This Thursday, March 5, 2015 (4:15pm, Bay 10, Smith Warehouse at Duke University), members of the S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, including Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, David Rambo, and myself, will be presenting our collaborative art/theory project Manifest Data. As usual, there will be drinks and light refreshments!
Above, a sneak peak at some of the work that Karin and I have been preparing for the Network Ecologies exhibition at The Edge, Duke University, April 20 – May 10, 2015. The paintings you see here are functioning QR codes (but the programming has not been finalized yet, hence the oblique presentation here). When finished, they will activate a variety of contents and scenarios that have to do with the theme of Network Ecologies. More info soon!
This Thursday, February 26, 2015, the Emergence Lab (headed by media artist Bill Seaman and composer John Supko) will be taking over the Duke Media Arts + Sciences Rendezvous. If you don’t know their work already, be sure to check out Seaman and Supko’s collaborative album s_traits (also available on iTunes and elsewhere), which has been getting a lot of attention in the media lately — including a mention in the New York Times list of top classical recordings of 2014:
‘S_TRAITS’ Bill Seaman, media artist; John Supko, composer (Cotton Goods). This hypnotic disc is derived from more than 110 hours of audio sourced from field recordings, digital noise, documentaries and piano music. A software program developed by the composer John Supko juxtaposed samples from the audio database into multitrack compositions; he and the media artist Bill Seaman then finessed the computer’s handiwork into these often eerily beautiful tracks. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
In their Generative Media Authorship seminar, which I have been auditing this semester, we have been exploring similar (and wildly different) methods for creating generative artworks and systems in a variety of media, including text, audio, and images in both analog and digital forms. The techniques and ideas we’ve been developing there have dovetailed nicely with the work that Karin Denson and I have been doing lately with the S-1 Lab as well (in particular, the generative sculpture and augmented reality pieces we’ve been making for the lab’s collaborative Manifest Data project). I have experimented with writing Markov chains in Python and javascript, turning text into sound, making sound out of images, and making movies out of all-of-the-above — and I have witnessed people with far greater skills than me do some amazing things with computers, cameras, numbers, books, and fishtanks!
On Thursday (at 4:15pm) several of us will be speaking about our generative experiments and works-in-progress. I will be talking about video glitches and post-cinema, as discussed in my two previous blog posts (here and here), while I am especially excited to see S-1 collaborator Aaron Kutnick‘s demonstration of his raspberry pi-based eidetic camera and to hear composer Eren Gumrukcuoglu‘s machine-based music. I also look forward to meeting Duke biology professor Sönke Johnsen and composer Vladimir Smirnov. All around, this promises to be a great event, so check it out if you’re in the area!
Sketch for a multi-screen video installation, which I’ll be presenting and discussing alongside some people doing amazing work in connection with John Supko & Bill Seaman’s Emergence Lab and their Generative Media seminar — next Thursday, February 26, 2015 at the Duke Media Arts + Sciences Rendezvous.
For more about the theory and process behind this piece, as well as the inspiration for the title, see my previous post “The Glitch as Propaedeutic to a Materialist Theory of Post-Cinema.”
The S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab at Duke University, with which I have had the honor of collaborating on an exciting set of art/tech/theory projects over the past couple of months, has a new website: http://s-1lab.org
It’s still under development at this point, but you can already get an idea of the kind of work that’s going on in the lab, under the direction of Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson. Check it out!
Click the image above to view the slides and hear the audio track recorded at our January 21, 2015 presentation of Manifest Data, a collaborative art/theory project by the Duke University S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab (directed by Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson). This is an ongoing project, with further elaborations/iterations and presentations/exhibitions in the planning (more soon!).
The presentation took place at The Edge, the new digital and interactive learning space at Duke’s Bostock Library. The presenters (in the order of their appearance) were: Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, Shane Denson (me), and David Rambo.
For more info about the project, see here and here — and stay tuned for more!.
Above, another poster for the Manifest Data event on January 21, 2015, which I posted about a few days ago. Again, we’ll be presenting “a project that includes a 3D printed manifestation of personal Internet browsing data and an AR-enhanced data-based garden gnome” (as Amanda Starling Gould summed it up succinctly). If you’re in the Triangle area, do swing by! The event is free and open to all. (And if that’s not enough to entice you: as the poster says, “Light refreshments will be served!”)
See also the posts about the project on the HASTAC digital humanities network (here and here), as well the full list of events in the Duke Digital Scholarship Services series this semester (here).
I have written before about Karin Denson’s crazy hand-crafted garden gnomes, based on figures from popular culture, philosophy, and modern art (see here for a piece I posted about them last year). Recently, Karin’s gnomes have taken on new dimensions — quite literally, in fact — as she has transformed personal data collected during Internet browsing sessions into a sort of “portrait” of the user, subsequently turning this image of the interface into a gnome’s “data face,” and then subjecting the poor creature to a strict (but playful) regimen of photogrammetry, AR enhancement, and 3D printing. These new aspects, developed as part of the collaborative Manifest Data project, have further expanded the gnome’s artistic questioning of popular and high-art cultural formations, material and immaterial labor processes, class consciousness, national identity, and the role of seriality in all of them.
It is only fitting, then, that as we prepare for next week’s presentation of Manifest Data, in which context Karin’s data gnomes mount a brave attempt to reverse the neo-cyber-Marxian dictum that “all that’s solid melts into zeroes and ones,” another of Karin’s gnomes is also currently on display: Karl Marx himself, or his gnomic Doppelgänger, is haunting the gallery, bringing things down to earth, and making them concrete (literally: solid concrete). This week only, the Karl Marx gnome can be seen at The Carrack Modern Art, where he’s participating in a community show featuring 100 local artists from the Triangle area of North Carolina. The show runs today through Friday, 12-6pm, and Saturday 2-5pm. Also, as part of “Third Friday Durham,” there will be a reception with food, wine, and music this Friday, January 16, 2015, from 7-10pm. If you’re in or around Durham, don’t miss it!