@Resonate: Nomads and Coders

I have managed to find a few closing thoughts about the Resonate Festival, now that I found a moment, and some issues related to digital culture, the culture of technology, the culture of information and knowledge.

I would like to mention a man, an educator, who has figured out (or continues to figure [in process]) how to get his students to think and do code for a visually artistic result. Casey Raes is an artist. He is a programmer, perhaps even a crack programmer, but that doesn't really matter to him. In his presentation at Resonate, he made the distinction between be a painter, whose tools are brushes, paints, and canvas, and the artist whose studio is virtual. That is, the studio as a work-space for generating programs and software, or the software studio, the title of his talk. The end result of both of these types of artists, is more-or-less the same: an object with visual appeal that you can experience physically. It is certainly a nominal set of parameters by which to define art; and yes, I consider light pouring from a monitor to be a physical experience. However, programs that result in something physical, or embody a digital-to-analogue fabrication, are certainly nothing new to the art, or industrial production. The distinction is subtle, in lies in the tools' ability to reproduce work. Subtle, because a painting can be reproduced by someone else, or a production method could be designed digitally. My point being, I think is necessary for designers and artist to consider the act of coding. Coding is the tool, the means with which form, light and sound are shaped. I think this was implication from Resonate: you don't have to be a programmer to code.

I would go a step further to say, if you want to work effectively with media, how can you not be coding? All you need do, is look at the types and quality of work being produced today.

Let us take, for instance the great response of people who participated in the festival. At any given time, the Dom Omladine cultural space was buzzing with activity. If any complaint could be logged, it was that the space was not big enough. By my estimate, I would say that about half of the participants would not describe themselves programmers. Yet, you could say many of the presentations were about things that would appeal to the more technically inclined. Not to overly simplify the festival's intent, but the content, for the most part, embodied a culture that mostly programmers would consider interesting. It is hard to imagine coding could be considered such a spectacle, so then why such spectator interest? Are people programming passionate? syntax savvy? Or, just a little code curious?

Well, there is one thing we can assume, the community of coders continues to grow. And, even though the organizers from Magnetic Field B and the Creative Applications network do a fantastic job of lining up the guests, it still requires an active base of interest for people to attend an event. The overall size of such a community is perhaps be difficult to accurately gauge, by any account of numbers. In part, as Barry Threw mentioned previously (in a video tag for Latus Creativity), due to the shifting landscape of communities turning to, and cross-over from a large variety of tools. It is like taking the census for nomadic tribes, "Come back tomorrow, someone else will be living here." So we need to be unassuming about popularity; numeric data can be used in bad ways. (Anyway that is what Moritz Stefaner warned us about in his presentation.)  At any rate, the success of numerous open source initiatives from the past decade, is a testament to the waxing popularity of programming. And, that a culture which can be defined (almost entirely) by its will to self-organize around technological autodidacticism, is becoming something much more significant.

What that significance is, I don't think anyone is really sure. Though it is not a stretch of the imagination to see that the right of self-determination is implicit, and the necessity for sustainability latent. Or, it may be that the quality of creative output which is produced through programming tends to be new, fresh, and furthermore, effective at leaving a lasting impression. At any rate, how can young artists and designers not be inspired from so many interesting code-based projects out there? I am sure Resonate corrupted a few graphic designers into becoming self-deprecating hackers. From my perspective, I don't really understand this reluctance for designers-artists to be programming. Many disciplines require programming skills: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geology... They don't consider themselves programmers, they are just using the tools available. However, I also think there is a notion that this form of media creation is a bit subversive.

David Gauthier of CIID [Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design] made a reference to the established academic institutions not being able to fund CIID because of the obscure nature of a highly interdisciplinary and morphic curriculum. Of course, there some exceptions to this perception, however, few. Mr. Gauthier went on to explain that they are able to sustain operations through consulting and research initiatives. Perhaps this interdisciplinary ambiguity, and perceived incompatibility with the paradigm of academia is a good thing. For all the wonders of an education, remember that schools and related enterprises have gatekeepers, and are, by and large, restrictive with the access of knowledge. This was really the point Aaron Swartz was making by downloading JSTOR papers from MIT servers. This is what open source initiatives would like to avoid.

It goes without saying, that we should remember open-source is not free. There are certainly degrees of sacrifice, and large amounts of dedication behind the convenience of information culture. Many platforms have to allocate resources to plan and perform maintenance and upgrades to insure maximum accessibility  For example, development of the Processing IDE is funded by the sales of the books authored by Mr. Reas.

I don't mention this to paint any one's coat the color of valor, but just to point out the fact that I am sure he is well aware you can find a digital copy of it anywhere for free. That is not the point. It is basically the honors system in which knowledge attained is value acquired. It is a gamble, but if you think about it, it is really the only way *all* of this is going to work out.

Open Circuit@MU

If you are visiting the STRP Festival, you might want to pop over to Eindhoven and visit the Funware exhibit at MU. Some young German artists have put together a nice installation you can play with. I am particularly interested in their work because it fills much of the criteria I like to see in the electronic arts. That is, it is made with relatively low costs, it minimizes CPU usage and it is a simple idea.

What they have done is cut and place adhesive strips of conductive metal throughout the gallery which are carrying low voltages of various sounds. You can hear the sounds by placing hand-crafted speakers containing piezo transducers on the "rails".There are few other pieces you may like as well, so take some time to visit.

@ROBODOCK

ROBODOCK held, what is very likely, its last event: the FENIX. It was a festival of music, sculpture performance, pyrotechnics, and, to a lesser extent, debauchery. Though the setting was smaller than in previous years, the mechanical type-of fairyland, steeped in archaic ritual, still provided a magical transportation to another time and space. Well, at least I forgot that I was in Amsterdam North for a little time.

The finale was reached in an episode entitled: "the Story of the FeniX"
..."The Pyrophonic Ensemble Berlin meets les resonateurs de La machine, meets la Mécanique Vivante meets Dutch Tetzepi meets actors in a apotheosis of flame throwers, fire organs, sirens, blowers and more."
One standing far from the blasts could easily feel the heat. A side note, on the day following the festival, while my housemate was listening to Jesus Christ Superstar, I could not help but notice the similarities (in-part) between the music at the festival. Anyhow, it was a spectacular event.

DeFenestrated@NP3

FMI's Interactive Media and Environment graduates mounted their show at NP3 on July 3 to the 12th.
My thesis work, entitled, Species: approaching a light fountain, was based on the research I conducted into ultrasound. The acoustic heterodyning effect could be heard if one was able to mentally filter out the ambient sounds in the gallery. The installation uses 42 piezo transducers and a steel bowl weighing about 100kg with the stand. The holes in the steel were made possible by a sponsorship from Machinefabriek Börger.
The process was involved, more so than I anticipated. However, I discovered a comfort in working with metal and plastics, and generated many ideas for new works. In this way, the project did more than I could imagine. More information is located at defenestrated.

@Optifonica

Lab Optifonica hosted another Synergetica event in their lab in Amsterdam. The white wine was refreshing. The host of this installment was Canadian theorist and immersive artist Chris Salter.

"The visual arts world increasingly embraces temporal “unobjects” and events that range from phenomenological investigations to technically saturated, responsive a/v environments—dissolving not only Michael Fried’s notion of object-hood but also the notion of the work external to human perception itself. This talk will examine the repercussions of James Turrell’s and Robert Irwin’s proposal to investigate the thresholds of perception in an experiential environment. Specifically, it will focus on the conception of the self and body in both contemporary artistic practices with media coupled with recent concepts arising from enactive cognition. What happens to the “sensing self” and its embodiment in audio-visual environments that overload or reduce our perception and how does this self expand or dissolve through such encounters?"