Figuring Data (Datascape Catalog Essay)

This essay was commissioned for the exhibition Datascape, at the Cube Gallery, QUT in April 2013. I should mention that since writing it I've discovered that Jer Thorp was way ahead of me on to the new oil thing.

“Data is the new oil” - Ann Hummer, Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners (source)

In the swirling chaos of twenty-first century capitalism, everybody wants to know what’s next. “Data is the new oil” is a pithy little announcement. It reminds us how we got here, powered by the long energetic boom of fossil fuels, now entering its closing stages. it announces a successor, a new wealth (and just in time). But in drawing the analogy, it also constructs data in a certain way; as a sort of amorphous but precious stuff, a resource for exploitation, and a sort of promising abundance. Similarly The Economist trumpeted the “Data Deluge” on their February 2010 cover: a businessman catches falling data in an upside-down umbrella, funnelling it to water a growing flower whose leaves are hundred dollar bills.

We need not (and should not) accept this analogy; but it demonstrates how data is figured, or constructed, in our culture. Our everyday life and culture is traced, tangled and enabled by digital flows. We produce and consume data as never before. But what exactly is this data? What can it do, and what can we do with it? Who owns or controls it? How can we understand, appreciate, or even sense it? The construction of data as a cultural actor is vital because data itself is so abstract, so hard to pin down. We ought not leave it to the captains of industry, and their upside-down umbrellas. In Datascape we see artists working with data, applying and diverting it for their own ends, as well as offering their own figurations of its potentials and limits. In a culture increasingly built on data, these works provide moments of cultural introspection, reflections on this abstract stuff that is our new social medium.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest make us - their users - into data. This makes us anxious about privacy and surveillance, but perhaps a more interesting question is what it’s like to be data. If we are all data subjects now, then what is data subjectivity? Jordan Lane’s Digital Native Archive imagines a new bureaucratic archive for the data subject, and immediately comes to the question of mortality. If we are data, and data can be faithfully preserved, are we now immortal? Or are we, instead, dead forever, entombed in a rationalised hierarchy of metadata, request protocols and archival record formats? Christopher Baker’s My Map (below) shows us what it might be to take charge of a personal archive, with a tool that reveals the patterns and relationships in email correspondence. This self-portrait suggests that one of the challenges of data subjectivity is simply knowing oneself: the scale of our personal data exceeds our grasp.

In two of the most prominent data art works from the mid 2000s, we mine these personal archives en masse. Golan Levin’s The Dumpster and Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris’ We Feel Fine scour the internet for “feelings” that are compiled into datasets, and in turn staged as dynamic visualisations. In turning our digital selves into swarming dots and bouncing balls, the artists animate us as members of a teeming throng. Data here is in part a new form of social realism, a way to represent the complex texture of life in the crowd; but these works also ask us to reflect on the limits of data-subjectivity. Can the intensity of our inner lives really be represented in cool, abstract data? Are we all so much alike? Aaron Koblin’s Sheep Market answers both yes and no; for we can see here both the comical diversity of the crowd (and its sheep avatars), and the uniformity that digital systems encourage.

The pathos of this contrast, between the coolness of the digital and the warm, messy intensity of humankind, emerges again in Luke du Bois’ Hard Data, where the tolls of war unfold as stark lists and map references. Du Bois’ soundtrack, generated from the same source data, acts as an emotional mediator, trying to return some of the tragic importance that the data fails to convey. Du Bois’ work pivots between the data-subject and what we might call the data-world. For if the world, too, is now data, then what might that feel like? How do we approach such a world?

In many works here the weather - a complex (and increasingly uncooperative) material flux - is a sort of proxy for the data-world: a field that is both easy to measure, and difficult to grasp. In Miebach’s Weather Scores, Viegas and Wattenberg’s Wind Map (above), and my own Measuring Cup, weather data is a source of aesthetic richness, as well as a pointer to the world beyond, the world that data traces. The weather - so much part of our everyday sensations - is abstracted here into numbers and symbols, only to be remade in new sensual forms. What if we could see the wind across an entire continent? Or hold a hundred years of temperature? Or hear the tides as music?

Here we get a glimpse of an alternative figuration of data itself. Rather than some kind of precious (but immaterial) stuff, or fuel for market speculation, data here is a relationship, a link between one part of the world with another, and a trace that can be endlessly reshaped. Of course, that trace is imperfect; a mediated pointer, not a pure reproduction. So Viegas and Wattenberg issue a disclaimer for their Wind Map: this is just an “art project”, they say; we "can't make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software.” Yet that connection remains; and art here plays the role that it always has. It transforms our understanding of the world, by representing it anew.

Read More...

Summary only...

Measuring Cup

Measuring Cup is a little dataform project I've been working on this year. It's currently showing in Inside Out, an exhibition of rapid-prototyped miniatures at Object gallery, Sydney.

This form presents 150 years of Sydney temperature data in a little cup-shaped object about 6cm high. The data comes from the UK Met Office's HadCRUT subset, released earlier this year; for Sydney it contains monthly average temperatures back to 1859.


The structure of the form is pretty straightforward. Each horizontal layer of the form is a single year of data; these layers are stacked chronologically bottom to top - so 1859 is at the base, 2009 at the lip. The profile of each layer is basically a radial line graph of the monthly data for that year. Months are ordered clockwise around a full circle, and the data controls the radius of the form at each month. The result is a sort of squashed ovoid, with a flat spot where winter is (July, here in the South).


The data is smoothed using a moving average - each data point is the average of the past five years data for that month. I did this mainly for aesthetic reasons, because the raw year-to-year variations made the form angular and jittery. While I was reluctant to do anything to the raw values, moving average smoothing is often applied to this sort of data (though as always the devil is in the detail).


The punchline really only works when you hold it in your hand. The cup has a lip - like any good cup, it expands slightly towards the rim. It fits nicely in the hand. But this lip is, of course, the product of the warming trend of recent decades. So there's a moment of haptic tension there, between ergonomic (human centred) pleasure and the evidence of how our human-centredness is playing out for the planet as a whole.


The form was generated using Processing, exported to STL via superCAD, then cleaned up in Meshlab. The render above was done in Blender - it shows the shallow tick marks on the inside surface that mark out 25-year intervals. Overall the process was pretty similar to that for the Weather Bracelet. One interesting difference in this case is that consistently formatted global data is readily available, so it should be relatively easy to make a configurator that will let you print a Cup from your local data.

Read More...

Summary only...

Right Here, Right Now - HC Gilje's Networks of Specificity

This essay was commissioned by Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen, Norway, to coincide with HC Gilje's solo exhibition blink (video below). It looks at Gilje's recent work - which spans audiovisual installation, performance, hardware, and networked forms - through the notion of specificity (developed earlier here).

The digital network, where we all spend ever more of our time, is a vast infrastructure of generality. It deploys a system which is standardised, formally defined, highly structured, and internally consistent. If I send you an email, I do it trusting that the interlinked systems of hard- and software, the protocols for data encoding and transmission, the network switches and servers, will all hold together so that the email you receive is the same as the one I sent. Perhaps I'm in Australia, and you are in Norway: we could say that the network generalises our two points in space - for the network, they are the same. As I draft my email it exists as a pattern of voltages and magnetic flux inside my computer. To transmit that pattern effectively, the digital network must erase or resist any local errors or inconsistencies that it might encounter along the way, so that it does not matter if the pattern travels by optical fibre or copper, or in radio waves, or if a boat anchor cut through a cable near Indonesia. It does not matter that your computer is made of different atoms to mine. Those are specificities - local, material events and instances. Digital culture, and networked space, absorbs specificities, compensates for them, rectifies them into generality. Wireless broadband and mobile computing make us into human nodes, bathing in shared connective protocols.

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values - fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make - which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

HC Gilje's work arises from a moment when the anything-at-all of digital video was just opening up, thanks to a combination of new real-time tools, cheap computing power, and some key interdisciplinary influences. Drawing on experimental sound and music, improvisation and performance became important solutions; working live in a specific situation, artists would gather, process, generate, and recombine material. In work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, from Gilje and his collaborators in 242.pilots, as well as video ensembles such as Granular Synthesis and Skot, the result is abstract and intense, a flow of layered digital texture. In performance it saturates the body and senses; big screens, big speakers. Instead of the narrative transport of cinema, which takes us somewhere else, this work creates - and is created in - an intensified sense of presence, what Gilje calls an "extended now". This methodology is vital; it focuses the open-ended generality of digital media in to a point: on this, rather than anything-at-all.

This moment relies on a circuit, a close coupling between artist and media; data flows become experienced events - sounds and images - which in turn inform new data flows, and so on. Audience and performers share a digital-material situation. The specificity of digital media comes forward; for of course these media are always specific, always local, always embodied; but that specificity is usually suppressed by the functional logic of generality. At the same time though, the processes underway here depend on exactly that generality, on the machine's ability to rapidly transform data and shift it between instantiations - from the voltages in video memory to the patterns of projected light.

In nodio (2005-) Gilje creates a system of networked audiovisual nodes that process and share image material. Each node generates sound derived from its image, in a process of automatic translation. On one hand this translation is another demonstration of the abstract pliability of the digital - its ability to transform anything into anything (generality); on the other, its tight audiovisual correpondences generate sparks of material intensity - real events, rather than digital effects (specificity). With these distributed nodes Gilje deploys audiovisual materials in space, creating flows and juxtapositions that function as dynamic sculpture. Of course the formal model of nodio echoes our most ubiquitous generalising paradigm: the network. Once again, the artist applies this digital tendency for generalisation in order to cultivate instances of specificity - the texture and sensation of the here and now.

From drifter (2006) (above) to dense (2006) and shift (2008) (below), Gilje's audiovisual nodes map out a developing exploration of specificity. drifter deploys standard computer hardware, formed into sculptural modules; in passing material between nodes Gilje begins to break the frame of the screen, creating an implicit inter-space. In dense, the hardware moves out of the sculptural field, and the screen is further deconstructed. Instead of the frontal configuration of the cinema / computer, these suspended fabric strips are illuminated from both sides with a video "weave". The familiar architecture of the screen as a blank (general-purpose) substrate containing or supporting image content, is reconfigured here; the specific materialities of screen and content overlap. Even more so in shift, where the nodes are now wooden boxes, illuminated with precisely controlled video projections. As in earlier nodio works sound and image are directly related. Here Gilje extends this fusion to the sculptural objects; each node is also its own speaker-box, so that the digital articulation of sound and image is realised, and grounded materially, in the nodes themselves.

These works drive towards a spatial materialisation of audiovisuals: dynamic constellations of AV intensity, fields for what Gilje calls "audiovisual powerchords". The projectors, speakers and networks of the nodio works present one means to this end, deploying existing media technologies. Again we find an interplay of generality and specificity, as Gilje adapts generalising systems - projectors, computers, networks - to realise materialised instances. The Wind-up Birds (2008) (below) represent another angle of approach; Gilje sets video aside, and creates materialised, local, sculpturally autonomous nodes from electronic and mechanical materials. In these robotic woodpeckers digital media and sculptural embodiment are further enmeshed. The birds communicate using digital radio, and their behaviour is programmed in a custom chip; but their sound is simply percussion - a mechanical switch, tapping on a specially constructed wooden slit-drum. Again this is specificity over generality: a loudspeaker is an acoustic shape-shifter, a technology which promises any sound, in the same way that the screen promises any image. By contrast the Birds produce only one sound, their sound, a specific conjunction of solenoid, timber and vibrating air.

The Birds will run for a month on their own batteries, strapped to trees, calling to each other and any other creatures nearby. These nodes are unplugged: they begin to come away from the technological support system of mains power and the shelter of the gallery or studio, and move out into the world. As in the artist's other work the engineering here is inseparable from the artistic agenda; the Birds are in that sense a realisation of Gilje's spatial and formal aims, an autonomous constellation of intensities. But they also literally expand from there; where the nodio works explore the composition of spaces within a network of intensities, the Birds move outwards, creating points of intensity in the wild, and evoking a spatial alertness - a way of being in and listening to the world - that extends beyond the well-marked edges of an artwork. The Birds are more like an experimental intervention, a digital-material overlay in a complex field of the living and non-living.

Similarly the Soundpockets works (both 2007) make small sonic interventions in urban spaces, pursuing local intensification and juxtaposition through directional soundbeams and micro-scale radio transmissions. Once again we find this interplay of the general - the anything-at-all of the digital - and the specific, the here and now. The "extremely local radio stations" of Soundpockets 2 form a sort of folded juxtaposition of three layers: globalised network infrastructures and protocols, the traced or mediated locations of field recordings, and the specific time and place of the transmissions. Just as Soundpockets 1 uses exotic soundbeam acoustics to perturb urban spaces, Soundpockets 2 shows how we can draw in technological infrastructures in order to reconfigure the real environment, creating flows and distributions that form intense moments of difference and specificity.


In this reading Gilje's work is partly critical. Pursuing specificity, and an intensified, material experience of the here and now, it pushes against the generalising tendencies of digital media. By the functional logic of the network, each node is formally identical, and must be effectively insulated from its environment. Ubiquitous computing promises us "everyware" - total connectivity, the complete interpenetration of the network and our lived environment [2]. But if the network is a generalising force, if it erases differences between places, what will life in "everyware" be like? Gilje's work suggests a utopian alternative: networks that are always local in time and space; nodes of right here, right now. Gilje's work strives for what Hans Gumbrecht calls "presence"; a way of knowing the world that is characterised by intense moments of encounter or revelation - aesthetic experiences that place us in the world, and of it, rather than observing from the intellectual distance of interpretation.

The beauty of Gilje's work though is that it not only suggests this prospect, but demonstrates it, makes it happen; and in that sense the work is constructive, rather than critical. In emphasising the specificity of media technologies, Gilje's work shows us a different way to frame those technologies; as always material, always in the world with us - a view I have called transmateriality. As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, "computers ... are material machines dedicated to propagating a behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality." Gilje shows us both sides of this statement, the functional illusion - generality - and its material foundation - specificity. It shows us a way to reframe the network, too; as always local, always specific; a tangle of real flows and propagating patterns; and endless possible ways of reconnecting the world with itself. Finally Gilje shows us one crucial role for the artist, in this context: seeking out configurations that intensify, rather than dilute, our sense of being in the world.

Read More...

Summary only...

Dorkbot CBR at Manuka CCAS

Dorkbot Canberra's inaugural group show opens Thursday November 6th at Canberra Contemporary Artspace Manuka. It's a great, super diverse lineup, including wearables, data art, solar power, generative grunge, drawing machines and audiovisuals. I'll be showing a big crop of prints from Limits to Growth, as well as doing a kind of urban version of Watching the Sky, gathering images from the street. Here's the full press release.

Read More...

Summary only...

Impermanence - Life by Projector-Light at BEAP

Another quick catchup post from BEAP, before it recedes into the mists of time. The Impermanence show at the John Curtin Gallery is a beautifuly-installed collection of video and interactive works. The gallery is an impressive space and curator Chris Malcolm knows how to deal with media art: HD projections onto custom painted surfaces, well-contained hi-fi sound, careful design and layout, and tons of breathing space. Daniel Lee's Origin (below)was shown as still prints and high-def video loop, and looked quite amazing; though the work in itself didn't stun me. Originally created in 1999, it's almost retro on the new media scene's manic timescale, and to me it was showing its age. For 90s Photoshop organohybrids you can't go past Australian artists Patricia Piccinini, Murray McKeich or Linda Dement - all of whom deliver lush surfaces with a lot more bite than Lee's manipulations.


"Nice, but..." just about sums up my response to this show; Lynette Wallworth's Still:Waiting2 features amazing nature-doco style video, with thousands of small parrots coming to roost in some enormous red gums in the dawn light. But it only made me want to be actually watching the birds instead of sitting in a dark box in front of a HD projector screen. Bill Viola's slowmo screen Observance is very pretty, but I just can't watch the overacting. The most interesting thing in the place was, unfortunately, an outright failure.


When I visited, we were told that Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's Eau de Jardin (above) was broken. This work reprises their 1992 classic Interactive Plant Growing, with sensors embedded in potplants driving artificial foliage on a panoramic projection. Ordinarily the artificial plants gradually recede back into their "pond," making space for new creations. But something was wrong and the water plants weren't dying, resulting in a kind of virtual algal bloom: the screen was locked up, choked with life. By contrast the real plants were not looking good at all. The ferns were shedding fronds onto the floor; I heard someone report that the soil in the pots was dry, while gallery staff explained the lengths they were going to in trying to keep the plants alive - wheeling in big UV lamps overnight, to compensate for the dim projector-light of their daytime life. The disjunction was stark; the polarity flipped on the happy techno/bio mix that characterises much of Sommerer and Mignonneau's work. It ocurred to me that a really useful project for all these bio-artists would be to engineer a form of plant life that could live happily under the light of a data projector.

Read More...

Summary only...

Langheinrich & Khut - Embodied Media at BEAP

One of the strong points of PerthDAC was its overlap with BEAP, Perth's premiere media arts festival; even better, the conference built in gallery visits to several of the BEAP shows. I'll blog the conference soon - meantime see for example Axel Bruns' comprehensive blogumentation. For now here are some thoughts on two of my favourite works from BEAP, both of which use abstract digital forms to create profoundly embodied experiences.


In Ulf Langheinrich's Waveform B, video projection and strobe lights play over a long, pool-like screen on the floor of the installation space. Entering the darkened central space of the building, the screen flashes and vibrates under ultraviolet strobes, seeming initially to come loose from the floor, hover and drift. The strobe banks mark out audiovisual intervals of time, but always accelerating or slowing, coming together, intensifying or dissipating: temporal waves meet, reinforce and neutralise each other. When these waves are most intense the work's visual field becomes overwhelming; bursts of ultraviolet seem to outpace vision, inducing refractions, afterimages, phenomenal artefacts that drive perception inwards. In calmer moments video-projected noise textures blend with the strobes, and again occupy a perceptual threshhold where time and space interfold; the noise seems to eddy and flow; differentiations in space rise out of this horizontal field and quickly sink back into it. The ripples are derived from video of Ghanaian ocean waves - there's a trace or imprint of fluid dynamics here; the overlay of oceanic ripples and video static recalls Michel Serres' Genesis, where he figures noise itself as a kind of material and informational sea.

Strangely, Hannah Mathews' catalog statement describes the work as "a temple to technology, enabling audiences to meditate upon the inherent stillness of a contemplative digital void." Slightly better than another PICA account - "a multi-level, immersive audiovisual experience of the colour blue." Happily neither description does the work any kind of justice. Waveform B evokes phenomenality; material, sensual experience; though unlike some other works with this aim, Langheinrich eschews (conventional) pleasure in favour of overload, disorientation and the edges of perceptual experience. Augmented with strobes the ubiquitous video projector is stripped back to its technical core, a kind of hyper-articulated source of visual energy, rather than a cinematic window on the wall. A 2005 interview fleshes out some of Langheinrich's background; I was struck especially by his mention of music as an aesthetic model. On that thread, the soundtrack at the PICA installation created an effective atmosphere, but lacked impact - maybe the sub had been turned down?


In George Khut's Cardiomorphologies v.2 participants are gently rigged with breathing and pulse sensors that drive an abstract visualisation. Overlayed concentric rings and discs grow and shrink in patterns that suggest both modernist geometric abstraction and mystical diagrams or mandalas. Using the system the visualisation takes on another inflection, as a kind of avatar, a (data) projection of the self imagined through the language of meditative practice as a point of energy. Biofeedback - at the core of Khut's project - occurs as bodily process drives image which in turn inflects mind and body. I enjoyed that state, but it's not a guaranteed ticket to nirvana; I saw others getting quite uncomfortable as their heightened awareness of breath led into anxiety.

Khut's approach is an interesting combination of techno-pragmatism and an ethical commitment to, and knowledge of, bodily subjectivity. Engaging visitors to the work he's very open about the mechanics of sensors, data gathering, analysis and interpretation; if you're interested he can explain in detail the theoretical correlations between spectral analysis of heartrate fluctuation frequency and the parasympathetic/sympathetic nervous system balance. Khut makes it clear this isn't some mystical strain of data-mapping "magic," but a concrete, physio-psychological process. In fact the conversations around the work are part of the process, drawing out participants' experiences and sensations and informing the ongoing development of the system. Khut's work shows how data practice can engage intelligently with, and reflect on, the extraction or creation of datasets as well as their aesthetic and affective manifestations.

Read More...

Summary only...

going DEAF: Pneumatic Sound & Hardware Surrealism

After a short and jetlag-altered visit to Rotterdam, I've been reflecting on some more works from DEAF. My documentation was pretty poor (phone cams don't like dark exhibition halls) but luckily Anne Helmond has some excellent photos from the show, and we liked many of the same works. Helmond also shared my observation that despite the theme ("Interact or Die!") the strongest works were non-interactive (even non-computational).


One other work that rates a mention was Edwin van der Heide's Pneumatic Sound Field, an outdoor installation made up of a suspended grid of 42 pneumatic valves under electronic control. Rapidly switched, the valves emit tiny bursts of white noise - not to mention (as the artist points out) actual air, the material substrate of sound itself. The result is visually underwhelming - a metal spaceframe snaked with little hoses - but sonically and perceptually amazing. Impulses of sound and air flicker over the grid, moving between discrete rhythmic pulses and fused granular clouds that traverse the space like waves. The valves are tiny, perfectly discrete sound sources, so the textures they create are packed with spatial detail, even if they are limited in sonic variety. Van der Heide frames the work as a perceptual and acoustic experiment, but its reception is equally shaped by techno (post-techno, whatever) and its language of immersive pulse and timbre. In other words, it reminded me of Pan(a)Sonic. And like Roots and especially Ondulation (blogged previously), Pneumatic Sound Field uses physical media to create a perceptual field that is richer, higher-res, and more inherently dynamic, than the computational equivalent.

Finally, a work that isn't post-computational at all, but tightly and ironically wedged inside digital culture. Exonemo's Object B is in part a Half-Life mod with a case of Surrealism. Your gun emits oil drums, trucks, furniture, cows and lumps of masonry, which accrete into bizarre composites. What's more, the mod seems to have leaked out of the computer; most of the "players" are controlled by spastic robotic sculptures made from home hardware and electronics shop detritus. It's a beautiful and incisive satire of human-computer interaction, as well as the whole paradigm of 3D graphics. The mass culture readymades of game geometry and home hardware converge in a mad, twitching clump. Documentation online is a bit sparse, but check out this video from tagr.tv.

Read More...

Summary only...

going DEAF: Sound, Image, Matter, Form

I'm in Rotterdam, briefly, for DEAF07 - a little taste of the European new media festival scene. Synaesthetic media has been a minor theme - primed perhaps by the train trip from Amsterdam airport to Rotterdam; I had a hunch that minimal European techno would go nicely with the gliding green planes of the Dutch landscape. I was right: superb - though no doubt the jet lag helped, and of course I probably got the idea from Michel Gondry in the first place. My soundtrack was by The Field and Ellen Allien and Apparat.


A kind of material synaesthesia from Canadian artist Thomas McIntosh, whose Ondulation is one of the standout works in the DEAF exhibition. The work uses water as a connective medium between sound and light. Amplified tones create standing waves in a large shallow pool of water; lights reveal and reflect the wave patterns. Ondulation parallels earlier work exploring sound, vibration and form, especially Hans Jenny's cymatics and the late-60s cybernetic sculptures of Wen-Ying Tsai. The documentation of Ondulation is nice, but the scale and material presence of the work is much more powerful; it's an elegant, non-computational way to achieve the kind of tightly fused AV that many other artists are currently exploring. It feels deeply retro - it's essentially a programmatic son-et-lumiere show - and very contemporary; the visuals reference (and totally surpass) digital sound visualisations.


Roman Kirschner's work Roots, another dynamic / generative sculpture, also stood out for me. More cybernetic influences here: Roots draws on cybernetician Gordon Pask's experiments with growing conductive metal filaments in a solution. Pask showed that a device can "grow" a new sensor adapted to its input - something that remains beyond the capacity of most computational systems (see this paper from Peter Cariani). Roots mines the aesthetic potential of Pask's technique: filaments branch, curl and intersect, suspended in an orange-brown haze and streaming dark, viscous clouds. As Kirschner points out their growth and disintegration both shapes and is shaped by changes in the electrical current flowing through them. There's material synaesthesia here too: the voltage at each filament drives a simple analog sonification of those electrical transformations. Unlike Ondulation, the scale of the work is small and intimate, but both works have the same feeling of encounter, a sort of physical self-evidence often absent in computational, screen-based work.

Read More...

Summary only...

Jonathan McCabe - Very Cellular Automata

A new year, and another exhibition from Jonathan McCabe at Canberra gallery/cafe The Front. The show, Travelling Wave, was shared with painter Luke Nilsen; it included some collaborative canvases, with Nilsen painting over McCabe's digital patterns, and new works from McCabe's Butterfly Origami and Nervous States processes. But also on the (very crowded) walls were images from a new McCabe process, based on cellular automata. In themselves the images are chunks of psychedelic maximalism, similar to McCabe's earlier work. But once again the real hook here is the mind bending and unusually rich generative process.

The generative system involves four linked cellular automata - think of them as layers. "Linked" because at each time step, a cell's state depends both on its neighbours in that layer, and on the states of the corresponding cells in the other three layers. Something like a three-dimensional CA, but not quite; the four layers influence each other through a weighted network of sixteen connections (a bit like a neural net). The pixels in the output image use three of the four CA layers for their red, green and blue values. (The images here show the full image on the left, and a 1:1 detail on the right)



As in a conventional CA, each cell looks to its neighbours to determine its future state. This is a "totalistic" CA, which means each simply sums the values of its neighbours, then changes its state based on a table of transition rules. Now for the really good part: each cell also uses its recent history as an "offset" into that transition table. In other words, the past states of a cell transform the rules that cell is using. The result is a riot of feedback cycles operating between state sequences and rulesets; stable or periodically oscillating regions form, bounded by membrane-like surfaces where these feedback cycles compete. Structures even form inside the membranes - rule/state networks that can only exist between other zones.



The images reinforce the biological analogy, but philosophically (ontologically?) this system is even wilder. It's inspiring to see a formal system where "the rules" are local and variable, rather than global and static. The way things are (or have just been) controls the rules that determine how things will be next - that much is historical relativism I suppose. But here we see regions of self-perpetuating but incompatible realities, competing for space - even states of being that only emerge where two or more reality-attractors meet. An ecology of ontologies, if you will.

McCabe has put up a page with lots of these images, including full resolution (2048x2048) jpegs.

Read More...

Summary only...

Abstract Microecologies - Pierre Proske

A rare treat last night: some generative art in Canberra. The event was a one-night show at the Front gallery from Australian artist Pierre Proske, presenting the results of a residency at the ANU's Department of Archaeology and Natural History. Proske was embedded with the Paleoworks group, who do palaeo- and archeo-botany, mainly by way of using microscopes to look at ancient pollen.

The resulting works use micro-botanical images as poetic and aesthetic materials to reflect on the residency itself. In one series they're used to texture Superformula shapes, creating hyper-layered clouds that seem organically lumpy and mathematically crisp at the same time. In another series Proske used portraits of his Palaeoworks hosts to "seed" accumulations of tinted micro-blobs; they play on the edges of abstraction, at the same time evoking (for me at least) some big ideas about identity, multiplicity, and symbiogenesis.



Proske's blog of the residency is a wealth of detail. His previous work is worth checking out too - the Intelligent Fridge Poetry Magnets (pdf) attracted widepread attention earlier this year; and apparently they may yet appear on a home appliance near you...

Read More...

Summary only...

Jonathan McCabe - Nervous States

Canberra artist Jonathan McCabe is currently showing some digital prints at the Front gallery in Lyneham - the show is called Nervous States, ostensibly referring to the neural net behind the generative process... but it seems to have much wider implications just at the moment, too. I wrote about McCabe's Butterfly Origami Method on generator.x a while ago, and was impressed by the elegance of the generative mechanism and the visual richness of the results. Nervous States is just as elegant, and visually psychedelic, but uses a completely different generative approach.


Like the Butterfly Origami images, there's a sense of materiality here... which is paradoxical, considering the abstraction of the generative techniques. Each image is essentially a visualisation of the output state of a small neural network. The X and Y coordinates correspond to two variables in the connections of the network; the colour of the pixel at that point is a representation of the network's behaviour for those parameters. So the image is a map of system states; coherent colours show areas of relative stability or gradual change; edges show sharp jumps in the output; marbled swirls show complex oscillations.

Technically, this work is pushing the edges in several ways. To select images from the vast range that the system can produce, McCabe first uses an automated analysis based on variation in the image at three levels of scale: the software varies the weighting of the inter-neuron connections, and selects images (maps) with the most variation. However this automated process still generated 6000 candidate images, which McCabe then whittled down to nine for this exhibition.

Generating these images at very high resolutions is a hefty computational task. The solution for McCabe was to make use of the parallel-processing grunt available on the video card. Using the Brook language from the Stanford Graphics Lab, the images are rendered using the parallel pixel processors on an nVidia graphics card.


This work also makes me wonder about communication, meaning and generative art. As McCabe explains them, and in the context of the "nervous" metaphor, the generative system is poetic in itself; the images can be read in that context, as mysterious maps of complex dynamics - or they can function on a more "retinal" level, as sheer visual stimulus - or perhaps both. But how comprehensible is the generative system for a wide audience? Does it matter? Understanding the images as state maps, rather than physical (or even simulated physical) traces and gestures, is a considerable leap of abstraction. And at a time when open-source tools are drawing more and more artists and designers to generative techniques, McCabe's work issues a similar challenge: underneath the initial challenge of learning to code is the conceptual process of understanding, designing and visualising generative systems, and it's those systems that (I'd say) are at the core of the work.

Read More...

Summary only...