Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut: playtesting an installation
April 6th, 2010
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shots from a playtest of my installation, Almost Everything Can And Shall Be Cut – a next iteration will involve layering the plastic sheeting to produce stereoscopic effects when the second channel video is projected. For the first video displayed on the monitor, I’m thinking of setting up the plastic tent in a stairwell.
Fischli and Weiss ” The Way Things Go”: inflatable and inflammable cause and effect
April 5th, 2010
research
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The most hardcore of mouse-traps on a human scale, with various inflamable materials, ballons, liquid helium, fire, bubble, tires, mutilated furniture, using the principles of inertia, wheeling in symetrical patterns, explosion, aerodynamics, the centripedal and centrifugal forces and many others. More grungy, more dangerous, more punk rock than the famous recent “This Too Shall Pass” video by OK Go, looking back at an experimental classic.
Brand X on Mindshare and Eric Gradman
March 30th, 2010
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In an empty loft space, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Brewery Arts District, Eric Gradman, Brent Bushnell and Doug Campbell are plotting the future of Los Angeles night life. These tech- and culture-savvy guys are thoroughly bored with L.A.’s bar scene, and they are scheming to bring interactive art, real-time games and dynamic technology to your next cocktail hour, where new ideas flow as liberally as the alcohol. They are, in fact, already manifesting this future social scene — and they call it Mindshare.
Every third Thursday of the month, Gradman, Bushnell and Campbell play host to a forward-thinking cultural salon that’s part tech-geek meet-and-greet and part playground of cutting-edge interactive art — all with an open bar. Started in 2006 by Doug Campbell and Adam Medford, the idea of Mindshare came out of their shared experience at the annual TED Conference. “We came back totally inspired,” says Campbell. “At the same time, we were really unimpressed with the typical bar-and-club-related social scene, and we thought, we’ve got a great network of people involved in science, technology, arts — let’s bring them together.”
But Mindshare is not just a boozed-up networking event. The evening starts out with a series of presentations that cover social robotics, apocalyptic survival cognitive neuroscience and even pole dancing. After all guests are thoroughly overstimulated, Mindsharians are let loose to mingle, drink and play with the “toys” made by the Mindshare Labs collective, a recently formed right arm to the Mindshare event. Gradman and Bushnell (among others) head up Mindshare Labs, and have been coming out with creations almost each month since last November. Somewhere between game, gadget and art installation, these innovative, cheeky inventions encourage people to lower their social inhibitions. Because, while we give a lot of credence to social networking on the Internet, geeks want to be social creatures in real life too.
After the jump: some of Mindshare’s latest inventions.
Laser Maze: Want to add some “Mission: Impossible” to your mixer? Bushnell’s game challenges partygoers to jump and duck through a room filled with angled laser beams. Using 3A lasers, Arduino circuits, Python and Linux programming plus a 1,200-watt fog machine, the Laser Maze is soon to be part of a multi-person game.
Cloud Mirror: Step in front of Gradman’s specially programmed video camera and projector at your own risk. Thanks to facial-recognition technology and what he calls “gentle data scraping” from social networking sites, tidbits of personal information appear above the projected person’s face in a cartoon-like “thought cloud.” Didn’t want the whole room to know your Facebook relationship status? Surprise! Too late.
ShadowSmoke: Imagine visuals that look like a digitally produced lava lamp projected on an entire wall of a club. Add Gradman’s computer-programming magic and suddenly whoever sashays in front of the screen can manipulate the swirls of colorful, virtual liquid-smoke with the movement of shadows. Wallflowers, beware: This project is meant to lure the dance-bashful out into the limelight.
Game Table: Bushnell has turned an ordinary dining table into a six-person video game platform that can play a number of classic games like Tron and Pong. Why six? Bushnell explains, “I think six is kind of an unstable number. People usually socialize in groups of two or four, so the Game Table encourages you to go invite others — maybe people you don’t know — into your circle to play. It’s a way less awkward way to flirt than the whole ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ thing.”
– Ramie Becker
Top photo: Eric Gradman stands before his interactive fluid simulation, “ShadowSmoke.” Credit: Josh Reiss
The Museum of Jurassic Technology: fantastical flutterings of real and distant space
March 29th, 2010
research
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The fictitious Renaissance scholar Athanasius Kircher’s fabulous system of magnetic divination: “The World is Tied with Secret Knots”
Hidden in sun-drenched Culver City, The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a hoax, an art installation of intimate and metaphysical magnitude, a labyrinth for the scholastic imagination and anything else you can dream of or wish for. Founded by the enigmatic David Hildebrand Wilson in 1989, susbequent recipient of a Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant in 2001 for this puzzling and original endeavour, the Museum is a cabinet of curiosities that tantalizingly frames tidbits of historical minutiae in a fabulous context, very much in the spirit of Mark Z. Danielewski’s legendary House of Leaves, also an ironic mise en abime of scholarly critique folded into an impossible (alhough imaginary) geometric space. Minuscule steroscopic projections visible through copper-articulated glass plates, documentary films with convoluted mystical narratives, whimsically lit diaoramas and glowing orbs: such is that place of perfect delight and incomprehension, the Museum of Jurassic Technology
The micromosaics of Harald Henry Dalton, visible only through a microscope
from the exhibit Lives of Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program
from the exhibit Garden of Eden on Wheels: Collections from Los Angeles Areas Mobile Parks
from the exhibit Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay
TORUS: conceptualizing my installation for Burning Man 2010
March 24th, 2010
germinating ideas
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Torus is a bouncing castle, an inflatable tunnel, a crawl space to rest and socialize, and a novel. After enjoying the buoyant properties of the platform at the center of the structure, revelers enter the darkly glowing, semi-translucent tunnel that circles the ring. Comfortably wide, and yet not large enough to allow you to stand up straight, the tunnel is a tautological maze that amusingly, gently disorients. Its elastic, squeaky walls have the consistency of a balloon and make for interesting reclining, lounging, splaying and contortion of limbs. Strangers meet as they crawl or wiggle through the tunnel: talk, experimentally intertwine, explore the space together. A system of fans keeps the air of the labyrinth adequately fresh and oxygenated.
The secret of Torus is in the speakers embedded in its walls: the tunnel is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant broadcasts a section of a short novel narrated by the novel’s protagonist. Like in one of Borges’ fantastical stories, the novel has neither beginning nor end – it is literally a circle!
The torus itself is a geometrical object with fascinating psychological properties…sound travels elliptically through it, allowing visitors to experience the ambiance rather than the letter of the novel.
Inflatacookbook: 1970s alternative media/architecture collective Ant Farm’s instruction manual on how to create weirdly inhabitable inflatable structures
March 23rd, 2010
germinating ideas
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In the late 60’s and 70’s, the San Francisco hippie art and architecture collective known as Ant Farm were creating buildings out of giant inflatable plastic bags. Their 1969 work, 50×50′ Pillow for the Whole Earth Catalog led to the commission to build the medical tent–or as Ant Farmer Chip Lord called it, “the Bad Trip Pavilion”–at Altamont.
Ant Farm also created uncannily prescient work about things like the all-consuming, TV-driven, pop media culture and the American fetishization of cars. [They're the ones who buried that row of Cadillacs nosefirst in the Texas desert.]
from Make Magazine:
“I had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with Ant Farm co-founder Doug Michels in the early ’90s. He was as delightfully crazy as ever, drawing up designs for spheres of water floating through space filled with dolphins, a Japanese sex theme park, a giant couch, called the National Sofa, in the park across from the White House, where people could come and interact with the First Family via the National TV set. This was definitely not a guy who liked to paint inside the lines. Sadly, Doug died in a freak climbing accident in 2003.”
Ant Farm’s “Inflatacookbook”
A Photo Comic of my installation film: production stills from the shoot of Everything Can and Shall Be Cut
March 10th, 2010
project updates
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Some stills from the shoot of one of the videos for my new installation “Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”
1. a balloon animal in a helpless position
2. the balloon animal in distress
3. a wig is powerless to keep the scissors at bay
4. the fate of the wig: stuffed in a blender
5. wig, ravaged , posing with its instrument of death
6. the slow decomposition of jello
7. the ice-cubes are handpicked for oblivion
8. a cube of polystyrene foam is tortured with a needle
9. green goo oozes from polystyrene’s wounds
10. a steak is posthumously fed with intraveinous liquid
11. a circuit board fears for its transistors
12. circuit board yields its last colorful breath
13. a pillow besides its own stuffing
14. exposing pillow’s inner flesh
15. the pink heart of pillow’s insides
Kourtrajmé at USC: qui l’eut cru?
March 4th, 2010
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Gritty short films, music videos and docs from Kourtrajmé Productions, a Paris-based collective of emerging visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians.
Kourtrajmé Productions is a collective of emerging French and Francophone visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians. The brainchild of internationally acclaimed directors Mathieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel, this production house and artist collective has garnered increasing attention and acclaim after getting millions of hits on online sites like Dailymotion and YouTube. Founded by Kim Chapiron, Romain Gavras and Toumani Sangaré, Kourtrajmé produces playful innovations and cutting interventions in popular culture and society that represent the cultural dreams, lives and crises of transnational urban and peri-urban French youth today.
ZIMOUN’s sound sculpture: most haunting murmur of elegant electronic objects
March 4th, 2010
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Zimoun : Sound Sculptures & Installations | Compilation Video V1.6 from ZIMOUN VIDEO ARCHIVE on Vimeo.
Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut III: interactive mind map of my installation
March 3rd, 2010
project updates
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Conceptual Sketch
(cast, shot list, reference tables using Prezi )Dream World I: unusual feasts
March 1st, 2010
germinating ideas
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I’ve decided to sprinkle this blog with recollections from my dreams: you never know when an idea might felicitously insert itself. After a few memorable dreams featuring labyrinthine space stations, magical cats, rapid aging, giant cattle with no skin, day-glow animals, a never ending forest etc…it seems a shame to let these things slip by without a word. Last night was pretty epic: I was invited to a party given by members of a special mafia that trafficked in human urine. How this had made them rich was mysterious, but the thing that struck me when I entered the restaurant was that a room with a long low table and heavy red drapes had been set aside for the offspring. And all these children were little girls, very be-ribbonned and cream-puff, velvet and taffeta dresses, their yummy hair giving off a soft burnished glow. In front of each one was a fluted cup of multicolored blown glass, heaped with melting fruit and gelatin. Despite the splendor they looked uncomfortable.
I surprised myself by making this video this afternoon but maybe it wasn’t a non-sequiture after all: it describes exactly what that particular dream sequence felt like.
Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut II: jello’s screen test
March 1st, 2010
project updates
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screen test for my upcoming installation project “Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut” featuring one of its stars: jello in all its wiggly, jellyfishy glory. Other materials will include foam core, computer circuitry, ice cubes, wigs, balloon animals, steak, and furry pillows.
Floating Donuts and Pink Pipe Joints: preliminary models for my project to hybridize the novel and the playground
February 25th, 2010
germinating ideas
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These sketches are first steps towards a visualization of my concept of “ambient narrative”. In this case, the book being read is inscribed in the walls of a warren of floating inflatable tunnels (suspended like a octopus-shaped air mattress from a ceiling), in the form of pressure sensors that, depending on the visitor’s ensconcement in a particular branch of the structure, trigger audio recordings of a story. Each chapter of the book can be accessed in a recombinant rhizomatic way – literally the visitor travels through the story, using her body, its movements and its rubbing against the plush fabric of the tunnels, as the decoding instrument that allows her to gather fragments of the hidden text. The story itself, called “In the Dark: The Story of a Disapearance” is an existential mystery or detective novel that is pieced together by the non-linear meanderings of the reader.
“Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”: my new installation project gets off the ground!
February 24th, 2010
project updates
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This two-channel installation piece examines the friction between texture and violence to bring us closer to the felt idea of flesh. The piece intends to question the relationship between affect and materiality, as well as the psychological economy of desire, destruction, and consumption by simultaneously making the viewer feel uncomfortable and viscerally involved.
Preliminary models:
A TV monitor presents us with a video of a hand performing different types of incisions using sharp and blunt metal instruments into a large array of materials. The monitor is covered with a loose “tent” of plastic sheeting, allowing the visitor a mysterious view of the video content through the blurring, glowing screen of the semi-transparent material. To get a closer look, the viewer has to unzip the tent’s opening and insert her head into an intimate space shared by the monitor.
The video is a loop of shot after shot of various texturally ambiguous materials or objects being clinically laid out on a chrome table while a hand, alternately gloved in vinyl or rubber gloves discovers the many methods by which each material can be cut up, destroyed, and divided and the specific instruments that do the job in the most satisfying or interesting way.
INCISION is preceded by a tactile prodding of the object followed by the MORCELLATION, FRAGMENTATION OF THE MATERIAL INTO ITS CONSTITUENT FORMS (filaments, bits, crumbs, slivers).The act of cutting can be smooth, swift : sensation of liberation, closure mixed with disquiet of violent end. The act of cutting can be difficult, messy, awkward: sensation of squeamish frustration. The viewer witnesses a Progression in the act of cutting: colorful liquid starts to OOZE out of the harmed materials (recalling old blood or water, displaying a viscous quality)
The second channel of the installation is rear projected onto a sheet of the same semi-transparent plastic wrapping that covered the monitor. The projection is a looping video of luridly colored organic textures (e.g. close-up of a beating heart, a time-lapse of growing mold). The video is processed into anaglyphic images to produce a stereoscopic effect, visible to the visitor with 3D glasses.
Sonic and Synesthesia: archaic utopia and toy emotion
February 18th, 2010
research
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As a child, I spent hours with my Sega Genesis or (Sega Megadrive, as it was marketed in Europe) developing digital motor reflexes meant to ensure my survival in a colorful 8-bit world. Rolling up in a little ball to zoom through transparent tubes or accelerate and fall in not-quite-Earth-gravity parabolas became second nature. Sonic introduced me to the delights of a sacharine electronic soundtrack that made the hard primary colors of Sonic world’s shimmer and subliminally controlled my minute pushing and pulling of the tiny joystick. Sonic is a masterpiece in synesthetic design: visual, aural and kinetic mesh together to create a re-embodied experience, more akin to telepresence than manipulating an avatar.
Apparently, other fans who still have dreams of pinballing through Sonic levels and have developped an automatic jump and bounce response to hearing repetitive synth melodies have posted these walkthroughs of Sonic 1 and 2…a nostalgic flashback to an archaic utopia.
Diana Thater’s Between Magic and Science: cameras and parlor tricks
February 18th, 2010
research
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Thater’s work in the past has focused on recreating abstracted immersive environments, using angled projections to transform the geometry of a space, often featuring the animal kingdom:
Diana Thater’s two channel installation Between Magic and Science deconstructs the magic metaphor that drives the myth of cinema and the cinematic apparatus. Not unlike an Andy Warhol film (Sleep, specifically), Thater offers the visitor the casual and yet involving spectacle of a continuous/reiterated gesture. In Thater’s piece, a magician keeps pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, an old cliché circulated in popular culture (including film and animation) that has become something of a symbol or archetype for the magic trick. In the first channel, Thater both dissimulates and exposes the magic trick by promenading the camera around the magician, an investigative motion that, however, repeatedly reveals nothing about how the trick is accomplished. In the second channel, the camera is static and records a “conventional” framing of the action, a tripod shot that references the illusory powers of cinema and its ability to create alternate realities out of “tricks” such as performance, production design, and montage. Both channels are commenting on the different persona or functions of the cinematic apparatus – the phenomenological or documentary camera (reminding us of Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye) and the camera of optical illusions and technological marvels, a device that traces its lineage to magic lanterns and the kinetoscope.
Diana Thater, Knots + Surfaces, 2001
The dramatization of this mise en abime goes deeper than these two asymmetrical mirrorings of the same action, however, since both channels are not projected in the installation space but inside an old Los Angeles theater, which is the footage actually projected for the visitors. Thater seems to be commenting on the layers of imaginary space that constitute the frame or screen of the cinematic mirage – just as the revolving camera is unable to unveil the mechanism or deception of the magician’s trick, so does Thater’s stitching together of the spaces represented in her two-channel piece appear seamless and opaque, hiding the layers of artifice within the totalizing control of the production.
Diana Thater, Between Magic and Science, 2010
And here, perhaps, Thater’s metaphor is too neatly tied up or packaged: the fact that her installation appears so convincingly to be a simple totality, in spite of the complex orchestration of its production, does not offer us a substantial or effective enough experience of the mise en abime she is representing in the piece. The work is more in the story about the work (including the thrilling tale of Thater’s acquaintance with a secret club of Los Angeles magicians) than the work itself, which makes the actual gallery experience a little anti-climactic compared to the curator’s introduction.
My films featured in the BLENDO show on hybrid animation
February 17th, 2010
project updates
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my films Remainder and Paroxysm are in a new show!
February 19th to the 27th, 5 to 8 PM in the SCA Gallery
“Squeaky Jaunt for Sci Fi”
February 10th, 2010
project updates
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My newest track of low-tech music. Enjoy!
I define low-tech and low-fi as a practice of jittery iterations – algorithms recode the same melody to create long looping ambient tracks. Anyhow, my idosyncratic use of the program Reason is responsible for the theory…still deep in the learning process.
FUN FAIRS AS MEGALOMANIAC SCULPTURE GARDENS
February 9th, 2010
germinating ideas, research
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Think of these rides as INTERACTIVE SCULPTURES : again, breaking down the false-ontological barriers between the cultural practices of high art and “low” entertainment. pop culture is the avant-garde !
