3ft x 1ft x 5ft | Video sculpture | 2010
ITP Spring Show, New York
Made with Michelle Temple
“Grandma Had the Hand of a Whip” forces people to advance a video projection of hand movements by pulling apart the knitted contents within. This piece grew from a series of conversations between the two artists about their matriarchal inheritance and delves into what goes on behind closed doors, how lessons were transmitted, and how emotions were sublimated through daily, repetitive chores like washing dishes, scrubbing the floor, knitting.
Last week, Toby came over and we played with mylar and mirrors to see what sort of light we could direct down into airshaft spaces.
I. MYLAR
Around 3:00 in the afternoon we hung some mylar sheets from the roof ledge to see how light would reflect down into the airshaft/courtyard behind my apartment building. Below is a video of the reflections from three vertical sheets (~3×5ft) hung approximately 6ft apart from each other:
Mylar has the advantage of being light, flexible, and relatively cheap. I also like it because it is safer to work with from up high and would be less likely to hurt someone if it came loose. The light reflections was caused by the wind are pretty beautiful, and one could imagine how more intense it could be if there were more sheets.
One of the issues with mylar is the sound and the need to stabilize it against stronger winds: So right now I’m in the process of designing a few possibilities for housing, rolling/unrolling and weighting the mylar. Ideally it’d be nice to also design window versions that people could hang from the lower window sills in order to increase light reflections.
II. MIRRORS
Because the 1ft x 1 ft mirrors directs sharp sunlight so specifically, I think it is best used for focusing on people’s window sills where they can keep plants or install light diffusers to brighten up their room. Bending the mirror just slightly convex or concave will also cause the light to bend into vertical and horizontal columns.
We sketched some different possibilities for a solar panel mirroring system and we’ll be working on a small model to test the mounting, motor, and sensing system.
I. CapSense with Graphite and Copper
I had success using graphite as a capacitance sensor (using this Arduino playground CapSense library) and was also able to differentiate between pages using different resistors to establish a base resistance as a ’signature’ for each page. After seeing what people drew on their pages, however, and after testing around six pages together, I ran into two problems a) not everyone used graphite, and b) the capacitance sensor is just too finicky for me to establish over 26 rows of pages right now. This has been my problem with capacitance sensors in the past: changes in air humidity, the wind, the way you look at it, seems to require a re-calibration every time. Luckily, because I’m layering sounds, I don’t need exactitude, but I won’t have time to finesse a pairing between unique pages and corresponding sound files.
So for now, I’m working on hooking up the metal book-binding rows to multiplexers-to-Arduino-to-MacMini with stored files. The electronics will be housed in a book stand that the metal book-spines will snap latch onto to connect the circuit.
II. MP3 Trigger
I played with the really sweet MP3 trigger last week, but realized a tad late that I couldn’t play multiple audio samples at the same time (note to self: READ description of applications carefully before trying shit). Nonetheless, this is a really nice device to play and loop MP3s, and I found these two documentation sites particularly helpful: from the Garage of Evil and Dave Miller’s ITP blog.
III. OpAmp (LM358)
I had a lot of fun in Basic Analog Circuits working with this dual op-amp (I didn’t have the right capacitor or potentiometer so had to fiddle around with resistors instead).
To get audio output, I used Tom’s TIP120 schematic and hooked up a hallmark card speaker to it. At the time I was still playing with paper speakers as well but turned away from this set-up when I realized that the polymer piezo’s I wanted to use sounded like CRAP.
IV. LM555 timer for audio
Out of curiosity, I played with the LM555 timer which I became excited about after seeing these videos of a 555 square wave generator and the http://hackaday.com/2011/01/10/555-based-am-radio-transmitter/. Here’s an audio schematic for the 555, and the data sheet that Eric Rosenthal gave us.
Blinking a few LEDS w/ the timer was quite thrilling, as you can imagine, but I also realized that square waves was not the sound I wanted to generate from my book.
I. BACKGROUND
I’ve been thinking about NY airshaft spaces ever since I was introduced to them in ‘98. How can we convert these typically dark, funky-smelling concrete holes into something more friendly and appealing for people? Having looked into potential ways of transforming airshafts into useful environments in a Hundertwasserian vision of re-greening all horizontal surfaces, this exercise explores the possibilities of connecting individuals whose windows are confined to airshafts.
II. OUTLINE
Purpose:
To connect people whose apartments look out onto airshafts. The hope is that increasing social capital between commonly shafted people will increase their potential of helping each other to improve their airshaft environment.
Questions:
which airshaft to start with (even as a thought exercise…. residential? NYU?)? how many people do you need to get something started in a single airshaft? or maybe reach out to anyone who’s shafted?
incentives?
improves real estate value
improves quality of life: air, light, nature
connects and encourages people (to encourage each other) to change their environment
can build communities in peer-to-peer and modular units
how can this be fun and incremental?
would the goal be better achieved via management? if so, would there be a point in working from the people up?
Challenges:
getting people connected; making it easier for actions to happen, together
privacy! and not pressuring those who don’t want to join
sustaining connections long enough for improvement to happen
negotiation of the airshaft commons: private vs. shared space; apartment dwellers v.s management
Fun Options:
Encouraging and uniting moss bombers and nocturnal planters
Night lanterns and video projections
Sunlight bridges: mirror to mirror reflections into airshaft
Window lines
Oh right: website/phone app
III. NETWORKING OPTIONS
As my non-Italian friend likes to say, piano piano! So while I have lovely visions of developing city-hippie communes and reclaiming our airshafts on nature’s behalf, the first “little by little” would be to design a website-phone app, maybe a cross between Foursquare and Windowfarms, that would allow New Yorkers who have airshaft access to get in touch with each other.
These are some of the features I would like feedback on: Confidentiality/Anonymity and Levels of Openness––I’d like to encourage guerilla-gardening behaviors, such as seed-bombing and moss graffiti-ing. But the point is to also share strategies, outcomes, and documentation with each other. So in terms of developing trust, how do you give people the option to engage in authority-challenging actions while also enabling them to meet each other and offer mutual support. I don’t necessarily want building management folks, for example, to have access to this info. How exclusive, or thorough the identity/location check, should all this be? And should that even be a concern? People probably already know other people in the same airshaft predicament and to some extent, there’s already an in-built privacy/trust that can carry over from these pre-existing connections into the online world. But what about connecting and creating trust between people who don’t already know each other?
Personal profiles and categories of interest––Maybe people can connect via different interests and approaches they want to take in changing their airshaft environments. Some people might want to group within their specific airshaft, some might want to connect for sustainability issues, some might want to just see who else they know is shafted.
Documentation?––Begin with an overhead map of buildings that can zoom into who’s where, with the option of accessing people’s pictures/videos of their airshafts. It’d be interesting to see changes through time and to get multiple perspectives of the same space. This would also allow for comparisons between airshafts which might motivate people to improve those conditions. A potential risk is invading other people’s privacy––we don’t want pictures into people’s apartments, or of people per se! One counterbalance is that we, the info gate-keepers, would know who and where documenters live and violators can be taken care of accordingly.
Community benefits––I am specifically interested in connecting airshaft neighbors to each other, and airshaft communities to each other. While we don’t necessarily want the shadow of the future down the hallway, or outside our windows, I think the benefits could outweigh the annoying possibilities and people could negotiate how much of a community they want. In any case, it’d be nice for an airshaft community to develop their own page on the website. Perhaps their page could introduce members to each other, state some goals, share a calendar of community events, offer a forum for discussions, etc. It’d be interesting to see how this would affect people in the same building who were not part of airshaft….
IV. PHYSICAL OPTIONS
Because I am wanting to see airshafts transform into greener spaces, I would like to offer a few suggestions as to how people could improve and use their airshafts. I’m not too sure how much of these suggestions we would want to introduce, especially not right off the bat, but we’d want to do it in a way that also inspires people to come up with their own ideas that suit their needs/fancies. Having said that, here are some ideas I would love to experiment with:
Moss and fern walls––When I asked Paul Mankiewicz, who has done some great work in NYC, what he would do if he could convert airshaft spaces, he suggested that I look into cave mosses and the types of ferns that grow on the northside of rock basins in the Adirondacks. Just try and see if you can cover the walls with moss and other clingy vegetation, he said. Well, ok, then! It’d be great to get even one or two people in a number of different airshafts to try and spread moss along their airshaft walls and to get them to compare notes and see what takes.
Directing light––One of the most depressing things about facing the airshaft is the lack of light. If people could somehow coordinate how to reflect sunlight to cascade down into the lower levels, that’d be amazing. After researching fancy ways to direct light down into airshafts, a few hi-low tech options I’d like to try include the following:
Mirrors in people’s windows, or mirrored windows: A few European villages, nested between high mountains have experimented with installing mirrors on the mountainside to direct sunlight down into their valley. I wonder if people could do the same using mirrors from window to window. Certainly, this would help people grow plants better!
Hanging prisms: I like rainbows. They’re cheerful and easy.
Light reflecting fabrics: People could hang light reflecting fabrics at different angles to lighten up the airshafts, even if they were just lined along the wall. Painting the walls white would also help tremendously but you’d have less control of heating during the summer time.
Water Pools: Water is much more difficult to work with but it does reflect light beautifully and even if airshaft communities could somehow install small water pools at the ground level, combined with mirrors at the top level, sunlight could be diffused throughout the space.
Nightlights––Every once in a while it might be fun to project movies, pictures, or data viz pieces down onto the airshaft ground. Or: individual spotlights with puppet shadows projected onto the ground would be beautiful. Or: people hanging lanterns outside their windows. Night gardens + floating lanterns = : )
Window lines and scaffolding––Even if two people could secure a single window to window line across an airshaft space, there could be so much potential for other stuff, especially with a pulley system! They could start a vine, they could hang some reflectant fabric, they could link some Christmas lights, they could devise communications systems. Of course, this raises all sorts of sharing issues. But since I’m in fantasy mode here, why not imagine a web of lines (that were magically management approved, infallibly secure, and universally loved) that could offer a scaffolding for hanging gardens?
CONTENT: scheduling
Private: Interviews & recording (negotiating privacy); Give materials to people and let them create
Gathering: create and record together
For our Social Facts class assignment two weeks ago, we were teamed up in groups, asked to observe how an online group made its decisions, and to present our observations to the class. My group of five decided to use the Skype conference chat format to come to a decision on what group we would observe; this, we thought, would allow us the bonus material of observing ourselves making a decision online. In the end, this observation of our own online decision-making process constituted the primary material that we analyzed. Aside from personality dynamics, there were two main factors that shaped our process. One was the question of how much we felt we had at stake in making our decision, and the other was the interface we used in communicating with each other. In relation to my own role in this process and how these factors influenced me, not only did I come in late to the live chat, but I also never engaged as fully with the decision-making process than I would have if this had been a face-to-face meeting or if I’d felt invested in the process or outcome.
From the outset it seemed clear that there was not that much at stake for each of us individually. We were not emotionally invested in each other and the group formation was externally imposed as an assignment. So any personal motivation to be a part of this group came from our respective interests in learning something about group dynamics through this exercise, and perhaps from a notion that we wanted to do well in this class. But by virtue of being a five-person group with no assigned leadership role or hierarchy, the responsibility for how our presentation turned out could be equally shared and easily shirked. In addition, unlike the exercise with picking which charity to donate to, there wasn’t much about the choices to get emotionally hooked on. In the absence of these types of incentives, the amount of satisfaction each member could get from the actual group interaction itself became all the more important in exciting that intrinsic motivation.
Unfortunately, the online chat medium we were using, Skype, was actively dissatisfying and did not facilitate group discussion, much less group decision-making, very well. First off, it is nearly impossible to be chatting with someone and not be doing something else at the same time. People are expected to be multi-tasking with these things and the threshold for not paying attention to the chat is very low. Secondly, the single-column design doesn’t take into account that people tend to write in an interrupted manner (i.e. delivering sentences in separate bits) and at the same time. Instead the column orders the disparate shards into an inaccurate linear logic whose fragments are confusing to decipher, especially with multiple people. Lastly, there’s a tension between the illusion of being “live” and failing to meet those expectations. Live, face-to-face presence encourages relatively high levels of attention commitment, and by contrast, language and emoticons are a poor substitute for real presence. This inability to reciprocate presence made the time investment in a dissatisfying “live” chat seem imprisoning.
The modes of expression were also incredibly limiting. We all discussed later the insufficient and yet necessary role that emoticons play in easing tensions, as well as how some of us interpreted things like typing speed as a sign of aggression or not paying attention. It was apparent that such limitations meant that we could not easily exchange the subtle cues that would allow us to feel satisfied with the legitimizing process—or with even feeling legitimately there. Notably, Barbra later said that she was feeling sheepish about being late and never felt fully acknowledged as being a legitimate contributor as a result. Head-nodding, brow furrowing, smiles, glazed eyes, etc. all offer a way for people to indicate levels of consensus and engagement which other people can respond to before anyone needs to explicitly state them. This pre-verbal acknowledgment cuts down on the time it takes to come to a consensus (we had all thought this would take around 20mins to complete, which I think is a reasonable expectation for a real, face-to-face meeting) and provides a way for more quiet or polite people to be heard.
In addressing some of these issues, one option for increasing the level of satisfactory interaction would be to change the Skype type-chat medium to the video format. Presumably, by increasing the amount of sensory data, the video chat would offer more immediacy and satisfying engagement. To begin with, unlike typing text, oral communication offers intimacy and flexibility. In actually speaking to each other, we could more easily modulate between casual chatting and a more directed discussion, thus facilitating both the need for building rapport and for meeting an objective. Even more obviously, the ability to see each other would mean that we could rely on non-verbal cues, and while eye contact would be tricky to negotiate, by reading each other’s facial expressions and body language, we could establish a level of rapport or syncing that need not be negotiated so abstractly or deliberately as in text chatting. On the spectrum of extrinsic to intrinsic motivation as laid out by Ryan and Deci, this rapport would yield more satisfaction to the participants in a way that would help foster an intrinsic desire to remain engaged with each other. In this respect, improving the opportunity for more immediate engagement would affect both the level and the type of motivation fueling the group’s behaviour.
Potentially, this intrinsic source of motivation would be coupled also with the extrinsic motivation derived from the knowledge that we might eventually show a video recording of ourselves to the class. That is, the prospect of having to present ourselves, and not just our words, for later scrutiny not only holds us more accountable for our behaviors (employing the effects of the shadow of the future), but in doing so, it introduces a performative element to our process. The specific consideration, then, is how that performative motivation might alter the behavior of each member in ways that either facilitate or debilitate rapport-building and decision-making. For example, would we still have had the socially bonding lemon ricotta discussion? (Probably). And would I have permitted the other last minute, face-to-face group meeting to occur at the same time? (Absolutely not. I would have attended the other meeting which was urgent but I wouldn’t have joined our group until the other meeting was over and I could give my undivided attention. Two key reasons: a) the immediacy of a video chat means that my distraction would be more distracting for the group, and b) more relevant to performative accountability, who wants to be that particular douchebag for everyone to see? and then to have to see everyone else seeing you as such….).
In any case, this video conference scenario seems to set up a potential for a self-consciousness that could either make people more reserved, more showman-like and attention-seeking, or more attentive to the objective of working well together and arriving at a decision. Whatever the influence may be, the performative aspect introduces a restraining checks-and-balance mechanism based on an awareness of behaviors that may result in feeling publicly shamed or praised. In our situation, I tentatively posit that overall there would be an increase in desire to perform well (that is, to stay engaged, be polite to each other, etc.) which would encourage us to pay more attention, stay on task, and be more professional, but that this would not necessarily help a genuine bonding experience that occurs more naturally when there are less extrinsic pressures.
With regards to the effects of self-consciousness on behavior, one interesting feature of the Skype video design (or at least interesting to someone who’s never used it before) is the dis/ability for people to see themselves during the chat. My first impression was, wow, this sucks––why would I want to see myself when I’m talking to someone else, it’s such a huge distraction from the conversation, maybe I should start holding a mirror next to people’s heads when I talk to them, etc. etc. ad nauseum. On the other hand, perhaps in competition with all the other distractions available to a computer user, having a video mirror is a great hooking device to keep the user engaged with the interface. Moreover, in the context of a video conference, and especially where everyone’s situated in a circular, round-table fashion, seeing one’s image in relationship to other people’s images helps tie the self to the group. To this end, an interesting element to play with in the video conference format is the matter of separate screen windows around each member––what would it be like to portray everyone within a single frame, as if on the same stage? or at least, how can we use the aesthetic language of borders and gaps between individual frames? These questions raise a series of design factors, as laid out by Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, not just having to do with the effects of gutters and boundaries, but also the advantages of portraying people more spaciously rather than simply presenting them in all the details of a realistic video medium.
Yet in exploring such elements as existing chat filters, animation styles, and aspects of traditional Chinese perspectivism, the most important conclusion I came to as far as my own deeper interests is that it is not really necessary to add more technology per se––in this case, switching mediums to video––but to improve the existing medium, viz. typing. It is funny to think that after ten years of being obsessed with James Joyce + Chinese calligraphy + ways for a small group of people to write together expressively, I might have found a good fit in re-imagining the conference chat interface. To go through some personal background: in 2001 I took Michael Seidel’s spring semester class on Joyce, became absolutely obsessed with everything about Ulysses, and upon encountering Chinese calligraphy later that summer, I began to consider the ways in which a visual embodiment of language could build on the type of reading and writing experience that both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake offer. After graduating, I moved to Taiwan to find a calligrapher in hopes of learning whether a) calligraphy could actually express the mood and personality of the writer, as if writing were a form of acting, and b) if you could get a group of writers together to create a visual play, or language theater on paper. Within a month and half of relocating to Taipei, I met an extraordinary calligraphy master who proceeded to fulfill and turn my expectations inside out. Not only did calligraphy express my level of skill, my personality, and my range of moods, but I couldn’t bloody escape it. Every week, my teacher would go through a foot high pile of my work and locate all the fluctuations of my emotional life. E.g.:
––Here, (circling a few characters w/ a bright orange inked brush), what were you afraid of when you were writing here?
––You have no motivation here, no life! Sometimes you can continue and work through that and still get something from it, but other times just let it go. Just go for a hike, watch a movie, get drunk with your friends….
––You keep waffling throughout these pages and this is tiring not only for you but for people looking at your work. Pick it up or put it down, don’t get stuck in the middle.
––Ah, see, this is where you relax. Your mind is moment by moment with your hand and your heart is still and expansive (waited two years for that one)….
––This is too controlling, you’re trying too hard to get it perfectly right. You’re too attached to copying the form, you’ve totally missed the energy of it. Don’t compete with a copy machine; show what a copy machine can’t show.
––See here? You’re trying to force this stroke against this one. Sometimes when you see someone throwing a tantrum (in this case, one of my characters), the strongest counter move to contain that is to give that character some space. Be soft and supple with the other characters around it, and then you can even showcase the beauty of the tantrum.
And so on. In this way, strengthening the characters on the page seemed to become a way to adjust one’s own character.
Apart from his diagnostic skills, what was also remarkable was that the solution to working out obstacles was not to think it out but to practice writing or to try something new. There was no absolute right or wrong, only what worked and didn’t work in specific contexts, and this sense couldn’t really be figured out beforehand or intellectually. The idea of not using my brain to problem-solve was a revolutionary concept for me and I became fascinated with other ways of knowing (perhaps characterized as apprehension via mimetic process and not just comprehension via reasoning). But to what extent could I attribute all this to the medium that I was using and not just to an insightful teacher steeped in an awfully old and coherent tradition? What is it about a tool that allows for expression and a learning process like that to occur? And what does all this have to do with computer typing and the chat forum?
Some cursory thoughts:
1) By my third year of training, I realized that I needed a way to translate the feeling and principles I’d been learning in Chinese calligraphy into an English-speaking environment. This was for the very practical reason that I wasn’t learning Chinese fast enough to create content well: the poems and dialogues I was writing were still all in English and I actually had little interest in writing them in Chinese. So to tackle this problem, I first started redesigning English words to mimic Chinese ideogrammatic units. Three months into that I realized that that, too, was taking too long. So I started looking at the main writing tool we use in English, the computer keyboard, and how that could be an expressive tool like the calligraphy brush. Having played piano growing up, and loved it despite it being the good little Asian thing to do, I began to wonder how we could turn typing into something like playing the piano, with the output being visual instead of aural. In fact, music and dance were key analogies my teacher used for helping us understand calligraphy, and this approach addresses something more fundamental and translatable than making English look Chinese.
2) With regards to the multi-user, type-chatting format, I’m curious as to how certain aesthetic principles in Chinese calligraphy could be applied to manage flow and to visualize relationships between the parts to each other and the parts as a whole. Of the four basic qualities one can look at in understanding a calligraphic composition, two that would be interesting to experiment with for this purpose are the concepts of energy linking and balance. I know this sounds pretty vague and in the realm of the woo-woo; the best way to really articulate all this would be to just try it out with few specific components:
a) space: have people be typing into individual thought bubbles arranged in a circle, as with the individual video chat screens, which can float to a middle forum upon completion of typing.
b) timing: don’t let people have the luxury of writing first privately and then hitting “return” for everyone else to see it. By making the typing as immediately present as possible, people can actually pace themselves better, with an attunement to where others are at and how a visual conversation is unfolding as a whole. This restriction will slow down the pace by addressing the twofold problem of people needing to insert their ‘voice’ as quickly as possible in the current linear chat flow (partly why they hit “return” before finishing their sentences) as well as people’s inclination to just write without taking the time to think.
c) expression: make use of typing speed as well as force/pressure to convey rhythm and musicality (thinking of a visual parallels to legato, staccato, piano, forte). Most importantly, expression can shift away from the symbolic realm of emoticons to more subtle possibilities that combine both intentional and unintentional gestures.
3) What could people learn by adapting to and using this type of tool? By giving users the option of making something look pretty, or in harmony or dissonance, etc., can they gain an aesthetic awareness, or a different body sense, or a simple creative satisfaction from communicating via typing? Could there be a way to see or intuit another person’s emotional state or stylistic sensibility from how they type? And could this fundamentally be a data visualization piece that on some level allows people to sense, for instance, when they are coordinating well or when things become tense?
4) Of course, one important balance to strike would be level of difficulty: you want to make this tool challenging enough for people to l/earn something from it (most obviously, increasing levels of expression), but also easy and fun enough to stay engaged in. Too, this type of chat interface would probably find its most receptive audience in China where the users are familiar with both pin-yin and the calligraphic tradition.
On that note, it’d be interesting to see how re-imagining an chat interface could in turn reshape the ways in which traditional Chinese calligraphy is produced and appreciated. Aside from re-thinking calligraphy as a social, collaborative production (which could also draw from pre-existing poetic traditions in at least the Chinese and Japanese cultures), there would be a potential for re-conceptualizing the spatial parameters within which one writes calligraphy, both in terms of the square boxes students learn in, as well as dimensionality and narrative perspectives. And with a final, as yet unrelated, nod to Joyce, it’s worth mentioning that the structural set-ups of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake organize information and the reader’s narrative journey in ways that really speak to hyperlinking and search engines, and that Joyce would have adored the vernacular productions found in LOLCats and its Bible Translation Project.
THESIS: late 14c., “unaccented syllable or note,” from L. thesis “unaccented syllable in poetry,” later “stressed part of a metrical foot,” from Gk. thesis “a proposition,” also “downbeat” (in music), originally “a setting down or placing,” from root of tithenai “to place, put, set,” from PIE base *dhe- “to put, to do” (see factitious). Sense in logic of “a proposition, statement to be proved” is first recorded 1570s; that of “dissertation written by a candidate for a university degree” is from 1650s.
I. Thesis Statement
For my thesis experiment I’d like to create a paper (book) sculpture which can mix and play audio in recombinatory ways depending on how one moves the paper. The question I’m approaching with this project is how can I make a book site-specific, where does a book take place? The heart of this question arises from my attachment to books during my childhood when I moved around a lot and when the consistent friends and environments I had were the books I carried with me. Books have always represented an imaginary space and time that I could access from anywhere, and mostly anytime (I used to have a system where I could read while taking a shower). Moreover, the medium itself offered an ability to access narratives both linearly and randomly by simply turning pages, which always gave me an inexplicable sense of pleasure and security.
There are definitely more qualities about books that I have in mind, but for now, suffice to say that I’d like to connect this narrative experience with a specific site: the ocean-beach. (The actual ones I have in mind are not close by so I might have to take a trip or find another option such as a local beach). Sea sounds constitute some of the most visceral experiences I’ve had with the sea and I’d like to connect the book sculpture with the sea, and seashore, by tying page movements with the sea’s sound scape. This relationship offers a way to juxtapose two temporalities and spaces, to be both site-specific and transitional. Eventually, I’d also like to explore a writing aspect. Even simply leaving the pages blank to write on will create an interesting texture and experience. But an avenue to also consider is how the sea could both speak and write to the book by analyzing sea waves and its sound waves and recording it into the book.
II. Process
The aesthetics of this project will depend very much on the materials, and I’m very excited to start working with the following tools and forms:
pop-up books
origami constructions
soft circuit materials such as paper, conductive inks and threads
c) Of course, I’ll be playing with all sorts of different types of paper shapes and experimenting with what I can construct out of different types of paper:
d) I’ll also be experimenting with recordings, both in terms of recording sea sounds as well as what types of interesting imprints we can make on paper. Paper Tattoo
site-specific relationship: how can you make a book site-specific?
obsession with language, writing, paper, and weaving
the sea
For me working an installation is working in relation to a particular place. You’re coming in and you’re in some sense animating the space, and you don’t know what that space or situation will do to you, or vice-versa, what you will do to it. Like you make yourself blank so you can pay attention to what comes up, what it makes you think of, what it makes you feel. All those ways that your skin is an organ, and the membranes are incredibly smart. Immediately you walk through any threshold and… you smell, you feel the temperature and the light and all those things that have enormous influence.
…thinking of the border that’s between the liquidity of the water and the solid ground. And the churning edge that always is and that edges are always conflicted or fraught places. And perhaps the most conflicted and fraught is the one that’s formed by the largest organ of our body, which is our skin and that makes, creates, an interior that’s always in relationship to an exterior. And I think that it’s really out of that border or edge that the work really forms.
I. Empathy and social class: dependency increases empathy
According to Dacher Keltner (Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley) and Michael Kraus (postdoctral fellow in health psychology at UC San Francisco), less wealthy people are more generous, more polite, and respond more contagiously to the emotions of others as opposed to their wealthier counterparts (interview on Forum, KQEDradio, Dec 30, 2010).
In their report, “Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior“, ‘lower class individuals’ demonstrated in four separate studies more prosocial characteristics defined respectively as (1) generous, (2) charitable, (3) trusting, and (4) helpful. In another abstract, “Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy” Keltner and Kraus also reported that compared to ‘upper-class individuals,’ ‘lower-class individuals’ scored higher on empathic accuracy, judging other people’s emotions, and inferring emotions from static images of eye muscle movements. In both reports, the researchers suggested that people from less wealthy background were more aware of their dependency on other people and tended “to explain social events in terms of features of the external environment.” Keltner and Kraus were careful to point out that in reality, the relationship between class and empathy is very complex, and other factors obviously also influence people’s empathic skills. Nonetheless what is fascinating is that Keltner and Krauss also mentioned that when they had individuals in their labs imagine themselves as being from another social economic status (SES), their scores reflected the same test results; that is, people who imagined themselves to be from a lower SES scored higher, by the same proportions, as the scores from people actually in those SES and those who imagined themselves to be from a higher SES scored lower on these tests.
II. Mirror Neurons: to see is to feel
According to Vittorio Gallese, professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and one of the discoverers of mirror neurons, “Our brains, and those of other primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, embodied simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds.” Indeed, as Marco Iacoboni explains in his 2008 Google lecture in Mountain View, CA the brain’s aforementioned functional mechanism hinges on mimicry, which may be the neurological basis of empathy (the ‘experiential insight’ of other minds).
First direct recording of mirror neurons in human brain (4/13/2010)
To summarize, when neurologists were studying the relationship between motor neurons and the physical action of grasping, they found that there was a set of motor neurons that were fired not only when the subject grasped something but also when the subject watched someone else grasp something. This set of neurons, called “mirror neurons,” is arguably a key factor in allowing us to put ourselves in someone else’ shoes and to feel another person’s emotions almost immediately, as Gallese explained:
When I see the facial expression of someone else, and this perception leads me to experience that expression as a particular affective state, I do not accomplish this type of understanding through an argument by analogy. The other’s emotion is constituted, experienced and therefore directly understood by means of an embodied simulation producing a shared body state. It is the activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding.
Outlining some of the neural mechanisms behind an “embodied simulation,” Iacoboni states that mirror neurons are connected to emotional experiences because when mirror neurons are fired, they will also trigger, via the insula region, responses in the limbic system where emotional responses occur. The diagram below models this relationship in a study on the mirror neuron system and affective responses to music:
Thus, the process of understanding another person’s emotions and intentions is not so much based on conscious analysis and deductive reasoning as it is on an automatic simulation of others’ experiences. As Gallese wrote:
I employ the term ‘embodied simulation’ as an automatic, unconscious, and pre-reflexive functional mechanism, whose function is the modeling of objects, agents, and events. Simulation… is therefore not necessarily the result of a willed and conscious cognitive effort, aimed at interpreting the intentions hidden in the overt behavior of others, but rather a basic functional mechanism of our brain.
Even without going into the question of emotions and empathy, studies into mirror neurons point to a neurological infrastructure that allows us to ‘feel’ the physical pain of another. As neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran describes in this brief TED talk below, when our mirror neurons fire upon seeing another person getting stabbed in the arm, the only reason why we don’t actually experience the pain of getting stabbed is because there are pain receptors in the skin that signal to the brain that we are not getting stabbed.
However, if we prevent the skin’s pain receptors from telling the brain “not to feel pain” (using some sort of anesthetization procedure), the observer will actually feel the pain of being stabbed from watching someone else being stabbed. Thus, “you’ve dissolved the barrier between self and other” which is why Ramachandran calls mirror neurons the “Gandhi neurons”:
Mirror neurons, states Iacoboni, can be bio-markers of sociability, as studies with children have demonstrated. In testing for interpersonal competence and emphatic concern, brain scans of mirror neuron areas showed that, whether observing or imitating, mirror neuron activation correlated with these areas of social competence. There have also been extensive studies into the relationship between autism and mirror neurons, as well as the function of mirror neurons in decreasing pain in phantom limbs. And while the evidence is still inconclusive as to the specific role that the mirror neuron system plays in empathy, as Jean Decety from the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago recently pointed out, neuroscientists such as Gallese, Iacoboni, and Ramanchandran, make a strong case for understanding empathy as a neurological function and this understanding in turn offers a paradigm shift in understanding cognition itself as immediate and intuitive. As Gallese puts it: “The shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of others, by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional attunement. Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’ intentions into the observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality of familiarity we entertain with other individuals. This is what ‘being empathic’ is about.”
III. Oxytocin
Last year, an article by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative reported that the neuropeptide, oxytocin, may activate the mirror neuron system. As with mirror neurons, research into the relationship between oxytocin levels and autism demonstrated that people with autism generally produced lower levels of oxytocin, and when given the oxytocin nasal spray, autistic patients seemed to be more receptive and open in social interactions. But these studies are not yet conclusive and the long-term side effects of such oxytocin treatments (which were given to children as young as two years of age) are unknown. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any other reports or abstracts detailing the connection between mirror neurons and oxytocin; however, oxytocin seems to add an interesting piece of the puzzle for understanding how empathy might work on a physiological level.
Oxytocin Diagram (Ink on paper Apr 2006 68cm x 45cm) In the Oxytocin Drawings people are positioned to represent the chemical structure of an Oxytocin Molecule.
Oxytocin, secreted by the pituitary gland and regulated by the hypothalamus, is not stored in the body but only produced/released by the brain only when you ‘need it’ and has long been associated with reproduction: it is well-documented that females produce oxytocin during labour and when they’re breast-feeding and both sexes produce oxytocin during sex. It has been found to be produced when people are watching emotional movies, when making eye contact, when hugging or being touched, and during rituals such as weddings (where the bride has the highest amount of oxytocin, then her mother, and then in decreasing order relative to the closeness to the bride and groom). In general, studies over the last ten years have shown that oxytocin levels correspond to the levels of trust and generosity that people show to strangers in various ways.
For example, in experiments testing the effects of oxytocin on people’s performances in a “trust game” (created in the mid-90s by three experimental economists), Paul J. Zak, professor of economics and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, found in 2007 that:
a) people’s brains released more oxytocin when other people showed them trust
b) people with higher levels of oxytocin reciprocated trust
c) artificially increasing levels of oxytocin in people’s brains increased their trust and generosity
The first two outcomes suggested that oxytocin made people more likely to interact and trust strangers, and numerous studies since then have corroborated this apparent relationship. The third point was tested using nasal spray doses of oxytocin and the results appeared even more dramatic: the subjects who received a dose of oxytocin gave 17% more money than their placebo counterparts and twice as many oxytocin subjects as placebo subjects gave up all their money. Although there were some oxytocin subjects who did not exhibit a high degree of trust, these and other experiments indicate a correspondence between oxytocin and openness towards strangers and there is even some suggestion that engaging with social network sites like Facebook and Twitter also increases levels of oxytocin in the brain.
Interestingly enough, since I first started looking into oxytocin, new reports have been published indicating that this trust is more discriminating than previously assumed. Oxytocin may also incline people to favor those they identify with in a tribal way—that is, with those within their perceived social cliques or racial groups. In various double-blind tests (where neither patients nor doctors knew who was given oxytocin and who was given a placebo), Carsten de Dreu, from the University of Amsterdam, found that oxytocin strengthens our tendencies to identify and dehumanize “outsiders” and that while it does increase trust and cooperation within communities, it also enhances natural biases and prejudices against those perceived to be outside that community. According to a recent NYTimes report on these findings, Bruno B. Averbeck, an expert on the brain’s emotional processes at the National Institute of Mental Health, stated that “it’s really surprising to me that this neurotransmitter can so specifically affect these social behaviors” as found in Dreu’s experiments, but that it was also important to keep in mind that the conscious mind can also override the emotional responses encouraged by oxytocin.
On the other hand, as the Handbook of Adult Resilience (John W. Reich, Alex J. Zautra, John Stuart Hall, Guilford Press, 2010) noted, oxytocin also seems to help the conscious mind by “…facilitat[ing] an indivdiual’s ability to infer the mental states of others” (48). Moreover, it seems to help people deal with stress better:
In humans, it appears that the combination of social support and oxytocin is most effective in reducing anxiety and HPA reactivity in response to psychosocial stress. Thus, in an experimental study by Heinrichs, Baumgartner, Kirschbaum, and Ehlert (2003) participants who received both social support and oxytocin had lower levels of cortisol, and reported greater calmness and lower anxiety during the Trier Social Stress Test than the placebo group, with and without social support, and the oxytocin-only group. (46)
According to recent studies by Professors Sarina Rodrigues (Oregan State University) and Laura Saslow (UC Berkeley), oxytocin does indeed relate to stress reactivity (i.e. it seems to help reduce stress) and it even seems to be linked to a person’s ability to be more empathetically intelligent at a genetic level. To be specific, Rodrigues and Saslow found that of the three combinations of the genetic variation of oxytocin receptors (labeled as AA, AG, and GG), one variation (GG) corresponded to higher abilities in emotional processing and other-oriented behavior. In stress reactivity tests involving white noise and countdowns, they found that women were overall more sensitive but that women and men with the GG variation had lower increases in heart rate. And in empathy tests of “reading the mind in eyes” which measures the ability to infer emotional states by eyes, women did better than men and both genders with the GG genetic variation were 22.7% less likely to make mistakes on the empathy test. Like Averbeck, Rodrigues emphasized that just because someone does or does not have the GG genetic variation does not necessarily mean they are more or less empathetic. Nonetheless, their findings suggest that there are genetic predispositions toward empathy.
I. Abstract Diptych (Gk. dis “two” + ptykhe “fold”)
Diptych is a live duet between two artists who attach themselves to monolithic paper microphones in order to create soundscapes conducted by body movements. Balancing choreography with spontaneous attunements, this performance explores the types of metamorphoses that can arise when two distinct parts are continuously juxtaposed and torn apart, synchronized and individualized, in an ever-shifting diptych.
The most prominent example of such metamorphosis occurs between the performers’ bodies and the paper instruments. Attached by hair alone, the body becomes an extension of the looming paper structure’s nervous system. In turn, the body movements give voice to those structures who sing in feedback loops with the speakers cradled below. Sometimes we performers appear to be at one with the paper structures as if our human bodies have reconfigured into strangely familiar beasts. Other times, it is difficult to tell if we are the structure’s prosthetic instrument, or if it is ours. Thus the boundaries of the visual diptych constantly change shape.
This shape-shifting also occurs aurally. Counterposed to nested, mobile speakers, the contact microphones built into the handmade paper sculptures allow for frequency compositions where the surface area and edges of the paper catch and resonate the sound waves below. At first it seems as if movement drives sound, but oftentimes, the attempt to attain certain frequencies is what actually drives the body gesture. At the same time, the two instruments generate sine waves in a phasing effect that forms new frequencies from the combined parts. All these variables enforce a degree of spontaneous improvisation where frequencies slip and shift unpredictably into a site specific architectural soundscape.
Most basically, the concept of a ‘diptych’ speaks to the collaborative form between two women. Our co-creative process is characterized by shared intentions, counterbalancing perspectives, and dialectically strengthening individualities. As a relationship, the diptych of two individuals highlights the integrity of each even as together something new and whole gets created. Moving into a performative piece, this dynamic is reflected through the performers who begin in a ritual unity that gradually differentiates into complementary parts. The resulting parallax offers views of the whole via the twofold parts, as well as the individual units in context of the related whole.
II. Last Dress Rehearsal, night before the NIME show at Glasslands in Brooklyn:
III. Glasslands Show
Thanks to Nisma for organizing and editing the NIME videos:
As an undergrad at Columbia, I quickly became acquainted with what it meant to “get shafted” in the housing lottery: there were, and are, always a number of doomed souls whose apartment windows opened onto dank, stagnant airshafts, usually a narrow column of space filled with darkness, trash, exhaust fumes, and the windows of other unfortunate souls.
It turns out these spaces have always been so. In 1879, James Ware won The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer design competition to increase housing for NY immigrants (and thereby profits for landords). At the time Manhattan lot sizes ran 25 by 100 feet and Ware’s design connected front and rear tenement lots with a long hallway, thus creating a “dumbbell” shape. When a new housing law that same year set minimum standards for lighting and ventilation, this dumbbell design quickly became ubiquitous. But whether this design actually offered light or ventilation was another matter. By 1903, Lawrence Veiller, secretary of the New York State Tenement House Commission (1900–01), declared that the “evil of the air-shaft” made NYC’s housing conditions “the worst in the world.” It was well known that the shaft was “simply a stagnant well of foul air” and moreover, “tenants often use the air shaft as a receptacle for garbage and all sorts of refuse and indescribably filth thrown out of the windows, and this mass filth is often allowed to remain, rotting at the bottom of the shaft for weeks without being cleaned out.” Fast forward to today, and we find that while conditions have improved somewhat, airshafts are still unpleasant pockets of dead spaces that fail to provide light or ventilation.
PART 2: Proposal to get unshafted and the role of permaculture
In an attempt to explore ways to actually redress the poor light and ventilation conditions, I have come across a few solutions for a) directing light, b) remediating air, and c) laying the foundations for developing a diverse vegetation system. However, while it is relatively straight-forward to consider each of these areas by themselves, it has been much harder to make design decisions that would combine these different elements together. To this end, I’ve found it very helpful to consider the designing process based on permaculture principles.
There are numerous definitions of what permaculture entails, all of which are rooted around an ethics of “earthcare, peoplecare, and fairshare” (I first heard this from Penny Livingston at the Omega Institute conference last fall). From these ethical values, permaculturalists have developed a set of design principles which point not so much to a specific mode of production as to a process of development itself. These principles include:
1. site specificity
2. multi-functional elements
3. functions supported by multiple elements
4. energy efficient planning
5. biological resourcing
6. energy cycling
7. small-scale intensive systems
8. natural plant layering/stacking and succession
9. diversity of species
10. increasing ‘edge’ within a system
11.replication of natural patterns
12. attention to scaling
Taking these principles into consideration has changed my approach to this project in a few ways. For one, I started thinking of converting the airshaft space as a more gradual, organic process rather than simply installing all the elements all at once. According to various studies on ecological succession, local species diversity and the overall ecological system becomes more resilient with gradual introductions and when disturbances are neither too rare or frequent. Furthermore, it makes more sense for us to introduce new elements via careful observation and adaptation rather than investing in a sweeping change that would not only increase chances of failure but prevent us from isolating what doesn’t work.
Another key shift in my thinking was how to model the airshaft on existing patterns or ecosystems in nature. It has been productive to consider, for example, cave environments:
or the small systems growing in hollowed out tree stumps, which often consist of moss, lichen, fungae, and fern:
This modeling will result in a hyrid of natural and humanmade elements, especially given the barren concrete environment of the airshafts and the fact that the primary organism living in these systems are homo sapiens. The specific outcome of the airshaft conversion, however, must arise organically and site-specifically tailored to each airshaft’s conditions as well as the community around it. Thus, the following outlines a set of decision-making steps that each airshaft community might take to convert a seemingly barren space into a living system.
PART 3: To light or not to light?
The first step for an airshaft community is to consider whether or not they want to pool their resources to push towards a change in their light condition, or if they want to work with the existing light conditions. When I first started thinking about this project, I just assumed that getting light down in the shafts would be the key step. My main impetus for getting sunlight into the airshafts, and by extension into apartment spaces facing the airshafts, was that it would not only increase people’s mental and physical health, but it would create opportunities for growing plants within the airshaft as well as in people’s apartments. I only later realized that this assumption precluded the possibility of transformation based on low-lighting conditions, such as seen in the aforementioned cave ecosystems. Nonetheless, I still think that light is a key choice airshaft communities should make on the outset (not that it can’t change later), mainly because it will determine what options they have for further conversion.
I’ve touched on various lighting options before and and here are a few more examples of light piping––in the first case, using light reflective piping at the Potsdamer Platz subterranean train station in Berlin (here above ground view):
and in the second design, using a heliostat and a piped prism system to refract light down in some D.C. law offices:
Other options I like include light reflective paint that could be applied to walls and light reflective fabric that could be hung strategically down into an airshaft at different angles. My amateurish instincts would choose a series of heliostats and reflective systems at rooftop borders of the airshaft which could direct solar (and lunar) light down into the shaft from above. This would provide for the most amount of light with the least amount of intrusion into the space, and the maintenance and control system would be relatively accessible. One could also optimize this system by daylighting with minor light reflecting devices on individual windows that could direct light into apartments (whether they be more sophisticated mirroring systems or simple prisms hung on windows).
If an airshaft community opts for light sourcing, then they can start developing a model for developing gardens and plant life based on those conditions (example below).
PART 4: Caves of Goblin’s Gold
If, on the other hand, the community doesn’t have the resources or desire to push for an overall lighting change, they can consider mimicking cave environments to transform their airshaft. A relatively easy solution would be to cover the airshaft walls with moss spores and start cultivating various forms of moss on the wall. This would not only enliven the space but it will also contribute to the air quality in the airshafts. Moreover, dark environments that support moss growth will also support cave ferns as well as decomposers such as mushrooms and lichen. In this case, the airshaft community can direct its energies towards building a minor composting system at the base of the airshaft, provided that it can arrange to have the compost be transported periodically to compost centers or local farms.
For especially dark airshafts, a beautiful, though more fragile moss option would be the schistostega pennata, otherwise known as luminscent moss, or goblin’s gold:
This type of moss is known for its glowing effect in dark places. This greenish-gold glowing appearance is due to the clear, spherical cells in the protonema that can collect even the faintest light like lenses, and the chloroplasts nearby in turn give off the greenish glow from the reflected light.
1. Schistostega pennata (Hedwig) F. Weber & D. Mohr, Index Mus. Pl. Crypt. [2]. 1803.
Gymnostomum pennatum Hedwig, Sp. Musc. Frond., 31. 1801; Schistostega osmundacea D. Mohr: Leaves of sterile shoots 0.5-1.2 mm, ecostate, median cells smooth, oblong-rhomboidal, thin-walled, 16-20 µm wide, decurrent, confluent at the base, margin entire, weakly bordered by narrow, elongated cells. Protonemal gemmae sticky, obclavate, 80-200 × 15-20 µm, 3-4 cells in length, tapering and thickened near apex. Seta 2-5 mm. Capsule erect, light brown, smooth, subglobose or ovoid, annulus absent. Spores yellowish green, pitted-reticulate, 10-13 µm.
Luminous moss capsules mature late spring-early summer, and they’re usually found on mineral soil in crevices on lower, sheltered parts of upturned tree root wads, ceilings of caves, crevices in soil banks, animal burrows, rarely on the shaded sides of deep pits along the upper banks of perennial streams, occasionally on rock. They are becoming endangered due to being overrun by more dominant species but they are native to New York State.
PART 5: Sensors and Community building
An important role that sensors can play in airshaft spaces is raising and maintaining awareness. Aside from giving information on air quality, like VOC and oxygen levels, sensor data can be used to connect people to each other via an interest in their habitat. As various students have already demonstrated, although not 100% accurate, these sensors can be put into places at a relatively low cost. The power of the data would be magnified by a data visualization piece, which would not just serve informational purposes, but it could help stimulate social networks and community building.
We can conceive human networks as playing a role in connecting various airshaft ecosystems. An important concept in permaculture is the idea of expanding “edges” where different systems meet. The edge of an airshaft ecosystem can be expanded into a rooftop system. But we can also think of humans as edge expansion tools when we consider our physical mobility and networking capabilities. Just as bees and wind help carry seeds away from the source, humans also act as carriers, and if we were to switch subjectivities, in a sense various airshaft systems can use us to help them communicate and modify each other.
PART 6: Bamboo and companion planting
I’ve already written about the prospect of growing bamboo groves in airshafts and how perfect it is for growing in the NY environment and for urban biofiltering, but here are some further considerations.
Planting. Bamboo roots and rhizomes spread horizontally and require anywhere between 1-4 feet of rooting depth depending on the type of bamboo and soil (looser, sandier soils require more depth), and can grow in low as well as bright lights. Bamboo needs soil moisture, abundant nitrogen, and protection from harsh winds. Given that most airshaft spaces will be protected from heavy winds, we can direct our focus on the first two requirements.
One way to indicate soil conditions, for moisture and nutrients, is using companion plants. For example, indicator plants for soil moisture include sedges (Carex spp.), reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea), and horsetail (Equisetum); indicators of nutrient rich soil include brambles (Rubus spp.) and stinging nettle (Urtica dioacea); and nitrogren providers include numerous plants from the legume family such as ceonothus, vetch, eleagnus.
Other interesting options are beans and peas, which not only provide nitrogen to the bamboo and act as a secondary crop, but they would also use the bamboo as a live trellis. This last relationship brings us back to all the other potential functions that bamboo could provide based on its hardy skeletal structure. Airshaft communities could potentially use bamboo as a form of live and cut scaffolding for starting vertical farms. As Bill Mollisson pointed out long before it became trendy, the key to permaculture planting in urban spaces is verticality and in his introductory urban permaculture video, he mentions grape vines growing on a NY building wall as acting as an insulator as well as providing yummy sustenance. These type of options remain to be explored on a case by case basis, but after beginning with a few basic design choices, thinking in terms of multi-functional elements and synergetic relationships such as bamboo and their companion plants will not only be more efficient in the long run but allows people to think more creatively about how they establish their resources.
PROJECTION SCULPTURE
Possible idea: Using wire and a semi-transluscent material (e.g. scrim, tulle), I’d like to sculpt the spinal curve so that when the posture is in proper alignment, we see a complete vertical column with no concave or convex distortion. However because the projection will go through the scrim, it’ll still create an otherworldly layering effect.
I) Spinal Vision
By placing cameras facing outward along various nodes on the back vertebrae column, I’d like to offer another sense of posture based on picture composites from the spine’s perspective. This idea was actually inspired by Ms. Keane’s presentation on posture a few weeks ago, which triggered an old fantasy of mine of depicting what plants or trees would see if they could see from every surface area or from all its leaves––except transpose that to the human spine.
The most direct depiction would be to simply depict what the spinal cameras sees at any given point in time. Presumably, where the spine curve is convex, the spine would “see” a greater range and the picture composite would be more spread out, whereas where a spinal curve is concave, the spine would “see” a more focused area and the composite would be more squished together. Initially, the computer posture was what I had in mind in terms of a single curve:
However, as you can see in the range of postures above, as well as the natural vertebrae alignment, there is usually more than one curve in the spine. I will probably focus on the thoracic (4) and lumbar (5) areas, and then make adjustments according to the sensitivity of the camera images.
One of the most interesting aspects, then, is how to depict these curvatures in an interesting and sufficiently familiar way. One possible way is to project the composites onto a white surface whose curves are proportionally matched to the curves of a correctly aligned spine.
II) How would you project spinal vision (in an installation)?
Aiwen was born in a jackfruit tree and she wants to return home. In the meantime, she tends to the unintended, finds it strange to be in a body, and aims to viscerate her contemplations of things.
I am interested in the idea of how a sense of self is dependent on a definition of an “other” and in what ways this definition (of self as opposed to other) poses a barrier to empathy.
In this first foray into different aspects of empathy, I specifically became fascinated with the controversial Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, and the ways in which power dynamics inspired the desire to control others, as well as how those who are controlled can identify more with the authority-power than fellow victims of that power. To be sure, these cases seem extreme, especially with the manipulation of pain and torture, and to this extent, they do not seem applicable to our own daily interactions. Nonetheless, given the ubiquitous evidence of such abuse on various scales (from schoolyard dynamics to slavery to totalitarian regimes, etc, etc) it is worth looking at the ease in these studies at which people became comfortable with torturing others.
With respect to our “Rest of You” class, I wonder if there are any ways of measuring empathy, how we could become conscious of the role of empathy in group dynamics, and if/what technologies make us more empathetic (a few articles on children, technology, and empathy).
I was super excited when Mike Cohen mentioned the Trapcode plug-in that can be used in After Effects. I started playing with the particle systems, coding it to match sound and other drawn movements I’d worked on already. Chris Kairalla and I agreed that these types of plug-ins (like with special effects in Psd and Illustrator) usually feel generic and unprofessional, but I think I was able to tailor it enough to my piece that it actually works ok. So far I’m pretty happy that nearly every still shot I’ve taken from the animated piece has yielded a pleasing result.
