Last week we used Jan de Weille‘s ECG (electrocardiogram) equipment to do a quick experiment. Gaspard and Sandra Bébié Valérian of art-act were starting a new project on mycelium and asked Jan (a scientist, who had also worked on sonification of electric fish and motoneurones) some questions about sonification of champignons.
An image of our first experiment. Jan thinks we just mesured the apparatus’ imperfections. (We had no idea about the response range nor about delays.) I was excited to see the potentials change when I talked to the mushroom, and Gaspard was excited about all. We had a nice range of reactions from scientific to almost chamanic.
Wondering what this tells about art-science projects.
Two books of two friends, female friends, friendins, friendxx …
I present both books together, because, the authors could be interested to meet the book of the other.
Both books make you read differently.
Once upon a [‘high’, ‘spring’, ‘slack’, ‘neap’] tide we [‘drifted’, ‘coasted’, ‘slid’, ‘slipped’, ‘tacked’] past a [‘bay’, ‘beach’, ‘cape’, ‘cove’, ‘dune’, ‘lagoon’,]
Crahsh. L∅j drpp∅d ah mirrr pahinting n th∅ jjr. AH shrn ahbiss wh∅r∅ th∅r∅ hahd b∅∅n nji sahnd. AH hj∅ in th∅ b∅ahch. Jiji jah∩gh∅d.
Jiji by Lily Robert Foley, Omnia Vanitas Review, Sept. 2016.
On page 4, all o’s are removed. On page 17, all j’s and l’s are exchanged. On page 22, h is added to a’s (ah). On page 94, y is replaced with i. On page 100, u is replaced with ∩. On page 123, e is replaced with ∅.
Jiji has its own rules which are transforming the book into a reading machine. The “code” is given from the start.
When I first leafed through the book I was skeptic “It looked impossible to read”. But it wasn’t, my brain adapted and became entangled with the lovers in this “roman à clef”. Incredibly how plastic our brain is, how much of reading is convention, incredible how fast you can learn a new code. I preferred the tragic story, its content mirrored through its form, to the machinic end. Not brave enough. I don’t regret. Jiji stays with me.
J.R. Carpenter also clears the coast at the start in her note to the reader. This book is made of other books. The poems in this book are composed of facts, fictions, fragments, and codes collected from accounts of voyages undertaken over the past 2,340 years or so, into the North Atlantic, in search of the Northwest Passage, and beyond, into territories purely imaginary. These poems are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works. They retain traces of the syntax and grammar of code language the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text.
In An Ocean of Static form and content are also intimately linked. I was again initially skeptic; the book looked so austere.
I like to “play” between choosing an argument and comparing them among themselves. J.R.’s variable texts read as code, as poetry, as a game, and they are deeply strangely personal. They leave me space to be in/with the ocean of noise, hearing faint voices and splinters, that sometimes I recognize as from the past, however are always first-most hers. This is what we are made of. This is what we are. This is how we can speak without ignoring what was. This is how we are entangled with machines.
In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts a reader will never wash ashore on the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.
Et puis : Un poème d’un autre amie: Camille Bloomfield.
Could un unbiased conceptually neutral investigation of how people see the world exist? How to share diversity?
(This post is copied from http://e-stranger.tumblr.com/.)
English is not an international language and it is wrong that scolars use it as if it is.
Describing diversity is impossible if you use English, you need a metalanguage.
Depression is an English concept. NSM makes it possible to talk about it.
Anna Wierzbicka cited from :
In this video she explains, she has nothing against people being naturally imprisonned in their language, but that she opposes scolars’ and for instance also politicians’ thoughtless use of it.
I read Anna Wierzbicka’s book Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language, because I can imagine that this indeed might be a problem.
Moreover the blurp for the book promised Anna Wierzbicka had a solution.
NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) has 65 primes (a human conceptual vocabulary) and a simple syntax.
“Minimal English is a new derivative of the Natural semantic metalanguage research, with the first major publication in 2018. It is a reduced form of English designed for non-specialists to use when requiring clarity of expression or easily translatable materials. Minimal English uses an expanded set of vocabulary to the semantic primes. It includes the proposed universal and near-universal molecules, as well as non-universal words which can assist in clarity. Minimal English differs from other simple Englishes (such as Basic English) as it has been specifically designed for maximal cross-translatability.” From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage
“There are two kinds of English words.
Words of one kind are like this:
if someone says something with these English words,
many people in many places on Earth can know well what this someone wants to say.
There are not many words of this kind.
When someone says something with English words of this kind, this someone is saying it in “Minimal English”.
When someone says something in Minimal English,
people in many places on Earth can know well what this someone wants to say.
At the same time, people in these places can say the same thing with other words,
not English words.” From “Global English, Minimal English: Towards better intercultural communication” Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka 2014. : http://hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/hrc/u78/Global_English_Minimal_English%20position%20papers.pdf
Ps “Minimal English has no priviledged status as a conceptual mini language of human understanding. From a conceptual point of view, Minimal Spanish, Minimal Chinese, or Minimal Arabic would of course do just as well.”
#nfcdab is a do-it-youself or do-it-with-others? digital art biennale that travels on wireless technologies, light waves and electromagnetic fields to access content. The idea of the biennale is to take advantage of the potential of near-field (mis)communication and other sharing technologies for making web-based digital art accessible in outdoors settings to slack-keep presence.
The Big Kiss (2008) and Angry Women (2012) are shown together with Michael Szpakowski’s, House and Garden (2009) during the Decentralized Web Summit in San Fransisco.
August 1st and 2nd,
San Francisco Mint,
88 5th Street, San Francisco, CA.
For Ruth Catlow, who curated Furtherfield’s screening room as a part of the “creative track” programmed by Sam Hart and Mindy Seu for DWS, these 3 artworks exemplify an attitude to artmaking particular to the Web before the great centralisation – these are works that speak from the origins of the P2P movement, a time in which communities began to form around new modes of networked interaction.
The Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit is dedicated to creating the web we want [and the web we deserve]. We are convening those who want to build a web that…
Remembers. Forgets. That’s safe. That cares about people. That’s a marketplace. That’s a public square. That learns. That’s magical. That’s fun. A web with many winners. A web that’s locked open for good.
June 30th 19:10 Distant Movement(s) #1 test (30′)
Distributed performance with audience participation. On online togetherness and movement without movement.
In the frame of /Prolegòmeni e Gómene/ * Performing Art 3Days, Teatro Rossi Aperto, Pisa (It).
by Ad Hoc Group: Annie Abrahams, Daniel Pinheiro and Muriel Piqué. With Ivana Gherbaz for the French-Italian translation.
Muriel, a choreographer from Montpellier, will guide a 12 minutes long choreographic gesture only using her voice in front of her webcam. She will describe, eyes closed, the bodily sensations she experienced during a choreographic sequence she developed based on simple daily activities in her private environment. Annie in Montpellier and Daniel in Lisbon will listen with their eyes closed in front of their webcams. All three will be united in one interface, that will be projected in Pisa in front of an audience. People in Pisa can watch the projection but also join the experience on the spot.
There will be no online audience.
Can we read this imaginary movement in people far away on the surface of a screen?
Can we share something as intimate as feeling a dance? And does this sharing over time via machines connect us?
When we look at a projection of a face in close-up we enter an intimate space, an intimate space of looking closely into the subtle changes that occur. When we listen to someone sharing the feelings provoked by a dance, we sort of dream this dance, we think and feel it and this will open up to an interior of hitherto unexplored paths, the body shifting through careful guidance.
screencapture during the performance – more information soon.
*Prolegòmeni – explanatory dissertations introducing a theory, the subject of a study, a doctrine. Gómene – twisted hemp hawsers, mooring ropes for boats.
Hence: a line of words meant to validate other words, to unite or divide; a material line supported by gestures, to leave or land.
5/3 – 16/3 2018 Workshop plurimedia La performance en ligne comme outil de dévoilement ?ESA La Réunion.
Aujourd’hui le corps humain est pénétré par les nouvelles technologies ; il est augmenté, prolongé, amélioré et surveillé par des applications. Le corps est contraint, maltraité, contrôlé et souvent oublié. Le corps qui libère, qui rattache le virtuel au réel et en sens inverse, qui fait médiation, qui est entre. Le corps qui n’est plus jamais seul, mais n’a pas appris à être avec, ce corps lié est le champ de nos recherches.
Plus de photos sur flickr – Merci aux étudiants, vous avez étés superbes.
14/03 16h30 Rencontre avec Annie Abrahams Corps et nouvelles technologies.
École supérieure d’art de La Réunion, 102 Avenue du 20 Décembre 1848, Le Port, 97826.
It felt as closely observing a test tube in an internet ecology experiment.
I finally watched the video of our performance Online En-semble – Entanglement Training. It was so nice and touching to hear the voices, to listen to the the different soundqualities and latencies, to see the changing pixelations and environments. It was interesting to observe how the performers act, react, respond, with objects, sounds and words and find ways to co-create with each other and the machines.
Near the end we had 5 minutes of silently being together online. Helen didn’t get the sign for the end and continued alone.
It was also very engaging to see the audience chatting life during the performance. Randal Packer called this a non-stop flow of online viewer commentary: a simultaneous litany of questions, responses, digressions, and interjections in Power to the Viewer, the article he wrote after his Art of the Networked Practice symposium, where this performance was a part of.
Here are some citations of the chat log that particularly stroke me today:
Alan Sondheim: There’s an odd calmness here, as if they’re dream images or freud’s magic slate at work
Jessica Laraine Williams: I almost feel as if we are neural nets being trained with various iterants of standard objects, as a reference library. The repetitive verbal cues sound like training signals
Martina Ruhsam: as if they would imagine this performance that just happened in their mind
ximena: what are they listening to?
Maria Chatzichristodoulou: silence?
Jessica Laraine Williams: the space in between
Jessica Laraine Williams: white noise
Randall Packer: silence
Jan R 2: they are listening to us
…..
Ng Wen Lei: 4’33
Johannes Birringer: lovely, a telematic re-performance
Maria Chatzichristodoulou: it is interesting that Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz were also talking about experiments rather than performances as such, and considered training, rehearsal and performance to be the same
I would love to do a follow-up, to continue this entanglement training. I propose to keep this messy never ending unperfect strange conversation going …. it would be an example, a test tube for developping our empathy muscles over distance, to exercice in distributed intelligence.
Entanglement TrainingOnline performance by Annie Abrahams with Antye Greie, Helen Varley Jamieson, Soyung Lee, Huong Ngô, Daniel Pinheiro, Igor Stromajer. Thursday 29 of March 2018 in the frame of Art of the Networked Practice symposium.
All project info (photos, protocol, collected phrases, reactions etc.) bram.org/en-semble/
Marc Garrett interviewed artists Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams for the last chapter of his PHD Imaginative Dissent: Art, Technology and Social Change.
Three different points of view on the relation between media arts culture and the already established, traditional art systems & if and how this relation changed over time.
– lack of viable commercial options – Freemium system – scary shared ownership – not grounded aesthetics – mimicking traditional systems – artists facilitate the introduction of technology to the layman and start to be used for that –
On March 4, 2018, while being in La Réunion FR (Indian Ocean), Daniel Pinheiro asked me to meet him on a surveillance webcam in Rue de Bleury, Montreal, CA.
He could not see me, but I could watch him online. We exchanged text messages, trying to discuss the possibilities of an architecture of surveillance as a form of agency between individuals.
Daniel edited the recorded surveillance webcam with the text we wrote :
Watching him on the surveillance cam during the exchange made me think of films made by Godard and Chantal Akerman. Now I look at this video as showing a way to escape the standardized communication of the social media by using the spare time of a surveillance devise, showinga way to reinvent communication on our own terms. And maybe it’s also a piece on our relation – distant, by times “lonely”, but strongly connected.
This experiment was part of Daniel’s research LIF3STR3/\M.
7-9 09 slaap video in STWST48x4 SLEEP, Stadtwerkstat, Linz.
* Time to relax, to think about writing a book, about continuing Entanglements Trainings and how to develop distributed intelligence, about neural networks and performance and maybe VR. .
Two books of two friends, female friends, friendins, friendxx …
June 30th 19:10 Distant Movement(s) #1 test (30′)
