[-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen

[Gabriel Menotti]

The obscured dimension of audiovisual circuits we are going to explore
this week is the /thickness of the screen/.

The first meaning of this expression is quite literal. We normally
consider screens to be mere surfaces, composed of only height and
width. We talk about their area, aspect ratio and resolution, as if
these characteristics were all that mattered to the structure.
However, to hold an image, the screen must also have some density –
and in order to be dense, the screen must be thick. A work that
illustrate this in a very poetic way is Guy Sherwin’s performance
/Paper Landscape/.[1]

But the thickness of the screen implies in a metaphor as well: it
likewise means the space that is produced by or contained within the
image – for example, the setting of the original recording, in which
camera, director and crew have once been present. This could also be
an appropriate paradigm to analyze digital images, which, from a
trivial structural-materialistic perspective, are just manifestations
of the computer physical and logical architectures.

In the debate, we are going to give more attention to this latter
meaning of the expression. To discuss it, our first three guests are
specialists in computer imagery – either pre-planned and programmed,
either contingent and accidental. In their works and research, the
space within the system is revealed in different ways. They are:

Rosa Menkman

Every technology has its own accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch
visualist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in
digital media. The visuals she makes are the result of glitches,
compressions, feedback and noise. Although many people perceive these
accidents as negative experiences, Rosa emphasizes their positive
consequences. By combining both her practical as well as an academic
background, she merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory
artifacts (a glitch studies), in which she strives for new forms of
conceptual synesthesia between sound and video. She has have shown my
work at festivals like Haip (Ljubljana), Cimatics (Brussels), Video
Vortex (Amsterdam) Pasofest (Ankara) and Isea 2009 (Belfast), and
collaborated on art projects together with Alexander Galloway,
Govcom.org, Goto80 and the internet art collective Jodi.org. In 2009
she finished her master thesis (on digital glitch) under the
supervision of Geert Lovink, and started a PhD at the KHM (on the
subject of Artifacts).

Jose Carlos Silvestre

José Carlos Silvestre is an Engineer in the Telecommunications field
by the University of Brasilia - Brazil and is currently pursuing a
M.A. degree in the Catholic University of Sao Paulo with a
dissertation on the aesthetics of error in the digital arts. As an
artist, he has participated in exhibitions and festivals in Europe and
Latin America, such as ISEA, the E-Poetry Festival, Vivo Arte.Mov, and
the Biennals of Seville - Spain and Yucatan - Mexico.

Scott Draves

Scott Draves (Spot) is a software artist and VJ based in New York and
San Francisco. He holds a PhD in Computer Science by Carnegie Mellon
University and is involved in the free software community. His
award-winning work is permanently hosted on MoMA.org, and has appeared
in Wired and Discover magazines, the Prix Ars Electronica, the
O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the main dance-floor
at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. His last project, the evolving
painting HiFiDreams, is permanently installed in the lobby of Google's
headquarters.

Scott might be a little off the discussion until the weekend, because
right now he is preparing a symphonic live presentation of his Dreams
in High Fidelity animation – to be held on Thursday, in Brooklyn. You
can check for more information about it in his blog. [2]

(Other guests are to be announced soon)

Cheers!
Menotti

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RZi_Nzyho
[2] http://draves.org/blog/archives/000632.html