Digital Resources in Arts and Humanities Conference, Cambridge, 2008

Tim has attended the DRHA08 conference and presented his interactive drawing machine, which has intrigued and alarmed some delegates.

A relay of joy - Synaesthesia and drawing: a performance of a physical computing assembly

Sydney Cooper Gallery Exhibition

Notations 2008

Tim set up the drawing machine at the Notations conference, a week long series of image/sound experiments and performances celebrating John Cage’s collaboration of the same title 50 years ago. This time the user could not see the paper, so audio feedback was the main sensory feedback for drawing. Touch also becomes important when sight is eliminated. The user could fel in front of the stylus, paint stick or graphite.

More images available on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artsmedianet/

Sound painting performance

I have presented the sound trigger relay machine to students, and in public performance. I have also filmed a painting test, where the work was set out on the floor. Integrating colour and viscous paint present a new challenge. I incude below the text that acompanies a submission for the Jerwood digital moving image award. Shortlist announced next year. See the Jerwood website.

More images on Flickr.

Description of current work
My work combines Fine Art practice with digital media, with an emphasis on the physicality and engagement with material and autographic expression.
I have worked for some years with traditional print processes, combined with image origination and processing on computer. New insights into my practice have emerged from work that combines the digital and analogue realms.
I am studying for a PhD at the Slade School, on the subject of the grotesque image and imagination. Theoretical and practical research combines within my work, which intends to render visible concealed forms, which would otherwise remain liminal and disparate.
My short films, paintings and interactive drawings aim to identify grotesque and problematic forms and concerns. The abject, and the grotesque, present, in my view, a vital component of the subject’s composition, because being an integrated individual requires a sense of wholeness, in contrast to disintegration and becoming other, or different from a normative sense of the person.
The identification of a point of dissolution and breakdown is an important aspect of my work, and I am constantly experimenting with new ways of articulating and engendering this experience.
The computer comprises an aspect of breakdown of the subject – an anomalous prosthetic that is now accepted as a portion of the human subject.
I am interested in the construction of human and non-human assemblies for the purpose of locating an invisible thing, which may be the ‘decaying aura’, identified by Adorno as a remnant of a pre-industrialised past, when painting, and autographic expression were considered more significant that they are today.

Description of the digital moving image submission
A physical computing device for combining live painting with live audio production. I have presented the work recently (Open Ear, Broadstairs, November 20, 2007) at a public multimedia event, with the intention of inducting the assembled audience into the “machinic assembly’ of line, colour, sound, computer, data projector: an open network of live expression.
The graphic and chromatic notation of painting elides with the aural relay of sound, creating a new, combined assembly of subject, and visual and aural production.
I have intended to create a face, a monstrous face, that is the character, or identification of a human/computer interaction. The figure/face tends to break up and reform – it is informed by visual and aural feedback simultaneously, and this leads to an emergent, assembly combining psychological and sensory complexity, where surface, movement and the passage of time can induce a condition of daydream, or reverie. I am concerned with invoking the grotesque, and use sound samples derived from the human voice: the base, drone audio tracks, and the sounds triggered from making marks, generate a set of shifting motifs, which inform the spectator and artist at the same time.
I am developing different ways of controlling sounds generated from the paintings, and plan to use live vocals and instruments, which would respond to the sound/painting, and inversely, be modulated by the drawings and paintings, to crete graphic instructions determining a live score.
This work is still at an early stage of development, I am excited about the possible directions it might follow.

Relay of joy sound drawing tests

Drawing as research into sound relay machine for a performance. The round triggers play a sound via computer once they are drawn over. The process of drawing is changed by the introduction of sound feedback from the touch sensitive area behind the paper.

I have tried making a drawing blindfolded (illustrated above), which brings far more random results in to play. The relay is also broken, or changed from the normal, sighted, hand-eye coordination. Instead, sound returns an element of sensory feedback, permitting another type of coordination to occur.

Open Ear

Open Ear: Audio-visual events and performances at the Department of Media’s Broadstairs Campus of Canterbury Christ Church University.

On October 16th at 8:00pm Open Ear hosted an event curated by Paul Adams entitled Interference which incorporated a number of performances and an installation based on this theme.

Videos from the first Open Ear event Interference are now online: http://openear.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/interference-videos/
with some photos:
http://openear.wordpress.com/2007/10/17/interference/

The call for contributors for the next event:
http://openear.wordpress.com/category/call/

Mick Grierson contribued to open Ear: http://www.mickgrierson.co.uk/

Photography and the fantastic

I have been teaching a 9 week programme in digital imaging to a group of Japanese students. The theme was the bristish landscape. We visited a suburban garden, went to Seasalter (the seaside) and visited Tate Britain to look at the history of the British landscape tradition. As with earlier animation work they have produced, it is clear thay have no hesitation in bringing drawing and invented digital images into the more representational, photographic images of landscape.

I asked students to comment on my work, and Bryan’s work, on display in the Powell Building. Although limited in vocabulary, its clear they have a strong insight into symbolism and composition; they remarked that the works on display used compositional structures that differed from ‘Japanese’ composition.

The students have sometimes been too ready to eliminate the photographic landscape images, priviliging invented and drawn elements to invest images with complex posibilities. I have prompted them to establish a balance between the observed reality, the photograph, and the invented, digital reality, to create a montages comprising a sythesis of elements.

It appears the Japanese students have a different capacity, compared to the predominantly European students, to integrate media types on computer.

face landscape

I visited the National Gallery in London this week and tried to apply the face landscape model to viewing the paintings. On a literal level, a very high proportion of paintings which are not portraits have face and lanscapes in them. The Early Netherlandish paintings commonly combine a tiny landscape at the edges of the image, as if it was not good to exclude one, or the church patrons expected to get one..

Music occupies an ethereal place that is free from physical substance, whereas painting is corporealised, face landscapes are always becoming possible with the viscosity and physicality of material, but music is constantly ‘inventing lines of deterritorialisation for the refrain, implies procedures and constructions that have nothing to do with those of painting…’ The distinctions Deleuze and Guattari define between music and painting invite alternative discussion. Does the written word not become something else when spoken? Can sound and image together transform both, when presented together? Can Deleuze of Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicities and becomings present an argument against the determination that music has its own index, that properties and assemblies can pertain equally to science, art and music? It may be tempting to pose a broad synthesis linking types of expression by defining core, shared properties. Although expression and content differs, certain abstract properties, and ‘assemblies’ can be borrowed and relayed. The issue of disjunction, rupture and anomaly, for example can be called upon to question the territorial borders between forms, including music and painting.

What is cyborg?

Year 3 digital culture students discussed man/computer relations yesterday, in preparation for the practical work for the year.

An issue emerged: the perception of the extent of intervention, or overlap between computer and the human organism, would need to be extensive for a cyborg ‘creature’; brain – computer implants, a robot with organic components, or advanced computer ‘intelligence’, combined with the human.

Heart pacemakers, hip replacements, or everyday human/computer interaction would apper to be a category of activity precluding the notion of ‘cyborg’.
A dictionary definition: cyborg |ˈsīˌbôrg| noun a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body. ORIGIN 1960s: blend of cyber- and organism .

Cyber: characteristic of the culture of computers
The melding of two entities, mechanical/organic, extends to the earliest tools. The combination of human and machine finds form when driving a car, or a bicycle. But the cyborg entity appears to require types of penetrative, implanted, functions, and a fictional, rather than actual presense.

Another definition: cybernetics |ˌsībərˈnetiks| plural noun [treated as sing. ] the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.
The cybernetic would embrace the motor car, the artificial limb, and possibly the use of skype, with a camera, where the digital ‘eye’ communicates the image of the person.

The semiotics of ‘cyber’ and ‘borg’, privilige a confined either/or definition of the cyborg. On an extended plane, the semiotic limits move towards blurry edges and anomalous forms. Those forms could be the cyborg as cyclist, computer user, and the online Cyclops.

I’m wearing reading glasses, sitting in front of computer display, with a mechanical watch on my wrist. The ideas under discussion have become bits and bytes on the computer, which can now be recorded and circulated electronically.
Does this suggest my thoughts and reflections have become ‘cyborgised’?
Where does thought stop and the machine begin?

What is cyborg 1?

The Cyborg Handbook (Ed. Gray, C. Routledge 1995) defines the difference between the primitive use of tools, a man using a stick to hunt for example, and the cyborg. A cyborg might be a machine comprising vegetable and computer circuitry, or other forms of non human hybrid.

A rig for painting bridges using hybrid forms avoiding risk to humans : the arms of a chimanpzee grafted onto a mechanical armature, including pulleys and a crane. The long arms would be suitable for painting around girders and pillars. the rest of the body could be used for mating and creating new arms.

Donna Haraway:
‘Whatever else it is, the cyborg point of view is always about communication, infection, gender, species, information, and semiology’ The Cyborg Handbook, p. xiv

The chimp paint rig would be a ruptured semiological device for painting high bridges. The rupture, caused by crossing machine and animal, would create a new form from the language of machine, computer, chimp, paint and bridges.
The index (as sign, or measure of something) of the device would include infection, species, information, in values relating to the specific cyborg assembly, which would change if another type of arm was used or the assembly (limborg?) was employed to dig holes, or assemble other chimpborgs. Updating the animatronics, to provide higher levels of mechanical power to the arms would also change the index of the new assembly.

The semiology crosses into the name a ‘thing’ should be given. A portamteau word ‘chimpborg’, or a neologism, ‘prodocrane’ (could be a portamteau word?). New index, new word, new creature, or assembly.