User:Inge Hoonte/Thesis Research

Research Angle

My projects often function as methodologies to order information. In ordering the information, I devise systems for an intimate audience experience while aiming to provide a setting for different interpretations for the same body of knowledge. Knowledge that can be reconfigured, to provide a personal experience. Rhythm, harmony, dissonance are important. To move forward, I want to go back first and examine a few previous projects that have been on my mind as a point of departure for the coming year.

1.) COLLECTING & COMPOSING
At the moment, I'm approaching the research from the angle of the Cabinet of Curiosities / Wunderkammer. Together with the Visboeck, these collections interest me more conceptually than literally, although my apartment and perhaps my brain look a bit like this, just not as stacked to the brim. I tend to display my collection of findings and small belongings in windowsills, little alcoves, in the hallway, on the fridge, on the wall above my desk, etc. In any new dwelling, however briefly occupied, I surround myself with a selection of these items, carefully (re)arranged into various compositions to make the space mine, and create a sense of belonging. The items range from photographs I find on the street, newspaper clippings, reminders on post-it notes, to shells, little plastic figurines, porcelain dolls without a head, postcards, store-bought fawns, and once, a big stone crab. I pick them up on a trip with a friend to the beach, a trip by myself to the beach, a walk down to the park, on my way to the grocery store, at a thrift store, on the street, etc. Each time I move, I throw some things out, pack the rest up in a box, and assemble a new collage at the next place to impose a new history with my own memories. The continuity is not how long I'm in a place, but how the assembled experiences (tied to a place, time, and person) together form my 'belonging.' As with any collage, the placement of and relationship between the objects is very important.

From wikipedia

I'm interested in relating this way of collecting 'stuff' to the way I document and collage my memories and experiences while creating new work. I have a tendency to work on several smaller things at once, which sometimes end up being stand-alone pieces, and other times come together in a larger performance, video vignette, radio show, series of posters, or collection of writing. In 2006, I made "Anything is Inside Everything," an 11 minute video. Originally I set out to play several independent clips on shuffle, but I ended up editing all scenes into a bit more of a linear narrative. After this I made a sound installation, worked on a documentary, wrote a short play, and ventured into online performance, while continuing to write poetry and short stories that I self-published in small booklets. I wrote an outline for a project a few years ago which I never ended up pursuing, to create an experiential environment in which various media come together to compose a narrative. I envisioned that a sound sample could be followed by a movement elsewhere in the space, and characters in the story moving in between screens, perhaps set in motion by the audience. I want to return to this idea of creating a work that is plural in its content, forms and methods, while together being one collection.

2.) CONVERSATION, DIALOG, RELATING, EXPERIENCE
I seem to have a need to be in a constant dialog with people, even when I can't establish a connection, such as in my letters to Phil Agre, and in a previous series of notes I wrote to people I dreamed about (as if we'd experienced it together, which in a way, we had). I can get lost in traveling in someone's brain and personality, picking pieces from someone's character, draw them to me, make them part of me, carry them with me long after they're gone, and recomposing the experience we have together in getting to know each other, however briefly. I'm talking about quirky, positive experiences of relating. Being yourself, moments of intimacy. Relating. Creating a platform for the transaction of experience.

Things to Ponder Over

• I think this might become a rather intimate setting, to be experienced by one person or a small group at a time. Recommendations of work I should look at, read, go to? People I should meet, talk to, contact? What does this recall?
• Test, rehearse iterations.
• Make work that is multi-faceted, well composed, not a mess. What should I look out for? Examples of what you've seen that didn't work.
• Get it out of my brain, out of the computer, off the wiki, out of the building, into the world. Bring it back again.

Analyze Work Methodologies, Relation to Previous Work

• Combine digital and physical in one space. Curiosity cabinet of storytelling, videography, computing, poetry, sound art, performance. Collection of experiences.
• Research on Visboeck, Aedriaan Coenen --> curiosity cabinet / collage of various bits of information and interests, contained in one form, in his case, the book / collector of curiosities. Inspired by the fact that he poured the contents of his brain, however scrambled, together, real or fictive onto the pages of the book. All presented as equal material, no distinction.
• The Heart - Owner's Manual -> adapt existing format (user manual) to new context
• Random Personalized Exhibition Experience v5.10.11 -> random connections, database that I composed
• 11:11:11 = currently developing -> play with random input and database, push physical space into online space.
• Dear Philip E. Agre = letter, lecture -> relating, storytelling, connecting stories to theory
• Captain Tweet -> recontextualize content, give a journal new life and audience. Liveness.
• Anything is Inside Everything -> Collage various documented experiences, movements, stories together. Devised a system for characters, each one interpreting the world in a different way, making the information theirs, relating it back to other people, or themselves, to make sense of the world.
• A Story that Relates -> in this 10 minute sound piece and text-based performance, I worked together with poet Emily Anderson. We wrote together, and edited each others' work. The material we felt most strongly about ended up being three parts / chapters of the piece, related to each other in content (relating to people when ill), and announced by the sentence "Oh I have a story that relates"
• First -> radio show about first meeting people. Prerecorded material interspersed with live interviews with couples who told me about what they thought of each other when they met for the first time. This is something I've been wanting to make a larger collection of for a while.
• Eavesdropping -> thesis work in undergrad, 2002. Sound installation with short audio clips, eavesdropped conversations in public space. By bringing them into a gallery setting, the audience is eavesdropping on people that are not present in the space. This was inspired by mobile phones that started leak personal information into public space and how this affected communal use of this space.
• Walkmandisco, 2001/2002 -> dance to your own music on headphones. Various rhythms composed together in one space.
• Project with Michelle Tupko for LowLives, online performance via UStream -> Being together while physically apart.
• I was 28 in 1923 -> collection of short stories, written with filmmaker Noe Kidder. About intimacy, longing.
• paper cut out of the waterways around Rotterdam -> resembling a squid with tentacles. Erase the land, expose the water ways
  
• xo -> composing with email content
  
• Of Course I Dreamed About You -> booklet with dreams, written as letters to the person in the dream, reminiscing about the experience we had together in the dream.
• Clapping Music for Animals -> finding a way to compose with code, turn variables into symbols/concepts that can't be performed in the terminal, but can be conceptually explored once you pull them into a different context.
• Ode to British Thinkers -> play with repeating word combinations. Originally used in a conversation between two people to describe works of art to each other and relate them to other works, but when combined together not really saying all that much.

• Open Poetry nights, 1st Wed at De Schouw --> rehearse and experiment with various ways of performing my texts in front of a small audience. I participated in October, planning to go every month. Mostly in Dutch, but seems like a generous, experimental setting.

TO DO

• Add descriptions of vulnerability and emotional layer to the previous works.
• Wrap up Agre.

Inspiration

Harry Partch --> harmony, dissonance. "Music should be tied to the human speaking voice" Mid 1920s -- On the Sensations of Tone, Herman Helmholz (?). Partch saw Western twelve tone system as a conspiracy. Wanted pure intervals and pure tuning, focus on natural speech: 43 tones in a scale. Microtonality. Dropped out of music scene to travel around the US on freight trains during the depression with other hobos. He enjoyed their company because there wasn't the pressure to be important, they just 'were.' Human contact. Among them he could be himself, drink heavily without being frowned upon, and openly express his sexuality. Made no music but stored up experiences for later use. Everyday living as a creative outlet. When everyone's a stranger, you have to make a decision very fast, you learn to trust the right people. Hobos are extremely individualistic people, can't conform to society, that's why they live like this. Never stopped being an artist, kept a journal, and still designed instruments. Wrote down inflections of individuals' speech on which he later based his compositions. Heard music on the road, accents differed from town to town. Organic process. From outsider perspective: rugged, romantic.

Fleamarkets, thrifstores, IJ-Hallen

Georges Perec --> Life, A User's Manual

Candice Breitz --> The Legend

Prospekt.1, New Orleans, 2008

OuLiPo, Generative Writing, Computational Writing

Vignettes

Aernout Mik

Watch again: Dogville, Synechdoche New York, Rear Window

Marc de Cloe -> look up Boy Meets Girl tv series

Grimm - Alex van Warmerdam

Spalding Gray

Disembodied Voices

"You have to tell stories, otherwise the people in it can't live on in your memory" (or something along these lines, Nullah character in Australia movie, 2008)

Gabriel Lester

Omer Fast show at NiMK earlier this year

Elmgreen & Dragset at Onderzeebootloods

Biking :)

Parallel Narratives

Phil Niblock

Letters from friends, sending letters

Give & Receive

Ann Mertens

Six Stages of Grief

Sharon Bridgeforth

Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic

Some notes on Ivan Sutherland's PhD Thesis text Sketchpad

Download full, updated pdf from Wikipedia here

• Applying Two Constraints to Two Lines
• topology for simulation
• "I made two basic errors which have subsequently been corrected." (p33)
• "If a thing upon which other things depend is deleted, the dependent things must be deleted also. For example, if a point is to be deleted, all lines which terminate on the point must also be deleted. Otherwise, where would these lines end? Similarly, deletion of a variable requires deletion of all constraints on that variable; a constraint must have variables to act on. (...) As soon as it is found that a block must be deleted, it is declared “dead” by placing its

TYPE pair in a generic ring called DEADS. The first dead thing is then examined to see if it forces other things to be declared dead, which is done until no more dead things are generated by the first dead thing. The first dead thing is then declared “free” and the new first dead thing is examined in exactly the same way until no more dead things exist. (p.79, or.90/91)

• "If two things of the same type which are independent are merged, a single thing

of that type results, and all things which depended on either of the merged things depend on the result∗ of the merger. For example, if two points are merged, all lines which previously terminated on either point now terminate on the single resulting point. If two things of the same type which do depend on other things are merged one will be forced to merge with the things depended on by the other. The result ∗ of merging two dependent things depends respectively on the results∗ of the mergers it forces.

(p.80)

• THE MECHANICS OF COPYING ∥ Needless to say, when a piece of ring structure is copied the definition picture used is not destroyed; the copying procedure reproduces its ring structure

elsewhere in memory. However, the reproduction is not just a duplication of the numbers in some registers. The parts of the definition drawing to be copied may be topologically related, and the parts of the copy must be related to each other in the same way rather than to the parts of the master. Worse yet, some parts of the definition may be related to things which are not being copied. For example, an instance is related to the master picture of which it is an instance, and the copy of the instance must be related to the same master picture, not to a copy of it. (p.91)

• CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION (p.93)
• "THE RELAXATION METHOD (...) for complex systems of variables, especially directly

connected instances, relaxation is unacceptably slow. Fortunately, it is for just such directly connected instances that the one pass method shows the most striking success. The relaxation method of satisfying conditions is as follows: Choose a variable. Re-evaluate it to reduce the total error introduced by all constraints in the system. Choose another variable and repeat. (p.96)

• He had to follow a stumbling trail to become convinced of what others had been telling me all along.
• display spots in random sequence makes it appear to twinkle (earliest giff??)

Nice pictures

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Write up on a blog (Via Amy)
Mr. Wilson's cabinet of wonder, Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, Lawrence Weschler - from googlebooks: "Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science. Illustrations."

Museums and Memory, Susan A. Crane, Stanford University press 2000
Geoffrey Sonnabend: Memory is an illusion. Just a human fabrication to deal with fleeting life and irretrieveability of moments and events. Memories are artificial constructions built on experiences that we attempt to make live again by infusions of imaginations. He questions all memory: "there is only experience and its decay," rendering short term memory as the decay of an experience. He was obsessed with how experiences decayed. He created the Model of Obliscence (model of forgetting), in which shapes and forms represent the various attributes that contribute to the process of forgetting. Basically, the Cone of Obliscence intersects the Plane of Experience, which is always in motion. Their intersection is called the Spelean Disc.

The Cult of Remembrance - Paula Findlen

Cern: art&science residency

(Sidetracked with Amy in mind)
A laboratory of the imagination. Currently, there are three ways to combine art & science:

• art as a communicator of science
• science as a means of art production
• science as art

And more subtly:

• art and science in a fluid interchange: oscillations between sameness and differences. Both are driven by curiosity, discovery, the aspiration for knowledge of the world or oneself. But they express themselves in different ways: the arts through the body and mind, often driven by the exploration of the ego, contradictions and the sheer messiness of life; science through equations, directed, collaborative research and experimentation that works in a progressive, linear fashion. As Dr Michael Doser, the experimental physicist on Cern's cultural board for the arts, says: “What I find wonderful about working with artists is that they are just as fascinated by side routes and diversions as they are by the direction in which they are going. This is what makes artistic work really different from scientific work.”

Mariko Mori: A space for connection: "Drawing upon the Buddhist principle that all forms of life in the universe are interconnected, Wave UFO seamlessly united actual individual physical experience with Mori's singular vision of a cosmic dream world. Within the tranquil interior of the work, Mori sent participants, three at a time, on an aesthetic voyage that sought to connect three individuals to each other and to the world at large. "