abstractmachine

• Workshop : Plot à la montagne
• Location : Pyrenees Aix-en-Provence, France
• Artists : Fabrice Gallis, Guillaume Stagnaro, Jean + Cristofol, Douglas Edric Stanley
• Dates : 14 – 18 April, 2008

This week Plot was supposed to be in the Pyrenées — riding rustic trains, going for walks in the mountains, playing with accelerometers and GPS, and watching The Sound of Music, Moloch and other mountain movies — but through various accidents we ended up transporting the entire mountain to Aix-en-Provence.

I’m in the middle of the second of two busy weeks. Last week France Cadet organized an excellent list of speakers for De l’objet de laboratoire au sujet social, and this week we’re working with Christian Graff whom she invited for a week-long workshop on electric fish. Régine Débatty has been posting her notes on we-make-money-not-art over the last few days and should give you a good idea of the highlights of last week (cf. Jens Hauser, Eduardo Kac). We’re only two days into the week-long workshop, so I can’t tell you much about it, but we’ve been working with Mormyridae, using an interface to listen into their rhythmic Electroreception. If you read my post a few months back on Echolocation you should see the interest this workshop had for us.

But the most exciting part for me has been over the last hour based on discussions we began yesterday with Christian and the members of Plot who are along for the ride (cf. « Mormyre » at Plotsème). As it turns out, all of the plot-ian concepts (as we call them here) from last year (« imprévu », « aléatoire », « lenteur », etc.) are perfectly aligned with a lot of the day-to-day theoretical discoveries of Christian’s research; and the conclusions and models he currently works with are quite brilliant for us and have just opened up some new territories. And on the question of physicalization, which I am working with more specifically through this blog and my thesis research, I’m equally seeing stars with everything Christian is showing us from his research — especially from the theoretical models he’s constructed only recently.

The basic question is randomness in relation to patterned activity, and what Christian calls « n’importe quoi ». We just spent ten minutes talking about the translation of « n’importe quoi » which he translated to « nonsense! » (I suggested he add the imperative to make it work), and which I prefer to translate as « WTF », « What the fuck »; hence creating a nice corollary with « n’importe comment » which would translate pretty well to « just fuck around » (another term we use a lot in the atelier). Christian’s problem is the biological as well as ethological study of electric fish, and therefore a question of behavior, environment and communication through the perspective of evolution (predation, reproduction, etc). In relation to communication (and keeping in mind all the other factors), the desire would be to see the mormyridae as great communicators, as well as electrolocators. But as it turns out, these fish use their significant cerebral power not to communicate with one another, but instead to create complex random patterns that allow them not only to avoid communicating with one another (i.e. recognition for the sole purpose of distinction) but also to act as camouflage within the complex riverbed for predators that are equally receptive to their electrical pulses. They generate amazingly irregular patterns, and as Christian has just suggested, « irregularity requires significant cerebral activity ». So where the desire would have originally been to see their significant brain size (in relation to their body) as a hint of great communicative abilities (think dolphins), this might turn out to be pure anthropomorphism and instead could lead us in the opposite direction: rendering the mormyr’s signal indistinguishable from the complex rhythms of the riverbed.

As Jean Cristofol has just reminded us, this takes us directly back to the theories of information. Indeed, the calculations Christian uses are precisely those of entropy.

The hilarious idea then becomes number generation via biological phenomena, similar to what I’ve spoken about in the past (cf. Quantum Randomizer, Snowy Tree Cricket, etc). This is actually already a reality in the LOEIL laboratory where we’re working: Jean-Pierre Mandon hacked a Linksys router into a Linux-server that sends the Mormyr rhythms to us over UDP. Then Guillaume Stagnaro used the Hypermedia UDP Library Stéphane Cousot and I built last year to grab these UDP feeds through Processing and by the end of the first day we had this ridiculous little sketch (cf. Happy Code Farm) animating a silly little fish using the data feed. The idea is to make this a permanent feed (data and audio) which could then be fed into the Locus Sonus streams. So basically we’ve built something equivalent to what I suggested was possible a few months back concerning the Snowy Tree Cricket.

A final note — more of a footnote for future discussions: Jean Cristofol has been using the concept of an expanded body, seeing the entire electrical field in relation to proprioception, which is not to be understood in the Macluhan sense of an extended nervous system through technology. For example, Christian used the term « transparency » to describe the fish’s ability to see internal organs thanks to the electrical spatialization, and the entire space analyzed by the electrolocation as transparent.

My colleague France Cadet has organized an excellent lineup for a week of talks beginning tomorrow at the Aix-en-Provence Art School and ending Thursday at Seconde Nature. It is entitled De l’objet de laboratoire au sujet social, which roughly translates as « From the Laboratory Object to the Social Subject ». In other words, the school will finally be returning to themes introduced by Louis Bec over twenty years ago when it instigated its art & technology program.

The speakers are Régine Debatty, Jean Cristofol, Jens Hauser, Beatriz Da Costa, France Cadet, Dominque Lestel, Eduardo Kac, Claude Gudin.

On Friday, we will meet and begin discussing with Christian Graff about his workshop on electric fish, to be held throughout the following week. This workshop was also organized by France Cadet, but she has invited plot to participate, so I will be at the school throughout next week as well.

Here is the complete list of speakers/subjects (in French).

Lundi 5 Novembre

• 9H30: France Cadet. Présentation du déroulement de la semaine thématique et du stage Mormyrophone®
• 10H : Régine Debatty : “Future Body”. Sa présentation abordera le corps tel qu’on le modifie déjà depuis des siècles, la manière dont les nano et biotech pourraient nous permettre d’aller encore plus loin (sera-t-on toujours des être humain? des uper humains? etc.) et les conséquences socio, cultu et éthiques de ce futur plutôt proche. avec exemples de travaux d’artistes et designers commentant le sujet.
• 14H : “Mon oncle d’Amérique”. Film d’Alain Resnais (1980). Le professeur Laborit part de l’exemple de trois destinées pour illustrer ses théories scientifiques sur le comportement humain.
• 16H : Jean Cristofol : “Comportement, code et contrôle”
• 17H30 : Radio Grenouille. Interviews et enregistrements pour diffusions ultérieures

Mardi 6 Novembre

• 10H : Jens Hauser. “Disembodied Cuisine“. Installation documentaire & Explication performative relatives aux steaks de grenouille du Tissue Culture & Art Project. Deux personnes, portent une blouse de laborantin, avec une installation sur une table à mis chemin entre la cuisine et le labo. Elles cuisinnte de la grenouille suivant la recette végétarienne de Peter Singer. La grenouille est censée être du steak de grenouille produit en labo et cultivé en boite de Pétri en référence au travail du groupe d’artistes australiens The Tissue Culture & Art Project. Le public pénètre donc dans cet espace et une discussion avec Jens Hauser s’engage et il commence à évoquer des textes qui ont été publiés à ce sujet, il fait référence à des articles de presse etc… pour aboutir à ses réflexions personnelles et autres préoccupations éthiques et philosophiques. La conférence s’installe donc comme ceci sous une forme moins traditionnelle et un peu plus déroutante et séduisante.
• 14H30 : Jens Hauser. “Sk-Interfaces“. Présentation de l’exposition dont Jens Hauser est le curator à l’occasion de la Capitale Culturelle Européenne 2008, Liverpool
• 17H30 : Beatriz Da Costa & Douglas Edric Stanley. Vidéo-conférence.
• 17H30 : Radio Grenouille. Interviews et enregistrements pour diffusions ultérieures

Mercredi 7 Novembre

• 9H30 : France Cadet. Présentation de son travail autour des robots chiens, de la résidence au BRL (Bristol robotics Lab), et des robots inspirés du vivant qui y sont développés (Ecobot I, II et III, robots qui mangent du sucre, des fruits avariés ou des mouches).
• Bristol Robotics Lab
• Bristol Robotics Lab
• 11H : “Fast, Cheap and out of control“. Documentaire d’Errol Morris (1997). Ce documentaire suit quatre personnages excentriques qui éprouvent une passion pour les animaux ou leurs représentations symboliques : un roboticien du MIT (Rodney Brooks), un scientifique spécialiste des rats-taupes, un dresseur d’animaux sauvages de cirque et un jardinier topiaire qui taille d’immenses animaux dans des buissons.
• 14 H : Dominque Lestel: “Enjeux des convergences homme/animal/machine au 21e siècle”
• 17H30 : Radio Grenouille. Interviews et enregistrements pour diffusions ultérieures

Jeudi 8 Novembre

• 9H00 : Navette Eole d’Art à Fondation Vasarely
• 9H30 : Eduardo Kac. Présentation de son travail + future expo & publication : à définir.
• 14H30 : Navette Eole d’Art à Fondation Vasarely
• 15H : Claude Gudin : Présentation rapide de son parcours et de ses recherches
• 15H30 : Table Ronde autour du travail d’Eduardo Kac; Participants : Eduardo Kac, Claude Gudin, Dominque Lestel; Modérateur: Jean Cristofol
• 17H30 : Radio Grenouille. Interviews et enregistrements pour diffusions ultérieures

Vendredi 9 Novembre

• 9H : Christian Graff. Stage Momyrophone® Présentation et début du stage Momyrophone®. Avec la participation de France Cadet et Jean-Pierre Mandon. Ce stage se propose d’Interfacer des signaux de poissons à faibles décharges électriques : les Mormyres.
• 14H : suite stage Momyrophone®
• 17H30 : Radio Grenouille. Interviews et enregistrements pour diffusions ultérieures

Semaines thématiques

Trois semaines thématiques de culture générale sont organisées chaque année à l’Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-provence.

Il ne s’agit pas de colloques qui prétendraient faire le point de l’actualité sur une question, réunir des meilleurs spécialistes, etc.. , mais d’une série d’interventions destinées à soulever le débat, croiser des points de vue, permettre un moment d’information et d’échanges (que nous souhaiterions les plus libres possible) autour d’une question.

Ces semaines sont en général conçues en liaison avec des activités pédagogiques initiées dans l’école, comme un contre point, un moment d’élargissement d’une réflexion, un moment de rencontre aussi.

Elle ne sont donc pas seulement destinées aux étudiants qui participent à ces activités, ou qui sont particulièrement concernés par les questions abordées, mais à tous les étudiants, de la première à la cinquième année, comme un lieu permettant l’élargissement à tous de leurs expériences et de leurs préoccupations.

Thanks to the dozen or so beta testers that have been playing around with the abstractmachine:synchronizer over the past few days, I’ve been able to spot a few bugs, most of them server-side and therefore requiring no client-side updates. However, this round of beta tests left me somewhat frustrated: while I could see, via server activity, how many people were using the service, none of the users (or « synchronizers ») had any idea how many other people were connected to their browser.

So I added a counter to let users know how many other co-synchronizers are online.

It is amazing that I forgot this little detail. Back when I started the abstractmachine project, I was all over this idea and it was almost rule no.1 during the many workshops I gave on networked objects: make the network visible, tangeable. If you can’t feel the networkedness of the network, what’s the point? If you can’t see at least a number on how many people are participating, it’s just surveillance. For your system to become shared, you need some sort of feedback on the scale of your collective interaction. One-on-one is cool, as long as that other person has some context, otherwise it’s just a random passerby. There are of course exceptions to this « rule », but those exceptions are mostly dependant on the project itself.

Unfortunately, this update will require a synchronizer update, but this is all automatic via Firefox’s update system.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, plot is fueled by its own internal folie. And yet we are perfectly serious about this folie, case in point our new pop song « L’ôde au lent » (cf. attached mp3). For some reason, I have a strange feeling that we will be joining Zlad! for the honor of this year’s Eurovision-reject, but at least our song has the originality of combining a manifesto on slow real-time machines with Bataille’s infamous quote on sex: « l’acte sexuel est dans le temps ce que le tigre est dans l’espace » (de La part maudite, 1949). Hey, you need a catchy chorus, right?

I actually had very little to do with this song other than (pitiful) backing vocals. Although it was recorded on the final day of the three-day « Samedi Plot » (i.e. « Plot Saturday »), it was actually written on a beautiful jetty on the Mediterranian two days before. Keeping with tradition, this year’s Saturday Plot took three days to complete (Wednesday + Thursday + Friday), and I was only able to participate in the final day which took place at the amazing artist’s collective Cap15 in Marseille. This was unfortunate, as the participating plotters created an impressive roster of inventions, interventions, itineraries (and pop songs) throughout the entire 3-day Plot Saturday.

Eddy Godeberge and Fabrice Gallis, for example, were inspired by Bataille’s notion of expenditure and prototyped several interesting mechanisms for generating power via lost energy: pistons that expand when frozen, a contraption for generating electricity from the lateral movements of a car going bumpity-bump on a country road (enough at least to play an mp3 walkman), circuits that open and close by collecting rainfall… One of the ideas here being that slow real-time systems will eventually be designed and built using organic materials, rather than silicon and copper. Algorithmic machines built with plants, waterflow, moss, geological stratatification, but also children running in a parc, soccer matches, workers readjusting their seats during a boring meeting, sexual acts of various sorts, etc.

In continuation with Plot explorations in (dis/continuous) space and time, we beta-tested my follow-up to the abstractmachine:crpyt; this time a plug-in for Firefox I’m finishing up right now entitled the abstractmachine:synchronizer. It‘s already working pretty well, and I’ll post more here when I’m finished with the beta testing period. Some of the plotters asked me how to program for Firefox; here’s (in my opinion) the best place to start: Firefox Toolbar Tutorial from Born Geek.

We were also joined (for Saturday Plot song + dance) by Wolf Ka (i.e. res_publica) who came down from Paris for a few days to visit the Atelier Hypermédia and work on his next project. More on Wolf later when he’s done, but you can begin by checking out this beautiful danse performance he choregraphed with lab_au entitled « man in (e)space » (photos + movie).

And finally, Caroline Duchatelet showed us a series of architectural lightworks that are spatially and temporally just at the edge of imperception. For this work, she designed a lighting system with Fabrice and Guillaume which allows her to modulate flourescent tubes over infinitely prolonged periods.

You can find more mp3′s over at the Samedi Plot entry on http://www.plotseme.net. For example, these recordings (ex: les petites têtes, fantomas, naine blanche, and more…) from Blaise Cendrars which (thanks to a PureData patch) called us up periodically on our cellphones. Or you can listen to Fabrice describing a trip plotters took on the first day of Saturday along the Medditerranian coast via the Petit train de la côte bleu (highly recommended, the train-ride itself that is, but also hanging out with Fabrice on a regional mediteranian train).

We just finished another day of plot, probably a Plot-Wednesday, or a Plot-Thursday, but I’m not keeping score. As usual, there were some pretty crazy ideas thrown around, and Fabrice has continued developing (and explaining to us) his system for measuring slowness as something separate from (or perhaps extracted from) speed. His idea revolves around a measure called the chouya — it‘s a joyous little theory and I actually found that by the end of the morning Nicolas and I were able to actually use it to start measuring slowness — although Fabrice kept telling us that we still hadn’t gotten it 100% right. Ho hum. I also liked his idea of slowness as a temporal « mass », although that idea is somewhat imcompatible as far as I can tell with his far more pragmatic calculations of the chouya.

Anyway, since we talked about it in Plot, I wanted to post this link to the blind american teenager (Benjamin) who can spatially model via echolocation, i.e. the same clicking noises that dolphin use, or the radar system that bats use to move through caves, etc.

(Actually that second video is going to make my students laugh. Yep, that’s right, american television really is that lame).

I had mentioned this amazing fellow in relation to the idea of projecting spatial dimensions beyond those you can directly experience. We were laughing at how pictures of my webchat for the last Plot (Plot-Tuesday, I guess that would be) made me look like the General Zod in the 2D-prison from Superman 2. This briefly lead us to a discussion of flatland, and the amazing section of The Elegant Universe where Brian Greene explains multiple dimensions from the point of view of an ant crawling on a wire. Although for me, I was actually constructing an entire space that completed their space based on the few inputs I had (stereo sound mostly, as the image was horrible); this construction was merely speculative though, and I didn’t have the advantage, nor experience of echolocation for reconstructing that space.

Of course, the example of a webchat or a telephone call is not entirely analogue with the echolocation wizard, because he is interacting spatially from within that space. Although the means he uses (tongue+ears) are uncommon, they are not illogical or maladapted to that space. In fact, sound is probably a more continuous medium and perfect for fully modelling a volume, as opposed to vision which is fast, but flawed. These ideas of a continuous space in comparison to a discontinuous space, are also somewhat along the lines of Louis Bec’s work with electric fish (cf. Waiting for Turning).

Our plot research group is currently high up in the clean air of the Plateau de Valensole in the Alpes of Haute Provence. Unfortunately, I’m stuck here at home writing and couldn’t free myself anymore from the schedule I’d already set for myself. So I’ll be participating à distance tomorrow via video conference from home. Seems I’m doing a lot of these sort of things recently, but of course for Plot it will be far more intimate than usual. In fact, I’m relishing the idea of teaching in the comfort of my pyjamas and a nice cup of hot tea — I think any teacher as invested as I am can appreciate the configuration. In fact, finding both temporally and spatially a human scale for real-time systems, is one of the implicit goals of plot, so we see no contradiction between serious research and a nice cup of hot tea.

One of the propositions that Fabrice Gallis made for this session was working specifically on machines that construct their own temporality, for example looking at a crypt as a temporal machine in the sense that it constructs it’s own specific durée, and even in this sense encloses that temporality within itself (I wonder what seepages might mean from such a point of view). One of the central propositions of Plot is that real-time is not an acceleration, but instead a temporal form, a sort of time-machine, if you will, generating its own emergeant temporality, but at multiple speeds, and not some ideal vector of absolute velocity. Although it’s been years since I studied with the infamous Jacques Derrida — and consider myself long since out of touch — I originally wondered if I shouldn’t crack open his Mal d’archive and see how it compares to Fabrice’s proposition. Now that I have, I regret it. One of Derrida’s gestures in Mal d’archive is to return to the originary scene of the archive where he finds a sort of ontological embalming that guarentees the dissapearance of the conserved object by its repetition, but also promises through this hypomnemic (and therefore technological) act of repetition a sort of future promise (a sort of impossible possibility). In probably the most indicative passage, he associates the archive with the historical arkhé, i.e. the archive as not only as a conservation of an origin, but also a commandement to conservation. I have no idea what to think of all this. All this talk of the Derridean concept of « promise » is so foreign, I think, to what we’re getting at here — ours is above all a Bergsonian concept of the temporal machine (there, I’ve said it). Again, it’s an affirmative machine, although in Derrida’s pseudo-romantic messianic vocabulary, he does make some interresting comments in a hilarious section speculating on what Freud’s method might have looked like if constructed atop the logics of AT&T and email. Here’s a translation I found online of this section which is closest to what Fabrice is proposing, « the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media. » Hmmm. Qu‘en penser ? Sure, okay, whatever — electronic media reaffirms to what extent hypomnema is a fundamental trait of our experience of (our) originality, and as such conditions our future (or its « possibility »). But Fabrice’s suggestion of a crypt goes far beyond Derrida’s typically not-this, not-that temporal structure, and allows us to actually construct temporal artefacts and systems. Hey, a crypt is a machine, it generates its own temporality. Easy enougj.

— Huh? Whazzahellwuzalldat for?

— Uhhhh, maybe it was just a long-winded way of saying: forget what I said at the last Plot…

Ok, so I was feeling a little inspired today, and sort of strung up a pretty diverse plate of references, and along with those from the students and my collegues it was a pretty fun mix. For those that were present, here are at least the few I was able to remember (we went very fast, despite our obsession with slowness ;-). This is a mix of everyone’s links, I can’t remember who brought what to the conversation: Slow Real-Time Systems, Kansas Flatter Than a Pancake, Computer Emotivity, The Room of Desires, Sowana, Eve Future, L’homme machine, John Von Neumann vs. Alan Turing (cf. Alan Turing with breasts), The Turing Test, Eric Cartman, Richard Dawkins, and the Wii, The Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster, The God Delusion, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephan Wolfram, Richard Dawkins & Memes, Probabalistic Robotics, Rube Goldberg Machines, Diet Coke & Mentos, Nucleation, Der Lauf der Dinge, Honda’s Fischli & Weiss rip-off, Widget Workshop vs . Max/MSP, I (heart) Huckabees, Heidegger – The Question Concerning Technology, Prédiction, variation, imprévu, Plotsème, …

There was a lot more, but that’s mostly what we talked about during the morning session.