, and yet reads like an enthralling novel. It’s the difference between Nieztsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Zur Genealogie der Moral : the former you read on a road trip, feeling like Jack Kerouac — worldly with your Bildungsroman half-torn and dangling out of your rucksack; while with the latter you actually learn something, and have to sit down in a small well-lit corner and let the thing soak in.