thesis update
I’ve been spending sometime reading, sketching, and trying to explore and see what kind of pieces I’d like to remake for my thesis. After experimenting with the Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, I needed a different piece, a different medium to work with.
As luck would have it, that day a link that was sent to the list pointed me in the direction of early computer art experiments, going all the way back to the fifties, with their room-sized computers, punchcards, and all of that. These were perfect candidates for short remaking experiments, as they’re relatively simple to execute. In addition, and contrary to most computer art today, there is no source code available, and even if it were available, the hardware is obsolete. All that’s left of these pieces are the visual documentation of them, and that would be my reference.
For now, I started with two that I liked:
Noll’s Vertical-Horizontal No. 3
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Nees’s Wurfel-Unordnung (Cubic Disarray)
Here are my remakes:
Vertical-Horizontal No.3 (After Noll)
Cubic Disarray (After Nees)
And one attempt at mashing them up:
Vertical-Horizontal Disarray
Thesis idea reading & reference
The artistic question is no longer: “what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life? — Nicolas Bourriaud
Reading:
“Postproduction”, Bourriaud
“Statements on Appropriation”, Michalis Pichler
“Original Copies,” The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, Martha Buskirk
“Sentences on Conceptual Art”, Sol Lewitt
References:
Cory Arcangle
Sherrie Levine
Gelitin
Kutiman
Girl Talk
Joseph Kosuth
Marina Abramovich (Seven easy pieces)
Walter Benjamin
Marshall McLuhan
Words:
Appropriation
Original
Copy
Steal
Homage
Mashup
Replicate
Repeat
Remix
Rearrange
Evolution
Transformation
Recycling
Reference
Apprenticeship
all ideas are second hand
All ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources – Mark Twain
I have commitment issues. While they’re not exclusive to school projects, as we get closer and closer to Thesis they’ve become a major source of agony for me. Following Marina’s and other people’s advice, I went back and tried to draw connections between the projects I had done so far. Great experience, but it got me last thing I needed – even more ideas – and no solution to my problem.
Three (four?) weeks into the course, we had to present our ideas in class. I had spent countless hours thinking about thesis, but when I had to choose one idea I was hopelessly paralyzed. Why couldn’t I just choose an idea? The simple answer is that I was waiting for the perfect idea to come – as if it even means anything. I’m pretty sure this is a common problem, and sadly, have yet to figure out a good way to deal with this (deadlines don’t help, and neither does telling myself to “just do it”).
When this became clear to me, I knew what I had to do: steal other people’s projects. And if they suck, hey, it’s their fault!
I’ve had this idea for a while now – I remember how, sitting in classes last semester as people were presenting their projects, I noticed how different everyone’s approaches were to the exact same assignment. And how we all had different ideas on how to take each other’s projects forward. I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be great if, for next week, we would all just pick someone else’s project and had our take of it?”
As is the case with most of the ideas I get, it got tucked away in the back of my mind, where it lurked patiently until sometime this semester, when we started discussing originals and copies in Recurring Concepts in Art. It so happened that the midterm project for this class was to remake a project you had done, without using technology. During the process of working on that assignment, I really got a taste of how much could be gained by rethinking an existing piece, and how much I personally enjoy doing that.
There’s a lot of interesting theory behind this, all the way from apprentices learning by copying their masters, through appropriation art, to digital art, where the distinction between original and copy loses meaning, even more so with the rise of the open-source mentality. So, I’m still trying to figure out from which angle I want to approach this. Even within this relatively narrow concept space there’s no shortage of choices to make: Do I limit the kind of pieces I remake? How do I choose them? How many do I make? Is there a time limit? Do I request permission? Do I take requests? Is it a plain copy? a mutation? a mashup? a change of medium? A distillation to a concept and recreation? Do I do each piece just once or repeat? and so on, and so forth…
I’m still thinking through this… any suggestions/comments are welcome.
steady state – quick update
It’s about time I write something about what I’m working on for project development studio. It shall be known as “steady state”, at least for the time being. It’s an exploration into emergence of organic motion, in the form of a kinetic sculpture.
The idea started from a brainstorming session for a another project, and, as it often happens, mutated into something quite different from the original. I got obsessed with the idea of having autonomous modular units that affect each other, and as also with tropism, and more specifically heliotropism. What I have in mind is something you might call a tree or plant (but I rather you wouldn’t), a series of units that are stacked on top of one another and can rotate around their axis (sketches to come soon).
After running to a lot of problems while working on the design, I decided to take Danny’s advice and prototype the thing in two dimensions first, just to see the motion and whether it was really what I imagined. Luis suggested that I start with a horizontal prototype, to take away some of the forces out of the equation, and so I did. At the same time, I spent a day working on a more precise design which I then proceeded to get laser cut. The results were pretty disappointing – the teeth didn’t come out right, even when I tried using acrylic instead of masonite. This is probably due to the thickness of the material (1/4″). I’m going to try again with a thinner piece of plexi and see how that goes.
wikipedia exploration tool
For my Expression Frameworks final project, I decided to work on a Wikipedia exploration/free-association/network browsing tool, continuing what I had started in the last 4in4. Some examples exist, but are mostly concerned with the large scale network structure. The closest thing to what I’m imagining would be wikimindmap, but it’s not quite what I’m looking for.
Last time my project’s stopped short of the goal because of the performance problems I encountered while trying to work with the API live – it was just too slow for my purposes. This time I’ll be using the Wikipedia link dataset, which should make things incredibly faster.
Right now I’m looking into database options for holding this massive (massive for me, at least) dataset. I initially thought about using a NoSQL DB such as Reddis and the likes, but one thing I forgot was that a plain vanilla database won’t give me even the most basic graph features without some kind of workaround – for example, if your DB has a page as a key and then the pages it links to it as values, you would also need the reverse mapping – page->pages that linked to it. Graph databases solve that problem.
Greg pointed me to Twitter’s recently opensourced flockdb, which seems very cool but doesn’t have a built-in RESTful API (I’ll be using javascript + canvas/processing.js), lacks graph traversal features, which I might need in the future, and generally looks like an overkill that would be a real pain to install/deploy. Neo4j, on the other hand, is a true graph database, is simpler to get started with and offers RESTful API, so I’m planning to start with that.
Principled Design: Transparency in Development project
- What is it?
A central hub for everything that’s going on in the field in the developing world. An independent, unbiased organization and web site that collects, aggregates, and validates information regarding the progress and impact of aid initiatives and projects from all angles: from official reports coming from the organizations themselves, to insider leaks, and finally feedback and witness accounts from the field via crowd sourced/street journalism. - Why are you doing it?
(a) The development field is impenetrable to outsiders. It is heavy on jargon, highly academic, and fragmented across many organizations and initiatives, requiring incredible efforts from a newcomer to the field who simply wishes to get acquainted with the state of things. (b) The same issues of fragmentation and lack of transparency also hinder aid and contribute to the general inefficiencies characteristic of nonprofit mechanisms. (The UN would be the natural candidate for coordinating and consolidating aid efforts, yet seems incapable/unwilling to do so.) - Who is it for?
Everyone who has an interest in the outcomes of development projects – what is actually happening in the field. These include people working in organizations in the field, donors, the clients/target audience of those projects, and the general audience who wants to know more. - How do you expect people to use it?
The content of the site will be completely user-generated at first (hopefully evolving to a more active organization capable of conducting unbiased and independent investigations and interviews), and so will rely on people to provide whatever information they might have on development projects – by web submission, email, phone call, or text message. People will also be able to view the content, verify it, flag it, tag it or add further information. - What are your criteria of success for
what you can accomplish during the semester:
A design for the flow of information – acquisition, verification, etc.; a research-based assessment of the viability of different information sources; clearly identifying the main stakeholders, determining what the project’s subjective value is for them, and how they are most likely to engage with it. Finally – a realistic evaluation of whether or not this project is viable.
if your project was produced / deployed:
Popularity, basically. Achieving a critical mass of users that will make it the central hub and main resource of its kind. - A minimum of 5 references (articles, related projects etc)
Donaldson, K. (2008): ‘Why to be Wary of “Design for Developing Countries”’, Ambidextrous, Spring 2008, pp. 35-37.
Ushahidi, http://www.ushahidi.com/
FailFaire, http://failfaire.org/
“Aid Fragmentation Worse Despite Paris Declaration”, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46043
“Haiti Relief Efforts Hindered by Excessive Bureaucracy”, http://thewillandthewallet.org/2010/06/24/haiti-relief-efforts-hindered-by-excessive-bureaucracy/
Knowledge Management for Development, http://www.km4dev.org/
The International Aid Transparency Initiative, http://www.aidtransparency.net/
dataviz data sources & schema
- The ER database
- World Database of Happiness: Nation, Satisfaction with Life (1-10 scale). Might be interesting to combine with the CIA World Factbook.
- Freebase: An entity graph of people, places and things. Not quite sure it is possible to represent with a simple schema. The Wikipedia link dataset is also similar.
- Metafilter Infodump – postid, userid, datestamp, category, comment count, favorites count, deletion status & reason.
- Activity/experience sampling self-study (using an iPhone app?) – Similar to, but not quite like either daytum, mappiness and your.flowingdata. The idea is to use the iPhone to is done in “beeper studies” (similar to what Cziksentmihaly did in Flow experiments) – basically, you sample what a person is doing and/or how they’re feeling at random times, and given enough samples you may be able to find some interesting correlations. The simplest schema for the data would have Time Sampled and Activity. Mood could be an additional column.
Other interesting sources I’ve stumbled upon: NYC Data Mine, Infochimps, Data Wrangling Blog, Numbrary.
projdev dream, vision, goal, plan
Dream – To create an experience (or a series of experiences) around the theme of our ever changing reality – a reality made out of sub-atomic particles, one that is continuously flowing and constantly morphing. These experiences should not be educational or informative per-se, but the aim is to involve the viewer (for lack of a better term) to such a degree that genuine experiential understanding will emerge.
Vision – I imagine a series of immersive audio-visual experiences completely engulfing several rooms – the walls, ceiling, objects in the room all covered with screens/projections. The input will come from the environment: the people and their movement through the space will be captured. The visuals and audio will be algorithmically disintegrated, decomposed, and recomposed in various ways.