Bogotissimo!

I’ll be speaking on the e-poetry 2009 festival this wednesday in Barcelona. My subject will be digital works that make the rather absurd demand that the viewer read their source codes. Philosophy of the Silverbox, a collaboration with Giselle Beiguelman, will be in Bienal Arte Nuevo ‘09 in Mérida, Mexico, opening on the 28th.

Also on e-poetry, there will be a work by Maria Mencía in which I was a technical collaborator. ^^

massive bubble blowing in Manchester.

Title: Dead pixel in Google Earth
Year: 2008
82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

Altermodern is the new YBA. Beware.

(And by the way: declaring that “post-modernism is dead” makes little sense; po-mo was, among other things, when we became skeptical about metanarratives - periodization and the Zeitgeist being clear examples. In other words: post-modernism is when you realise that the avant-garde artist arguing that the current style is dead and must be replaced by the kind of stuff he makes - for such are the times, so dictates History - is just silly.)

meanwhile, there’s this and this.

Tom Moody writes about a recent schism in Digital Art and proposes a new taxonomy: “new media artists” vs “artists with computers.” Here:

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don’t care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. (…) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich’s principles (”new media objects exist as data,” etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

Boy, do we even need to state this? The kids that are making fancy wallpapers and squiggly trippy things in Processing do not belong with the conceptual artists with works about code they can’t write themselves.

By the end of the post:

New media artists scoff at the art world’s notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

Tom Moody is saying: what the coder guys do is not art, but there is no telling them that. His divide is clear: there are “new media artists”, as there are, for example, “circus artists.” Nothing wrong with that. And then there are Artists, capital A, and among those, there are some who happen to be interested in computers right now. High Art and Low Art, all over again - do we really want to start this discussion? I don’t even think the two groups are moving apart - they have always been separate, far apart in spirit, and only meet when they are lumped together by curators and critics who don’t know any better. This is not the case with photography, that, early experimentation aside, branched out in different movements from a fairly singular origin. Lush, superficial spectacle and arid, challenging works you need the catalog to understand do not mix, and there are more, rather than less, people who don’t understand this today.

i made this. you play this. we are enemies., a, er, game-art work, is making the links rounds this week. Suffices to say that net-art pretty much started with dadaist collage, and it’s been a while since then, and I don’t get the what whole new excitement is all about. The oft-copied recipe now includes a ball you can move around, which I guess is why this is cool again.* And: screenshots, newspaper cuts, logos for large Internet corporations, self-reference, text about links: everything feels so dated!

Taking the opportunity to bitch some more: at least we are not seeing another offshoot of the weaker theories of Electronic Fiction. A misguided emphasis on interactivity - and, for some, even on immersion through interactivity - back in more innocent days eventually led theorists, Stuart Moulthrop all the way to Janet Murray, to shift interests from literature to videogames, where the stuff might find some practical use. Losing your scholars to Videogame Theory is quite a punch on the stomach. Poor e-lit.

* of course you could use just the same argument over the jodi link there.

high tech production of La Damnation de Faust in the Metropolitan

Trailer for Bill Viola’s “game-art”* The Night Journey

Transgendered man elected mayor in small Oaklahoma town

* (You see, I say “Digital Art” without a blink, and other such very silly things. But “Video Art” and “Game Art” never ceased to sound funny when I hear them.)

boring.

From The Art Neswpaper: Speculation in young artists is over, and the smaller dealers will be hurt the most

And at the Telegraph:

That said, the top end of the sales, the best supported until now, looked no less immune to the downturn than the lower end, and other million-pound-plus pictures by Bacon, Freud, Richter and Warhol found no buyers.

The global financial crisis may have changed the art market, but for many there could be a positive result. As the art critic Robert Hughes so effectively argued in his television programme The Mona Lisa Curse, the appreciation of art has become too tainted by its association with bloated values.

Art insurers, at least, can now have a happy time readjusting those values - though to what extent might not become apparent until after the more important auctions in New York next month.

always been a fan (L) (via pinktentacle)

“without records” - YCAM Otomo Yoshihide / ENSEMBLES from YCAMArchives on Vimeo.

I bought The Recognitions from a used book store. Sometimes these books are, like advertised, as new; sometimes they contain charming sidenotes and scribbles. Mine had, next to a line of Wyatt Gwyon (in the context of discussing his relationship), one of these interesting sidenotes, written with a yellow-marker pen. It read:

“BULLSHIT!!!”

I took this and other telling signs left by the yellow-marker reader (and by the blue-marker reader, who I suspect was the same person, though there is room for controversy) to speculate what this person was like, and, in a curly, roundabout way, review The Rec elsewhere.

The Recognitions is one of my favourite books, but I’ll admit that it is, how shall we put it, rather uncompromising. This has kept away the ruckus surrounding other writers of long, ambitious novels, but it takes its burden on the reader, and sometimes it is quite a burden. There is, for example, the infamous 80-page long party scene everyone complains about, and I too had a hard time slogging through it (and believe me, I have been to my share of terrible parties). Wyatt Mason, in Harpers Magazine, has decided to share with us one of the notes he made in this scene:

—-

In the Guardian:

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara’s hat trick, the surrealists’ automatic writing or Burroughs’ cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson’s infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?

So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic. Meade himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. I can but concur. Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel. The slow switch to broadband limits its potential audience, e-readers are only adapted to conventional texts - and when was the last time you curled up in bed with a hypertext? In spite of all this, Amerika may well be on to something when he claims that we are witnessing the emergence of a “digitally-processed intermedia art” in which literature and all the other arts are being “remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed”. My feeling is that these “other forms” will have less and less to do with literature. Perhaps e-lit is already dead?

This kinda nailed my concerns about e-lit: sure, the earlier experiments were still clumsy, expanding on modernist strategies or unskillfully recycling the easier recipes of post-modernism. But then the second wave came, and the incipient bud of electronic literature found itself devoured by Media Art folks, realizing text is one among many other possible media. (Which by the way I argue it isn’t: textuality is something more basic and encompassing.)

Of course all literature is, in a sense, meta-linguistic: usually tacitly, in the form of an imperative of honesty. But there is a key difference between textual Media Art, or Media Art about text, and literature; it is difficult to spell out, but it is akin to the distance between Andrei Tarkovsky and Bill Viola. The novelty and the challenges of the new medium steal the scene, and because of this we stray away from engaging with the literary tradition and remembering what’s specific to literature as an art form. In Brazil, we have nigh endured 50 years of “concrete poetry,” which was actually lousy media-art-about-text disguised as literature, and it pretty much ruled universities for a big portion of that time: so trust us, by now most of us can tell the difference. Readers such as the author of the Guardian post can, too, hence their disappointment.

(Need I point this out? I’m all for media art and all that, I even practice the stuff. And the times ask for a revision of what we know about text, and for careful study of what is changing on that front. The ground is moving beneath our feet, and moving ground demands accounting for. But I am also growing weary of this false, throwing baby away with tub-water dilemma. Drawing this distinction is as difficult as it is easy to topple it down; but does anyone honestly think this is not one worth making?)

Philosophy of the Silver Box, by Giselle Beiguelman and yours truly (hi!), is in Vivo Arte.Mov São Paulo from yesterday to mid-november. This work was comissioned by the Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla, where it will also be on display* from October 2nd to January.

* It’s the XXI century. Art replicates.

Electronic Literature in Europe conference in Bergen starts today, and most papers are available online.

Of note: Serge Bouchardon addressing one of my current obsessions (The Aesthetics of Materiality); Katarina Peović Vuković will talk about hypertext, cybertext, networked text, and their political function; Alice Ferrebe will talk of Japan and Electronic Literature; and Maria Engeberg looks for an Aesthetics of Noise, another obsession here, though her focus is on the literary.

okcupid has turned online dating into a huge statistical problem. Mediamatic instead thinks it is art.

I am 23.

It follows from that that a few years ago I was going through adolescence, and then through the sophomoric stage around 18-21. By then I experienced that urge, typical of those two phases, for newness; of being my own contemporary, of keeping a firm grip on the Zeitgeist (preferably by the balls), of being aware and maybe part of what was going on. (This led me - again pretty typically - to flirt with the works of some authors and artists I am terribly embarrassed about today. And in public, sometimes, to boot.)

Not that I don’t still care about these things. But I have realised of late how dated most of my, oh, adolescent/sub-21 Zeitgeist feels, looking from today. Milorad Pavic is still on the crush-list, for example, but as a grandfatherly figure, as someone whose high time was when I was a toddler. But if Paul Auster had published his New York Trilogy today, I would have just met it with a yawn. (Don’t ask me about Foster Wallace; I have no idea what I was thinking.)

I complain that Peter Greenaway has gone senile, from one of cinema’s last hopes to the director of Tulse Luper and the man responsible for that dreary Last Supper installation. But could we suffer The Pillow Book today? Text, body, inscription? The easy gimmicks of his non-narrative cinema promises?

And on the more popular front - which is where the Zeitgeist really is, I would inform you by the time - I find it funny how movies like Lola Rennt or bands like the Flaming Lips are intolerable now. Even the stuff that is still likeable, like Serial Experiments Lain (yeah, anime), again I can’t quite imagine happening today.

I was excited over Takashi Murakami when reports and pictures of the 2001 Los Angeles “Superflat” exhibition spread. Today I roll eyes most impatiently when the eager arts or design student mentions his name.

The list goes on. Sometimes I would feel there was something missing in the whole Zeitgeist thing, some story that was not being told, blame it on the sorry state of culture (it’s easier when you are in the Third World) and feel the need, like Alec Linderbergh, that someone sound a Call-to-Arms - this expectation itself dated, quite High Modernist. The irony is there is not really a Zeitgeist when you are young, it hasn’t quite formed yet, there is only the shadows of older people - who will either give you anxiety of influence or embarrass you shitless as you wise up. To make matters worse, ours was a post-modernist, post-structuralist shadow that makes the whole “Zeitgeist” concept troublesome (though I never really met a bona fide sub-21 po-mo kid. Of course a lot of us have tried.). So, what, it’s been less than a decade, which makes this then versus now talk sound funny. I don’t really know what “is going on right now”, but I think my grip now is tighter than when I was certain I had it mostly figured out.

I am reporting this because I just learned earlier tonight that there is a transhumanist friend-of-friend in my social network. Yes, a transhumanist in 2008, in Brazil, 2-step distance in my social bloody network. I’m baffled.

This is supposed to be a lunar map (click to enlarge), but as for me, I would hang it on the wall and deny the moon had anything to do about it.

(via Strange Maps, pretty cool blog by the by)

Lately I have been thinking about Glitch-Art, an emerging aesthetics inside Digital Art which takes the computational error as its subject. If this is your first contact with the subject, here are two examples to get started:

From Ant Scott’s “pure glitch” phase.

What Bruegel’s Tower of Babel might look like, seen through the Glitch Browser

Browse around, there are many different examples on the web, I’ll stop at two before I am unfair for not including something.

The first comprehensive study of Glitch Art was Iman Moradi’s monograph in 2004; he and Ant Scott have written a book that will be out soon, and which I’m looking forward to. In the 2004 work, Moradi draws many interesting comparisons between Glitch and twentieth century aesthetics such as cubism (with its jarred images that might look to us today as glitchy). One very interesting parallel is with Mondrian - an artist both of straight, computer-like geometry and of intentionally inserted imperfections, affirming the human behind what is often perceived as coldness in his composition. He also points out the established role of noise and distortion in music and video.

I don’t know what Moradi and others have been up to lately (I have learned he is writing his doctorate on the subject right now), but reading his monograph and looking at the glitch art scene I have formulated three interlocking hypotheses:

Number 1: It is perhaps obvious that most computational art tries to conceal the underlying layers of processing and machinery which generate the pieces: from virtual reality and immersive environments, passing through computer graphics and animation all the way to webdesign, any glitch in the transparency of the interface is a flaw to be corrected: the user/the public should be able to forget, at least momentarily, all the technology that is running below the surface, if they are aware of it at all. And even where the focus is in the process itself - algorithmic art, generative art, fractal art - the algorithm is then treated as a pure, mathematical construct, not as a set of instructions for a physical machine. To refer to this, Katherine Hayles has coined the term “Regime of Computation“: a philosophical attitude or sensibility which projects the algorithmic onto the world, thinking of algorithms as pure objects abstracted from the machines to which they serve as instructions of operation, and as possibly existing in nature itself.

Glitch Art reverses this philosophical attitude - I am tempted to use the word “deconstructs” - by bringing to the foreground the layers of processing and physical operations which otherwise remain hidden to the user (and which he is usually invited to ignore). As opposed to the pure, abstracted interface or to the Regime of Computation of mainstream digital art, Glitch Art is an aesthetics of the materiality of informatics: it affirms both the non-human-like operation and the physicality of computing machines.

Number 2: The computational error has been the domain of hackers from the start. Since the early days, knowing how to creatively exploit a flaw in a computer program was one of the most praised traits of hackerdom (see for instance the Story of Mel in the Jargon File). There is a subversiveness in the glitch, at least as metaphor, in that it defies the totality of a system which by its very nature is hostile to individual expression and tends towards constancy, repetition and homogeneity. The praise of the error in the Story of Mel - and in all of hacker culture - is the praise of creativity, of taking roads less traveled. As computational systems, in an analogy with social systems, are procedural by nature - defining steps both for itself and for the user to follow - any path other than the previously traced path is glitch, often literally. Much of the popularity of glitch art resides, I speculate, in that it so poignantly expresses these tensions.

Number 3: I speculate also that Glitch Art perhaps could be grouped inside a broader category of aesthetics, not only of the error but also of the imperfect, the accidental and the incomplete. This is a troublesome claim because these words are not exactly interchangeable, and this aesthetics is more one of affinities we might trace than the continuity of a tradition.

–

Ok.

Moradi makes a number of very good parallels in his monograph, but I want to add a few of my own, some of which might be surprising at first.

Let’s start with the Tea Ceremony.

Kakuzo Okakura writes in The Book of Tea:

The absence of symmetry in Japanese art objects has been often commented on by Western critics. This, also, is a result of a working out through Zennism of Taoist ideals. Confucianism, with its deep-seated idea of dualism, and Northern Buddhism with its worship of a trinity, were in no way opposed to the expression of symmetry. As a matter of fact, if we study the ancient bronzes of China or the religious arts of the Tang dynasty and the Nara period, we shall recognize a constant striving after symmetry. The decoration of our classical interiors was decidedly regular in its arrangement. The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection, however, was different. The dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea-room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. Since Zennism has become the prevailing mode of thought, the art of the extreme Orient has purposefully avoided the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition. Uniformity of design was considered fatal to the freshness of imagination.

Moreover:

In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence. The various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that no colour or design shall be repeated. If you have a living flower, a painting of flowers is not allowable. If you are using a round kettle, the water pitcher should be angular. A cup with a black glaze should not be associated with a tea-caddy of black laquer. In placing a vase of an incense burner on the tokonoma, care should be taken not to put it in the exact centre, lest it divide the space into equal halves. The pillar of the tokonoma should be of a different kind of wood from the other pillars, in order to break any suggestion of monotony in the room.

So in the tea-room, the decoration avoids symmetry by very carefully avoiding anything that could suggest it: it looks wrong and mistake-ridden as the result of an effort one takes years to master fully. This is justified on a reasoning that symmetrical, “perfect” environments communicate monotony, repetition and homongeneity, and ultimately stifle the imagination. True beauty is found instead by freshness of imagination, when it finds room to mentally complete the incomplete. Note this is a free, individual pursuit: it is left to each guest to complete (…) in relation to himself. This is, surprisingly, very close to point number 2.

Engraving by Uzaki Sumikazu which illustrates some of these compositional principles.

Another artist “working out through Zennist ideals” was American composer John Cage. Though extremely relevant here, his considerations on what constitutes “silence” and “noise” merits a separate, more careful discussion. But he was a composer of chance operations - the aesthetics of the accidental - and of the prepared pianos, which, as the video below shows, is more of a piano in error conditions than a “prepared” piano:

Now for another surprise, let’s look into Michelangelo.

On the subject of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, Walter Pater wrote:

[t]his effect Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of the wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de’ Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if the half-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the charm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is Michelangelo’s equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect finish.

One of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures. Click to enlarge.

We have, again, the aesthetics of the incomplete and the imperfect, as a reaction against the totality of a complete work which stifles imagination and drains art of its vitality. But I’d also like to add a second reading to this: this incompleteness works as “the equivalent of colour in sculpture,” communicating liveliness to pure form, because it brings to the forefront the materiality of sculpture. When contemplating a finished, complete statue of a human figure, it is very easy to forget that it was once a rude block of stone (now turned into a gentle block of stone); we take it as pure, abstract form, and remembering it is stone only empowers this triumph of form over conquered matter. Michelangelo instead brings the hidden layers and processes of the work to the foreground: one is forced not only to acknowledge that form is sculpted into stone, but to face it directly, and all that it implies. This clash (or maybe interplay) between materiality and ideality is where the overwhelming sense of vitality of these sculptures comes from. Though of course there are very important differences, compare this to point number one.

Then there is Pollock (which I don’t think I need to illustrate), who interestingly denied any role of the “accidental” in his Action Paintings method. This brings in the question: as glitch art grows, at what point the carefully planned mistake, not radically dissimilar to previous works, starts functioning itself as a system and a language of its own? This has for instance happened to noise in music and video, where it has lost its signifying power and became cliché, no longer processed as disruptive by their audience.

Finally what I think is the most important parallel, the experiments of a previous generation of video-artists with error in video and television; as they examined a new medium - one whose threats of “totality, homogeneity, and repetition” were far more obvious, though not necessarily greater -, it would be easier to catalogue those who used video and television in its “correct” mode than the crowds that “misused” it. Take for instance Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV, TV sets whose images are distorted by magnets:

Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV

We can probably make points number 1 and 2 for most of such works with video and television (point number 3 is complicated), though they obviously had a different context, a simpler one I suspect. And the examples are endless, from Stan Brakhage working on the materiality of film to the exciting emerging technique of Camera Tossing. Though I’m drawing a bunch of comparisons here (and I like talking about most of this stuff, to boot), please don’t take these as equivalencies: there is something very specific about the computational error and glitch art, as to the tea ceremony or to Michelangelo. And to add a fourth hypothesis to the mix, maybe it is in examining these specificities - what the difference is between pointing out the materiality of informatics and the materiality of sculptures, a computer program in error and a television in error - that the really cool stuff’s to be found.

Some of you might remember the images I generated when first learning Processing, and made a (pretty silly, I admit) blunder when writing a Julia fractal as an exercise.

I didn’t make much of it at the time, other than think it a pretty cool serendipity, But as I showed them around to people, some - including my thesis adviser - started pressuring me to look more deeply into it. “There may be science to be done there.” They tempted me. “Or art. Maybe even both.”

“Or maybe neither,” I would reply, playing hard to get.

But eventually I gave in, both to the advice of my elders and to my excitable curiosity. I found Craig Kaplan worked on a similar glitch three years ago, and his approach is very close to what I envisioned I would have to do. Fractality of moiré (which aliasing artifacts are, afterall) has also been covered before.

But well, lots of work to be done on that front. Don’t take the science part too seriously*; this is a blog, I can talk out of my ass if I want to.

It was the symbolism of this glitch that interested me the most. We consider fractals beautiful because of their suggestion of infinity: infinite repetition of patterns as the contour of an infinitely detailed line. On the other hand, the Julia set fractals, like many others of the most famous fractal algorithms, only exist in computers; they don’t model anything in nature. Even their existence as pure mathematical objects is questionable: the algorithm had been around since the nineteenth century, puzzling generations of mathematicians, but it only became “a fractal” once one could plot it in a computer.

So this code is trying to draw a fractal, which stands for infinity, but stumbles upon its own limitations as an instruction set for a physical machine. Allocated memory is limited; sampling implies interpolation; digital can only truly represent integers. It is an environment hostile to infinity whichever way you look at it.

What the code spews out, though, turns out to have a fractal dimension - completely dissimilar and probably unrelated to the fractality of the original image. Probably. (damn, I need to figure the maths out ). Granted, the patterns do not repeat indefinitely, but never did they in the Julia set fractals, either. Moreover, whereas fractals are all about repetition, the glitched images exhibit a long pattern of concentric circles, each always different from the others. It is difference, rather than repetition, that catches the eye. So much goodness.

On deciding how to package this to the public, I have noticed that what the code tries to do, what was written on it and how we may take it versus what it actually does, had a disproportionate importance compared to most other works on a digital medium. So, in a gesture I know will get me the “bogus” tag from quite a few friends, I have decided to call this a code poem. A poem, yup, written in computer code as opposed to text and speech. And here you have it.

* (the art parts you should never take too seriously, as you know.)

Mariana Manhães‘ Liquescer was the only artwork at FILE Installations exhibit I really liked.

Virtually everything exhibited in FILE is interactive, by which they mean the works have sensors, usually haptic or of some sort of computational vision. So when you walk past Mariana Manhães machines and they start yapping and rotating helices, you can only assume it is reacting to your presence. But as you look into these extravagant machines - with rubber and wood parts, and a display showing a jar gradually filling with water, or a glass - you fail to figure out exactly what it is that they are doing, in response to what, and you can’t find the sensors. Eventually you find (or read it in the walls) that the machines have no sensors whatsoever: they are operating and reacting to processes of their own, and they are not interactive, though they are made to look like they are.

In a festival that is allegedly about “electronic language”, this was the only work that actually adressed that core issue: machines work according to a logic of their own, a language that is strange and indifferent to that of humans - and when you realise the machine was /not/ interacting with you, you feel sort like an intruder. But would it have made any difference if in the end of this closed, inscrutable system (inscrutable beyond the technical, obviously, though her machines communicate a strong sense of strangeness even there) you had a sensor, the work inevitably asks.

This reading might be context-dependent - in a festival of sensorless artworks, this illusion of interaction (which most people had, at least at first.*) would probably be subdued, though the work would remain interesting. In FILE, however, its high-pitched, irritating yapping comes out like a hollow, phantasmatic mocking of the shallow promises of human-machine interaction of the other pieces; a machine eerily laughing at the travesty the entire exhibition at that point seems to entail, and our disregard of their utterly distinct nature.

* I’m fond of watching the crowds and their reactions to the works. This is often more fun and more compelling than the works themselves, at times more beautiful, even.

–

On Saturday we went CCTV hacking with !mediengruppe bitnik. I’m one of the kids in this video:

CCTV Sniffing @ Sta. Ifigênia from b2kn on Vimeo.