Saturday, May 22, 2010
Audiotectonics: Articulating Practical Sound/Space Dialectics
Sound not only exists in space, it becomes space and can also frame space, define space both conceptually and perceptually, and determine in more physical terms how it is negotiated by physical bodies.
Industry Standards: Approaching Maya, Blender, and 3D max in private practice
Given the public’s increasing exposure to avenues for mastering digital media that were once limited, the realm of 3D modeling still maintains an aura of mystery and inaccessibility because of the complexity of it’s interface and it’s almost exclusive domination by the entertainment industry. A new version of Maya has been introduced every year since the beginning of the century, and in a way the program embodies it’s own obsolescence which is based on the essential fallacy that whatever a computer can make look realistic is never real enough. The levels of programming that go into generating the software alone are immense, making the potential for exploiting it’s idiosynchrasies equally if not excessively vast. The technical and artistic possibilities that this program holds yield aesthetic explorations that were not even possible even this time last year, and given the current trend in the software’s development, the possibilities that is holds for the future are limitless as computers become faster and more powerful and as the software becomes increasingly complex. Exploiting its full potential in it’s current state is nearly impossible since it has become a tool that is on the verge of becoming beyond human understanding, something that is truly post-human. Mastering this medium, therefore, becomes a metaphor for grabbing the reigns of our technology and keeping it within the control of those who are willing to understand it, rather than letting it become the representation of an abstract dominating force.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Digital Dialogues
The divisions between the digital and analog worlds has become quite blurry over the past 15 years or so. As computer technology becomes increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, cell phone ring tones that sound like old fashioned telephones, and light boxes mounted with photographs that emulate the computer screen are common-place. Simple things such as these are evidence that these two radically distinct worlds are not mutually exclusive, but entwined in a dialogue of imitation and emulation that goes beyond mere stylishness. When approached in relation to each other, we see that we have entered a frontier of “new media” that may prove to be at the heart of its phenomenological core; the manifestation of objects that whose distortion of perception occurs on the borders between these two worlds.
The entire scope of art that ranges from photography, sound and video, to sculpture, painting, and print making have all been drawn into this dialogue, and to deny it's relevance is tantamount to embracing ignorance. The separate specific issues related to discrete practices in all media share a common thread that defines the relationship between analog and digital technology. There is a powerful tendency toward simulation, or illusionistic enhancement. A powerful Post-modern urge take that which was thought of common place and everyday and elevate it to an epic status. In a sense, creating functional and very real objects of an abandoned and false technological utopia. But perhaps there is such a thing. Perhaps this dichotomy that exists is a step closer to that goal, and we have only begun to scratch the surface. The age of pluralism will not last, and there are new disciplines emerging that are not restricted to a designation of a particular medium. Sound was one, Virtual Architecture is yet another. What we MUST attempt to communicate are how to articulate the creative possibilities inherent in a new and complex world of digital tools and artefacts that’s sole purpose up to this point has been only to simulate reality for entertainment purposes. We, as New Traditionalsits intend to communicate to our audience, the power of these tools to create new worlds and the artifacts of those worlds to establish a more appropriate context for addressing proper aesthetic issues: authenticity, genius, originality, social functionality, ethics, romanticism, pragmatism. These universal aesthetic principles are forever at the heart of our enterprise and shall perenially reflect our own relationship to a brand of technology that has come to dominate our physical world.
We hope to inspire others to approach this medium with a similar attitude and inform their own aesthetic values and explorations.
The entire scope of art that ranges from photography, sound and video, to sculpture, painting, and print making have all been drawn into this dialogue, and to deny it's relevance is tantamount to embracing ignorance. The separate specific issues related to discrete practices in all media share a common thread that defines the relationship between analog and digital technology. There is a powerful tendency toward simulation, or illusionistic enhancement. A powerful Post-modern urge take that which was thought of common place and everyday and elevate it to an epic status. In a sense, creating functional and very real objects of an abandoned and false technological utopia. But perhaps there is such a thing. Perhaps this dichotomy that exists is a step closer to that goal, and we have only begun to scratch the surface. The age of pluralism will not last, and there are new disciplines emerging that are not restricted to a designation of a particular medium. Sound was one, Virtual Architecture is yet another. What we MUST attempt to communicate are how to articulate the creative possibilities inherent in a new and complex world of digital tools and artefacts that’s sole purpose up to this point has been only to simulate reality for entertainment purposes. We, as New Traditionalsits intend to communicate to our audience, the power of these tools to create new worlds and the artifacts of those worlds to establish a more appropriate context for addressing proper aesthetic issues: authenticity, genius, originality, social functionality, ethics, romanticism, pragmatism. These universal aesthetic principles are forever at the heart of our enterprise and shall perenially reflect our own relationship to a brand of technology that has come to dominate our physical world.
We hope to inspire others to approach this medium with a similar attitude and inform their own aesthetic values and explorations.
Electronica in the Expanded Field
Sound is the sculptural aspect of new media
Electronica is no longer a pitifully vague term for what is less of a genre of music, and more of a contemporary practice in music and sound production. Having been out of popular use for the past several years, it is now a term that I believe is due a re-examination. An abused and discarded designation that should be picked up from the second hand lexicon show room and be given a glossy new life. What I call electronica is a discipline that is vast with permutations and discreet dialogues and discourses that have been developing for well over forty years at this point. It is not a future forward _topian infused term, but rather a way to survey the digital/analog landscape in which we are now most currently present. But I would like also to not remove the mystical, musical implications from the term as well. After all, we are talking about Art. An art who's groundwork has been laid by hard physics, mathematics and the labors of fastidious personas as devoted to boredom as one can find, but it is Art none the less, and an art to and of itself. What we need to do perhaps, is get a wider a perspective on what we designate as Music vs. Sound in the context of digital media. For the purpose of this essay, we will say that anything musical is what is intended to be listened to directly, and to which any accompanying media is ancillary. The focus of this essay however is on the leftovers. Sound. It is sound that bears the most in common with the tangible analog world, it is the literal surface against which other media is pressed, in impenatrabel surface as ethereal as it is presient. Bearing more in common with the most concrete of arts, Sculpture and Architecture. This is not intended to be a critical response to Krauss's now iconic tome on Sculpture in the expanded field, it is rather meant to be a point of contact. For the most important question asked about New Media work accross boundaries, is "How does it Address Sound"? Sound is the unseen, underacknowledged discipline upon which all new media practice is based. It is the illusionistic faculty, the abstract faculty, the concrete, the tangible.
Electronica is no longer a pitifully vague term for what is less of a genre of music, and more of a contemporary practice in music and sound production. Having been out of popular use for the past several years, it is now a term that I believe is due a re-examination. An abused and discarded designation that should be picked up from the second hand lexicon show room and be given a glossy new life. What I call electronica is a discipline that is vast with permutations and discreet dialogues and discourses that have been developing for well over forty years at this point. It is not a future forward _topian infused term, but rather a way to survey the digital/analog landscape in which we are now most currently present. But I would like also to not remove the mystical, musical implications from the term as well. After all, we are talking about Art. An art who's groundwork has been laid by hard physics, mathematics and the labors of fastidious personas as devoted to boredom as one can find, but it is Art none the less, and an art to and of itself. What we need to do perhaps, is get a wider a perspective on what we designate as Music vs. Sound in the context of digital media. For the purpose of this essay, we will say that anything musical is what is intended to be listened to directly, and to which any accompanying media is ancillary. The focus of this essay however is on the leftovers. Sound. It is sound that bears the most in common with the tangible analog world, it is the literal surface against which other media is pressed, in impenatrabel surface as ethereal as it is presient. Bearing more in common with the most concrete of arts, Sculpture and Architecture. This is not intended to be a critical response to Krauss's now iconic tome on Sculpture in the expanded field, it is rather meant to be a point of contact. For the most important question asked about New Media work accross boundaries, is "How does it Address Sound"? Sound is the unseen, underacknowledged discipline upon which all new media practice is based. It is the illusionistic faculty, the abstract faculty, the concrete, the tangible.
Peace through Austerity- from Fascism to Brutalism: The disemination of the development of the International Style in Germany and Japan
We see it everywhere, and there's hardly a person alive today who can imagine a world without it. From college campuses, to government buildings, to schools, libraries, and research facilities both domestic and federal. One style in which form follows function is taken to it's apex is in the form of The International Style, or what LeCorbusier referred to as Brutalism (a reference to the rough appearance of poured concrete). Like the architecture itself, its origins were pragmatic in nature, somber and austere in the wake of the worst global carnage in History. Defeated super powers, Germany and Japan, were left reeling in the wake of their whole sale destruction and confronted with a very difficult question, in the face of international humiliation and cultural annihilation both self imposed and thrust upon from outside, how does one go about rebuilding?
The past is unacceptable, the future is uncertain, what is the bridge? Where do it's foundations lie? In Germany, it meant a second look at the long defunct Bauhaus School, the cultural gem of the Weimar Republic. Starting from scratch, but at less than zero, groping to find a way to begin re-imagining what it means to be German.
In Japan, it meant a schitzophrenic cleaving of National Consciousness, how to maintain a radically unique culture of animism, the spirit world, and transcendentalism that would complement the hard, fast, cold, agnositc Western World into which they were unmistakably a part. It is no mere coincidence that Japonism, Western infatuation with the fart east stretching back to the 18th has been revisted with successive generations, and that Japan has had it's own fascination with the west for just as long.
The seeds that were to become the principal tenets of the International Style, in fact sprang from Germany, and already had a particular international appeal before the beginning of WWII. Many of the design priniciples championed by Walther Gropius, Mies Van Der Roe and others had there stylistic origin in the ancient austere design principles that have defined Japanese interior architecture for centuries. It was this impulse that would become the seed from which the New Internationalism would sprout. This tangent, truncated by WWII, was re-invigorated so to speak in the age following. How does a nation re-invigorate pride with out prejudice? How do you build confidence without hubris? How do you develop advanced industry without wholesale exploitation quickly? As the world watched, the skylines of battered Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Munich, and Dresden revealed the answer. A surface of concrete. Cheap, simple, cold, too abrasive a surface upon which cultural values of old could be heaped. Government buildings, school, municipal offices. A new initiative of Peace through Austerity. In Japan as well, a glass, steel, and concrete supplant wood, lacquer and paper. Japan and Germany forged a silent allegiance to repay their debt to the world with advanced technology and industries to help lead the world toward a new future reinvigorated. These aesthetic trends were not isolated to these nations alone. Frank Lloyd Wright in america was the first artist to use concrete a serious building material. Corbusier in France had long been meldlig fur and leather with polished steel. But it was the initiative of the formerlly fascist defeated nations that would define the aesthetics for the rest of the world. From Washington and New York, to Moscow, to Bogota, and Mexico City where it was embraced with particular enthusisam and artistry (a topic again for a later date), these monuments to the Modern age resurected our faith in it. Their lack of ornamentation makes them strangely invisible inspite of their scale which is a testament to their success as evideneced in their global ubiquity. The offer, peace, enlightenment, sanctuary, purity of form that resonates within. But it's a ubiquity that is being observed, scrutinized and challenged from the outside as emerging powers reeling from their own humiliations are beginning to emerge on the National stage. Shanghai, Quinjong, Seoul and Dubai are posing a formal challenge to the primacy of the International Style that has it's rumblings in Cyberspace as much as it does in real space anf are changing the world of architecture at large. As I am writing this, the World Expo in Shanghai, the 2008 Olympics, and the Survey of Contemporary Chinese Art that dominated the Charles Saatchi gallery a few years ago are proof that a new world is unfolding from outside and slowly engulfing our own. and whose influence will without a doubt be felt accross the globe.
The past is unacceptable, the future is uncertain, what is the bridge? Where do it's foundations lie? In Germany, it meant a second look at the long defunct Bauhaus School, the cultural gem of the Weimar Republic. Starting from scratch, but at less than zero, groping to find a way to begin re-imagining what it means to be German.
In Japan, it meant a schitzophrenic cleaving of National Consciousness, how to maintain a radically unique culture of animism, the spirit world, and transcendentalism that would complement the hard, fast, cold, agnositc Western World into which they were unmistakably a part. It is no mere coincidence that Japonism, Western infatuation with the fart east stretching back to the 18th has been revisted with successive generations, and that Japan has had it's own fascination with the west for just as long.
The seeds that were to become the principal tenets of the International Style, in fact sprang from Germany, and already had a particular international appeal before the beginning of WWII. Many of the design priniciples championed by Walther Gropius, Mies Van Der Roe and others had there stylistic origin in the ancient austere design principles that have defined Japanese interior architecture for centuries. It was this impulse that would become the seed from which the New Internationalism would sprout. This tangent, truncated by WWII, was re-invigorated so to speak in the age following. How does a nation re-invigorate pride with out prejudice? How do you build confidence without hubris? How do you develop advanced industry without wholesale exploitation quickly? As the world watched, the skylines of battered Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Munich, and Dresden revealed the answer. A surface of concrete. Cheap, simple, cold, too abrasive a surface upon which cultural values of old could be heaped. Government buildings, school, municipal offices. A new initiative of Peace through Austerity. In Japan as well, a glass, steel, and concrete supplant wood, lacquer and paper. Japan and Germany forged a silent allegiance to repay their debt to the world with advanced technology and industries to help lead the world toward a new future reinvigorated. These aesthetic trends were not isolated to these nations alone. Frank Lloyd Wright in america was the first artist to use concrete a serious building material. Corbusier in France had long been meldlig fur and leather with polished steel. But it was the initiative of the formerlly fascist defeated nations that would define the aesthetics for the rest of the world. From Washington and New York, to Moscow, to Bogota, and Mexico City where it was embraced with particular enthusisam and artistry (a topic again for a later date), these monuments to the Modern age resurected our faith in it. Their lack of ornamentation makes them strangely invisible inspite of their scale which is a testament to their success as evideneced in their global ubiquity. The offer, peace, enlightenment, sanctuary, purity of form that resonates within. But it's a ubiquity that is being observed, scrutinized and challenged from the outside as emerging powers reeling from their own humiliations are beginning to emerge on the National stage. Shanghai, Quinjong, Seoul and Dubai are posing a formal challenge to the primacy of the International Style that has it's rumblings in Cyberspace as much as it does in real space anf are changing the world of architecture at large. As I am writing this, the World Expo in Shanghai, the 2008 Olympics, and the Survey of Contemporary Chinese Art that dominated the Charles Saatchi gallery a few years ago are proof that a new world is unfolding from outside and slowly engulfing our own. and whose influence will without a doubt be felt accross the globe.
The New Byzantium: Shanghai, Dubai and the demise of The International Style
"So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and
where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing edifice
of society above my head holds no delights for me. It is the
foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to
labour, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals,
idealists, and class-conscious working-men, getting a solid pry now
and again and setting the whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we
get a few more hands and crowbars to work, we'll topple it over,
along with all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous
selfishness and sodden materialism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar
and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no
parlour floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and
where the air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.
Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress
upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will
be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-
day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in
the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual
sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-
day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some
Frenchman has said, "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the
wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending."
-Jack London, 1905
I open this essay with a passage by the great writer (and when I say great, I mean racist social darwinian) Jack London and implicitly forgive the shortcomings of the age of which he was afflicted. But it must be noted that if any anachronisitcally folksy American writer should be given an ear today, in light of recent global events, it be this man. China, and Shanghai in particular has emerged as a seminally important center for the development and technological border crossings of Architecture on the International scene. So too has Dubai. It must be said at this point as well, that if ever there should be a graveyard of the tenets of the recent past, it be in these once far, and still misunderstood territories. China has no need for International Style, Dubai is itself less of a city, and more a testament to a distinctively Persian enthusiasm for excellence.
Where is the tallest building in the world? Dubai. Where will it be in 10 years? Probably Shangai. What has happened in that now so close to home region that was referred to so long as the Orient? The east? We must give pause and ruminate for a moment about it.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Project Proposal #2 Teletelier
It's a mobile atelier for site specific sculptures and installations in remote areas where it would be too difficult, expensive or infeasible to move or construct a given piece safely. It's split into two sides, one is an apartment, the side facing the camera is the studio itself. It's climate controlled and generates electricity from solar ... See Morepanels so the artist can work in comfort without dealing with the constant harshness of the environment or having to leave the sight when it becomes too difficult to work.
Project Proposal #1 Chimera
Kinetic piece of virtual architecture created from a hodge podge of various other works of architecture already in existence. The scale is unfixed and varies depending on one's location, and what form the complex has taken.
Project Proposal #4 ASHRAM Audio Sensitive Holistic Research Architectural Model
The governing concpet behind this particular project is Kinesthetic Architectonics in the service of the production of sounds that... See More are intended to have a calming meditative effect. The end goal is to have this be an interactive environment like in a video game, except the action is directed toward engaging the structure directly to manifest a direct connection between the viewer and the model to move it beyond artifice or representation and cull forth a psychological state in which one's engagement with the virtual environment overpowers that of the 'real' space in which the piece is installed.
The symmetry is used as an anthropomorphic device. The idea is that once you enter the structure, you fill it and it becomes an extension of your body, which is housed within a geometrically symmetrical membrane itself. I'm using brutalist architecture because I have a nostalgiac connection to it since a lot of the University structures at UT, ... See Morewhere my dad used to work, were built in the 60's and 70's and I spent a lot of time in and around them. I feel a great sense of peace and alignment being in their presence, and the direction I've been taking my music lately has been geared toward simulating that sensation.
Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
The 2005 Role Playing Game 'Super Columbine Massacre RPG!' brings to light a very fascinating aspect of the subversive elements of VA, the establishment of meta-narratives, and entire systems derrivative of real world events the unfolding of which are directly defined by a user's direct engagement with the VA of a disembodied entity. The initial impulse set in motion in this came being the perenially popular first person shooter game 'Doom'. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were such obsessive players of the game, that legitimate questions about the games influence on them were raised. Some speculated that if they had not been exposed to the game, they would not have carried out the violent act that they perpetrated. And indeed, it has remained an issue that has remained at the core of vidoe game ethics since. Whether or not 'Doom' was responsible for the violent act they commited is not at issue in this article. But it is the level at which they were engaged with as users with the game itself. During the game's heyday in the late 1990's, there was a special internet forum for fans of the game where you could go online and download levels created by other players and play them yourself. The user was given access to the source code and Harris and Klebold actually designed a level for 'Doom' drawn directly from the Columbine High School's blueprints. This gesture could be taken in one of two ways. The more innocent one being a sort of sick joke (which would have been appropriate if they had not actually carried out the shooting), and the second more plausible one, that they designed the level to help train themselves and prepare physically, psychologically, and emotionally for the act they later perpetrated, using the game in the exact way that military recruits are taught to use it, as an emmulator of a real world environment in which correlative actions are to be made. They appear to have been successful in their self training, since the Columbine Massacre remains unparralleled by shootings that have occured since. These facts alone are enough to make substantive claims about the relational aesthetics of FPS's VA aesthetics, but the issue gets a taken farther in light of the development of 'Super Columbine Massacre RPG!' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Columbine_Massacre_RPG!]. The game became an overnight sensation, but it is not designed in the manner in which one would expect. It is not designed as a first person shooter like 'Doom' or an adventure game like 'Grand Theft Auto' which would be the more logical format for them to take, but as a role playing game more related to Final Fantasy, the reason for this being mainly because it was the product of a single person, not a game development company either major or independent intending to exploit and sensationalize the event. Disembodied aspect of the game makes it clear that it's very creation was an artistic product in which the design of the game and the emulation of it's architecture was intended to be a cathartic act of . The fact that Ledonne designed a game emulating the columbine massacre not as an intense and detailed representation as Harris and Klebold did, but as a quick and dirty RPG indicate very differnt motives with recreating the same virtual environment six years on. So what does all this say about the actual high school itself? There is no doubt that if game emulations of the High School had not been made, the psychological landscape would be a very different one. It is the creation and dissemination of the structures virtual counter parts that prevent the event from being relegated to the past, and instead ensure that it exists contemporaneously being carried out over and over again, simultaneously, ad nauseum, with no end in sight.
Virtual Architecture and Video Game Design
The most obvious departure point to begin the discussion of the aesthetics of virtual architecture would be video game design. While nearly all video games are user oriented, the buildings, maps, etc that make them up are first element to give them shape and define how the user interacts with them. Without them, there would be nothing. I have chosen to discuss a handful of video games to represent various genres that have laid the foundation from which countless others have emerged as well some that may be a little more obsure. These games include, the 'Tony Hawk' pro-skater series, the first person shooters, 'Golden Eye', 'Doom', 'Halflife', 'Halo', 'Arctic Fox' and 'Wolfenstein 3D', adventure games 'Tomb Raider', 'Tenchu' and the 'Grand Theft Auto' series, the horror games 'D' and 'Bio-Shock', the puzzle game 'Myst', the RPG's 'Final Fantasy 7', The 'Warcraft' franchise and 'Panzer Dragoon Saga', as well as the fighting game 'Bushido Blade', and the 'Sims' franchise from 'Sim City', to 'Sim Ant', to the current manifestation, 'The Sims'. Each of these games has made major contributions toward defining the significance of a user's experience of VA that represent increased levels of sophistication occuring in tandem with technological advancements that made the games possible.
The structure of this study will happen chronologically, with games from each genre being listed and described successively, beginning with the first majorly released game first person combat game, Arcticfox, which was released for the Amiga console in 1986 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcticfox]. Arctic Fox was essentially a stripped down commercial version of the software used by the military to train cadets for combat in urban areas. From this game we can begin to define the rudimentary issues related to VA in the world of video games. The virtual environment creates and defines the context for action within said environment. The succes one has in the game is directly related to how effectively one's immersion in a virtual environment supplants the actual one in which the user's body is actually in (which was afterall the entire point of the military's interest IN virtual reality to begin with).
The first games which set about the task of not only desiging environments in a virtual world, but actually creating that world at the same time were the Role Playing games known as the Final Fantasy series. In the Final Fantasy games, the immersion with the environment in the games is established
The effects that one's psychological engagement with such an environment has on their experience of the 'real' world.
It is these games that have laid the ground work for the concrete aesthetics of this new discipline.
The structure of this study will happen chronologically, with games from each genre being listed and described successively, beginning with the first majorly released game first person combat game, Arcticfox, which was released for the Amiga console in 1986 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcticfox]. Arctic Fox was essentially a stripped down commercial version of the software used by the military to train cadets for combat in urban areas. From this game we can begin to define the rudimentary issues related to VA in the world of video games. The virtual environment creates and defines the context for action within said environment. The succes one has in the game is directly related to how effectively one's immersion in a virtual environment supplants the actual one in which the user's body is actually in (which was afterall the entire point of the military's interest IN virtual reality to begin with).
The first games which set about the task of not only desiging environments in a virtual world, but actually creating that world at the same time were the Role Playing games known as the Final Fantasy series. In the Final Fantasy games, the immersion with the environment in the games is established
The effects that one's psychological engagement with such an environment has on their experience of the 'real' world.
It is these games that have laid the ground work for the concrete aesthetics of this new discipline.
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