Data Rep – The Greatest Films of All Time (according to The Guardian)
The Guardian’s data set for “The Greatest Films of all Time” was immediately interesting to me, both because of my love of film, and because of my skepticism when it comes to such arbitrary lists.
The data set contains a number of characteristics and I had to be selective from the on start. I picked the ones I thought would provide the most incite. In the first visualization, I focused on 1 genre (the data set itself is divided this way: one .csv per genre), the films’ country of production and its release date. I had already decided to discard directors’ and actors’ names, as well as the ranking within that category (1-25). The titles of the films can be revealed upon hovering on a dot/film and the the dot is circled in yellow if the film has received one or more Oscars.
The Second visualization is very similar to the first, but I wanted to put all the different genres into one graph to get a better sense of the relationship between countries, genres and eras.
The individual genre spreadsheets hinted at the fact that American films were prominently featured but this became overwhelmingly apparent in the second visualization. I also found it rather telling that the only movies considered as “great comedies” are english speaking (UK or USA). Finally, it seems like the past 2 decades have seen the rise of a more “global” selection – with countries like Spain, Denmark, Taiwan and Korea getting some recognition.
Finally I wanted to experiment with aesthetic choices that echoed the specificities of film. The “credits” format felt like it may lend itself well to list-like information. I had to be yet a little more selective about the relationships I wanted to bring into focus. This iteration isn’t as thorough as the second (the countries with less than 2 entries are not represented and the genre categorization overwrites the year). This version could still be improved a lot (it could be interesting to have a soundtrack made out of all excerpts of all the listed films and there might be other ways of listing as to preserve the overall timeline)…
Colombus Park is filled with organized movement: Tai-chi, chess and card games, performed by individuals or groups. The Northern section of the space is also a popular gathering area for the seniors-chinese immigrants of the surrounding Chinatown. To an untrained eye, the codified motions comprising tai-chi or chess may seem completely arbitrary or even absurd, but from the point of view of these practices’ connoisseurs, they are intricate and eminently deliberate. Similarly, the vibrant but insular community life taking place in Colombus Park can shift from alienating to comforting according to one’s social standpoint.
The kinetic installation in the center of the park’s pavilion will echo this tenuous shift between understanding and confusion, outsider and insider. At first glance, it will seem like an array of disparate and uncoordinated objects/shapes. However, a singular spot will reveal an organized circular pattern slowly and elegantly looping from one state to the next. The viewer must thus engage with the piece by changing his perspective, engaging his own body in a dialogue with the structure’s movement.
http://vimeo.com/31550838
Three years ago, I attended two consecutive lectures at the New Museum, which resonate with me to this day. One was given by Rirkrit Tiravanija, the other by Paul Chan about his recent and ongoing project “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans”… The reason I am evading the content of Tiravanija’s talk is that it was nebulous if not inexistent. He sat behind a desk on the stage, in front of a room filled to capacity , and opened a paperback book. Ensued a 45 minute-long, monotone and stuttered reading, followed by a few slides about “The Land Foundation” (the art residency which the artist was in some way or other involved with), and finally an invitation to all gather for a drink at the museum’s sky room. The text by Chaloui Kaewkong may have been tied to “The Land’s” mission statement – but its delivery was so utterly disengaging, that it might have as well been rendered in its original Thai version. Not only did the “poster boy” for “Relational Aesthetic” fail at connecting with that evening’s audience, he also missed an opportunity to establish a relation (or at least an interest) between that group and “The Land’s” community. I did not attend the post-lecture festivities, I may have missed the highlight of the evening – perhaps Tiravanija’s eloquence was revealed then. But even if it had, the preceding alienation exposed the self-serving and superficial nature of Relational Aesthetics’ criteria. According to Bourriaud these works should be judged on the “quality” of the democratic relations they foster. However the questions on what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why are rarely addressed (Claire Bishop’s essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetic” delves into these problematic aspects brilliantly). If Tiravanija’s point that night was that drinking wine at the top of the New Museum, with curators, students, artists and board members of the instititution was more interesting than a patronizing lecture, his notion of “democratic relations” is one I have no interest in engaging in.
In contrast, Paul Chan’s talk the following week was well-structured, compellingly documented and passionately delivered. He managed to convey that an art practice can engage and even benefit a community outside of the art world. “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans” is one of the rare projects that walks the line between aesthetic/conceptual discourse and social practice in an elegant and convincing way.
Many artists in Bourriaud’s canon have produced inspiring work (Pierre Huyghe is one of my favorite, all categories included), and I wouldn’t be surprised if Paul Chan had been influenced by many of them. But Bourriaud’s desire to expand from the socially-engaged practices of the 60s and 70s, may have led him to produce a realm too broad in theory and too narrow in practice.
Response to Art of the Archive‘s fourth series or readings:
- Clay Shirky, ‘Public, Private and the Collapse of the Personal’
- Christian Boltanski, “Research and Presentation of All that Remains of My Childhood”
- Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”
- Bruno Latour, “Beware, Your Imagination Leaves Digital Traces.”
On the surface, Warhol and Boltanski may appear to take categorically divergent paths to personal archiving – the first advocating a distancing (both physical and psychological) from one’s “dump”; the latter willing to spend one’s life gathering “traces” from one’s past and present. However, their drastic endeavors are both motivated by the same desire/fear – im/mortality. The classification/arrangement is prominent in both texts – more conceptually in Boltanski’s (“searching, studying, classifying…”); more formally in Warhol’s (monthly, color-coded boxes). While their relationship to the equation archive + present differs, they both acknowledge the importance of the document’s future. The impulse to collect/arrange is the only way of evading death for the Frenchman, born in 1944, the only way to live for the Pennsylvania native. Perhaps there is a cultural paradigm at play – the old-world (+post-WWII) obsession with the past vs. the new-world’s compulsion to innovate. But the human mind’s awareness of one’s own mortality surpasses these socio-geographical properties. Perhaps Shirky and Latour’s essays should be read with that in mind: The only way for our technologically driven societies to reclaim personal archives is to make active, conscious decisions about collecting/preserving – whether this act consists in rigorously selecting and analyzing documents that matter to us or making haphazard/chronological piles, we need boxes, labels and closets (or their virtual equivalents) to make sense of our present and be at peace with the future.
” Choose a particular archive, such as Google Street View, the WikiLeaks Iraq War file, or your high school yearbook. Create a work, such as a collage, visualization, or essay video, which uses at least one document or image from the archive to call attention to the underlying logic behind it.”
I focused on the New York City Housing Collection - part of the Laguardia & Wagner Archive. NYCHA’s sparse documentation of The Prospect Plaza Houses stands in sharp contrast with the developments’ controversial past, present and future. Some 1,171 Residents, attempts to expose this problematic ellipsis.
Response Lev Manovich’s The Poetics of Augmented Space & J. Crary’s Spectacle, attention, counter memory
Crary’s concluding inquiry points to the limits of Debord’s argument. The screens’ ubiquity has rendered them “un-spectatcular” – as much tools for self-empowering knowledge and creation, as dictatorial control apparati. The individual may be surrounded by media, but that physical encirclement does not imply the mind’s surrender. One may argue that “(time-based) media” and “spectacle” are not one and the same, but it certainly appears to be in Crary and Debord’s essay: They both seem to regard TV, film, radio, video etc… as inherently awe-strucking, discarding any insight on the part of the viewer. Of course advertising, TV shows and standardized movie-making can be mind-numbing,as well novelty and financially driven. But, the thoughtful use and analysis of media has also allowed more meditative narratives (i.e. Antonioni’s filmography), social/historical/political consciousness (i.e. Resnais’ “Nacht und Nebel”) and the conservation and propagation of the past (i.e.: the INA’s digital archives). While Manovich talks of integration between space and media, his vision should not be amalgamated with Debord’s: the latter envisions the triumph of the media for media/power’s sake, while Manovich advocates a thoroughly cognizant appropriation of these tools – not to overwrite space and life, but to enter into a fruitful dialogue with it. The example of Koolhaas’ work for Prada is anything but manipulating: it manages to subvert the screen’s 2-dimensional limitations while evoking that liminal space between screen and reality. Even in a commerical setting, in the right hands, new media can address contemporary life’s uncertainties, appealing to our individual layered consciousness rather than mass instincts.
Response to Miwon Kwon’s The Wrong Place
A successful art practice often displaces – an idea, an image, a social-construct… This very principle seems to collide with “site-specificity”. How can an art practice inhabit a determined location (its inherent history, daily routines, visual/spatial qualities) and shift it? Perhaps these two verbs don’t collide, but rather are integral and inseparable in creating a powerful site-specific work. Compelling digression requires thorough grounding. Thus, the glamorized nomadic art practice, as it is discussed in Kwon’s essay, appears incompatible with such an endeavor: how can an artist occupy a place utterly new to him/her? Placelessness seems to have been equated with “everyplaceness” – applying the cliche idiom “citizen of the world” to the contemporary creative mind. As “the Wrong Place’ further discusses, lifestyles may have shifted towards the global and fragmentary, but not the human mind/identity. While (or perhaps because of?) my own cultural heritage is best described as “diasporic’, I have often looked to Lippard’s “the Lure of the Local” for inspiration. Kwon’s emphasis on Lippard’s nostalgic bent struck me as exaggerated, but it did succeed in outlining a decipherable contemporary relationship to place: a slight yet fundamental change in the equation-not human = local, nor human = global, but human vs. local/global. A site-less artist’s site-specific work will fail at exposing a locations’ history, or in annihilating it in favor of global pretenses… a genuine vision must build upon and evoke human memory and identitary claims – their inadequacy yet ineluctable nature.
Response to Talk to Me
[Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence series (2010), by Geoffrey Mann]
One of the few projects that really stands out in my recollection of Talk to Me, also happens to be completely free of user input/interaction – a sad testament to the exhibition’s failures. Cross-fire is prominently displayed – in a large/isolated space, right before entering the main, overcrowded room. Dialogue may lay at the core of the piece (between characters, between voice and space, and between digital and physical form)… but it seems a far reach from the show’s premise, that: “things talk to us”. I really responded to Mann’s thoughtful and layered juxtaposition of video and object and, while not a champion of “American Beauty”, found the appropriation and choice of the scene engaging… so I am grateful for Cross-fire’s inclusion… I just wish it had belonged to a different group show.
[Analog Digital Clock (2009), by Maarten Baas]
I had encountered Analog Digital Clock before attending Talk To Me. In fact, I have it playing next to me as I am typing: I downloaded it as an iPhone app last year, mesmerized by its simple, playful and striking qualities. However, seeing it on MoMA’s wall was not a heightening experience… on the contrary, it shattered some of the most interesting components of Baas’ work. The small size and hand held screen of the smartphone makes the piece particularly engrossing, emphasizing the mundane content to make the surreal apparition of the “time painter” all the more delightful. The display at Talk To Me, could have shifted the scale in the other direction (a tower-like clock and giant painter), but the institution settled for an understated (but space-saving) mid-size LCD screen, utterly failing to address the public as an individual or as a crowd.
Response to Living as Form
I didn’t know what to expect upon signing up for Sunday’s “elements of composition” walking tour. While the website’s description was convoluted, there was enough for me to gather that the event would address the L.E.S, urban planning and gentrification – all subjects I am currently looking to investigate in a project. The Essex Street market was rather subdued on that rainy afternoon – no more than a half dozen visitors were perusing the space. Ryan and I waited at the designated area for the tour to begin. Another gentleman was seating there, looking through papers. 20 minutes past the announced start-time, we were still the only people waiting, and no tour guide had made himself known… thus I approached the third tour participant and asked if he knew what the status of the event was. It turned out that HE was to conduct “elements of composition”. After resolving another set of misunderstandings (he couldn’t quite recall what tour he was suppose to give on that date…), we exchanged names and hand shakes and Dave proceeded to his presentation. At the risk of appearing utterly prejudiced, I have to admit that I was taken aback by the tour leader’s demeanor: an african-american man in his 50s, all front-teeth missing, nervously searching through a pile of photocopies, while uttering a fragmented but uninterrupted flow of sentences. The first 20 minutes were a bit uncomfortable and confusing, but once Dave got his bearing and we acclimated to the situation, his passionate vision of Essex Market and SPURA’s future and his thorough knowledge of their past shined through. His point of view (he has a number of proposals and is very active on community boards) is extremely pragmatic – acknowledging the L.E.S’ change in demographics, not attempting to stop the city’s flux, but rather to find means for a vibrant community to re-emerge, and for viable financial housing projects to finally claim the parking lots currently occupying SPURA’s perimeter. He was particularly eloquent on the lure and dangers of nostalgia. I have definitely been faulty myself of admiring an old tenement’s crumbling facade or shattered windows, and of scorning Robert Moses’ superblocks. But one forgets the insalubrious state of so many of these striking tenements. Historic preservation is indubitably valuable, but a vibrant city must also find solutions to balance past and future – saving what can be saved, but not at the cost of empty buildings and blocks. Dave took us all around the SPURA site, on streets I had never encountered before – devoid of any life and surrounded by empty architectural structures – amongst them a synagogue, a 19th century brick-less tenement, and a post-war assisted living facility in the process of being emptied. Dave’s candor and eagerness to share personal and historical anecdotes made for an amazing evening – like nothing I have ever experienced before. the genuine nature of Dave’s endeavor stood in sharp contrast with the excerpts of the “Creative Time Summit” I was able to stream on September 23rd: Artists pretending to be activists and talking to an audience with overwhelmingly similar socio-political backgrounds. I don’t think the tour we attended on Sunday was art, neither did Dave presented as such, and I think it was this lack of removal or theoretical backdrop that initially surprised me. But instead of feeling manipulated and passive (as when watching ‘Ultra-Red” and “Wochenklausur’s” presentations), I felt engaged and inspired. The dialogue we engaged in with Dave for that 1h30min, may not have been an art practice in itself, but I will surely think about it often during my creative process.
Response to Art of the Archive‘s third series or readings:
- Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation, Boris Groys
On the New, Boris Groys
- The Avant Garde Archive Online, Danny Birchall
- If It Doesn’t Exist on the Internet, It Doesn’t Exist, Kenneth Goldsmith,
- UbuWeb Wants to Be Free, Kenneth Goldsmith
I love objects – I like the [potential] ownership of objects… call me a materialist…
However, these impulses often collide with my own art practice – video, multimedia, projection, and installations can be firmly grounded in time, space, and concept but rarely is their intend translated into one transportable/essential object. Is it possible to have a drawing, model or print evoke the feeling of an elementally conceptual work? Or is it always viewed as an afterthought – a consumerist one at that? Groys’ interpretation of Benjamin’s “aura” is amongst the most decipherable and relevant I have read. The constant shift between original and copy is terribly alluring, and somewhat appeased my censoring of objectification: An artifact in conjunction/dialogue with an installation can ingest and evoke the latter’s poesis. Perhaps, “art documentation” doesn’t only allow for the removing/restoring of the aura, but also its transferable/multiple embodiment. Just as the museum transcends and transforms the profane’s mundanity, rigorous intend may shift an installation’s partial residue into a full-fledged component and manifestation of a piece’s concept. Not every piece will land itself to this method. Similarly, not every medium/artwork thoroughly translates to online distribution. Perhaps this is why Birchall’s conclusion (avant-garde film’s internet streaming as reference rather than experience) still rings true… but this may very well imminently change: contemporary artists must evaluate all different modes of distribution during the creative process.
“Create a fictional archive based on material created from scratch or appropriated from another source. Present this in a way that offers an insight into the vent or culture that it purports to document.”
THE LOWER EAST SIDE’ S INTRA-FRESCOS
An archival endeavor of a, yet to be elucidated, urban archiving anomaly
Response to Art of the Archive‘s second series or readings:
- The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Jon Rafman
- Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument”, Okwui Enwezor
- Money Behind Mirrored Walls, Trevor Paglen
- The Blast Shack, Bruce Sterling
One of my teachers always liked to emphasize that an artist’s role is to create rather than resolve questions/problems. Enwezor’s essay is an engaging exemplification of this idea, expounding on the various approaches this inquisitive process may take. When embarking on a new project I find myself particularly compelled by the initial research that the subject at hand calls for… in fact, more than an “enjoyable” step in a project’s materialization, reading, google searching, and movie watching are the locus of my conceptual (and often formal) creative process. I need an archive to ground and subsequently displace my subject from. Google street view may be the “ultimate” archive – structured and objective, but Rofman proves that it still allows for suturing, blurring and indetermination. His sensitive approach may be a hopeful alternative to Assange’s dogmatic “transparency” – the human mind, like human history and its archiving is NOT objective and structured. I am skeptical of art practices claiming to change the socio-political realm, but will always strive to invoke the individual’s universal narrative impulses… especially if I aim to dismantle it.
Xu Zhen’s piece was part of the San Jose Biennal’s first installment. While it did not directly engage the City or surrounding environment (it was displayed within the San Jose Museum of Art), it did address site-specificity and 01SJ’s title (“Build your own world”) in a playful and poetic way. “(…) Zhen and his assistants used saws and rudimentary tools to cut 1.86 meters off the peak of “Mount Everest.” Their low-tech expedition is documented in overstated narration and grainy video footage. Zhen endeavored to trick the viewer into believing an unlikely event: this video was actually filmed on the roof of an art gallery in Shanghai.” (form 01SJ’s website). While the piece can be read as a denunciation of Chinese propaganda, it is the combination of whimsy, austere tone, and nebulous imagery that attracted me to the piece. While 8848 – 1.86 did bring to mind Francis Alys’ practice (walking, video documentation, unadorned aesthetic), it diverged in its blend of fact and fiction. Alys’ poesis derives from absurdist but concrete action in a set reality; Xu Zhen’s from acting upon that reality. I am interested in blurring the line between fact and fiction, adding a layer of plausible yet manufactured element to mundaneity. Not only does 8848 – 1.86 delight, it also makes us reconsider what we take for granted (the height of a mountain, why man would want to know that, climb it, alter it…)… something to always aspire too…
- Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner
- The Design of Spaces, City: Rediscovering the Center, William Whyte (1988)
- (Relations in Public) Microstudies of Public Order , Erving Goffman (1980)
- Public Space in a Private Time, Vito Acconci (1990)
- Another Pavement, Another Beach: Skateboarding and the Performative Critique of Architecture, Iain Borden
- I enjoyed Warner’s breakdown of the figure of the “stranger”. The juxtaposition of the human suspicion towards the disturbance entity, combined with its contemporary ubiquity, has an uncanny quality. Like many other city dwellers, I have spent many subway rides imagining a nearby passenger’s day/life scenario. This impulse to construct a stranger’s narrative can be more or less conscious, but it does seem to echo the instinctual need to resolve/remove the intruder, while taming anxiety towards it: the curiosity becomes a means to relating rather than rejecting the mass of anonymous city dwellers with whom we interact on a daily basis. (I like the idea of bringing this process to light – perhaps simply by exposing this individual yet wide-spread story-making process).
- Whyte’s emphasis on scale and point of view when considering a public space is (like the essay itself) straightforward yet thought-provoking. The discrepancy between the architect’s uninhabited layout and the bird’s eye view of the crowd’s movement within it is arresting. Both emerge within the boundaries of the same space, both have undeniable aesthetic potential… yet completely diverge in their grammar/final output. Of course, the role of an urban planner is to imagine methods to encourage reconciliation… but I am more interested in investigating this clash.
- Vito Acconci’s concluding admonition: ”beware of the walkman”, points to the flaws (or perhaps simply outdated nature) of his essay’s delineation of the individuals’ digital connectivity. The assumption that online “clusters” would thoroughly replace physical ones, has been turned on its head by social networking apparatus such as foursquare (wherein the digital is merely a prompt for the physical interaction), and even facebook (while the dialogue is bound to the online platform, it often reflects and feeds an existing,tangible social construct). Perhaps a more interesting and troubling observation is our inner-tumult in attempting to escape the digital realm; our inability to entirely forego our access to our online activity (how many times have I given into the temptation of checking my email while “taking a break”, in a park, or while strolling?). Should the city be building/promoting wi-fi/3G free public spaces?? Would we even consider using them??
- Space, Site, Interventions (2000)
- Sculpture in the expanded field , R. Krauss, (1979)]
- Site-Specific Art , Nick Kaye, (2000)]
Response to Art of the Archive‘s first series or readings:
- Archives, Documents, Traces, Paul Ricoeur
- The Archeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault
- Little History of Photography, Walter Benjamin
- The Index, J.G. Ballard
- The Secret File, Walid Raad
In this age of camera phones, personal blogs, photoshop and all around digital-storage-efficiency, how does one deal with the growing ubiquity of archival material? The prevalent role given to institutions in “Archives, documents, traces” fits in a world wherein the production, dissemination and preservation of documents was prominently dependent on a conscious effort on the part of the creator and the politico-social environment surrounding/controlling the act of manufacturing documents. Today, not only do pictures, videos, and sentences move swiftly across platforms and locations (phone/email/youtube/twitter etc…), but their permanence is intrinsically linked to their existence. Ricoeur’s emphasis on power structures does resonate with something like WikiLeaks mission, but seems inadequate to investigate our era’s overwhelmingly democratic,mundane and unconscious archives. While “the Archeology of Knowledge” does appear to de-centralize the issue, Foucault’s advocacy of “disruption” may prove equally unfit to investigate a gargantuesque array of personal/pervasive data. In contrast, and despite his even further temporal distance, Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” already evokes this “unconscious” quality of documentation (specifically that of early photography – a candid relationship to the medium we may be arching back to). Perhaps his romantic insight (echoed in Raad’s and Ballard’s use of fiction) is the only way to excavate meaning from the 21st century archive : Are extraordinary narratives the best decipherers of ordinary documents?
port·man·teau \pȯrt-ˈman-(ˌ)tō\
“a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms (as smog from smoke and fog)”
- Merriam Webster dictionary
This installation invites the viewer to reconsider the idea of assemblage in a playful take on IKEA’s model of furniture design, evoking both the inherent beauty of separate parts becoming a whole and the absurdist freedom often overshadowed by a company’s instructions.
IKEAportmanteau applies the linguistic method of combining words to interactiveart to create a poetic experience of mundane artifacts. The small scale and detailed imagery encourage an intimate relationship between the viewer and the work, while the 3D element surprises and emphasises the tension between practical/pre-designed objects and the delight of absurdist creation.
video documentation:
The interface for “BACKDROPS” is live!
Please go to:
http://itp.nyu.edu/~ap2469/backdrops/
(preferably on your mobile or tablet device)
More animations are to be made and loaded (currently, only the first 2 videos on the “index” list are accessible).
port·man·teau \pȯrt-ˈman-(ˌ)tō\
“a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms (as smog from smoke and fog)”
- Merriam Webster dictionary
This installation invites the viewer to reconsider the idea of assemblage in a playful take on IKEA’s model of furniture design, evoking both the inherent beauty of separate parts becoming a whole and the absurdist freedom often overshadowed by a company’s instructions.
Project description
At each end of a ~5feet wide table, two square surfaces are slightly elevated.
on each square, the silhouette of an object’s parts is projected
The closer the viewer places his hands towards the parts, the more defined they become
When the viewer’s hand comes into contact with the delimited square, the parts disappear to reveal the object they are the parts of in the center of the table. The view shifts from flat projection to 3D effect through the pepper’s ghost technique.
When the viewer touches both squares/series of parts, a “portmanteau” version of the two objects appears.
The videos are controlled by 2 rangefinders whose data are processed by Jitter, and projected from a slightly angled projector placed above the installation.
IKEAportmanteau applies the linguistic method of combining words to interactiveart to create a poetic experience of mundane artifacts. The small scale and detailed imagery encourage an intimate relationship between the viewer and the work, while the 3D element surprises and emphasises the tension between practical/pre-designed objects and the delight of absurdist creation.
INTRODUCTION
“Down on the East side, on the East side
that’s my home, sweet home.
Some people think it’s the home of black eyes.
Just because guys don’t wear collars and ties.
That’s all the bunk, they just say that in fun.
Real East side folks is the best what come.
They’d give you their shoit only they ain’t got none.
Down on Toidy Toid and Toid.”
- Lyrics of Song by Ben Ryan, 1926.
“33rd Street and 3rd Avenue” is often cited as an example of quintessential New York Accent. The idiosyncratic pronunciation’s use in a number of popular songs from the first part of the 20th Century, jokes and vernacular speech has anchored it in the public conception of what a New Yorker sounds like. Today, the area (at the edge of Murray Hill and Kips Bay) is mostly residential, upper-middle class, and ethnically homogenous. Even the architecture (mostly high rises/condos) gives little insight on areas past boisterous past.
NEW YORKESE
There has been much debate on what actually constitutes a New York accent, how it came to be and whether or not it is disappearing. “New Yorkese” as portrayed in popular culture was influenced by the old-world inflections of the Yiddish, Irish and Italian immigrants of the beginning of the 20th century. There is a trend to differentiate accents by borough rather than ethnicity, but one may argue that cultural background, geographic location and social class all play a role in the variations of the New York accent. This combination/dichotomy of local and global gives “New Yorkese” an uncanny quality. One might have expected that new waves of immigrants would shift the inflection in new direction, but those new influences seem more subdued. This may be partially explained by the fact that immigrants are less prone to living and working in uniform enclaves and that New York (especially Manhattan) has become a more transitional place. But more importantly the growing influence of TV and New Media promulgating a “standardized american dialect” has greatly undermined the city’s inhabitants particular speech.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
50 accents were gathered around the five boroughs, representing an array of age, ethnicity, and socio-economical background. Each participant was asked to record a fixed sentence (“I am standing at the corner of 33rd Streer and 3rd Avenue.”) to allow for visual and auditory comparison. Each accent is visualized with the help of a Processing sketch, using the minim library and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) to analyze its rhythm and amplitude. This data is used to create an abstract graphic (see below).
This graphic is subsequently imported into illustrator and etched on a 5 x5 transparent acrylic plate along with the accent donor’s personal information: Birth Place, Native Language, Age/Sex, Age of English Onset, English Learning Method, Length of English Residency, Borough. Each acrylic square is also be equipped with an FSR triggering each accent’s audio file. Finally all 50 accents/acrylic pieces will be woven together to form a panel.
Mock Ups (click to enlarge):
The viewer may contribute and visualize their own accent through Toidy Toid & Toid‘s website:
CONCLUSION
This project is both an homage to the accents that used to be encountered at 33rd Street and 3rd Ave and to the History of the New York inflection. It also evoques the relationship between disparate accents and the tension between an individual’s identity and that of the city as a whole.
WORKING PROTOTYPE
For my final Giant Stories Tiny Screens’ Project, I am creating a video meant to be viewed on a small hand held device. I hope to built the interface in HTML5 and the final output to be downloadable as a smartphone app.
USER INTERFACE
INDIVIDUAL SCREENS
home
about
index
animation still
I presented a draft of the “London Character” installation/animation last night. I am far from being entirely satisfied with the content or presentation of the piece, but do feel I learned a lot through the process of making it:
1. I can use a drill and an electctric saw, and thus build a wooden structure by myself (with more time and resources, could be straighter and cleaner)
2. The frosted acrylic’s thickness diminishes the quality of the image too much (especially for pencil drawing)
3. Masks in After Effects are very useful! In just a few seconds I was able to get a much more contrasted/clear animation
4. Plan on more distance between projector and screen rather than less (I didn’t get access to a small tripod, which made positioning the projector much more arduous than it should have been)
5. Sometimes (perhaps often) less is more – I should have either integrated the two animations or focused on one. The correlation between the two remained tenuous both formally and conceptually and the combination impeded the viewer’s understanding.
The visualizing parameters of Toidy Toid & Toid, is at the core of the project. While it isn’t meant as a scientific diagram and will probably never reach that level of intricacy or readability, I want it to directly relate to the given accent and be rigorous enough to invite a comparisons between the accents.
I revisited my initial processing sketch, delved deeper into minim’s FFT function and added a beat detector. Here is accent #2′s output:
audio
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visualization
The program analyzes and depicts two of the .mp3 sample’s components: amplitude (amount of energy in a sound wave – the greater the intensity of the sounds, the greater the amplitude) + beat (only heard as such if energy is largely superior to the sound’s energy history – brutal variation).
The FFT function analyzes the signal in order to retrieve the frequency spectrum. The latter can be used to return the amplitude of a requested frequency band (in processing: z = fft.getband (i);
The beat detector analyzes the audio stream, looking for rhythmic onsets.
The final visual representation is as follow:
1. Each frequency band’s amplitude (z) is marked by a small dot. The dots’ location and fill are determined by z’s value
2. The bigger ellipses each represent a beat. Their size and location on the y and x axis is determined by z’s value.
More examples can be heard and viewed on the project’s website
The Object
The Story
I was born in New York on the 1st of December 1953. While my features and name may evoke Great Britain I never set foot on the Queen Mother’s soil. People were always surprised upon hearing my roar – influenced by New York’s dialect rather than the old world’s distinguished inflection.
I was called upon to reign over a series of items I would never consider using myself. My paws can withstand any surface – be it dirt, sand or grass. Human’s soles seem to have endured an irreversible degeneration, forcing them to rely on rubber and leather contraptions to confront the asphalt they obstinately lay down.
Rain boots, businessman’s oxfords, evening heels, Sunday school moccasins… I conquered them all! I slept in countless closets, was intimate with a plethora of socks and even some bare feet.
Along the years, the leather tore; the city streets wore down the rubber; factories were shot and storefronts emptied.
On May 9th 1994, I was officially deposed. One by one, my past success’ testimonies vanish.
Along with the last artifacts, my genteel disposition fades… history turns into memory, myth, and, finally, amnesia. With nothing left but my feline instincts, I will indubitably have to leave men’s ephemeral creations, to conflate with what, I suppose, is my natural dwelling.
Installation Mockup
I am interested in investigating the format of the mobile phone screen – creating a video which specifically addresses the intimate quality of the platform – something which I find underexplored in the current production – whether it be film or apps (Martin Baas Analog Digital Clock is a great example of the potential of this unique viewer/screen relationship).
My initial impulse is to make a play on one’s hand- playfully calling attention to the intricate tension between screen-artist-viewer. Departing from this visual cue, two idioms immediately come to mind:
1. To have something/someone in the palm of one’s hand
2. To know something/someone like the palm (or back) of one’s hand
Finally, the process of accumulation seems appropriate for the format – retaining some narrative qualities, while escaping a compulsory linear acquisition of meaning.
Aggregating these 3 components, hand held device + palm/idiom + accumulation, I am considering the following 2 ideas:
1. In your palm’s hand
Gathering a list of what people wished they had control over (object/person/emotion…).
For each item:
The subject of the controlling wish will appear in the life size palm – on the screen, behaving as desired. An audio explanation (the person’s description of what/why they wish they had control) will accompany the video.
2. Getting to know a place
Loosely based on Perec’s Tentative d’Epuisement d’un lieu Parisien. The video starts with the empty palm. As the audio recites the description of a given place, the palm gets filled with the location’s elements – some elements disappear with time or get overwritten by a new description. The more components – the more the palm “becomes” the place.
I created a rudimentary website to prototype the web component of TT&T . The Network application of the project allows the viewer to add his/her own input and is an opportunity to view and expand on the collection.
SITE
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“Down on the East side, on the East side
that’s my home, sweet home.
Some people think it’s the home of black eyes.
Just because guys don’t wear collars and ties.
That’s all the bunk, they just say that in fun.
Real East side folks is the best what come.
They’d give you their shoit only they ain’t got none.
Down on Toidy Toid and Toid.”
- Lyrics of Song by Ben Ryan, 1926.
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“33rd Street and 3rd Avenue” is often cited as an example of quintessential New York Accen. The idiosyncratic pronunciation’s use in a number of popular songs from the first part of the 20th Century, jokes and vernacular speech has anchored it in the public conception of what a New Yorker sounds like. Today, the area (at the edge of Murray Hill and Kips Bay) is mostly residential, upper-middle class, and ethnically homogenous. Even the architecture (mostly high rises/condos) gives little insight on areas past boisterous past.
NEW YORKESE
There has been much debate on what actually constitutes a New York accent, how it came to be and whether or not it is disappearing. “New Yorkese” as portrayed in popular culture was influenced by the old-world inflections of the Yiddish, Irish and Italian immigrants of the beginning of the 20th century. There is a trend to differentiate accents by borough rather than ethnicity, but one may argue that cultural background, geographic location and social class all play a role in the variations of the New York accent. This combination/dichotomy of local and global gives “New Yorkese” an uncanny quality. One might have expected that new waves of immigrants would shift the inflection in new direction, but those new influences seem more subdued. This may be partially explained by the fact that immigrants are less prone to living and working in uniform enclaves and that New York (especially Manhattan) has become a more transitional place. But more importantly the growing influence of TV and New Media promulgating a “standardized american dialect” has greatly undermined the city’s inhabitants particular speech.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
I will gather accents around the five boroughs, representing an array of age, ethnicity, and socio-economical background. Each participant will be asked to record a fixed sentence (“I am standing at the corner of 33rd Streer and 3rd Avenue.”) to allow for visual and auditory comparison.
Each accent will be visualized with the help of a Processing sketch, using the minim library and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) to analyze frequencies. This data will then be used to create an abstract graphic.
Processing Sketch Screen Shot:
This graphic is subsequently imported into illustrator and etched on a 5 x5 transparent acrylic plate along with the accent donor’s personal information: Birth Place, Native Language, Age/Sex, Age of English Onset, English Learning Method, Length of English Residency, Borough.
Individual Acrylic Sheet Prototype
An array of button triggering each accent will be created and the individual plates will be assembled to form a panel equipped with speakers.
Mock Ups (click to enlarge):
CONCLUSION
This public art installation points to 33rd St and 3rd Ave’s diverse and accent-filled past, reinvigorating it with a contemporary snap shot of the five boroughs auditory diversity, while evoking the tension between individual accents and that of a city/region.
View and share Movable Blocks here (or by clicking on the map)
Artist’s Statement:
Blocks are the essential denominator of New York’s urban planning – past, present and future. As early as 1811 the Commissioner’s Plan delineated the Island’s complete set of rectangles. The land it divided was still vastly unoccupied, however the 2,028 blocks were already being laid-out and numbered. The perdurability of the grid itself stands in strong contrast with the constant shift it contains: Block # 1024 may still represent the same section of the city, but the architectural structures it is made out of have indubitably shifted along the years. While Google Maps constitutes yet another representation of the grid, it’s “bird-eye view” emphasizes another way of considering the quintessential unit – through the mutability, disparate arrangements, textures, and tints of its buildings.
This Project aims to capture the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the block, embracing Google Maps inherent potential for abstraction.
The process is at once subjective and systematic: I first selected a series of 10 blocks whose visual nature I find engrossing, reiterated it through drawing and created an animation evoking the reality of the location, its past, the mutability of its current state as its possible future and imaginary iterations. The final piece takes the form of a seemingly ubiquitous Google Map, highlighting a series of blocks through pins; each pin contains an individual abstraction/animation of the location.
As a child, I thought that my avoidance of lines on the asphalt was utterly idiosyncratic. I realized much later that many people were (or still are) following this “rule”. This memory is at once very personal and vivid, and universal. It also evokes the power of constraints in infusing the mundane with surrealism. The medium of animation emphasizes that last point: having to focus and draw each image allows me to fully re-appropriate it, making it my own and extrapolating new meaning.
Martin Bravo and I made a working prototype for a kinectic light sculpture titled Living Room. The piece evokes the light filtering through the door of an inhabited room. While the width of the slit of light coincides with that of an average door, in daylight the “box” confounds in its unexepcted measurements. The moving shadows are created by a mechanism of abstract shapes programmed (with an Arduino) to organically and randomly rotate around the lit “box”.
Video documentation of the prototype
The inside of the box
Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913. Zdenek Pešánek. Sculpture for Prague’s Edison Power Station, 1929-30
Tokihiro Sato, Photo-Respiration #1, 1988
Pesanek, Marinetti and Sato have represented light through different means and this shift in medium has also engendered very different ideas.
While the Futurist’ upheaval against traditional modes of representation is at the core of their manifesto, they were also bound to the canvas and oil they attacked. Like most art movements Futurism was a reaction to the art establishment – it was interested in creating new forms… but perhaps even more passionate about breaking down old ones.Pesanek’s kinetic lights touch upon the issues that have surrounded New Media since the coining of the term. The fascination for technology was at the core of his art production. This candid and hopeful tone can, to this day, be confounded with a blind faith in technological developments and a lack of artistic intend. I was once told that “Design” is equated with solving problems, while “Art’s ” aim is to create problems. This might be a bit reductive, and the power of novel aesthetic experiences should not be discarded. In fact there is something very poignant and beautiful about Pesanek’s oeuvre… but the fact that it has almost all vanished is also a tragic reminder of the very ephemeral nature of NEW technology.
Sato’s photographs play very close with lyrical beauty – a dangerous path in contemporary art. But the way he creates this imagery remedies the impulse to simply judge his work as “pretty”. There is something very complex, calculated and perhaps even insidious about his process. He may be in complete control of his medium, but the final photographs also resonate with uncanny and atemporal inquiries. He is a perfect example of the type of New Media Art I wish to produce: Visually stunning and surprising yet conceptually challenging.
I’ve been intrigued by Robert Moses for a few years – not only for his huge influence on the city’s urban landscape, and the controversies surrounding it, but also as a semi-fictional character, both lauded and reviled. Caro’s The Power Broker is the preeminent resource of my research, but I wish to remove myself even further from historical fact. While the epic biography is as engrossing as any novel, the writer anchors himself in non-fiction. Caro’s depiction has had its detractors and his Moses can be seen has a character of its own – between fact and fiction. It is this uncanny tension that I wanted to explore in this piece.
There is a plethora of public projects built under Moses, but McCarren Park Pool was appealing in that it was one of his most popular endeavor, was a central point in many of Williamsburg & Greenpoint’s changes, and is currently being “revived”.
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I am rarely compelled to seek timebased works online. Despite using animation/video in my own practice, and often using such platforms as “vimeo” to share my work, I feel web browsers undermine the work in most cases. The “context” – such an important notion in conceptual art – is often completely disregarded when it comes to displaying videos on the web. Video sharing sites may represent an unprecedented opportunity to show and discover short/experimental/independent films, but their democratic approach may also hinder an artist’s aesthetic. As a certified “cat lady”, you do not have to convince me of the candid and thorough pleasure LOL cat videos can provide… but that doesn’t mean they are an adequate neighbor for more meditative pieces.
I selected 3 videos which I find not only beautiful in themselves but also appreciate the care taken in presenting them
Moments of Inertia, R. Luke Dubois & Todd Reynolds, 2010
thisartist.tv series, 2010 – ongoing
The Johnny Cash Project, Chris Milk, 2010 – ongoing
Deep Listening Exercise
During our first “Sound and the City” class, when we were asked to pick our “favorite place in New York”, 2 locations swiftly came to mind: Clinton Ave in Brooklyn (just a few blocks from my home – almost any stretch of that street between Greene and DeKalb Ave displays a diverse and beautiful range of architecture. A serene yet distinguished atmosphere pervades, while the top of the Empire State Building on the Northern horizons stands as a reminder of Manhattan’s bustling streets’s proximity) and Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. In the context of the exercise, I settled for the Manhattan spot – Both places contain visible layers of history but Eldridge’s Street Jewish past and Chinese present somehow felt more vivid than Clinton Ave (undoubtly due to its more “nosiy” inhabitants – after all the Lower East Side is the quitescential immigration neighborhood, while Clinton Hill used to be the retreat for 19th century wealthy Manhattanites). With the only recording apparatus at hand – my iPhone – I made my way to the Eldridge Synagogue through the snowy streets recovering from the previous night’s storm. I found a recessed corner at the right of the Temple, pressed the recording icon, closed my eyes and “deep listened”. The list of sounds I drafted upon opening my eyes was as follows:
Chinese music fading in/out – footsteps on wet asphalt – plastic bag – someone running – keys dangling – elevated train – car’s exhale trying to get out of snow – rain drops on trash-bag – cars driving in slush – own runny nose – 2 men speaking chinese – door opening/closing
Here is the recording:
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… and the drawing:
I thought the chinese song might be distracting, as it pertains to the realm of (harmonic) music rather than noise. However it actually emphasized the surrounding environmental soundscape, providing a recognizable rhythm for the other elements to fit into or fight against. The visual contrast between different eras/cultures remained undecipherable sonically - The Synagogue is in fact a museum, seldomly holding services. Upon entering the beautiful building one can get a sense of the life, chatter and music that once filled it, but the early 20th century congregation has long departed the neighborhood. While I wish there was a way to translate the beautiful facade on Eldridge Street through sound, its sheer absence within the recording might be even more eloquent.
4 Projects in 4 Days
January 17 – 20 2011
Do a different creative project each day for four days straight.
Documentation of each project is required at the end of each day.
Monday 17: Build Adafruit Waveshield (or how I finally got a grasp on soldering)
I ordered the Waveshield over the winter break in the prospect of building a wall-embedded sound installation. The final project’s aesthetic and conceptual aspects are quite clear in my mind, but I first needed to gather the technology. Adafruit’s kit seemed to contain all the necessary parts: SD Card to store the sound, button to trigger the sound and speaker to project the sound. While the “Waveshield” was by far the most affordable option, it also required quite a bit of assembling.
The unassembled kit:
Adafruits’ instructions were very thorough and rather well illustrated. The most intimidating part f the assembly was the 80 soldering joints! The first 60 were very uneven, but I am quite proud of the last quarter – I finally got the angle of the iron right. The main trick seems to be heating a broad surface and placing the solder just close enough to the tip so that it melts onto the surface but not on the iron itself.
Soldered parts
The last step before programming the shield was to solder it to the Arduino itself… which I wasn’t confident enough to do – at least not until I buy an extra/back up Arduino!
Waveshield patiently waiting its final merge with the Arduino:
Tuesday 18: ”Floorplan Ballet” Animation (After Effects)
As per usual, animation takes more time than planned – I thought that since I had my file ready to go (a .psd of a floorplan where each shape was given its own layer), I would be able to easily finish the animation on day 2 of 4-in-4. However, the numerous layers, their organizations and relation to each other were quite time consuming to animate.
The animation is 5 minutes long as of right now (I want the rhythm to be meditative but not imperceptible – I might have to speed it up once its exported) and about 3/4 of the elements are successfully “dancing” on the composition.
Screen shots of After Effects
Wednesday 19: Conceptualize Circuit
Carlin and I are collaborating on a project inspired by our common interest in soft circuitry. While Leah Buechley‘s lecture last Fall was inspiring, her energy and innovative use of materials was a bit undermined by the aesthetic emanating from the “soft circuitry” movement – very crafty/handmade/unfinished.
We spent an afternoon brainstorming around the idea of circuitry as an art in and of itself and came up with the following idea:
The piece resembles a wall label (artists’ names, title, date, material…). The letters are incorporated into the circuit connecting the range finder. The final object is placed in a dark room, and a bulb placed over it gradually brightens and illuminates the piece as the viewer approaches.
A play on “art for art’s sake”/ “technology for technology’s sake” – the familiar interaction between the viewer and museum conventions is used to make explicit the transformation of circuitry into art. We decided to use a 10″ x 10″, 1″ deep canvas to place the text/circuit and hide the Arduino behind.
The working title was “postmodern circuitry”, but Carlin’s mention of the last line of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass : “I stop somewhere waiting for you” seemed like a more interesting fit – less “tongue-in-cheek”, allowing for the uncanny and humorous quality of the piece to come through while allowing a more poetic interpretation as well.
The first step consisted in building the circuit on the Arduino in order to have a physical/working reference. Because the Range Finder’s numbers go down (min.11) when something gets close to it and up (max. 147) when it senses a greater open space, translating these numbers direclty to the LED brightness in order to dim it didn’t work. There must be an equation to reverse those numbers, but we have yet to find it. In order to move forward, we decided to turn the LED on/off with an “if statement” (if rangeFinderValue < 50 { LED = HIGH…).
working circuit
We then created the illustrator file to use with the laser cutter to create our circuit out of copper tape (the “p” of “stop” will be GROUND; the “u” of “you” POWER).
Illustrator file
Thursday 20: Build Circuit
We ran into a rather important problem early in the day: The laser cutter is unable to cut through copper tape (something about the reflective quality of the material). We spent most of the day trying to come up with an alternative. We first tried cutting the circuitry manually. While the precision wasn’t exactly machine-like, it was enough to fit our desired aesthetic.
Laser cut paper stencil
However, we soon found out that the copper tape didn’t adhere to the canvas securely enough and that the combination of materials hindered the connectivity. After much back and forth we settled for conductive thread – stenciling the circuitry with a black pen and subsequently sewing along it.
Conductive thread and pen on canvas
The last hurdle was soldering the range finder to the thread behind the canvas, which we finally achieved, by covering the thread with copper tape and soldering the wires to the latter.
Soldered range finder
While this prototype worked technically, the thread and hand stenciling compromised our initial idea. We still have a few options we want to explore, including conductive tape on cardboard…