abstractmachine

MCD has just annouced the publication of WJ-Spots #1 – 15 Years of Artistic Creation on the Internet. It is a billingual (French/English) publication.

As readers of this blog might have noticed, I participated a few months back in Anne Roquiny‘s WJ-S project at the Maison des métallos, Paris. For those that don’t know the system, WJ-S is a multiscreen networked performance apparatus, allowing for real-time mixing of the web, à la DJs and VJs, hence the moniker « WJ-S ». So while I spoke last may on subjects ranging from protocol politics to sleepy surfers, Isabelle Arvers and Anne Laforet clicked and mixed a visual tapestry on the WJ-S system for the parisian audience. Now that talk, along with some 40 other talks from various artists and intellectuals, has been compiled into an illustrated publication.

Here’s the English press release:

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WJ-SPOTS #1 15 years of artistic creation on the internet

WJ-SPOTS is a project that was conceived of and designed by media curator Anne Roquigny, in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events are invited to look back on 15 years of Internet history.

The interviews are conducted inside the WJ-S multi-screen environment www.wj-s.org, transformed for the occasion into a space for thought and investigation. Online browsing of a selection of emblematic websites, chosen by the speakers, take place simultaneously on 3 big screens. Real time surfing is like a magnified and augmented thought presentation, offering multiple of points of view while the participants answer a series of 5 questions.

With the participation for WJ-SPOTS#1 of : Aliette G Certhoux, Agnès de Cayeux, Anne Laforet, Anne-Marie Morice, Annick Rivoire, Annie Abrahams, Antoine Schmitt, Bruno Alacoque aka weweje aka s.u.n aka datatank, Albertine Meunier, Christophe Bruno, Collectif MU, Cyril Thomas, David Guez, David-Olivier Lartigaud, Douglas Edric Stanley, Elisabeth Klimoff, Emmanuel Vergès, Eléonore Hellio, Etienne Cliquet, Fred Forest, Grégoire Courtois aka Troudair, Gregory Chatonsky, Isabelle Arvers, Ivan Chabanaud, Jacques Perconte, Jérôme Joy, Jocelyne Quelo, Joëlle Bitton, Julie Morel, Lucille Calmel, Mabuseki, Margherita Balzerani, Martine Neddam aka Mouchette, Michaël Borras aka Systaime, Nathalie Magnan, Nicolas Frespech, Nicolas Maigret, Olga Kisseleva, Olivier Auber, Olivier Forest, Peter Sinclair, RYBN, Thierry Théolier aka ThTh, Xavier Faltot.

The first WJ-SPOTS took place in Paris, on May 27th & 28th, 2009, from noon to midnight, and was programmed within the framework of two digital events : Futur en Seine and Les Immatérielles.

WJ-SPOTS#1 was a two-day opportunity to discover approximately 40 outstanding figures of the French Internet community and the online content (texts, sound, video, animations…) browsed and downloaded in real time by Isabelle Arvers and Anne Laforet, from the gigantic hard drive that is the web.

The participants commented and analyzed, from an artistic perspective, how the Internet has been progressively taken over as a space of artistic creation, from its beginning until now : online creation, software art, code art, ascii art, flash art, google art, generative art, interactive art, collaborative art, tactical media, locative media, telematic art, network performances, etc.

WJ-SPOTS #1 is the first edition of a series of events and publications that will be organized in 2010 and 2011, in partnership with international media and cultural organizations.

WJ-SPOTS plays on numerous levels of re/transmission and publication.

WJ-SPOTS is a public event where it is possible to interview online artistic creators and surf in real time their selection of Internet sites.

WJ-SPOTS makes it possible to see the live retransmission of the event on the Internet on the Selfworld site.

WJ-SPOTS makes each of the interviews available via video on demand, on the server of Digitalarti.

WJ-SPOTS provides access to the artists’ bookmarks.

WJ-SPOTS is also a collection of bilingual (French and English) special editions, produced and published by the magazine MCD.

WJ-SPOTS #1 is supported by

• the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Délégation au développement et aux affaires internationales (DDAI)
• Futur-en-Seine
• La Maison des Métallos
• Musiques & Cultures Digitales
• Digital Art International
• Selfworld
• WJ-S

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ACHETER EN LIGNE / BUY ON LINE - Paper, 104 pages – 9 euros - PDF, 104 pages printable – 7 euros

I’m posting this a bit late, but for some reason I totally missed this video. It’s a summary of some of the sound objects built by François Parra’s students in our joint sound-hypermedia mini-course for second year students. This year we split the two-week class into two: in the first week half of the class learned Processing while the other half learned PureData and audio acoustic instrumentation; the following week they reversed roles. While the hypermedia students were making Processing Monsters in preparation for Eniarof, François’ students were making these interesting instruments.

Objects soundscape from François Parra on Vimeo.

From François’ description:

This is a short movie coming from a teaching project in Aix-en-Provence art school. Students build piezo amplified objects to compose a soundscape. They only used piezo mics, motors, a mixing board, speakers. You will see at the end the begining of a program, made to tie a string sound with generative pictures.

To be clear, I had little to nothing to do with the construction of the objects, I’m only in the video looking like the dork I am because I was the only professor present to conduct any sort of critique, which basically consisted of, « uhhh, how does it work? » followed by some random attempt at analyzing physical algorithmic phenomena. But I wanted to post the video here because it gives a fairly typical picture of the experimental method we use in our exploration of machines. Yeah, yeah, I know, plastic babies on a seesaw have that oh-so-art-school stench of ennui, but there are still some valid ideas in most of the instruments. Also, there’s some brief attempt at audiovisualisation, but on a very very basic level. I think we were far more succesful a few years back at approaching this connection, around the time of 8=8 for example, but again these are students who had only been programming for two or three days and these things go in cycles anyway.

• Installation: « Bohlen’s Experiment No.1 »
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Technical platform: OpenFrameworks + PaulStretch + Arduino
• Event: 8° Encontro Internacional de Arte e Tecnologia
• Exhibtion: « Instinto computacional »
• Curator: Suzete Venturelli
• Location: UNB Gallery (September 2009) / Museu Nacional da República (TBA)
• Lecture: 08:00 – 09:00 Friday September 18, 2009

After some complications actually getting into the country, I am now finally in Brazil for the 8° Encontro Internacional de Arte e Tecnologia in the capital city of Brasília. Last night was the opening of the exhibition on « computational instinct » where I’m currently showing a new piece, « Bohlen’s Experiment No.1 ». And tomorrow Joseph Nechvatal and I will be each be giving lectures as part of four days of conferences organized by the Laboratório de Pesquisa em Arte e Realidade Virtual.

The installation as well as tomorrow’s lecture are my attempt at a response to Suzete’s invitation to present something around the subject of « computational instinct ». The subject is vast, and this piece is by no means to be considered my definitive response. But it has allowed me to work out a certain framework for thinking the subject of instinct, and from which I’ve come up with this proposition « no.1 » in what could easily be extended into a series.

While I suppose there are a lot of directions one could take the concept of « instinct », I actually decided to avoid the whole innate vs. aquired debate, and focus instead on the environmental conditions of behavior, in other words looking at existence not from the perspective of a subject (transcendental or otherwise) in conflict with its biological predispositions, but instead from the perspective of a being historically embedded in an environment; i.e. a question of « Umwelt » as a formative ingredient to embodiness. From this perspective, instinct is not some contrary force acting against us, but rather the residue of our environmental context that exposes itself through our behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, instinct could then be considered a context within which behavior takes place; it is the behavorial framework that reveals something about the nature of our consciousness and how this consciousness is shaped by our negotiations and inscription within the world.

Which leads me back to this first experiment which like all experiments is about exploring the limits of a concept. While the concept of Umwelt is highly cybernetic in its conception of stimulus and effectuation, I found it more interesting to approach the concept of Umwelt from a purely temporal perspective. So I asked the question: what is our temporal behavior? and its corrollary can we experience other temporal existences? And if indeed the answer to the latter is yes, is our experience of temporally divergent worlds limited to communication or can we also simulate such environments, through immersion or other means?

In « Bohlen’s Experiment No.1 », I have recreated a machine described only on paper in Philip K. Dick’s 1964 science fiction novel « Martian Time-Slip ». In the novel, Dick suggests that communication could be made with autistic children via temporal variation devices:

« There’s a new theory about autism, from Bergholzlei, in Switzerland [...] It assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it. In fact, he is unable to perceive it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast so as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledygook, you know? Just extremely high-pitched mishmash. Now this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slowed down. Both sound and video slowed, at last so slowed that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehend the human sounds as speech… » – Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

The novel goes on to discuss an attempt to build such a device, but which ultimately fails for various reasons concerning the intrigue.

Obviously, a similar device has already been made for the image: it’s called « 24-hour Psycho » and « Five-Year Drive-by (The Searchers) », by Douglas Gordon. And stretching the image this way is fairly easy, at least from a technical point of view: just slow it down. But I got to thinking about the sound, which is continuous medium and not discontinuous like the film frame: how could we stretch the sound in a more consistent way while avoiding the chipmunk effect?

In my first attempt at creating Bohlen’s device (Bohlen being the character hired to actually build such a thing in Dick’s novel), I decided to create a purely audio communications device wherein one could communicate in real-time and yet to two divergent scales of real-time. You speak into a microphone, and out the other end your speech is stretched from anywhere to 1x to 100000x. You can adjust the speed with a dial.

Therefore, you co-exist in two temporal scales, and yet both, while temporally divergent, can still be considered real-time in the cybernetic sense; it is merely the biological rythm or scale of that real-time that has shifted. Indeed, as my colleague Jean Cristofol has argued within our various theoretical working groups (cf. « lenteur »), real-time is a temporal form, and not a measure of speed. s Speed and feedback are in fact two very different temporal forms.

On the technical side of things, this piece is little more than a real-time adaptation of Nasca Octavian Paul’s Paul Stretch algorithm. Basically, it uses FFT to analyze the frequencies of the sound at any single point within the wafeform, and then scrubs through those frequencies indepedently of the temporal constraints of the incoming audio. The result is fully comprehensible speech, no chipmunk effect, and yet stretching on a scale which can go from seconds, to days, and even (if desired) years. As anyone who has heard 9 Beet Stretch knows, the result can be quite beautiful.

While there are some other questions I’m asking as well in this piece, notably the question of consciousness in relation to the speed of computation, I’ll discuss all that tomorrow. This talk will also be reproduced in a publication some time next year. I’ll also try to add some photos to this post once I’ve had a moment to return to the exhibition space with a camera.