Activated Memory is a two video project based on animated photographs of different parks and buildings of Montreal. Through the use of video feedback, 3D animation and color manipulations, the pictures render a new kind of space, a virtual world where only fragments of “reality” subsist. The music accompaniment is composed by Roger Tellier-Craig.
Virtual Resistance: A Genealogy of Digital Abstraction | ISEA2011 Istanbul
Dec 21, ’11
7:24 PM
According to one narrative, an evolutionary trajectory for computer graphics begins at rudimentary figures and progresses towards visualizations of a world whose properties mirror our own. But there is a tradition of computational abstraction that renders visual equivalents of abstract mathematical calculations. This paper considers whether computational abstraction fits a modernist narrative or whether it envisions a new call to order.
Hito Steyerl, Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life / Journal / e-flux
Dec 12, ’11
12:49 AM
Lets start with a simple proposition: what used to be work has increasingly been turned into occupation.
This change in terminology may look trivial. In fact, almost everything changes on the way from work to occupation. The economic framework, but also its implications for space and temporality.
If we think of work as labor, it implies a beginning, a producer, and eventually a result. Work is primarily seen as a means to an end: a product, a reward, or a wage. It is an instrumental relation. It also produces a subject by means of alienation.
An occupation is the opposite. An occupation keeps people busy instead of giving them paid labor. An occupation is not hinged on any result; it has no necessary conclusion. As such, it knows no traditional alienation, nor any corresponding idea of subjectivity. An occupation doesn’t necessarily assume remuneration either, since the process is thought to contain its own gratification. It has no temporal framework except the passing of time itself. It is not centered on a producer/worker, but includes consumers, reproducers, even destroyers, time-wasters, and bystanders—in essence, anybody seeking distraction or engagement.
Inside Photoshop : Computational Culture
Dec 12, ’11
12:47 AM
Contemporary media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organized and shared with software. This software includes stand-alone professional media design and management applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Final Cut, After Effects, Aperture, and Maya; consumer-level apps such as iPhoto, iMovie, or Picassa; tools for sharing, commenting, and editing provided by social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Video, and Photobucket, and the numerous media viewing, editing and sharing apps available on mobile platforms. To understand media today we need to understand media software – its genealogy (where it comes from), its anatomy (interfaces and operations), and its practical and theoretical effects.1 How does media authoring software shape the media being created, making some design choices seem natural and easy to execute, while hiding other design possibilities? How does media viewing / managing / remixing software affect our experience of media and the actions we perform on it? How does software change what “media” is conceptually?
This article approaches some of these questions via the analysis of a software application that has become synonymous with “digital media” – Adobe Photoshop. Like other professional programs for media authoring and editing, Photoshop’s menus contain many dozens of separate commands. If we consider that almost all the commands contain multiple options that allow each command do a number of different things, the complete number runs into thousands.
CCS Bard | Cosineve and the Old Internet
Dec 12, ’11
12:38 AM
In the 1990s, I was a frequent reader of Usenet, a collection of Internet discussion boards called newsgroups, whose history stretches back a decade before the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1991. Social phenomena that would later become part of the Web already existed in prior incarnations on Usenet: there were local city groups that functioned like Craigslist today, others devoted to file-sharing and tech tips, and many clustered around certain professions, hobbies and pop culture topics like music, television, and film. Usenet was a text-based phenomenon, like early email, direct dial-in bulletin boards, and IRC, the live chat protocol that likewise predates the Web; all of these structures were replicated in some form within the gated communities of contemporaneous commercial services like AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. This loosely interconnected congeries of systems provided the linguistic biome where the peculiarly telegraphic cant of online culture first flourished and evolved into a new mode that operated between writing and speech; years before the Web, these were the places where colon-dash-parenthesis began to signify a smile or a frown, where “spam” and “troll” took on new meanings, and where users learned to type ROTFL and LOL while staring, physically impassive, at a screen.
A new documentation. an interview to joao vasco paiva – Robin Peckham
Dec 12, ’11
12:32 AM
João Vasco Paiva (n. 1979) is a Portuguese artist based in Hong Kong since 2006. He has taught at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media and Hong Kong Art School/ RMIT University. With a background in painting and advanced training in media technology, his work is characterized by the appropriation of observed phenomena, mapping apparently random situations and presenting them in an aesthetically organized framework through video, audiovisual performance, recording, and installation.
One of his best known projects in this rubric is Experiments on the Notation of Shapes (2010): taking the city as a sculptural playground, two projections present images of the Hong Kong skyline at a distance: largely still, contemplative, and gray, they offer a dispassionate glimpse of urban planning and architectonic monumentality. Facing the ceiling in a box on the floor, a monitor depicts a different vision, frenetically winding through back alleys and service roads amidst the architecture of spectacle, and generating an audio signal that is, in turn, modulated in frequency by the projected images. The resulting cocoon of sound and image runs the gamut of the urban experience, from the quietest moments of stillness to the madness of the intersection.
More recently, the project Forced Empathy (2011) consists of a single-channel video, a kinetic sculpture, and a series of prints. A number of floating objects in the harbor of Hong Kong subject to wind, waves, and other factors causing them to bob and sway, sometimes gently but other times rather wildly, are recorded by a stationary camera. When edited, the filmic object is computationally “forced” to remain stable and equidistant from all edges of the frame, such that the background environment inversely adopts the motion of the floating platform and takes on the role of visual noise. A wooden sculpture of the floating object is kinetically animated to inversely follow the motion of the video, causing a moment of confused parallelism in flat image and habitable space. Behind this kinetic moment of mimicry sits a simple graphic print, an abstraction of the harbor background.
His aesthetics often emerges at the point where generative processes come into contact with urban topographies, exploring control through randomness and quotation. The work discussed here is concerned with new modalities of documentation that rewrite originary aesthetics—creating new worlds as it restructures our shared sphere of perception. As Paiva prepares his latest solo exhibition, Palimpsest, which consists of an electronic installation, generative video, prints, and paintings based on the non-space of the mass transit station, he responds to a few questions about the role of new media in his practice and the status of the outsider in cosmopolitan Hong Kong. The exhibition opens at Saamlung in Hong Kong on 18 November.
