Just Another Practical Dreamer

Sonic Physiognomy is my response to the politicization of the human face, drawing a relationship between the historical practices of physiognomy or face reading and the technologies of facial recognition and iris identification used for tracking and surveillance.

The is a form of live sonic portraiture, and comprises an installation wherein participants volunteer to have their face “scanned” and translated into sound. (For a future interation, each song will be recorded and made available for download to be used as unique sonic signatures in other applications, such as ringtones on cell phones.)

The Sonic Portrait installation consists of a “scan pod” that is made of over 615 unique pieces of corrugated cardboard that form the shape of two interlocking spirals.

Inside the pod is a mirror, LED, plexiglass screen, a pico projector, a portable speaker, and a webcam. The pod is open to allow people to put their heads inside.

This is the landscape which serves as a screen for Liwanag, a multi-channel animation piece that draws from Filipino and Chinese myths, language, and writing to tell the story of my experience of hybridity in the Asian diaspora.

“Liwanag” means light in Tagalog. Through live video capture and a program created in OpenFrameworks, viewers will find themselves in the animation piece, woven into the thread of the narrative. I will be taking inspiration from historical illustrations, ink painting, and calligraphy to create a multi-dimensional landscape that illustrates the flux of people and culture through time—-taking an intimate personal look at the legacy of colonization, migration, assimilation, hybridization, and nostalgia.

I’ve always been fascinated by smoke, its transience, its potency, its grace.

It serves as a metaphor for so many things, the beauty and absolute changeability of life.

It would seem antithetical then to wish to paint with smoke–creating a painting is a somewhat solidifying activity. Us ink painters, in particular, create artifacts of the moment. Snapshots of it. Ink is always honest and uncompromising in its ability to capture your every movement.

Conversely, smoke is ineffable. It escapes definition unless infinitely contained.

This project, written in Open Frameworks, attempts to capture smoke — to create a tool for smoke painting. I wanted to capture the glass painting famously recorded with video from Jackson Pollock and my own teacher, the Zen painter Kazuaki Tanahashi.

The program mirrors the person via live capture video while playing a video of smoke whose opacity is controlled by the mouse’s X coordinates. By clicking and dragging the mouse, we can capture the smoke as it travels across the screen, creating layers of smoke painting that continues to evolve.

This project uses the body’s topography as a 3D musical score. It takes place at three sites: a physical installation, a website, and on personal cell phones. The physical installation involves a series of sensors that will translate an audience member’s physical profile (from head to toe and back again) into music that will then play, be recorded and uploaded unto a website. From this website, viewers can download their “musical portrait” unto their cell phones and play them as ringtones.

 

On Chapters 1 and 2

What is missing in the thesis the “medium is the message” is the audience.

The issue the strikes me in reading MacLuhan’s first and second chapters is that although he sees media as an extension of the human self, he also talks about it as if media and its content arise independent of its audience. He talks primarily and colorfully about the relationship between media and content without a developed awareness that this relationship rests on the interpretations of a diverse audience.  

Granted, I am aware that he wrote this in the 1940s and that this self-reflective perspective has probably come to the fore in recent decades thanks to the postmodern theory. His theory predates the prescient notion that the audience has an active hand in authoring”the message”as it is received and that the role of the medium in activating this message is largely determined by the varying differences in audience backgrounds. These differences relate to socio-economics, race, language, culture, gender, education, and any combination of factors. MacLuhan doesn’t take into consideration the projections, assumptions, and diversity of experience and contexts that make media more or less successful in any given occasion. He presupposes that we are passive consumers rather than authors of our own experience. 

Ultimately, the medium is only part of the equation of the message. I might say that the ultimate medium is the experience of the individual. 

The second chapter discusses what I feel are rather relative terms of “hot” and “cool” media. He makes categorical rules as to how hot and cool media operate independently and in relation to each other. However, again this is problematic because the designation can be flipped according to the context–the era, cultural norms, purpose and use–of each object. A radio is “hot” in comparison to television in the fifties, but in 2010 the categories may well be reversed because television is moving in the direction of becoming a more interaction medium.

Below is an excerpt. For the complete piece, open the pdf:  Alive on the M5.

 

Alive on the M5: a poetic narrative of a journey through Manhattan

 

Sitting

on a sun-drenched bench

in a box, flanked by a smiling

female cyborg

touting vodka,  …

 

I am waiting

for the familiar squeak and squeal

of tired rounded rubber

alongside curb and dusty sidewalk.

As hoboes tend carefully

their tattered sheets, bags of

waste treasures

muted dolls, and patient canine

friends, panting languidly

in the cool dappled light

of autumn.

 

It comes tearing down the street,

almost swiping aside a woman, hunched

over to peer at something aground.

With unlikely grace

it swerves, sinking slightly

before balancing up beside

us, and in the same gesture

opening with a beckoning

hissssssss…  spit.. crack, ah!

 

I step in.

Slip my card in the slot

retrieve it and look on, upward

making my way

to the back of the bus.

Sitting by the loud exhale of the AC

I strain to hear conversations

filtering into this bubble

created by that exterior chamber.

 

“What is dance?”

someone asks his friend philosophically. ..

 

The sunny day outside glimmers

across Korea Town

neon lights calling bonchon

barbeque, bibimbab!  . ..

 

The greys of midtown Manhattan

shiver by in a proud flow

of shopping, construction, traffic.

I see words, “Avenue of the Americas”

“Bryant Park”, “Little Brazil”

“Trump”  . ..

 

It’s a beautiful day.

I start to ask questions.

What would happen if all traffic stopped in Manhattan?

What if there was no concrete in the city? …

What if subways were silent?

What if the walls of buildings where grown like the bark of trees?

What if they bent to adapt to the flux in families and movement of people?

 

What if cars didn’t have horns? . ..

What if the trees made music? 

 

What if everyone focused on the things they had instead of the things they don’t have?

What if there was no concrete in the city?

What if soft because synonymous with strong?

 

What if women and men wore long flowing silk dresses that trailed behind them for two city blocks? Would we all then be woven together in this fabric of amazing array?

What if airplanes blew bubbles as they flew overhead?

What if all the buildings were gilded with gold?

And all the fried chicken places inlaid with silver?

 

What if trees spoke to us and took the role of peacekeepers in the city?

They could give warning to transgressors and sweeps up bandits into their leafy  limbs.

 

And then the question,

In our work, are we putting the art in the context of technology,

or putting technology in the context of the art?

 

But this is the topic of a much longer essay.

And perhaps thoughts spanning the scope of many years to come.