User:SN/Graduate proposal draft

What are you working on now? Relation to previous practice

I have two ideas, both connected to my previous practice.

First: 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?) I will avoid my influence, appeal to feelings and perception.

How does what we see relate to time?

Second: Explore the area of self-identity in digital media and how this identity is fading away. I plan to write code that would allow me to a 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. I'm writing small code that would allow me to continuously make screen shots while I working on my computer and create making barcodes for each day. The script will also keep a record of the amount of time the computer is not used - this created blind spots on the resulting bar code image.

Why do you like the term barcode?

How will you show the process (what are the possibilities?)?

How do you make the decision about process? (if 10 people why not 20? 10 people for 1 day 10 people in 10 days)

what happens when I change the conditions of the machine?

not only about process, but also about decisions I make to put this process in action.

How do you plan to make it?

I have some readings to do and analyze what is done already in this area. I've started from:

"Aesthetics of administration." Buchloh

"Aesthetics of the Error" Timothy Barker [qoute p55]

"The Glitch Momentum" Rosa Menkman

Both ideas have the similar method. I am attracted to the method, in which I set up conditions and rules, establish the degree of randomness in the code. I am not responsible for the result and cannot influence on the final piece. 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.

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.

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

Why?

Process: write the code (two weeks), make it work. try prototypes in three weeks make book

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.] [describe work in WdW and how it might relate to your proposed wok.

context

Thomson & Craighead 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.

Glitch aesthetics is the visualization or making visible of errors, it is a way of organizing perception that emphasizes the artificiality of representation.

Example: While working on Untitled, Chain reaction project mistake in the first version of code caused the script to run an infinite loop. The Code was running for half an hour until my computer ran out of memory. I made a short screen recording of this prosses. There is something hypnotizing in it.