User:SN/Graduate proposal draft

What are you working on now and why?

My interests are in the area of machine art and generative design. I am attracted to the method, in which I set up conditions and rules, establish the degree of randomness in code. My interests here are the boundaries and conditions that direct process. The final piece is quite far from having a narrative in the form we used to. It appeals to our fillings and perception. So here is another layer of this game where I only provide situation/condition for a piece to be created and judged.

I would like to explore the area of self-identity in digital media. I plan to write code that would allow me to create "diary" of my/others routine on the internet. Look how I can use this data in an artistic way. What this data tells about the user, about his uniqueness. Right now I'm writing small code that would allow me to continuously make screen shots while I working on my computer and create barcodes for each day. The script will also keep a record of the amount of time the computer is not used - this will create blind spots on the resulting bar code image. When I receive results, I can speculate on the theme of identity and digital life. Also how people understand and interpret the results is also interesting.

What are you thinking of making and how?

Process-based aesthetic. "...Art as dematerialized concept that awaits actualization by spectator" David Hopkins, After Modern Art. 1945-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206

"The artist must provide the condition for the emergent and unforeseen, and the audience or the software must bring this conception to satisfaction."

Formula: Artist provides conditions and sets rules for the situation to emerge — participant is a source, creates message, software is a tool actualizes the message — spectator as a receiver and decoder — final piece

Formats: get a lot of people to participate and make a book of it. There will be differences for instance if someone has a habit of looking at pastel shades and another person chooses only black and white text. Make a wall piece in which these differences can be read on a different format. [these differences cannot be read, but one can see difference.]

Questions to answer: How to reveal the process? Should it be a performance?

Why do you like the term barcode?

How do I make the decision about the process? (if ten people why not 20? Ten people for one day ten people in 10 days)

what happens when I change the conditions of the machine?

Relation to previous practice

Transformation experiments. Image to text conversion experiment. The Script converts RGB values of each pixel of the image to its binary representation and maps each digit combination with the letter. Text to image conversion experiment. The script creates an image where RGB values of each pixel correspond to the binary representation of each letter in the text. In this experiments, I didn't change the source. Only it's representation. And on representation depends the readability of the source.

Group-project. An E-book that concatenates previous records of graduation projects. Distortion [ is an ] inevitable consequence of Documentation. We are looking at the process as our subject, which seeps into our method as well as design. Documentation of documentation of document creates distortion and buries original object and its attributes under the layers of documentation specificities and its media attributes. Being focused on the process of documentation, we decided to pick scanning as a method and general strategy to work with content. Scanning as a process is very fragmented yet systematic with the aim of creating an entity. When you are scanning the scanner has no idea of the whole, the image is that of the fragmented images. Scanning as a concept could be implemented different ways on different types of documentation objects. To underline disruption while documenting, while we are scanning something, there exists the framework - even it is successful or unsuccessful - just doing it once. I was working on "scanning" documents. This process brings to surface all kinds of errors caused by machine malfunction and human factors. These errors reveal new aesthetic, bring unforeseen results.

Project for EYE There is the same formal approach; that transforms specificities of one media to another. The difference is context. A formal approach to the transformation process reflects the formalities of the indexing and archival system. The piece is an outcome of several stages of manipulations of silent films which mimics the formalities of the indexing methods within the archive. The categorisation processes distort the understanding of the narrative content of the silent film the same way the formal characteristics of the video distort the sound. Motion vectors and histogram data were isolated from the source to generate an audio track and reassociate it with the footage. My project is a creative point of view on the specificities of the storing and preserving methods and its influence on items that are stored.

Internet poetry Originally the project was a performance made by Pleun and me during the thematic seminar "Chain reaction." Pleun and I played on the field of combinatory literature, machine art and chain reactions. We looked at the way Youtube autoplay and Google method of crawling the internet works and took it as a starting point. The process is based on the loops of chain reactions, where the error plays a role of 'a decision maker' where to stop poem. The result is a list of words with or within a connection among them. The project states the role of the reader and its subjective interpretation. He is the one who creates connections between words. The computer pretends to be a human; human pretends to be a computer and in between, there is a spectator who creates connections and interpretations. During the performance, I was operating the computer, and played the role of a coupler between audience, computer, and Pleun. Pleun was operating the printer. The performance starts with providing the link to the Python script. The script follows the link, extracts all the text and links that are on this page. I ask a random person to feed me a number. The number determines which word to extract. I ask Pleun to print this word. After she finishes, I ask one more time a random person to feed me a number. The number determines which link to follow. Process repeats. The failure to follow a link or extract a word causes the system to finish "the poem."

Relation to a larger context

Machine artificial art, how do we see it and understand it. The beauty of machine poetry could be understood only by another machine. Is it? Glitch aesthetics is the visualization or making visible of errors; it is a way of organizing perception that emphasizes the artificiality of representation.

Thomson & Craighead The stutterer is an instructional artwork – a poetry machine that uses the human genome like a music score to play back a self-assembling video montage spanning the thirteen years it took the Human Genome Project to complete the first documented human DNA sequence. The four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand are represented by the letters T, A, G and C and Stutterer plays (or will play – if it were to run continuously for more than sixty years) all 3.2 billion letters representing the human genome, where each letter becomes a word plucked by the artists from an English language television broadcast made sometime between 1990 and 2003. In this piece, I like the formal approach that is used to pick video fragments. Simple rules with certain freedom for the machine to combine the clip.

Error in the process as a part of the work. How it can affect the piece and how we see it.

Thesis Intention

???

References

I have quite some texts to choose from:

"Aesthetics of administration." Buchloh

"Aesthetics of the Error" Timothy Barker

"The Glitch Momentum" Rosa Menkman

Jos de Mul - The work of art in the age of digital recombination

"Form + Code" Casey Reas

"Post-media Aesthetics" Lev Malovich

"The language of New Media" Lev Malovich

Adrian Mackenzie "Cutting Code: Software and Sociality."

Mark Hancen "The new Philosophy of New Media."

Beyond Myth and Metaphor-The Case of Narrative in Digital Media

"Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" Kenneth Goldsmith

David Hopkins, After Modern Art.

Other Idea: Continue further what I've started in EYE project. Investigate more connections between sound and video, how one can affect, transform the other. The EYE Project is a manipulation of silent films from the Eye Archive and Prelinger collection. The metadata used for indexing the material provides the starting point. The formal parameters of the image source are separated from the narrative to produce sound. Motion vectors and histogram data were isolated from the source to generate an audio track and reassociate it with the footage. This time, I think to work on building video source based on audio. Video with sound (music - talk) which is lifted from the internet. Composition based on audio features live video or code that could compose the video in real time. You will get feeling... (affect?)