HUSO2213: Public Domain: Catalogue Essay

PUBLIC DOMAIN: DIGITAL APPROPRIATION OF THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

CATALOGUE ESSAY

JAY CURTIS, OCTOBER 2013

“The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment.” (Burnham, 1968)

If the 20th Century was defined by the Megalopolis, the 21st will be defined by the data that passes within it. At the dawn of the new millenium, digital information technology had only barely evolved to be a capable, meaningful element of urban life. When the sun sets in the final moments of the 21st Century, the line between physical and digital will be have been long since incomprehensibly blurred. It is not by chance that the emergence of street art is in parallel with the evolution of these systems. The city is the physical organ for the growth and proliferation of information. Be it by pen, bytes or spray can, wielded by urchin or academic, the public space is a petri dish for knowledge.

Public Domain illustrates these concepts in both form and function. Utilizing the public space of Federation Square in the Melbourne CBD, the exhibition itself is illustrative of the metanarrative of urban artwork, freely accessible to foot traffic and running from morning through night. The boundaries between these expressions of contemporary Urban art practise and the gallery space are removed as much as logistically plausible, with all artwork referencing the 21st Century crossover point where the lines between the digital and physical are becoming less clear.

In the algorithmic distortions of Clement Valla’s The Universal Texture, the imperfections of the omnipotent eye of Google Earth are laid bare and we see the perfect representation of the modern 21st Century landscape. Rigid manmade structures bend and droop, highway bridges sag as if Dali’s The Persistence of Memory had somehow been captured with a digital SLR. Impossibly flat cities extend out to the horizon across the incorrectly contoured plane, bending and twisting we see our world as a quilt stretched to fit over a mismatched topography. The public space is subject matter of all of these images, The Universal Texture renders the disparity between physical and digital before our eyes.
                                                                                                                                                                   

The exploration of the themes of physicality in the urban landscape have been the obsession of Belgian artist David Mesguich for over 10 years. In previous works such as Crosswords he painstakingly recreated a street landscape from Downtown Manhattan as a wall mounted paper sculpture in miniature, for the purpose of “questionning (sic) the place of the truth in produced images today.” (Mesguich 2008) His sculptural work since has continued to develop this with larger and larger abstracted vector forms and displaying them in public spaces.  Folds, his collaboration piece with painter Valentin Van der Meulen  on display at Public Domain is a 3 metre wide wall mounted sculpture of a skull emerging between two faces constructed from flat vectors of polypropylène. Mesguich’s work is an exercise in bringing these digital 3D modeled forms into the physical world and deploying them in the urban landscape. His work appears almost architectural, his sculptures appearing to emerge organically from their man made surroundings animating it with bold, abstracted facial features. Face perception provides a wealth of information that facilitates social interaction. (Haxby, Hoffman, Gobbini 2002) Due to our predilection for human faces, Mesguich’s work engages our minds in a subliminal dialogue. We apply human characteristics to the urban landscape from which his sculptures emerge, making the inorganic textures of the manmade environment human, through the artifice of digital tools.

Graffiti is irrefutably the foundational element of the Urban Art movement. Synonymous with urbanity for nearly 30 years, the tenets Graffiti art encapsulate the notion of Public space as a battleground where the mutable concepts of intellectual property, individualism & identity are fought. Brisbane artist Graffiti Technica has made his transgressions btween the physical and digital a key feature of his work. By taking fundamental aesthetic forms of modern Graffiti art into the digital realm and manipulating them into animated 3D objects, he has made a career out of contemporising Graffiti art in the 21st Century.

from Graffiti Technica.com, Why?

Why not spray paint?

There is a digital world out there. There are lot of electronic screens, i want to be apart of that world. I want to use the skills that I have acquired to do something different, graffiti to me is a style not an automatic choice of artistic medium. (Graffiti Technica 2009)

The fusion of Parkour and Network Hacking in the collaboration piece by British breaker duo Methods of Movement and London hacker collective Mediashed, The Duellists takes these entirely urban concepts and modernises them in beautifully fluid tangibility. In the spirit of Parkour’s less pretentious title “Free Running” - Mediashed’s information age nerd-anarchy concept of “Free Media” employs the same concept of harnessing and engaging nondestructively with the public space. The commandeering of unprotected wireless signals for the purposes of art is no different to using a bridge as a canvas or a shopping mall as an obstacle course. 

Issues of privacy, surveillance and data security have been at the forefront of ethical debate in the 21st Century. On the surface it may appear that the terrorist attacks of 9-11 may have catalysed the fears posed in Orwellian lore, but surveillance of Public spaces fall under the legislation of the Freedom of Information Act 1982, Public Records Act 1973, The Information Privacy Act 2000 and the Surveillance Devices Act 1999 which all predate this (Brouwer 2012). The Duellists challenge both the public and private enterprise to be confronted the rights of the individual within contemporary society in the digital age. Through the simple act of Free Running, the public is confronted with the consideration of the rights to their own image, identity and recorded copies of it and empowered with the knowledge that they are not passive members of a society but the citizens with the tools to reclaim their own image through freely accessible digital tools. The Duellists as a performance piece illustrates that the concepts of Free Running and Free Media subvert the old world dichotomy of Life and Art as parallel forces in flux and demonstrates that Life is Art.

Light painting takes the rigidity of Projection Mapping and makes it a guerrilla artform. The pioneering multimedia performance work of Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw’s Sweatshoppe uses green LEDs housed inside a paint roller to control the throw boundaries of a nearby projector using a camera to track movement and custom software to perform the operations in realtime. The duo roll up in a van housing the equipment, one leaps out and “paints” the wall with the video feed from the projector covering entire walls with garish Pop art style moving images until the door slams shut and the pair zoom to their next location. The possibilities opened by Sweatshoppe are unique and profound in the context of contemporary urban art. Light Painting not only removes the problematic element of vandalism, but liberates Urban art from the shackles of the static image through digital technology. Finally, visual artists working within the disciplines of street art, graffiti and their related fields are able to move beyond the static limitations of one singular frame. Animated forms can now exist in a live, improvised performative context. The lifelessness of prerecorded antecedent forms of animated Urban artwork bound to immobile projector, CRT, LCD or Plasma screens are a thing of the past. 

Sweatshoppe presents an exciting glimpse into the future of life within the 21st Century, where every surface is a multimedia canvas. The accessibility of this technology is the death knell of the advertising hegemony that controls moving images in the public space. Advertising executives are no longer the gatekeepers of multimedia billboards, a privilege afforded only to corporations with a daily advertising budget that exceeds monthly minimum wage. The ceaseless miniaturization and improved affordability of technology has rendered us with pocket sized projectors and high resolution cameras housed within our smartphones, these portable media drives capable of the computations required to light paint, record the output and stream live to everywhere in the world. This technology costs about 2 weeks wage and can now exist in two pockets of an overcoat. The implications of this cannot be overstated.

Each of these works are a commentary on the juncture between contemporary urban life and the immersive digital age. From the extruded vector forms of David Mesguich and Valentin Van der Meulen’s wall mounted sculpture Folds, to the unconventional abstracted use of depth in the hanging of Clement Valla’s The Universal Texture; the imposition of 3D rendered graffiti forms into filmed locations by Brisbane artist Graffiti Technica or the hacked CCTV captured performances in The Duellists, or live projection based light painting of Sweatshoppe all of the artworks exhibited at Public Domain break the fourth wall and encourage us to step through it, so that we may continue to celebrate and  fight for our own place within the Public Domain.

Bibliography: 

Burnham, J 1968, “Systems Esthetics”, Artforum Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 30-35, viewed 26 October 2013. 

CROSSWORDS. 2008. CROSSWORDS. Available at: http://www.davidmesguich.com/79131/316210/work/crosswords. viewed 27 October 2013.

Haxby, James V., Elizabeth A. Hoffman, and M. Ida Gobbini. "Human neural systems for face recognition and social communication." Biological psychiatry 51.1 (2002): 59-67.

Graffiti Technica - 3d Graffiti electronic art tagging and mechanical goodness why. 2009. Graffiti Technica - 3d Graffiti electronic art tagging and mechanical goodness why. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.graffititechnica.com/why.html. viewed 28 October 2013

Brouwer, G.E 2012, Victorian Ombudsman’s Guidelines for developing Closed Circuit Television policies for Victorian Public Sector, pp. 9, Available at: http://www.ombudsman.vic.gov.au/resources/documents/Guidelines_for_establishing_Closed_Circuit_Television_in_public_places_-_Final.pdf viewed 29 October 2013

Victorian Legislation and Parliamentary Documents. 2013. Victorian Legislation and Parliamentary Documents. Available at: http://www.legislation.vic.gov.au. viewed 29 October 2013

VART3456: Federation Bells Composition

Choosing to attempt this task from one more new perspective proved fatal today.

Still completely unsatisfied with previous attempts (including my initial attempt which ended up being my submitted piece) and with the prospect of being able to perform live from a midi channel in ableton I was drawn to Euclidian Rhythms as a means to realize my initial concept of composing this piece spatially as opposed to melodically. By using duotone or tritone based polyrhythmic loops I would be able to meaningfully connect sets of bells within the space, having them intersect at engaging rhythmic intervals that would appear more dynamic than a standard meter.

By using a midi controller (in this instance a gaming controller/HID, being one of my objectives to incorporate into improvised performance) I could stand within the space and manipulate the rhythmic loops around me gesturally, altering the notes within the loops using another midimapped gesture - coordinating rhythmic and melodic fluctuations purely with two joysticks on the controller.

A further 2 gestures were intended for mapping by clicking in each of the joysticks to
a) retrigger the current loop and b) mute the current note - to add further articulation.

Euclidian Rhythm Approach - Federation Bells Project

Having not allowed sufficient rehearsal time with my new improvisational template, I backed out of using this approach at the last minute and reverted to an edited version of the piece I demoed the previous week.

 

Experiments with Harmony & Dischord - Final Federation Bells Composition

DOWNLOAD MIDI FILE

Screenshot of MIDI Sequence for Final Submission

HUSO2213: Public Domain: Digital Appropriation of the Urban Landscape

Public Domain: Digital Appropriation of the Urban Landscape

Intercepted transmissions from the battleground of the Post-Individual New media colony.

Curatorial Statement 

Three decades have passed since 1984. At the brink of economic collapse, Proles and Outer Party members alike gather en masse to occupy the Public space outside the Ministry Of Banking,  the central data centre - where man has receded to a custodial role. Representatives acting on behalf of Outer Party members oversee the vast array of global economic data, seas of transactions enacted by hordes of algorithms and calculated within fractions of a nanosecond, the smallest element of life within the datascape, creating the ebb and flow of tides within the ocean of wealth that is the lifeblood of the entire species.

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Public Domain explores the urban landscape as the battleground where 20th Century notions of intellectual property, individualism & identity are subverted, distorted and are ultimately rendered obsolete.

The artists we present here have been selected due to their awareness of the aforementioned concepts, either beginning their artistic life with the street as their canvas and moving into a gallery setting or at pioneering new methodology in taking their craft into the Public Domain - keeping this medium engaging and very much a contemporary practice.

Public Domain explores the relationship of the Urban landscape to the Digital landscape as contemporary society increasingly move to an existence that traverses both in simultaneity. As we walk to the station glued to our smartphones to sit down in the carriage we exist in both the digital and physical public space briefly puncuated only by the 90 seconds of no service in the city loop.

Public Domain also explores the urban landscape as an artform within itself.
Public Domain also explores the datascape as an artform within itself.

Whether painted on a building or a jpg hosted on a server, these artworks serve as footprints, watermarks, artifacts - real or the digital, left by by individuals moving within the Public Domain.

VART3456: Reading Response - Iannis Xenakis and John Cage "Two Sides of a Tossed Coin"

I've always been aware of some of the significance in the work of Iannis Xenakis. I've marvelled at his glorious, psychotic, dischordant compositions and the aesthetic beauty of his notation systems. Though cacophonous, unsettling in parts and seemingly arbitrary - there is a grander sense of order that is tangible, the details of which having been beyond mine and realistically, outside of academia - most listener's comprehension. The detail of Xenakis' compositional method in the construction of Pithoprakta outlined in this essay not only developed my understanding of Xenakis' almost mythological status amongst academics and contemporary experimental electronic musicians, but my understanding of the grander significance in the unique role of stochastic processes in art/music as a means to enrich our understanding and perception of not the nuances of music or sound, but of the utterly intangible constructs yeilded by all of the discplines of science, mathematics, physics et al.

I wholeheartedly uphold the argument made by Xenakis paraphrased within the essay that "in certain cases chance operations could represent a composer's intentions more closely than any other compositional process." The common notion that aleatoric methodology is arbitrary, indolent and ultimately inconsequential is not one that I share. My obessesion with the paradigm that encompasses, but is not defined by the concept of aleatoricism was formulated not through research but by my own creative practice, and before this - the music I found myself being affected by most deeply.

The essay first posits Xenakis and Cage as opposing poles in the spectrum of compositional methodology then uses Cage's postulation in the opening quote - that he and Xenakis could be in fact approaching the same objective through different means - as a catalyst to explore the merit of this through the analysis and comparison of Xenakis' Pithoprakta and Cage's Fontana Mix in great technical detail. The author draws a parallel between the two composers in their concept of time, both having a developed instrinsic, detailed understanding of the mechanics of time itself that were not compatible with conventional metronomic notions of meter in a musical sense. This was formed by the observation (particularly by Cage) that the perception of time in a musical context is able to be manipulated  - thereby rendering standard metering to be in many respects obsolete and mistakenly upheld as a fundamental compositional construct. In many ways it became Cage's mission to, in the author's words, "..to do away with clock time.." thus many of his pieces are primarily reflections and explorations of this.


The essay touches on the irony inherent the necessity of rules and structure to effectively develop aleatoric process where the intent is to manufacture chaos. Anyone who has explored aleatoric methodology in a meaningful context can testify to the absurd paradox demonstrated here.

In the instance of Cage's Fontana Mix the objective was in the author's words, "suspend the flow of time" whereas, I would argue that this is not the most accurate choice of words to describe Cage's intent with this piece. I would argue that is was Cage's intent to suspend not the flow of time but in fact subvert time itself.  We commonly refer to quite simplistic absolutist notions when using the verb Suspend in contextual relation to the concept of Time, considering time to be in either a binary state of either ON or OFF. This illustrates what an absurdly simplistic comprehension of this concept we still possess. Time, like most elements of perception is entirely relative.

The lengths that Cage went to in his compositional process to subvert linear causality were as detailed and methodical as the stochastic methods employed by Xenakis in In measures 53 through 60 of Pithoprakta. Neither composer approached their objective with an intent that could be seen as remotely arbitrary. Cage systematically removed emergent bias from his probability tables that determined the sounds used and the event durations in the Fontana mix, thus eliminating causality and subverting Einsteinian relativistic notions of time. Xenakis employed a framework from theoretical physics used to explain the mechanics of the properties of matter itself (in this instance gas) in a very decisive, direct, procedural methodology that sonified this fundamental concept of everyday experience (how the temperature of air is constructed on a molecular level) through an orchestra. When in the context of the almost entirely imperceptible domain of theoretical physics the implications of this are deeply profound. This section of Pithoprakta can be seen more as a landmark scientific text than a musical composition. By examining the mechanics of time itself, deconstructing it to the essential elements of cause and effect and thus highlighting the competing dichotomy of the temporaral framework of Newtonian concepts and relativistic concepts of Einstein, Xenakis manages to demonstrate that each exist entirely independently and illustrates them both imaginatively and succinctly by using a non-recursive process to compose these 7 measures populated by musical events that are causally unrelated - in the author's words, "During the 18.5 seconds of Newtonian time needed to play this passage, Einsteinian time stands still." The implementation of Boltzmann's formula through a developed probability based procedural composition system on an orchestra of human performers renders this piece no less profound even purely in the historical context of musical achievement.












 

VART3456: Bells Rehearsal and Dax Centre

I rehearsed my piece at the Bells today - cacophonous. Need to adjust velocities to about half their values and space out the density of note placement.

This is the piece I rehearsed today, not particularly pleased with it - may continue to experiment with other methods to realize this piece.






Before rehearsal I was able to hear the start of the curatorial speech from the exhibition at the Dax Centre at Melbourne Uni.

I found the focus of the exhibition to be compelling. I've often internally debated the merits of artworks created by children and the mentally ill - finding it hard not to consider them to be equal artistic value to those produced by adults not affected by mental health disorders. This exhibition highlighted this false dichotomy, or at least attempted to. All art is expression.

I would have liked to have heard the full presentation - but what I was able to witness in the pieces themselves and the first portion of the talk has at least inspired and validated some of my internal debate on this subject and given me a local reference point to explore the subject further, perhaps later in practise.

VART3456: Text / Visual Task [Creative Writing Response]

Amongst the transcripts posted I found my selected piece, following my notes back in August here: http://s3377610.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/vart3456-text-visual-task.html

OK. The light turns you upside down. Toe hits the top of the eye, and the top hits the bottom. Now, you do this twice. Left and right. Then you join yourself, invert behind the spheres. That’s where you become you, to me. You, blue eyes. You, brown eyes. Short hair. Acne. Whatever. A snapshot of your concrete insecurities and frail confidences.
From behind the eyes, you bounce between the occipital and frontal lobes. Back and forth. You become what we all know, what we all can say.
But, uh oh. Sometimes the optic nerve becomes a traffic jam. Faces, gestures – what does that mean? – remember, remember – shit! And then you fall into…what they call a synaptic gap. 20 nanometres. A twenty to thirty billionth of a meter. In which you slip.
Sorry. I’m trying to make sense of this myself, yeah
It should be easy. You dance through my pupils, form and stand. I look closely, I don’t need glasses, but I just see cardboard. Our pupils are holes, really. There’s glitter in the gaps which serotonin builds shitty branch bridges to jump across.
I send you traversing this Styx to arrive a drowned skeleton,
surfacing in shapes of memories.
It’s happened before, it’s happened before
It made me small, it made the world tall
A drop in biochemistry and the world transforms to diagonal wells and my heart vibrates blood that makes sounds of crushing blows against walls and nothing connects against nothing to shake in my eardrums the whines and the cries
Listen to me, I never make this up
It ends up happening one way or another
Falling or forming
See, the things you do make up haunt you, like those friends who never liked you
(You make up hitchhikers, like highjackers, who say hi and plant thoughts to rusty receptors. Like clinging and evolving bacteria, like parasites and spiders)
It’s not just to mum or Rachel or your friends but to friends you pretend to mistake and who was Rachel? Well, she said…
*
‘That’s silly. Why would you lie about that?’ She smirked.
Whereas I turned to the painting on the wall to my left - partition cubicles that you could pull away, they shook every time a door opened or closed - but the painting was still. It was a sailboat, in a thin rectangle mast, triangle sail, and trapezoid hull. Just red and just blue. Floating in jonquil sand. It was there every week. I looked and saw; everything was in the painting, as everything is all present always before my eyes, ears, hands, feet. Then doors closed metres away and the walls shook down again.
‘Are we always in this room?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It seems smaller.’
‘Would you like to move to the next room?’
‘Why not?’
I’m screwing with the reuptake. The neurons have to leap across the electrical gap. But the receptors repel pain and heart and head ache by pulling on the axion cord. Pieces of the Real knock back and forth, empowered by the distance and struggling against the volume of Nothing waves.
There’s nothing else. My mind, it floats, floats and collects tokens of the material world. While my body trails behind, wanders, and trips, and…
Memory’s office is in the frontal lobe. She’s working frantically while dopamine plays knick-knock games between her and the sensory receptors. Flaming bags of shit on the doorstep. She answers the door and her incomplete work slips out and away. Out of my mouth and then you’re otherwise.
You become a dream
An alien

I decided to approach my selected piece using some new methods opened to me now being more competent with MaxMSP.

I initially planned on creating the structure of the composition by sonifying the work in several ways (importing the file as raw data, creating tone rows from the text, observing rhythmic patterns in the prose) then imposing some of the narrative and descriptive content of the original text on the result to preserve/extend it thematically.

Spent a lot of time on the mechanics of serializing it and implementing data using dozens of different approaches, built probability tables by analyzing the text data (markov chains etc) indexed each word individually and converted the ascii values to integers then to midi pitch, velocity and duration values - longer words triggering chords and new rhythm seeds - seemed to get further and further away from the goal of preserving/extending the thematic content let alone creating a cohesive composition.

 

My MaxMSP patch breaking each word from each line of text into ascii, then into MIDI notes & chords.

Matrices created from the text - The left matrix is a direct representation of the entire piece.

I moved over into ableton and constructed a piece using the notes I took from the reading, creating cues for compositional events from a handful of key phrases in the text, letting certain elements of the descriptive language govern sound palette/design choices.

I did not particularly want to take the direct, narrative recreation foley oriented approach to the task, which governed my choice of text - but as I somewhat inevitably yielded to this in the end I ended up regretting taking an abstracted approach to begin with.