October 24, 2006
video workshop week.07
Although the sensor project is not due for another week, I have decided to post the progress I've made on my own personal project. I am also again working with Ed and Ariel on a modernization of the old "Pepper's Ghost" Illusion, and with GabeBC on an elegant installation dealing with depression.
My own project centers around the concept of augmenting perceived real-time video with prerecorded video. It's much easier to show the demo I built this week than explain it in prose.
check the photos for what I am envisioning the final project to reflect. I am considering using the body as a possible subject, although my college photo teacher said that using the body as subject is "fuckin overdone." We'll see what happens.
Posted by andrew schneider at 12:51 AM
September 28, 2006
video workshop week.03
thoughts on this weeks reading from Database as a Genre of New Media by Lev Manovich
The Database Logic
Lev Manovich opens with a fairly agreeable series of statements that read as follows: "Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other." There are two ways of looking at this statement. The first, is to agree: traditional narrative cannot live and grow contained within the structure of many new media objects. The second, is to take a realistic, albeit relative, approach and assert that this is presicely the place to where story telling has evolved (or devolved).
"They don't have beginning or end." The stories we tell today are sound bytes and youtube snippets, one-liners, here-say, and sensational headlines in the Post. The "story" today is precisely what Manovich will later go on to define as "database" -- a random compiled assortment of non-related objects. That is how we live our lives now. Either the majority of culture no longer tells stories in the traditional sense, or we need to attend to just what constitutes a story in today's media hyper-everythinged culture. Linear time in the era of the all-pervasive hyperlink is no more.
"...it is also appropriate that we would want to develops poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database." This is what will usher us fully into the database as story era.
The web as an un-editable medium will assure that a story will never have to be complete, it will not (unfortunately) assure that we tell stories in any more engaging ways than they are already being told.
Data and Algoritm
We start to get a little more interesting here, but only a little. Manovich opens this section talking about games and narrative. Whether or not a game has a narrative structure doesn't necessarily impact the engagement with the game, although more often than not, this could be the case. Which is more engaging, Monopoly or Chess? Both call for algorithmic play within the structure of the game, and this is what makes it engaging. Manovich writes, "An algorithm is the key to the game experience in a different sense as well. As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules which operate in the universe constructed by this game. She learns its hidden logic, in short its algorithm." What can this tell us about the success of engagement that is possible with interactive video? What about narrative interactive video? Here we are back to the fundamental question of whether video can be engaging without a narrative, and whether a narrative can provide any sort of real interactivity. I am still rather pessamistic about both of these queries outside of the artistic community.
"The computerization of culture involves the projection of these two fundamental parts of computer software - and of the computer's unique ontology - onto the cultural sphere." I believe this wholeheartedly. The tools we use to hold conversation change the way in which we hold that conversation and are influential enough to even change the content of that conversation.
"Steven Spielberg created the Shoah Foundation which videotaped and then digitized numerous interviews with Holocaust survivors; it would take one person forty years to watch all the recorded material." I often wonder as we fully enter the "authorship" era whether any of us is listening, simply waiting for our turn to talk, or just focusing on putting out our own stuff. This very writing will be "published" to a blog that I am keeping for my Interactive Video Workshop class at ITP. It may never be read by another person for the rest of time. It is doubtful that even I will read it again. Manovich continues, "Jorge Luis Borges's story about a map which was equal in size to the territory it represented became re-written as the story about indexes and the data they index." When I first started my studies here I worried about adding to the "trash heap of history" by writing things that would never be read, producing projects that would never be seen, but as all of my work is archived on-line, and my website maps out the contents on my small partition of the server, at least I can be confident that even if no one ever sees another thing I produce, there is the possibility, however slight, that...i still feel that way.
Database and Narrative
"With new media, the content of the work and the interface become separate. It is therefore possible to create different interfaces to the same material." This is true and may hold some interesting possibilities for future work. It also goes hand in hand with the notion of the never-done piece of art. "New-media objects" as Manovich calls them, are more often than not, infinitely editable.
It may be an interesting project to create some kind of "new-media object" that is not necessarily stagnant, but one which can never be rethought, or changed in any way once it is "completed." A closed loop. An ever *present* time capsule.
"...traditional linear narrative can be seen as a particular case of a hyper-narrative." I agree with Manovich here, however this statement shouldn't be anything new. Hyper-narrative (analogous to hyper-text, as Manovich defines it) will *always* play out into traditional linear narrative. Interactive narrative can rarely rise above the level of a souped-up "choose your own adventure" story. In fact I am hard pressed to think of any examples as of this writing. If we think of a narrative as hypertext and halfway through the second chapter we link off tangentially to find our just what the historical lay-out of Narnia is, the narrative degrades into either exposition or database.
Manovich delves into some fairly subjective territory when he asserts what does and what does not constitute narrative, "Another erroneous assumption frequently made is that by creating her own path (i.e., choosing the records from a database in a particular order) the user constructs her own unique narrative. However, if the user simply accesses different elements, one after another, in a usually random order, there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative at all." I suppose there is also no reason to assume that these elements will not form a narrative then. Manovich goes on to give the confused impression that a database is always a database and sometimes a narrative, which would be obviously more engaging than choosing "different elements, one after another, in a usually random order," which constitutes nothing more than just a database. He is then startled that "narratives - still exist in new media." Of course we are trying to squeeze these old forms into new media. It is what engages us. Too bad it doesn't seem to work.
Posted by andrew schneider at 11:07 AM
September 20, 2006
video workshop week.02
thoughts on this weeks reading from Film Art Phenomena, by Nicky Hamlyn
II Interactivity
"Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level."
Sure seeing is decisive, as in it produces a definite result in one's mind, but as far as placing the maker and the veiwer on the same level, i'm not sure that is any more true than saying, "reading is a decisive act, it places the reader and the writer on the same level," or, "hearing is a decisive act, it places the hearer and the speaker on the same level." They say that seeing is beleiving, but this is perhaps no more true than hearing, reading, or dreaming.
On "interactive cultural products:" I suppose this is what makes for good interaction, that the user is able to be a creative as possible, while still being engaged. After all, total creativity, or authorial control in an interaction can be much less engaging than assisted creativity. Especially if the user is not especially creatively inclined or talented. The goal is to make the user look good.
As in the severed heads emample, there may exist a prerequisite of context whereby the user's engagement is enganced because they know they are meant to be engaged, i.e. they have come to the gallery to see this space. Whether or not this interaction and the things that can be gained from it are more or less than those things that can be gained from a discreet interaction whereby the 'spectator' may or may not realize they are meant to be engaged.
Hamlyn writes, "...this interactivity is is acheived at the cost of the insight and understanding achieved through contemplation." Perhaps, but much insight can occur with "static art" after the 'spectator' leaves the gallery. Much 'static' art also works on a very visceral level.
Hamlyn continues, "If anything, the activity of interaction renders contemplative consideration of what one has done impossible." Impossible? I'm not so sure about this. I tend to relise more profound things about systems when I am involved within them, when I experience them, as well as taking an objective stance. I do however agree with the possibility that "being able to rearrange elements within a work in any way that one wants, one is effectively talks to one self," but that does not necessitate that meaning "drain away." Comparing as Hamlyn does interactivity to traditional "non-interactive" painting he states, "...the rectangular form of a painting can seem limiting and arbitrary...until we realise that most good paintings use those rectilinear boundaries as compositional boundaries to energise and focus the picture." I am interested in how this notion then translated to the letterbox of film and video. Veiwing a film in a theatre is certainly a different experience than viewing that same film at home on your television or even on your iPod while riding the train. And film is certainly a different medium than television. I will argue however that the rectilinear form of film and television is be limiting and arbitrary, simply because it must conform to the absolute homogeny of the television and film aspect ratio. With a few exception such as IMAX, and some projection techniques, the compositional nature of television's 4:3 aspect ration is a direct result of how we have always made TV's. This is beginning to change with the gradual increase in the 16:9 aspect ratio, but I would argue that in terms of compositional innovation and experimentation on a widespread basis, television is era's behind painting. Television's constraints, in this way, do not become "(inter)active elements in the compostition" in the same way as Hamlyn thinks of them as doing so for painting.
"The spectator is not wholly absorbed, to the point of self-forgetting...but becomes a tentative self-conscious intervener..." This is why interactive art is very hard. And yes, not all interactive art needs to be narrative, in fact none of it does, but as we are thinking about interactive art within the context of video, narration seems hard for me to avoid in some way, even if it is expressionistic. Empathy causes self-forgetting. There is no empathy without connection. Narration is the easiest form of connection. Everyone loves a good story.
In "Two Sides to Every Story," Hamlyn goes on to describe Michael Snow's film of the same name in which the same story is essentially told in two different ways and projected back to back so that a viewer is unable to view both simultaneously. This inevitably took place in a gallery. The infrastructure of movie theatre obviously dictate exclusion for this kind of content, and so it refrains from the mainstream and becomes "art" in a gallery. What if this weren't the case? I can almost picture Snow knowing his film would never be screened in a conventional theatre to large audiences and so that affects the working content. But what if a mainstream film could work in this way. You have to see the movie twice. Once on one side, once on the other. Less interactive? More engaging? Hamlyn goes on to state, "...we could never, in principal, experience all of it. The most we cojld ever experience would be less than half of a version of a whole thing." I would add to that, "at one time," and also say that while this may be true, it seems that the piece is giving us double the experience to begin with.
Release of tension.
This may be the single most important element in entertainment, and one might argue engagement. A satisfying experience, tension release.
The piece is fucking called "ARBITRARY LOGIC." The idea that it "challenges this drive" of mastery and completion of a system in any active way is in the mind of the Hamlyn, as I see it.
Thoughts about Jensen's 'Interactive Room 12':
If no one know's you're doing conceptual art, the art can't mean anything. Art does not exist without an audience. In speaking about 'Interactive Room 12' Jensen states, "only very few members of the audience even knew they were interacting." Yes, in an interactive work of art, change is somehow initiated by the viewer. But for it to be meaningful art, *someone* has to know about it. If it's the viewers of the viewers, that's still valid. In this piece, because the feedback from the interaction is so gradual and subtle it fails to work. It falls below the case-specific threshold of knowledge of self-awareness of a viewer within a work of art. To negate this is to claim also that *all* art is interactive. My presence, by body heat, breath and vibration of movement all affect the object of art in some miniscule way. Is this interactivity? In the simplest example, If I push a button labled "shut off in 3,000 years" and in 3,000 years, a light above an "interactive painting" shuts off, is this interactivity, or does interactivity require the user to know and experience tangible evidence in some way of the change they have affected on a thing?
If art happens in a forrest sort of thing...
It seems that Hamlyn was with us the whole time when he states of both video games *and* much interactive art, "what has the participant really gained?" This, he argues is due to the fact that the viewer, and the subject, essentially remain unchanged.
This feels like this is all to say something, to come to some sort of conclusion or argument on interactive art, but I will refrain from doing so, as I don't see it in any way valid.
Posted by andrew schneider at 07:38 PM
video workshop week.01
here we go.
Posted by andrew schneider at 07:30 PM