The opening act of the Olympics was routinely spectacular in one sense, but it can also be read as a more interesting cultural, geo-political and aesthetic sign of the times. I'm talking about the massive array of (2008) drummers, who kicked off the show with a synchronised sound and light barrage. The traditional Fou drums they played were "augmented" with pressure-activated arrays of white LEDs set into the top, creating a modern variation on the opening ceremony staple of choreographed human/graphic arrays (image from boston.com).
This not-very-subtle interweaving of old and new was a major theme of the ceremony, of course, but the drummers resembled nothing so much as a giant United Visual Artists show: the crisp light of the LEDs, the transitions from flickering chaos to global order, the articulation of individuality and global coordination (individual as pixel) and the intrinsically tight audiovisual sync. Intentionally or not, artistic director Zhang Yimou hit on major motifs in recent media art (blogged earlier). As well as UVA, see Monolake's Atom, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and many more.
The opening ceremony is sending the same message, then, as the Games architecture: cultural and technological leapfrog. The Water Cube and the Birds Nest don't simply display China's modernity, they claim a jump into a digital, sustainable, mega-scaled future. The computational aesthetics of multiplicity that mark these structures are, again like the opening ceremony, a powerful cultural narrative: coherence, strength and beauty made of countless tiny pieces. Like the flickering grid of the drummers, the ordered diversity of these structures is important too, in that it's not total uniformity, a simple (modernist) grid. In fact these buildings contain a kind of post-industrial grid, where the uniformity or regularity is not literal or material, but procedural or computational - the computer's ability to resolve complex distributions of force is what enables the "organic" multiplicity here. Of course this post-industrial process hits the ground, on site, in the form of human labour, and that's where the social narrative begins to unravel (image by theojones).
The other none-too-subtle message of the opening ceremony was about technology, and specifically LEDs. LEDs are post-industrial lighting - semiconductors instead of mechanical-era glass and metal - not to mention efficient, bright, flexible, ubiquitous. They are already a feature of the olympic landscape in GreenPIX, a "zero energy media wall" that is also the world's largest LED display. They were everywhere in the opening ceremony, in the drummers sticks as well as the drums, the massive scroll display surface, and in the olympic rings. There was another old/new interplay here around lighting technology, with (digitally deployed) fireworks in the "old" role, but LEDs held centre stage in the stadium. Again this is a technology that is nascent in the West, and being taken up by the cogniscenti in art, design and architecture. And again, here China makes a show of trumping the West in a display of cultural and technological advancement and literally massive industrial clout. Here, above all, more is more.
p.s. Dan Hill's latest post offers an interesting angle on this, quoting Craig Clunas on the "modular mass production" of the Terracotta Army. Another array, of course.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Array Aesthetics (Olympic Edition)
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Array Art (More Multiplicity)
Since that earlier post I've begun to notice another form of multiplicity. I'm seeing arrays everywhere, lately. Grids or articulated fields of points; substrates for transitory patterns and forms in light or sound. In United Visual Artists' recent Battles video, the band plays in a triangular grid of vertical LED strips. Patterns traverse the array, bathing the surrounding rocky landscape in flickering, articulated light. Of course UVA have got form with arrays; their 2006 Volume installation uses a similar configuration - and in a way there's a continuum between these grids and the more conventional (but equally effective) LED wall they used for the Massive Attack tour in 2003.
Edwin van de Heide's Pneumatic Sound Field - blogged earlier - echoes UVA's light arrays, but uses flickers of high-pressure air. There's another parallel here, in that the elements in the array - the "emitters" - are simple, physical things; points of energy. Other arrays I've noticed recently include Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder's Atom; a grid of LED-lit helium balloons that also move vertically under remote control. See also Artificiel's Condemned Bulbes (2003); and then it's a short hop to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's recent Pulse Room at the Mexican pavilion in Venice. We could add a "mirror" sub-genre, with Aleph by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai-Fischer and Daniel Lazin's beautiful articulated arrays. I'm sure there are many more.
UVA's body of work illustrates one of the reasons I'm interested in these arrays; they represent a kind of expansion, or explosion, of the screen. In part these arrays mimic everyone's favourite luminous grid, the digital display; but they literally take it apart; they expand it in size but also string it out through physical space. Instead of a vertical image (think cinema, painting, architecture, etc) we get an often horizontal array, a field to walk through. These arrays echo the display, especially its logics of modularity and generality - a logic shared by computational culture more broadly, where grids of uniform elements create wide spaces of potential. But these are not simply low-res displays. The visual unity of the screen is based on the merged imperceptibility of the pixel elements; by contrast these works expose those elements and emphasise their interrelations, making them available as kinesthetic as much as visual experience.
In "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects" (1969) Robert Morris discusses the "anti-formal" move in sculpture of the time, where discrete geometric objects began to be replaced by wide, horizontal fields of undifferentiated stuff. He draws inspiration from Anton Ehrenzweig, a gestalt psychologist, and his notion of "synchretic" or "scanning" perception. This is an unconscious or "low level" mode of vision that Ehrenzweig claims provides access to richly detailed information in the perceptual field. To put it in modern (ie technological) perceptual terms, scanning occurs before recognition or gestalt formation, in the perceptual pipeline. As such, argues Ehrenzweig, scanning can easily accommodate "open structures" - complexity, contingency, chaos, the unformed or uncertain. Morris argues that the lateral, post-formal "fields" in sculpture of the time, build this mode of perception into their very structure; and ties this to a larger, McLuhan-like argument that "art itself is an activity of change ... of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes."
Leaving the modernist declarations aside, there are some interesting links between this horizontality and the perceptual mode it demands, and the arrays of the works discussed here. Works such as Morris' 1968 Untitled (Threadwaste) (above - source) emphasise unformed materiality; in works like UVA's arrays or Lozano Hemmer's Pulse Room the material and the immaterial, or informational, play against each other in a very contemporary way. These explicit, low-res arrays reveal themselves as material structures (unlike the screen), but also as material substrates for dynamic, informational patterns and forms. The role of the light source is important here; in Condemned Bulbes and Pulse Room, archaic light technology is used for its material and sonic byproducts; the globe here isn't a pixel, it's a physical device, a buzzing, glowing object, a manifestation of electricity. Yet it's also a pixel, an abstract unit in a digital array; the two are complementary, co-constituents, rather than opposites.
Ehrenzweig's "scanning" perception also seems relevant all over again; it's exactly the mode of experience that a lot of data visualisation demands, and linked to what I've described as the "artist's squint" in data art. In a culture of digital multiplicity - where, as in these arrays, we are literally surrounded by digital grids - the gestalt or fixed image is impossible; "scanning" promises access to the pre-conscious information in these articulated masses. Sometimes these works offer a reassuring, unified image of the grid, where it's in sync, under control, centrally choreographed; but other times, especially in Lozano-Hemmer's work, it's a more complex, chaotic field.
What about the relation between this form of multiplicity and the generative variety? As well as an aesthetic interest in sheer "moreness" there's a conceptual connection. In a way these arrays are the inverse of generative multiplicities that sample wide spaces of potential. These grids partly act to manifest that space of potential explicitly; this is all there is, 64 balloons (as in Atom, above) or a few dozen LED strips. But what they reveal is how that explicit grid contains a far vaster, implicit space of potential, an unthinkable mass of relations, patterns and movements. So though the manifestation is very different they suggest the same dynamic - of the actual pointing to the virtual
Monday, October 29, 2007
More is More: Multiplicity and Generative Art
Douglas Edric Stanley wrote a nice post recently on complexity and gestalts in code and generative graphics. In it he wonders about "all those lovely spindly lines we see populating so many Processing sketches, and how they relate with code stuctures." I've been wondering about the same thing for a while, and Stanley's post has prodded me to chase up a few of these ideas.
Stanley makes some astute observations about the aesthetic economics of generative art; the fact that it costs almost exactly the same, for the programmer, to draw one, a hundred or a million lines. Stanley pursues the machinic-perceptual implications - how simple code structures contribute to the formation of gestalts; but he only hints at what seems like a more interesting question, of how these generative aesthetics relate to their cultural environment: "all of these questions of abstraction and gestalt are in fact questions about our relationship to complexity and the role algorithmic machines (will inevitably) play in negotating our increasing complexity malaise."
I actually don't think complexity is the right concept here. For me complexity refers to causal relations that are networked, looped and intermeshed (as in "complex systems"). These "lovely spindly lines", and Stanley's gestalt-clouds, show us multiplicity but not (necessarily) complexity. Simple, linear processes are just as good at creating multiplicity. There's certainly a relationship here - complex systems often produce multiplicitous forms and structures; and causal complexities embedded in "real" datasets seem to be a reliable source of rich multiplicities - but complexity and multiplicity aren't the same thing. For the moment I want to focus on the aesthetics of multiplicity.
Multiplicity is the uber-motif of current digital generative art - especially the scene around Processing. Look through the Flickr Processing pool and try to find an image that isn't some kind of swarm, cloud, cluster, bunch, array or aggregate (this one is by illogico). The fact that it's easy to do is a partial and not-very-interesting explanation; to go one step further, it's easy and it feels good. Multiplicity offers a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure. There's probably a neuro-aesthetics of multiplicity, if you're into that, which would show how and where it feels good. Ramachandran and Hirstein have suggested that perceptual "binding" - our tendency to join perceptual elements into coherent wholes - is wired into our limbic system, because it's an ecologically useful thing to do. Finding coherence in complex perceptual fields just feels good. The perceptual fields in generative art are almost always playing at the edges of coherence, buzzing between swarm and gestalt - just the "sweet spot" that Ramachandran and Hirstein propose for art in general.
I don't find this explanation very satisfying either, because it doesn't seem to tell us anything much about the processes involved - it's a "just because," and a fairly deterministic one. Another way in is to think formally about the varieties of multiplicity in generative art. I rediscovered Jared Tarbell's wonderful Invader Fractal (below) in the Reas/Fry Processing book recently. It shows a kind of multiplicity that's the same but different to the "spindly lines" aesthetic. Each invader is the product of a simple algorithm; the whole mass is a visualisation of a space of potential - a sample (but not an exhaustive display) of the space of all-possible-25-pixel- invaders. Multiplicity here is a way to get a perceptual grasp on something quite abstract - that space of possibility. We get a visual "feel" for that space, but also a sense of its vastness, a sense of what lies beyond the visualisation. John F. Simon's Every Icon points in the same direction; towards the vastness of even a highly constrained space of possibility (32x32 1-bit pixels).
Perhaps current aesthetics of multiplicity are actually doing something similar. The technical differences are fairly minor; basically a switch in spatial organisation from array to overlay; a compression of instances into a single picture plane. The shortest (and my personal favourite) path to multiplicity in Processing is aggregation: turn off background() and let the sketch redraw. Reduce the opacity of the drawing for an accumulating visualisation of the space of possibility that your sketch is traversing. Multiplicity here isn't an effect or aesthetic for its own sake; it's intrinsically linked to one of the defining qualities of generative systems - their creation of large but distinctive spaces of potential. Multiplicity is again a way to literally sense that space; but also, since it almost never exhausts or saturates that space, it points to an open, ongoing multiplicity; it actualises a subset of a virtual multiplicity, and shows us (as in Every Icon) how traversing that space is only a question of specifics and contingencies. Multiplicity says "and so on"; an actual gesture towards the virtual.
Multiplicity refers to the specific space of potential in any single system, by actualising a subset of points within it; but it also metonymically refers to an even wider space of potential, which is the one that all computational generative art - and in fact all digital culture - traverses. Because of course any system can be tweaked and changed, no chunk of code is immutable or absolute, the machines of the Processing pool are ever-changing things that collectively sample the space of all possible (generative) computation. Just as it refers directly to the space of potential of its own (local) system, generative multiplicity alludes to the unthinkable space-of-spaces that contains that system - a space the system gradually traverses with every change in its code.
This, for me, explains the aesthetic and cultural charge that multiplicity carries. It's a gesture towards an abstract, unthinkable figure; an aesthetics of the virtual, in the Bergson / Deleuze sense of the word. What's more this particular form of virtuality, or possibility - the one accessable through code and computation - is at the core of digital culture and our contemporary situation. Generative multiplicity is, quite literally, a visualisation of that figure.
