How to Get From Zero to One

Trimester 1, 2012 Thematic Seminar

Title: How Long Does it Take to Get from Zero to One?

Tutor: Richard Wright

INTRODUCTION
The overall subject of this seminar series is time and media. By which I mean media which is experienced in time rather than being about time. We will begin by exploring moving image and animation as the first dominant forms of time-based media and their differences to recent forms of digital or “new” media. Why is new media so concerned with the immediate and the simultaneous rather than with duration? Can we see how new media “moves”? Can it produce its own “image of time”? How long does it take to get from 0 to 1?

STRUCTURE
The seminars consist of presentations, discussions, demonstrations, screenings, class activities and exercises (some literally) and project assignments to be completed in between sessions.

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS
Project assignments are expected to be taken as far as a prototype, pilot or rough. Where this is not practical with the time or resources available in this short seminar (if you needed to time lapse record a plant growing, for example), a realistic production plan would suffice.

ASSESSMENT
Assessment is on the last day, Friday 14th December.

1. MOVEMENT – MIMESIS - LABOUR
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 19th – Friday 21st September

In this session we will finds ways to use animation to understand the relation between time, the body and media. Mimesis is the most primitive ways of acquiring knowledge and animators use it particularly to understand how things move. How to represent movement is also the original problem that triggered the birth of cinema, such as in Muybridge's well known studies. The movements of media workers then became an object of “scientific management” itself. When digital media became dominant, where did this movement of working go?

SCHEDULE
Wednesday 11:00
Introduction: “Freedom of Movement” presentation and discussion
Bodies that mediate technology
Screenings: “Little Nemo”, Winsor McCay, 1911, etc
Text: “Biometry and Antibodies. Modernising Animation / Animating Modernity”, Edwin Carels.
Wednesday 14:00
Discussion: Media as a form of movement and labour – bodies vs. cameras.
Workshop: Media Production Olympics

Thursday 11:00
Discussion: Bodies that mediate other bodies for technology – mimesis. How do animals walk?
Screenings:
Text: “The Uses of Live Action in Drawing Humans and Animals”, chapter 13 in “The Illusion of Life”, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
Media:IllusionOfLifeCh13.pdf

These are a few pages from Preston Blair's book about animated movement, the first to be written, started in 1948. In these first pages he describes the importance of "scribbling" to find an animated form, and the differences between "straight-ahead" and "pose-to-pose", the two main approaches to classical animation.
Media:Blair_Cover.jpg
Media:Blair_04.jpg
Media:Blair_05.jpg
Media:Blair_06.jpg

Workshop: Build a cheap and simple motion capture studio.
Thursday 14:00
(Continue from morning).
We compare rotoscoping, 'photo-stats' and motion capture.
Screenings: The body moving as a technology.

Friday 11:00
Discussion: Disembodied movement. The interface - from physical labour to perceptual and cognitive labour.
Text: “Surveillance and Capture”, Phil Agre.
Friday 14:00
Workshop: Does the “movement” of the media artist still exist?

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS (one of these suggestions):
i) A History of Walking (could be your own, could be biographical, could be an animal or even a toy, could be over the course of a single day).
ii) Represent the “movements” of a new media worker. Can you make them into a “work”?

TEXTS:
“Biometry and Antibodies. Modernising Animation / Animating Modernity”, Edwin Carels. In: “Animism”, Anselm Franke (ed), Sternberg Press, 2010.
Edwin Carels uses animation to describe how cinema developed by both regulating our senses and movements and deregulating them at the same time. What does this actually mean for the difference between animation and live action cinema? And for digital media?
“The Uses of Live Action in Drawing Humans and Animals”, chapter 13 in “The Illusion of Life”, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Hyperion, 1981.
This book is still the bible for classical animation, and although it heavily promotes the Disney version, it is full of information. This chapter gives some intriguing insights into the kinds of cross-overs between live action and animation during the 1930s, including how to “become animal”. How does all this relate to recent motion capture technologies?
“Surveillance and Capture”, Phil Agre, Information Society, 10(2): 101-127 – April-June 1994.
Although this is apparently about surveillance, it provides a way of describing our interactions with a computer as a form of movement or a “grammar of actions”. What makes this “grammar” fundamentally different from previous kinds of rationalised movement?

2. CHAIN REACTION – A MACHINERY FOR NARRATIVE
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 10th – Friday 12th October

Narrative knowledge can be thought of as the opposite of mimetic knowledge. But perhaps there are forms of narrative that betray its inner workings in unexpected ways. A very popular modern genre is the “chain reaction” work, often in the form of a film but also in games as well. In this seminar we explore how far it has come to function as a general idea of time, risk and contingency.

SCHEDULE
Wednesday 11:00
Screenings: “The Way Things Go”, Fischli and Weiss, 30 mins, 1987, etc
Text: “Constructive Instability. Or: the Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife”, Thomas Elsaesser. In: “Video Vortex Reader”, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
Media:ConstructiveInstability.pdf
Wednesday 14:00
Workshop: Images of chain reactions and images from chain reactions

Thursday 11:00
Discussion: Media technology as chain reactions.
What is a narrative 'event'?
Screenings: “Mickey Mouse – The Chain Gang”, Disney, 8 mins, 1930, etc
Thursday 14:00
Workshop:

Friday 11:00
Research: How far can we extend the chain reaction approach?
Screenings: “Run Lola Run”, etc
Friday 14:00
(Continue from yesterdays workshop)

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS:
i) Your own chain reaction work in any media.

TEXTS:
“Constructive Instability. Or: the Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife”, Thomas Elsaesser. In: “Video Vortex Reader”, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
Elsaesser uses the phenomenon of “chain reaction” films to articulate the modern condition of risk and “tipping points”, such as ecological or financial. At the end he tries to extend this mode to describe how you stumble your way through networks.
“La Ronde”, Arthur Schnitzler, 1897.
Early modern example of a narrative constructed through a sequence of lovers meeting before one moves on to another liaison, eventually returning to the first character like a loop. Still very readable and open to many interpretations, although I like what it could say about an endless, possibly futile seriality in modern human relationships.
“Time's Arrow”, Martin Amis. Vintage Books, London, 2003 (1991).
A short novel written in a “reverse chronological narrative”, that is, backwards. Does this form of narrative help us to understand the subject in any new way?

3. RHYTHMANALYSIS
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 7th – Friday 9th November

In this seminar we look at an unusual approach to analysing contemporary “everyday life” in terms of time.

SCHEDULE
Wednesday 11:00
Introduction to a theory of rhythm using two short texts:
“The Rhythmanalytical Project” and “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities”, Henri Lefevbre and Catherine Regulier.
Media:LefebvreRhythmanalysis_Project.pdf

Wednesday 14:00
Workshop: Rhythms of Rotterdam – is Rotterdam a solar or a lunar city?
Screening: The “city poem” genre.

Thursday 11:00
Research: What is “rhythmanalysis” for?
Thursday 14:00
Discussion: Mediated rhythms and the rhythms of media.
Workshop: How does Lefebvre deal with rhythms which are not visible or not at a human scale?

Friday 11:00
Workshop: Continue our rhythmanalysis of Rotterdam (or somewhere) with consideration of media.
Friday 14:00
(Continue from morning)

PROJECT ASSIGNMENT:
i) Conduct your own rhythmanalysis in any media.

TEXTS:
“The Rhythmanalytical Project”, Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Regulier, Communications, 1985. “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities”, Henri Lefevbre and Catherine Regulier, 'Peuples Mediterraneen', 37, 1986.
Henri Lefebvre is probably the only person to attempt to define a “theory of rhythm”. A big influence on the design of urban space, at the end of his life Lefebvre turned his attention to time instead. Lefebvre and Regulier describe various ideas and methods, and a central problem emerges as to how to study rhythms that are beyond human scale and perception.

EXAMPLES, FILM:
“Weekend”, Walter Ruttman, 12min, 1930 (first sound only film). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVZVpAVfZ6M
“Railings”, Francis Alys, 7:00, 2004. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC4-op71sa4
“MUTO”, Blu, 7 mins, 2008. http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.html
“Bow-tie Duty for Squareheads”, 13:24 (2004), Stephan Flint-Muller. http://vimeo.com/6420239
“God Bless America”, Tadasu Takamine, 2002. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qm08s7y7Hk

EXAMPLES, WALKING:
“Walking and Art” blog, http://walkart.wordpress.com/
"Urban adventures in Rotterdam" (psychogeography), http://kazil.home.xs4all.nl/
"Soundtrackcity", sound walks, 4 in Rotterdam (I have 2, the rest are not free). http://www.soundtrackcity.nl/amsterdam/rotterdam/
Rozenburg peninsula - via train to Maassluis and ferry to Rozenburg. Cycle to barrier takes 1 hour.

EXAMPLES, MEDIA:
“Flowing Cities”, projects that visualise cities, http://flowingcity.com/
"Amsterdam Realtime", GPS traces of different routes, 2003, http://realtime.waag.org/
“Flight Patterns”, Aaron Koblin, http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/
"Urban Sonar" measures walkers spatial proximities and heartbeat. http://urbansonar.com/index.php
“Greenwich Emotion Map”, Christian Nold, 2006. http://www.softhook.com/emot.htm
“Sonicity”, Stanza, 2004, http://www.stanza.co.uk/sonicity/index.html
“Regeneration Squares”, Stanza, http://www.stanza.co.uk/stanza_regeneration/index.html
"Pigeonblog", air pollution project inspired by pigeons used for aerial photography, http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/pigeonblog.php
“Electrical Walks”, Christina Kubisch, 2003. http://www.christinakubisch.de/english/install_induktion.htm

RESOURCES CITY:
Maritime Museum “Mainport Live”, Leuvehaven 1. E7.50. http://www.maritiemmuseum.nl/website/index.cfm?fuseaction=tentoon.digest&lang=engels
Municipal film archive, Hofdijk 651. Tues – Fri, 9 – 5. http://www.gemeentearchief.rotterdam.nl/collectie/beeld-en-geluid
Spido Rotterdam harbour tour, 75 mins, Willemsplein 85. E10.50. http://spido.nl/en/rotterdam-harbour-tour (only as far as Waalhaven?)
The Euromast. http://www.euromast.nl/
Museum Rotterdam ("1,000 Years of Rotterdam"). http://www.museumrotterdam.nl/

RESOURCES PORT:
Rotterdam port webcams: http://www.portofrotterdam.com/en/Port/port-in-picture/Pages/WebcamsMap.aspx
Video Gallery: http://www.portofrotterdam.com/en/Port/port-in-picture/video-gallery/Pages/default.aspx
Port Statistics: http://www.portofrotterdam.com/en/Port/port-statistics/Pages/default.aspx
The Harbour Coordination Center has three VHF channesl -, 11, 14 and 19.
Port water levels, current speeds, wave height, wind and visibility: http://www.portofrotterdam.com/en/Shipping/up-to-date/Hydrometeo/Pages/internet-amethyst.aspx

RESOURCES MEDIA:
“noTours” audio tours and platform for GPS Android, http://www.notours.org/audioguides, http://www.notours.org/archives/258
Timemap.js for plotting temporal data on online maps, http://code.google.com/p/timemap/
iMapFlickr, Google Maps from geotagged Flicker photos: http://imapflickr.com

4. IS THE NETWORK A TIME-BASED MEDIUM?
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday 12th – Friday 14th December
(Friday 14th is assessment day)

Film maker Babette Mangolte posed the question of why is it so difficult for the digital image to communicate duration? Perhaps networked media are not time based media but spatial media. But surely we can find ways to challenge this...

Wednesday 11:00

“Night Mail”, Basil Wright & Harry Watt, W H Auden, Benjamin Britten, GPO Film Unit 1936. 23 mins.
“None will hear the postman's knock without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLoDg7e_ns

“Are the simultaneous and the immobile deceptive? ...No and yes. No: they constitute, they are, the present. Modernity curiously enlarged, deepened and at the same time dilapidated the present. The quasi-suppression of distances and waiting periods (by the media) amplifies the present, but these media give only reflections and shadows. You attend the incessant fetes or massacres, you see the dead bodies, you contemplate the explosions; missiles are fired before your eyes. You are there! ... but no, you are not there”.
“Seen from the Window”, Henri Lefebvre

“I wouldn't have stayed until the end if it'd been on Youtube”, Jem Cohen.

Example of work that spatialises using video:
“Eternal Sunset”, 2006, webcams all around planet timed to record the sunset as it reaches that location, create a single image of an endless sunset.
http://www.eternalsunset.net/

“The Bank of Time”, 2001.
A temporality of the desktop.
http://www.theBankofTime.com

Travelling between nodes in the network.
“Flat Earth”, Thomson and Craighead, 9min, 2008.
http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/flat_earth.html

The journey in-between the nodes rather than the destination.
“Molotov Alva”, Douglas Gayeton, 2008.
http://molotovalva.submarine.nl/

“Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, Michelle Terran, 2009.
Screening Youtube videos on a coach trip to meet their creators in Murcia.
www.ubermatic.lftk.org/blog/?p=225

“Wireless Walks”, Michelle Terran, 2003-. http://www.ubermatic.org/?p=221
“Video Sniffin'”, David Valentine, 2006, http://www.mediashed.org/videosniffincom
“The Duellists”, David Valentine, 2007. http://www.mediashed.org/duellists

Norwich Castle shopping mall, 360 degree CCTV footage.

Wednesday 14:00

Live, real-time film making.
“Empire 24/7”, Wolfgang Staehle, 1999. Live webcam of Empire State Building streamed over internet.
http://www.wolfgangstaehle.info/pages.php?content=gallery.php&navGallID=1&activeType=gall
“Short Films About Nothing”, Thompson and Craighead, 2003.
Footage shot from live online webcams, combined by software and mixed with text from message boards and random internet radio sounds. “Template Cinema”. (“A Short Film in Which Nothing Actually Happens”).
http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/sfandoc.html
“The 13th Screen”, Carrie Dashow, 2008.
9 to 16 participants go out and shoot continuous personal journeys through their town, synchronised at the start so that they can be exhibited simultaneously on a split screen. Every time one of them sees something significant they signal it by passing their hand in front of the lens. The video display software detects these “edits” and displays that persons channel on a separate 13th screen.
carriedashow.wordpress.com/projects/13th-screen-solo/

The Diegetic Desktop

“The Diegetic Desktop in a New Media Film: “Skydiver AKA Instructional Video #4 - Preparation for Mission by Eugene Kotlyarenko”, Ashiq Khondker.
The desktop interface as part of narrative space but also where we perform our identity. How does that play into how we construct stories of our own lives, how we remember things.
“In-computer” movie making/editing also requires careful planning, but related to the limits of time. When it becomes too easy to obtain all the footage you ever need, the infinite time factor works against you.
http://vimeo.com/21296103
“Skydiver AKA Instructional Video #4 – Preparation for Mission”, Eugene Kotlyarenko, 2010.
http://www.jstchillin.org/eugene_kotlyarenko/index.html

“Guy 101”, Ian Gouldstone, 9 mins, 2005.
http://www.movieola.ca/video_streaming.php?id=03497001

“Discrete Packets”, Nick Crowe, 2000.
Discrete Packets is also a narrative, which, despite using the language and iconography of emails, search engines and active links, remains traditionally filmic in nature.
http://www.nickcrowe.net/works/discretepackets/discretepackets_1.html

“The Digital Event” section, pp 163-174 in “The Virtual Life of Film”, David Rodowick.
Rodowick uses the one-continuous-take digital film “Russian Ark” to try to explain why he thinks digital film (and perhaps digital media in general?) cannot express duration and articulate temporality as analogue film could. So how does this make the experience of watching “Russian Ark” differ from, say, long takes in analogue films? Is it due to a deep, technological difference or an aesthetic difference?

“Russian Ark”, Alexandr Sokurov, 2002.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0KRRgzZvHk (end scene)

Compare to other famous narrative long takes.
“Touch of Evil”, Orson Welles, 1958.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg8MqjoFvy4 (intro)
Compare to non-narrative long takes.
“Let Each One Go Where He May”, Ben Russell, 2010.
http://vimeo.com/39846969 ,

Preface to “The Rise of the Network Society”, Vol I, Manuel Castells. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.
In this part of his 2010 preface to his large study, Castells updates his idea of the information network as a “timeless time” existing in a “space of flows”. Although basically a sociologist, his ideas have become widely influential. Years before, Castells had been a critic of Lefebvre's work on urban space, yet here you might notice him referring to problems of “rhythm” and cyclical time. For a more detailed account, read chapter 7.

“Glacial time” and the environment.
“The Clock of the Long Now. The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer”, Stewart Brand, Basic Books, 2000.
“How do we make long term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? …The device is a Clock, very big and very slow... a Clock of the mind, an instrument for thinking about time in a different way...”
http://longnow.org/clock/

“Practicing Media Archaeology” from “What is Media Archaeology?”, Jussi Parikka, Polity Press, 2012.
Although media archaeology is more to do with historical temporalities than media temporalities, the section on “Media archaeological art as time machines” uses the idea of “polyphonic” and “pleated” time to describe how technology might have its own temporalities. But the section on “Signal based media art” is where he describes new microtemporalities of digital media and the work of people like “The Institute for Algorhythmics” (the similarity to Rhythmanalysis is not accidental).

What is the difference between media archaeology and media history?
Media Archeology as “polyphonic” or “pleated” time.
Wolfgang Ernst and the temporality of technology – if it works it's in the present.
Michel Serres' modern car “assemblage”.

“Vinyl Video”, Gebhard Sengmuller, 200.
“… VinylVideo™ reconstructs a home movie medium as a missing link in the history of recorded moving images while simultaneously encompassing contemporary forms of DJ-ing and VJ-ing”.
http://www.gebseng.com/03_vinylvideo/

Microtemporalities:
“Hidden AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere” - Shintaro Miyazaki
“listening and looking for an epistemology of everyday life”. Bi-quad antenna “Detektor” picks up different sounds of gsm mobiles, wireless routers of different kinds.
http://www.algorhythmics.com/
Cory Arcangel, ‘Data Diaries’, 2002.
“... take a huge data file--in this case his computer's memory file--and fool Quicktime into thinking it's a video file. Then press play. Your computer's memory is now video art...” (Alex Galloway)
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/
Where can it go? Instead of an epistemological analysis or a poetic work, you might only be listening to “weird stuff”.

Richard Grusin's blog articles:
“Premediating Sandy”
and
“40 Days in the Wilderness: Premediation and the Virtual Occupation of Wall Street”.
http://premediation.blogspot.co.uk/
Grusin's blog provides a brief description of his idea of “premediation” and how it prepares us for “multiple mediated futures”. Here he describes two examples – news coverage of Hurricane Sandy which seems to encourage us to accept catastrophe, and the #occupywallstreet movement, a political movement without a clear goal but paradoxically with a future.

“The New York Times Special Edition”, Steve Lambert (US), 2008.
http://nytimes-se.com/

Invent a temporality for the network

E.g.
What would an email version of “Night Mail” be like?
“None will hear the postman's knock without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
A work for networks that runs “in reverse”.
A time-based Google search?
A diegetic wireless video ?

Thursday 11:00
Workshop: Continued
Thursday 14:00
Workshop: Continued

Friday 11:00
Assessments
Friday 14:00
Screening (if necessary):
“Gandahar”, Rene Laloux, 1988. Animated film. An idyllic community are threatened by a force from both 1,000 years in the future and 1,000 years in the past. Only the deformed are spared by the men of metal. WARNING: this film will scramble your brains.

PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS:
None because we are done.