“The conversation” work is an installation I prepared last March, and which I think it’s interesting to present it again as part of the practical work for Unit 1. This installation consisted of two engines that turns two bodies modelled with meshwire. The two bodies collide randomly. The shadow of the grid is project using LEDs. The idea that I proposed is whenever the two pieces touch each other, this clash select speakers that emit a conversation from a chat or a spam e-mail. This idea will be developed with a practical example for Unit 1 in early December.
My main idea for the practical exercise in Unit 1 is about touching and being touched. In my essay, David, from Marble to virtual Olympus, was reflected upon the gradual loss of physical presence in physical space due to our interaction with virtual media. The main questions of my essay were associated with the following.
Has the use of the Internet’s physical presence been destroyed as a way of socialization?
Is this means that the body is converted in an absent material?
Eugenio Tisselli is an artist and computer programmer from Mexico who has developed several projects involving poetry and manipulation of text from the Internet. Dadanewsfeed is a code that get a random news headline from a news server and creates a collage seeking synonyms for each word.
Eugenio Tiselli has a nice story about how he started programming code of his first games of childhood. You can read it here.
Another related work is MIDIPoet. He has also worked with Antoni Abad in Zexe.net.
dadanewsfeed
//dada newsfeed: hole of eponym
//a cutthroat archetype in heedless megacosm
//2003 by eugenio tisselli: crack hurrah!
//this code is the set of rules that generate dada newsfeed.
//it is a collection of functions and procedures that instruct the computer
//to do the following task:
//1. get a random news headline from a current news server
//2. get a random image from an image bank, based on a random word taken from the headline
//3. combine these two elements in a web-collage and display them on a page
//4. if the user clicks on the image, a new image and a new headline are displayed
//5. if the user clicks on the headline, a new image is displayed,
//and the headline is transformed as the computer attempts to get a synonym for
//every word in the headline. these synonyms are taken from an internet
//thesaurus. if no synonym is found, the original word is preserved.
//sometimes dada newsfeed can take too long…
//if this happens, don’t worry, just click again… or wait
//dada newsfeed has nothing to do with speed or efficiency!
Plastic life is a series of photographs by Vincent Bousserez in macro universes he creates with plastic figures of small dimensions in everyday situations.
Slinkachu is an artist who makes tiny sculptures, his interventions in the urban environment. His compositions are very effective and retailers. He has published a book called Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu that can be bought here
Akiko Ida e Pierre Javelle are two artists working together making small figures compositions very similar to Vincent Bousserez.
There are references to other artists published in their blog (in French) who used tiny figures in his works. One that I really really enjoyed is the Australian Keith Loutit´s work. He converts the real world in a kind of decorated. In this case we become these little plastic figures through the mixture of different technical processes that are known as miniature faking or tilt-shift photography. His work focuses in video animations of high technical quality. In my essay I reflected upon the living sculptures of Gormley, on the desire of the Greeks to give movement to their statues, a sculptor that falls in love with a statue of ‘living ivory (the myth of Pygmalion), the sculpted body of Orlan, Stelarc obsolete body, the automata creation of Leonardo da Vinci and android carried out by Hiroshi Ishiguro to his ‘image and resemblance’ called Geminoid HI-1. The process of creation by Keith Loutit is reversed, and he converts the human being and what surrounds them in tiny plastic figures in motion. With a zenital look the creator becomes in the Creator “simply” observing.
Miniature faking o Tilt-shift” refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes the term is used when the shallow depth of field is simulated with digital postprocessing; the name may derive from the tilt-shift lens normally required when the effect is produced optically.
“Tilt-shift” actually encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to change the line of sight while avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings.
Reuben Margolin´s, work focuses on sculpture kinetics carried out with different materials to create very interesting waves and subtle movements that become a living organism. Movements that have as a reference to nature. Motors that move cables that handle large amounts of modular mesh with hypnotic motion.
Magic Wave contains 3000 pulleys, 5 kilometers of steel cable, and 9 motors.
Leonardo da Vinci was a “precursor to mobile robots as said Mark Rosheim in Wired magazine article titled The Real da Vinci Code . Mark Rosheim is a roboticist who has produced designs for NASA and Lockheed Martin, author of Leonardo’s lost robots book.
The manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci are converted into a legacy of 7000 pages with diagrams of machines, some of them called “impossible machine” . Two of the principal manuscripts with drawings of machines and mechanism are the codex Atlanticus and the Codex Madrid (I and II). Leonardo da Vinci was also the precursor of the automobile, a wooden cart from 1495. Five centuries later this sketch belongs to Atlanticus codex (Ambrosian Library in Milan, Italy) was built a replica in 2004 that can be visited in the Museum of Science History in Florence. The cart can be considered as one of the first automated mobile devices in history. Rosheim suggests, might even be “the first record of a programmable analog computer in the history of civilization”.
In Vimeo web page I’ve found this video about Anatomy to Robot is an exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci´s work as an anatomist, an artist, and a scientist. It´s really incredible the “Drummer Boy”.
The “Drummer Boy” is as explained to us a world exclusive. An approved accurate reconstruction of one of Da Vinci’s drawings that has never before been done. This is the first working example that you see, constructed literally days ago, patent pending. The scale of this announcement goes way over our heads, just grateful for the opportunity to share it with the world.
This week we had a workshop on arduino with Leon Barker. I am interested in using Arduino to drive multiple LEDs, making it “fade out” and “fade in” with a different time. My idea is to create a projection with the meshwire shadow from the abstract to figurative. The distance of the LEDs with regard to meshwire is very important, approaching and receding the LEDs with engines you get a totally different effect of the same object.
This is the code that I´ve used to manage 6 leds.
int value = 0;
int value2 =0;// variable to keep the actual value
int ledpin = 1;// light connected to digital pin 1
int ledpin2 = 3;
int ledpin3 = 5;
int ledpin5 = 6;
int ledpin7 = 7;
int ledpin9 = 9;
void setup()
{
// nothing for setup
}
void loop()
{
for(value = 0 ; value =0 ; value-=1) // fade in (from min to max)
{
analogWrite(ledpin, value);
analogWrite(ledpin2, value);
Serial.println(value);
delay(100);
}
delay(5000);
//now do the other one
for(value = 0 ; value =0 ; value-=1) // fade in (from min to max)
{
analogWrite(ledpin3, value);
analogWrite(ledpin5, value);
Serial.println(value);
delay(100);
}
delay(5000);
//another one plus other
for(value = 0 ; value =0 ; value-=1) // fade in (from min to max)
{
analogWrite(ledpin7, value);
analogWrite(ledpin9, value);
Serial.println(value);
delay(100);
}
delay(5000);
}
This photo shows an installation I made in October 2009, curated by Rotoreliefs at Vibe Gallery in London.
The leds I handle them with clean engine car windscreens. This type of engines I have used on other occasions. I enclose a couple of videos of an installation I made with them. For the final piece I need smaller engines, and surely, it is best to use servo motors.
Samuel Van Hoogstraten, The Shadow Dance, 1675. This work was created in Rotterdam and served as an inspiration for Lozano-Hemmer’s Body Movies, 2001.
School of Leonardo da Vinci. Study of shadow projection, after 1500. The pierpo Morgan library. New York.
Athanasius Kircher, Parastatic machine, engraving for Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Rome, 1656.
Joseph Benoît Suvée (1743-1807)
La invención del arte del dibujo, 1791
Tim Noble y Sue Webster. 2002.
Shigeo Fukuda. 1987.
Christian Boltanski
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Body Movies, 2001. Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam. People play with their giant shadows. In addition their shadows reveal photographs of people in similar public places in different parts of the world.
James Turrell. Sky space.
Daniel Canogar. Mirada. 1993.
Nuage Vert. 2008.
Nuage Vert proposes to use the chimney emissions of a power plant as a canvas for information flow. The intervention consists of tracking and projecting a laser image onto the contour of vapour, adjusting its shape and size to signal real- time information. This information is collected by the power plant and relates to ecological activities of local residents.
David, from marble to the virtual OlympusThe body as a residue of past, present and future life.
Abstract
This paper examines the myths of the ancient Greek connecting with our present, myths that have been slowly becoming a reality. Those myths as predictions of the future. Through this works I am investigating the control of the body as a product that relates to humans directly with the creator. The line that separates us from being a subject to become in an object and vice versa.
The main aim of this research is to find out if we have hugely changed so much that we are not able to even recognize ourselves. If the specie has evolved so aesthetically that we have become androids, cyborgs or in a Second Life avatar. Check if the human being has improved its ability to create themselves. This concept seems to me as very remarkable point of reuse that the evolution does of the body. The use of Internet has destroyed the concept of socializing as physical presence are not involved or I should say, necessary anymore. Will this means that the body is converted in an absent material?
I wanted to redefine my project to incorporate the work that I conducted in parallel to the Master. Having chosen the topic of spam as my proposal has taken me away from my work, so what I now intend to do is to link the master with the second project that I am introducing in this post.
My work focuses on two projects.
The first one I’ve called Cement eclypses, The human beign becomes part of the urban furniture, which consists of small figures made out of cement representing daily activities located in public spaces.
You can download a dossier about this project here.
Public swimming pool. Camberwell. London. May 2009.
The figures are of small dimensions (25 cm.) they are made with cement and they are duplicates through molds of silicone. The figures represent routine scenes, a purchase, a phone call, a long wait, etc. Scenes that contemplate puzzled the demolition and the reconstruction of everything that surrounds us. The cement is one of the materials that more betrays us in our relation with the environment that surrounds us. Is the footprint of the human Being in the nature scene, our more recognizable trace. A mark that make us to believe that nature is “that” that we see from a city to another. In the case Galicia (Spain), the place where I come from, the coast that is converted in the endless flat city. One of the points of reference to carry out these small figures were based on those stunning images of the attacks of the 11S in which many of the survivors for a moment became part of the furniture, filled with dust and surrounded by debris.
In London I have begun my intervation in the bus stops with my small cement figures attached to the roof. The site seems to me very interesting as users of the bus can see the pieces in their journey and its durability is the longest because there are less accessible for people and for the cleaning services. Gradually, the figures are disguised as part of the furniture.
The second one are installations in which intentional lighting models the shadows that are the central element. This is the kind of project that I want to develop for the final draft of the Master. It is based on the work that I produced for the exhibition Transition at Bargehouse, London.
The feature comprised of three visages (shaped from pieces of metallic grid mesh wire) hanging from a motorized cable spinning horizontally. At first these installations seem regular but by looking closer it becomes apparent there are small optical confusions caused by the form of the objects projected shadows. Through an LED light positioned a few feet away from the hanging features, the light passes through the wire mesh, constructing facial outlines that are cast out as its shadows are projected in a large window of wall space centrally located in the darkened room. The projections become an interesting drawing that recalls a 3 dimensional representation of a computer constructed model. The movement of the pieces confuses the human perspective due to its projection having concave and convex forms. This work I have tried to carry out of the simplest form to try to reduce to the maximum the use of technology.
My idea is to attempt an installation similar to this but the lights and engines will be more complex, creating abstract landscapes and figurative metallic grids which will be hidden and showing just the projection. Attempting to create a story. To control the lights maybe I can use the spam that arrives in an e-mail and communicate via Arduinoethernetshield.
You can download a dossier with more info of this kind of works here
Ubuweb has become one of the most important mediateque of art in Internet. In this archive you can find a lot of information related to the experimental sound and video. Ubuweb is an exciting project to share and disseminate the culture as a necessity. One of the last pieces of video that I´ve found related of some way with my project is Junktopia from Chris Maker.
Chris Marker, John Chapman & Frank Simeone (1981, 6 min)
One day, at the stroke of evening, on Emeryville beach in San Francisco, where unidentified artists, leave, without anyone knowing, sculptures manufactured with items that have washed ashore from the sea.
This includes a short introduction by arte, approx. 1:12 secs long, with the film being around 6 minutes itself….there are 2 intertitles in the film itself, giving the latitudanal and longitudanal co-ordinates of the beach. No subtitles required, but ill work on some anyways.
