Bogotissimo!

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.

1969 video on Internet shopping and banking, home surveillance cameras and stuff. But, as usual with retrotech, they missed women’s lib.

Web Zen covers vintage.

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)

madiju at flickr

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.

Lately these days I have been reminiscing about what science fairs were like when I was in school. It worked like this: each project was associated with up to three class subjects, and the participants received extra marks on their grades in those. So kids gathered around and surveyed what subjects they most desperately needed extra marks on. “Ok, so we need a project about Mathematics, Biology… and Portuguese Grammar.” Or, say, “Chemistry, Geography, and English”. Or, I don’t know, “Physics, Informatics, and the Arts.”

Needless to say this process also yielded a list of the three classes the group collectively liked the least and cared the least about. But oh, not everybody was desperately looking for grades. Groups often managed to recruit a geek or two, who did the science fair thing for the pleasure of it, and who usually wanted to do something very scientific and mathy. And sometimes nerds would gather together in groups that really didn’t care about grades, and make projects about, oh, the Vampire: the Masquerade role playing game.

(No, I never participated in any of this. I was lazy, didn’t work well in groups, and had a keen sense of pointless.)

Most of the projects proposed an unfeasible challenge: they had to coordinate topics that were very difficult to associate in themselves, and which, except for the occasional nerd who knew the science part, they didn’t really like or know about. So most projects covered one or two of the classes on the list moderately well, and the remainder had to be weaseled through: “Ok, this is an interesting project, but what the Mercosur trade agreement has to do with Chemistry exactly?” “Ok, I see the Physics and the Informatics, but where is Art?” The half-arsed, absurd explanations were the best part of the whole event, and it was a good idea to follow some of the teachers around just to hear them.

But then again, teachers were very liberal and condescending with the explanations. They didn’t take these projects seriously - who did? - and wouldn’t deny the kids their one or two extra marks for the effort. And the students of course caught on to this real quick, and the weaseling became de rigueur. And that’s what a “Science Fair” scenario means to me: a place you don’t even fake it that you are faking it that your project has anything to do with Geography, Chemistry, or Art.

On an invitation by Cine Falcatrua (no link?), I’ve been messing around with moiré patterns.

The four very simple geometric patterns introduced in the beginning of the video, when displayed together, create new visual patterns. Some of the possible combinations are illustrated next.

They are going to do stuff with this. As for me, I’m using the “artsy stuff” tag on myself. (y)