[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 92, Issue 21
Vicki Sowry
ars at anat.org.au
Fri Jul 20 11:55:25 EST 2012
Just a quick note...
ANAT has published a couple of editions of Filter that address
transformations of screen space that listers might be interested in...
In 2009 we published Screen Play, edited by Scott Hessels, himself a
tour-de-force in challenging everything to do with screens:
http://filter.anat.org.au/category/issue-70/
And, in 2010, Exploding the Frame (specifically about fulldome screens and
the impact that 'removing the frame of reference' has on filmmakers and
audiences alike: http://filter.anat.org.au/category/issue-76/
Cheers
Vicki
On 20/07/12 6:15 AM, "empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au"
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: July on empyre: Sceens (week 3) (Scott Mcquire)
> 2. Re: stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines (Scott Mcquire)
> 3. Extending the screen beyond the 'Proscenicum Arch'
> (Andreas Maria Jacobs)
> 4. Re: stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines
> (Johannes Birringer)
> 5. Re: stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines (Sean Cubitt)
> 6. Re: July on empyre: Sceens (week 3) Anri Sala installation
> (Karen O'Rourke)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 23:38:42 +0000
> From: Scott Mcquire <mcquire at unimelb.edu.au>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Sceens (week 3)
> Message-ID:
> <D5267BF1B9394A469E73E9A083FA6EE0398D5BEF at 000S-EX-MBX-QS4.unimelb.edu.au>
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Simon?s reference to ?expanded cinema? reminded me of an a conversation I had
> with Jeffrey Shaw a few years ago. Some snips of Jeffrey below, which make
> clear the link between experimenting with new screening situations and the
> later interest in immersive experiences.
>
> Best, scott
>
> ... my other interest became very strongly focused on the notion of expanded
> cinema. So this was really addressing the cinema per se, and as an artist
> starting to think of myself as a filmmaker who was also clearly completely
> dissatisfied with what cinema was, and still is, which is just this big
> spectacle ? but on the other hand, enjoying it a lot ? but feeling this
> terrible frustration of being this passive audience member.
>
> All this energy of the drawing that is somehow sublimated into the
> inaccessibility of the precious object, or the energy of the movie, that
> somehow is sublimated into its being trapped on the screen, in the cinema
> auditorium, and the audience are then sort of obligated to have a specific
> relationship with it. And looking for ways to get the film to come out of the
> screen and enter the space of the audience, or to allow the audience to enter
> the space of the film, which is the basic expanded cinema paradigm.
>
> So I started to do a lot of performances at that time, performance art things,
> which were again all directed at cinema, and they were usually titled
> ?Dissolution of this? or ?Dissolution of that?. So they were called
> ?Dissolutionary Events?. And the notion was that the cinematic illusions would
> be subverted.
>
> That subversion what sometimes done very literally, like the screen would just
> be made out of paper, and behind the screen I?d have tubing which could be
> inflated, so films projected on this screen, at a certain moment the screen
> would start to break up and burst and tear, and out of the screen came this
> tubing so that the screen, instead of being a plane, became this tubular
> three-dimensional object which then pushed its way out into the audience. And
> the film was still attaching itself to the surface of this tubing; so the film
> was basically being extruded out into the audience and then became a plaything
> for the audience. At that stage the audience was playing both with the tubing
> and with the image that was imprinted on it.
>
> There were a whole bunch of performances that were done at that time. The
> scenographies for these were quite funky; there was also a very strong erotic
> element in a lot of them. At that time I also came under the spell of a
> surrealist painter called Clovis Trouille, who was making these surreal erotic
> paintings, and I also was influenced by?at that time there was a thing called
> the Destruction in Art Symposium, at the ICA in London. It was my first
> exposure to Fluxus live, actually seeing performances, seeing and hearing
> these people, meeting them.I suppose it also synched well with my own teenage
> sexual energies at that time. So those performances I was doing had a strong
> erotic narrative. [...]
>
> I suppose one of the high points was the Knokke which was called Movie Movie.
> That was in ?67, ?68. [MOVIEMOVIE, 1968, 4th Experimental Film Festival,
> Knokke le Zoute, Belgium] That was a very large-scale piece with a very large
> inflatable structure where the whole audience, or a large number of people in
> the audience, threw off their clothes and just jumped in spontaneously ? or
> not so much spontaneously, they were led by Jean-Jacques Lebel. He took off
> his clothes because he understood that this was the right thing to do, because
> you were throwing yourself into the projection screen, into the images that
> were projected onto that screen, and basically you were then body-painting
> yourself with all this cinematic imagery and disturbing, changing the
> curvature and shaping of the screen, so it was really throwing yourself into
> the screen and joining, immersing yourself in the cinematic space.
>
> And this, after a week of experimental cinema where people were sitting in
> chairs watching fabulous experimental films, and getting more and more pent
> up, more and more energy building up, but unable to do anything? Then suddenly
> at the end there was this finale when suddenly you could jump into the movie.
>
>
>
>
>
> On 18/07/12 10:09 PM, "Simon Biggs" <simon at littlepig.org.uk> wrote:
>
> I'm mainly referring to the practices of the 60's through to the 80's, that
> were initially termed 'expanded cinema' (Youngblood has to be mentioned in
> this discussion at some point). My own practice is rooted in that period and
> in the days when I did make single screen works (the 70's and 80's), for
> display on monitors and projection screens, I employed irregular framing and
> avoided filling the whole rectangle of the frame. I would leave much of it
> black (which could read as blank) and allow the subject material comprising
> the image to determine the shape of the frame it required. This was easy as I
> produced all my images synthetically (no cameras involved) so was in control
> of every pixel in every frame. Of course, the rectangular 4:3 (as it had to be
> then) frame was still there but, especially when projected straight onto a
> wall and with careful balancing of the projector settings and ambient light,
> to ensure that black didn't read as projected black, the image elements app
> eared more or less as one with the wall, like a fresco. This allowed the
> elements of the image not only to be read as not a rectangular frame but as
> discrete visual elements. Using multiple projections further enhanced the
> sense that the screen, as a defined area, no longer applied. Since the 1980's
> I've extended this differentiation of the visual elements by making them
> independently interactive, so objects react individually to user/viewer
> presence and action (not just their physical location or movement, but their
> voice, the words they speak - using voice recognition - and other behaviours).
> This requires object oriented programming and some AI algorithms as well as,
> again, attention to how the projected image is delivered and interacts with
> the environment it is in, and taking into account the limits of human
> perception and how our expectations determine what we see. The result is that
> you aren't aware of the screen or frame as such, even though these are always
> there in
> the apparatus.
>
> Rafael's work also has elements of this sort of approach, especially his
> relational architecture pieces, which destabilise the projected frame and the
> structures he projects onto. His work is all screen and yet it is difficult to
> perceive where the screen starts and stops or, indeed, whether it is even
> there or not.
>
> The work that Salvatore refers to functions more like a Warhol multiple -
> using repetition to break our sense of contiguity and spatial relations. This
> is a trick that was used by Paik to great effect in many of his classic and
> influential works, particularly the larger video sculptures like Global Groove
> and Electronic Superhighway.
>
> best
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 18 Jul 2012, at 06:39, Scott Mcquire wrote:
>
> Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Sceens (week 3)
> Don?t know if we?re ever going to ?throw out? the frame ? this is a key
> aspect of the continuity I was evoking between earlier screen forms and
> contemporary devices including mobile phones and tablets.
>
> In an earlier post Kriss Ravetto mentioned Eisenstein, who of course relates
> the (cinema) screen to both the printed page but especially to painting (the
> aesthetic of the golden section etc). The standardisation of the rectangular
> screen is certainly integral to the current production of screens as commodity
> form, but the frame (which does not have to be rectangular) as a function
> pre-exists this relation, and hence shouldn?t be reduced to it.
>
> But I take your point about the assimilation of video art ? this where the
> shift of the screen beyond the gallery starts to ask interesting questions
> about protocols of display.
>
> Scott
>
>
> On 18/07/12 6:54 AM, "Simon Biggs" <simon at littlepig.org.uk
> <x-msg://164/simon@littlepig.org.uk> > wrote:
>
> Video needs to step out of the frame, like sculpture needed to step off the
> plinth 50 years ago. The thing is, from the beginning, video (art) stepped out
> of the frame (Vostell, Jonas, et al). Ironically, video art seems to have
> gained acceptance in the mainstream of the art world as it has chosen to step
> back into the frame again, aping (home) cinema. Sad, really...
>
> best
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 17 Jul 2012, at 19:35, Sean Cubitt wrote:
>
> Ciao Salvatore, salut Karen, G'day Scott, hello
>
> I just visited Sung Hwan Kim's installation in the new Tanks space at Tate
> Modern, which attempts something like the open space of fixed screens
> Salvatore talks abut: perhaps not as vividly as the Guangshen Superhighway
> market (though they have tried to keep the ambience of alternative industrial
> spaces / lofts / warehouses and the other marginal spaces used by performance
> and video artists for decades). The social structuring of space is what Kim's
> installation is 'about' rather than what it achieves
>
> Coming up at the tanks is a day showing Anthony McCall's four cone films (one
> of which is in permanent display at ACMI in Melbourne) - abstract works where
> a shifting line projects through haze creating a 3D projection space ? hints
> and memories of works like Andrea Zapp and Paul Sermon's Body of Water, part
> shown in a derelict mine building where archive footage of miners in the
> showers after their shift was projected onto a 'screen' made of falling water
> (http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/~azapp/art_works.html)
>
> What's intriguing for our discussion is that there might be another
> distinction to make. On one hand the socialised screen-space of the market as
> a kind of DIY installation, a way of populating and inhabiting a space
> (non-lieu), turning what appears to be the void under a motorway into a Place,
> a process which also describes what Sermon and Zapp did (the installation also
> involved telematic elements but "The shower room is the heart of the
> installation, all the visual and conceptual layers meet here" as zapp writes
> on her site)
>
> On the other McCall's magical transformation of the black box into a kind of
> sculptural space. Lis Rhodes' Light Music, which has a related aesthetic,
> wasn't working when I visited the Tanks today ? hopefully it will be soon).
>
> Both suggest something important about screening as a practice: that the
> boredom so many people report about biennial-style video art is based on the
> uninteresting mode of projection, four-square on a white wall, only
> occasionally improved when curators have enough nous to silver, or to project
> onto grey or black
>
> As Karen says, work like Bill Viola's can rescue themselves from this tedium
> by sheer visual power, and perhaps by evoking other kinds of screen (the
> reredos or altar screen, other decorations which hide while hinting at the
> sacred ritual space behind them). Viola is one of the few who seems ready to
> pry apart the foveal concentration, the selection of what on the screen we
> should be attentive to, for example by masking or otherwise making obscure
> his angel's faces, so that the peripheral vision opens out not just to
> offscreen space but to the nuanced tonalities of the 'background'
>
> I've grown to dislike the banal four-square projection: there have been such
> brilliant uses of keystone effects (Stansfeld and Hooykaas for example) - now
> all DLP projectors come with automatic anti-keystoning which can be a bugger
> to switch off - or of projecting onto corrugation (the People Show), curved
> or textured or otherwise tactile, sculptural, 3D (smoke, water, bodies)
> surfaces and objects . . .
>
> Should we think of the rectangular screen, bounded with a frame, as a prison?
> Or should we consider it as something like the form of the sonnet, a rigid
> construct into which, however, from Petrarch to Wordsworth, for several
> hundred years, or like the 3-minute pop song, an amazing variety of poetic and
> musical action has been perpetrated? But even so, we need to understand what
> that is
>
> William Carlos Williams wrote of the beginning of free verse
> "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave"
> Which is itself a pentameter . . . Do we need to throw out the framed screen,
> the regular and normative rectangle? Is that enough (eg in Gary Hill's or Tony
> Ousler's work)? Or can the pure proliferation make the relation with screens
> open out onto other modes of relationship, ways of relating to each other
> otherwise than through the object/commodity?
>
> S
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From: "xDxD.vs.xDxD" <xdxd.vs.xdxd at gmail.com
> <x-msg://164/xdxd.vs.xdxd@gmail.com> >
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> <x-msg://164/empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> >
> Date: Tuesday, 17 July 2012 17:06
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> <x-msg://164/empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> >
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Sceens (week 3)
>
>
> hello everyone,
>
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 3:15 AM, Scott Mcquire <mcquire at unimelb.edu.au
> <x-msg://164/mcquire@unimelb.edu.au> > wrote:
> What was really interesting was the way the audience shifted around the space
> to watch. It wasn?t the platform that moved (like the old diorama with
> rotating floor) but the people who would stand, sit, lie in one place then
> turn around or get up and move elsewhere as another came on. The afternoon I
> saw it there were about 60 people doing this together for over 30 minutes.
> This creates a really fascinating spatial ambiance, where screens are
> simultaneoulsy material objects (blocking passage, blocking view) and surfaces
> that open into heterogeneous spaces.
>
> At one stage, all the screens are just red, then pale with no image, while the
> sound is dispersed throughout the entire gallery. Everyone kind of wandered
> around, not really looking for or at anything, but enjoying a promenade among
> the screens in each other?s company.
>
>
>
> in this market, in China, under a highway,
>
> http://www.othermarkets.org/index.php?tdid=17&part=6&txt=0&poststart=0
>
> dozens of screens are lined up on one side of the space, each tuned in to a
> different channel or dvd
>
> instead of using a remote to change channel, people move to a different table.
>
> screens, in this case, are a platform built into public space and into
> people's perceptions. in-between the two, actually.
>
> both for people who watch them, and for people who use them to propose
> services of various types: as soon as enough people gather around a single
> table, watching something on that channel or dvd, other people immediately
> arrive, offering services of various kinds, videogame consoles (to be attached
> to screens, as well!), board games, food or even internet connections.
>
> i particularly enjoy this example, as it is a peculiar way in which screens
> modify our perception of space (they are un-movable, yet they suggest how
> people move and reassemble and relate in public space), and their
> configuration suggests the affordances of public space and, thus, also the
> economic (business) models which can be built into them.
>
> In more than one way it is not different from many geo-referenced mobile
> applications :)
>
> all the best!
> salvatore
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype:
> simonbiggsuk
>
> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/
> http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
> MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php
>
>
> ________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:15:59 +0000
> From: Scott Mcquire <mcquire at unimelb.edu.au>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines
> Message-ID:
> <D5267BF1B9394A469E73E9A083FA6EE0398D5C3A at 000S-EX-MBX-QS4.unimelb.edu.au>
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Hi Salvatore, Johannes, and everyone
>
> I really enjoyed both your posts. I think it?s clear that the dominant
> trajectory, as Johannes points out, is using screens for varied modes of
> spectacle and surveillance. But I agree with Salvatore that this context
> makes it even more important to recognise and try to develop alternative
> modalities. I?ve also recently been re-reading Lefebvre, specifically his Le
> Droit de Ville essay, where he emphasises the importance for inhabitants to be
> able to ?appropriate? the time and space of the urban. In relation to screens,
> this kind of appropriation can occur at a variety of levels, but one of the
> most fundamental moves is demanding that screens situated in public locations
> are able to be accessed by different publics, to support diverse, collective
> inputs (as in the atlante-dell-visioni/atlas-of-the-visions project that
> Salvatore mentions). In our work, we?ve found that there is often an unspoken
> barrier to public interaction with large screens ? precisely because people
> are
> so innured to the one-way display mode of advertising and broadcasting.
>
> Of course, public ?inputs? can cover a whole spectrum from harvesting data via
> crowdsourcing techniques to providing platforms for deeper forms of dialogical
> exchange. One of the strengths of an work like Rafael?s Body Movies is
> precisely its capacity to use the screen as an interface to inspire, provoke
> and facilitate spontaneous playful interactions among groups of strangers.
>
> Best, scott
>
> On 19/07/12 4:55 AM, "xDxD.vs.xDxD" <xdxd.vs.xdxd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> hi Johannes and everyone!
>
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 4:32 PM, Johannes Birringer
> <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Surely not in real-time interactive art installations, and
>> I wonder or worry about crowdsourced raising of
>> political consciousness/cognitive compasses, too...
>
>
> i'm glad you're bringing this up.
>
> we obviously know that the objective of neutrality is technically unreachable
> for human beings, but in our practice we try to be at least honest :) and
> highlight all the points of view that we are aware of.
>
> the case of the technologies i mentioned earlier (harvest real-time info from
> social networks, use natural language analysis to understand topics/issues and
> expressions/emotions, make info accessible in a variety of ways, from AR to
> screens to body augmentations) is no exception. Even considering the fact that
> it touches many open issues for which we're passionate about ( the
> dictatorship of the algorithm, privacy/intimacy/anonymity, privately owned
> public spaces.. and we could go on and on )
>
> this is why, for example, we used the same exact technologies for radically
> different projects
>
> for example as in the Atlas of Rome, where we built a large urban screen in
> which citizens could publish their visions about the city in a variety of ways
>
> http://www.artisopensource.net/2010/06/13/atlante-dell-visioni-atlas-of-the-vi
> sions/
>
> or as in VersuS, where we analyzed the digital life of the city of Rome during
> the violent riots in the city of Rome on October 15th 2011
>
> http://www.artisopensource.net/2011/11/06/versus-the-realtime-lives-of-cities/
>
> but also as in "Enlarge your Consciousness"
>
> http://www.artisopensource.net/2012/02/12/enlarge-your-consciousness-in-4-days
> -4-free-2/
>
> here we used the same technologies to sell unaware social network users'
> emotional states for 9.99 euros at the Artefiera contemporary arts fair in
> Bologna, capturing their emotional flows as expressed on
> Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare and basically, turning them into human
> tamagotchis.
>
> we sold hundreds of them at the fair. and the most common question we received
> was "but... i could be in one of those boxes?" exposing multiple interesting
> things about the common perception of the processes which are behind these
> techniques and methodologies.
>
> Yet we perceive opportunity and, most of all, possibility behind this.
>
> but it's an "old" question, isn't it? Is the "hammer" a tool to drive nails
> into the walls or to smash your head?
>
> Fact is that all these technologies correspond to specific business and
> strategic models which are relevant to corporations, large cultural operators,
> institutions, governments and many other forms of "power".
>
> this obviously applies to screens, as well: fixed, urban, ubiquitous,
> body-related, square, key-stoned and frameless
>
> for example, sticking to my personal research focus, Mitchell's idea of the
> City of Bits, or of McCullough's Digital Ground, or of Zook&Graham's DigiPlace
> are very interesting when brought to the domain of the screen, especially of
> the urban and ubiquitous quality, as they in someway describe the possibility
> to achieve a multi-layered, emergent version of the city, in which multiple
> points of view can be freely expressed across cultures and perspectives.
>
> This is a very interesting point of view, as it places enormous questions on
> the practices of design and architecture which are authoritarian by their own
> nature: the Designer and the Architect, in the end, make the Plan that will
> shape what i see/traverse/live in the city.
>
> There is a wonderful liason with this concept in Cl?ment's Third Landscape,
> where he describes the presence of natural environments in urban contexts.
> Normally nature is present in cities under the form of synthetic
> administrative boundaries (the flowers at the center of the roundabout, the
> vegetables in the supermarkets, the "park").
>
> The Third Landscape, instead, is a place for possibility and opportunity, and
> it is emergent, real-time, temporary, autonomous (the grass in-between the
> bricks).
>
> And it is the possibly most important factor in determining our cities'
> biodiversity.
>
> One thing about the Third Landscape is that its existence really depends on us
> and on our "sight", and our sensibility in seeing and recognizing it while we
> lead our daily lives in cities.
>
> Seeing creates a perception (of the "possibility" of this kind of natural
> environment) and, thus, a spatial affordance ("this type of natural
> environment can exist") and, in turn, a series of critical, constructivist
> practices which can be based onto it (one for all: urban gardening).
>
> I see a beautiful parallel between this and the theme of the screen in urban
> contexts, be it fixed or ubiquitous or of the many types which can exist
> nowadays.
>
> people constantly re-program public space. mobile devices and screens
> radicalize this process. If you're jogging in the middle of a park, you
> receive an office phone call on your mobile phone, the park transforms into an
> ubiquitous office for a few minutes, careless of urban planning, zoning and
> administrative boundaries.
>
> In the same way, if your pocketable (or wall-mounted) screen enables you to
> freely and easily perceive (or "publish") multiple, independent, autonomous,
> emergent interpretations of the same space, space transforms, and other
> practices can emerge.
>
> in my research, this greatly enhances the ideas of de Certeau's "strategies vs
> tactics", of Lefebvre's "social construction of space" and of Soja's "Third
> Space".
>
> In this, great insights can be collected by focusing on de Certeau's idea of
> "daily practices", meaning that it is interesting how Lefebvre wanted to
> capitalize on these kinds of possibilites for the sake of a political agenda
> and, instead, in de Certeau, politics should emerge from the creativity of our
> daily practices, in an interesting inversion.
>
> and, so:
>
> whether the vision of the ubiquitous urban screen-net-to-end-all-screens is a
> globalized metropolitan vision for the hyperdeveloped, leaving out the
> regional, the less developed, underdeveloped and non developed (along these
> predicted lines)?
>
>
> this is focal issue to confront, in the wider range of issues which we
> commonly call digital inclusion and digital access.
>
> both at technical and cultural levels.
>
> "solutions" can never be as simple as "smartphone", "urban screen" or "app".
> They need to confront with the context (cultural, political, social,
> economic...) and, probably, the architectural diagrams of "solutions" should
> have a big box at their base with the word "anthropologist" inside it, before
> sensors, cloud computing, expert systems, screens of any form and type. And,
> possibly, a box with "citizens", as well :)
>
>
>
> And Salvatore mentioned a performance in which bodies "displayed"... (body of
> the performer was a "display" [screen?] of user interactions and, in turn,
> everything that was heard/shown as sound and video of the performance was
> generated my the dancer's movements and biological data.); Salvatore, could
> you please elaborate on that, and how you, and others here, think about the
> performance side of interactive behaviors and what they might or might not
> indicate? Following Sean's critique, have consumer relations changed at all
> in principle?
>
> In Turner's anthropological definition, performance is liminal: it exposes
> conflicts and highlights discontinuities with predetermined order.
>
> I particularly enjoyed Luisa Valeriani's book "Performers".
>
> Performers break crystallizations of meaning, recombining imaginaries in
> creative ways: they subvert by playing. Knowledge is not confronted through
> academic discussions, but through practical performative actions.
>
> Nowadays, consumers are performers, and business models are based on this.
> "Products" have changed, and have become "places for performance".
>
> Even more, people's (users', consumers') performance has become the "product".
> Think Facebook, the iPhone etc. When we observe iPhone's design with our
> students for the first time we really focus on the fact that most of it's
> success is due to the fact that it's "empty", ready to be used by its "owner"
> to express him/herself by populating it with apps which describe personality,
> desires, perspectives, points of view, daily practices, needs.... iPhone is a
> performative object.
>
> and (coincidence?) it is a screen. there's practically nothing more to it,
> than a screen.
>
> a performative screen.
>
> now: iPhone is, obviously, a very controlled screen
>
> but its characteristic of being "an empty, ready to be performed, screen which
> constitutes a platform for personal expression" changed everything.
>
> We see the scenarios of interactivity and (ubiquitous) screens along these
> directions, with the idea of exploring spaces/modalities for liberation of
> these "platforms for expression".
>
> in the example of the performance i mentioned, all was dedicated to this.
>
> radicalizing the idea of reactive/interactive environments, we tried to create
> constructivist experience which would shape the sensorial environment
> according to people's interactions in extreme ways, to disclose a set of
> opportunities which we perceived as being critical.
>
> as suggested in the practice of multiple performers before us, including
> Stelarc, Orlan, Marcel-li Antunez Roca and others, as well as in the ones of
> queer performers, the body is a fundamental space for construction, resonating
> with the ideas of architecture and mutation to explore the possibilities for
> expression and liberation.
>
> this is why the "construction" was performed at the level of the body.
>
> people could use interactive toys (interfaces and gadgets) to generate stimuli
> which propagated onto the body of a performer. Patterns of stimuli were
> interpreted as symbols of a choreography. The effect was that multiple people
> could establish physical dialogues to transform the center of focus of the
> performance: the body of the performer. This, in turn, was observed through
> sensors, whore readings were used as parameters of the generative sounds and
> visuals which filled all sides of the environment. Furthermore, sounds and
> visuals were designed to create feedback loops with people, counterbalancing
> their interactions (oversimplifying it: lack of interaction=strong, arousing
> A/V stimulations; lots of interaction=soothing, meditative A/V).
>
> on one side: the necessity to collaborate (each interface produced only parts
> of the stimulation patterns, so that people contributed to parts of the
> symbols of choreography, with each action producing visible results and only
> coordinated actions produced predictable results once the collaborative
> approach was understood) produced performative dialogues among individuals,
> who worked together to achieve agreed transformations in the body-->space
>
> on the other side: there was an untold story which was clearly perceived
> this was a mediated, authoritarian experience.
> we decided all the parameters,algorithms, colors, sounds, strategies etc.
> to "modify and liberate space" people could have just stopped using the
> technologies and starting to physically touch/move the body of the performer,
> or even radicalizing everything and tearing the whole place up in pieces,
> turning the location into a chaotic, physical, 4D screen displaying in
> real-time their strong desire for liberated spaces.
>
> We were prepared for this option, but it didn't happen. Yet we received
> explicit questions about it. People, who enjoyed and actively participated to
> the performance, explicitly asked about this possibility: "Could I just have
> stepped on stage and moved the performer's body with my hands? What would have
> happened?"
>
> This was an extremely interesting response for us, as it displayed how these
> kinds of experiences are still authoritarian, in the sense of "design": they
> are walled gardens, aquariums, in which "designers" establish various degrees
> of mediated freedom according to which "users" are able to move, act, express,
> perform, inform, communicate, interact.
>
> This has been enlightening for us, and we transformed our practice towards
> different forms of performance/interaction, aiming at creating frameworks for
> expressions under the form of free/libre tools, hardware/software and
> methodologies for autonomous, ubiquitous expression which are free to use and
> which are, after all, our "artworks".
>
> After that show we stopped producing "closed" artworks and started to adopt
> the methodology of 1) present opportunities 2) workshop to disseminate and
> recombine knowledge 3) disappear 4) co-create scenario
>
> in this the idea of screen becomes of fundamental importance, as we refer to
> urban contexts and with emergent, open, recombinant, temporary communities
> which take active part in the performance (be it about art, consumption, city
> governance... ) by "writing" onto the world using ubiquitous publishing
> techniques and by becoming aware of the multiple layers of info/action created
> by other actors through "interactive screens" of multiple types, such as the
> fixed ones in the Atlas of Rome, or the synthetic sense we created with the
> Electronic Man
>
>
> after writing this, i just realized i wrote an enormously long email!
>
> sorry! :)
>
> ( passionate about the topic.... )
>
> i'll just stop now
>
> all the best!
> Salvatore
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:11:58 +0200
> From: Andreas Maria Jacobs <ajaco at xs4all.nl>
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] Extending the screen beyond the 'Proscenicum Arch'
> Message-ID: <012B2ABD-77F5-4550-8ABB-37E85AEE661E at xs4all.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Some real world examples from my artistic practice, to be used as examples and
> to illuminate the current discussion without too much theory
>
> Extending the screen beyond the 'Proscenicum Arch'
>
> 'Web Uebermahlung', paint the screen - 2007:
> http://rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/46915/
>
> 'Die neue Elite ist das Volk',Urban screen - 2011:
> http://rhizome.org/announce/events/57837/view/
>
> 'Cigarette Girls', Subverting branding screens - 2011/12:
> http://www.nictoglobe.com/new/room/New%20Room/ma201111a.html
>
> The Ambassy of Eleutheropolis, Mobile screens - 2004:
> http://www.nictoglobe.com/new/room/New%20Room/cellphone.html
>
> Rembrandt 2000, Projecting the screen - 2006 :
> http://nictoglobe.com/new/query2.html?d=fastbeaming&f=text
>
> Ey'Ar, Body as screen - 2006:
> http://nictoglobe.com/new/query2.html?d=eyar&f=text
>
>
> Remarks:
>
> Interface equates not to screen, interface is before or after the screen, i.e.
> projector, cinema, film - the physical layer, photo-sensitive emulsion on
> celluoid-, light?, lens etc etc.
>
> Interface functions as an intermediate of something 'happening' simultaneously
> in real mind-space or in real body-space, where the mind/body dichotomie is
> that field of interaction wich is 'touched' by the agency of acting upon it,
> i.e. it's teleologics
>
> Real space is 'still' conditional for the functioning of our sensory apparatus
> and as such imperative to out 'worldy' understanding
>
> Mapping the (invisible) information layer to a visual or sensory field of
> experience
>
> best
>
> Andreas Maria Jacobs
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:08:02 +0100
> From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines
> Message-ID:
> <DF657B70CB20304DB745D84933F94B1E02500563B1 at v-exmb01.academic.windsor>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
>
>
> Dear all:
>
> Salvatore's response was beautiful, inspired, and moved me with both its
> enthusiasm and idealism. I wish to reflect on it a bit more before [even]
> attempting a response.
> But i'd like to pick up from Scott's and Andreas's reply, also debating what i
> think are the intrinsic weaknesses of (Jeff Shaw on) "expanded cinema." I
> link my comments on expanded cinema to the false claims and impressions
> marketed under the labels of 'interactivity' and such inanities as "Twitter
> revolutions".
>
> from Shaw:
>>> That was a very large-scale piece with a very large inflatable structure
>>> where the whole audience, or a large number of people in the audience, threw
>>> off their clothes and just jumped in spontaneously ? or not so much
>>> spontaneously, they were led by Jean-Jacques Lebel. He took off his clothes
>>> because he understood that this was the right thing to do, because you were
>>> throwing yourself into the projection screen, into the images that were
>>> projected onto that screen, and basically you were then body-painting
>>> yourself with all this cinematic imagery and disturbing, changing the
>>> curvature and shaping of the screen, so it was really throwing yourself into
>>> the screen and joining, immersing yourself in the cinematic space.
>
> Scott Mcquire schreibt:
>
> ...<<spectacle and surveillance...... that this context makes it even more
> important to recognise and try to develop alternative modalities. I?ve also
> recently been re-reading Lefebvre, specifically his Le Droit de Ville essay,
> where he emphasises the importance for inhabitants to be able to ?appropriate?
> the time and space of the urban. In relation to screens, this kind of
> appropriation can occur at a variety of levels, but one of the most
> fundamental moves is demanding that screens situated in public locations are
> able to be accessed by different publics, to support diverse, collective
> inputs (as in the atlante-dell-visioni/atlas-of-the-visions project that
> Salvatore mentions). In our work, we?ve found that there is often an unspoken
> barrier to public interaction with large screens ? precisely because people
> are so innured to the one-way display mode of advertising and broadcasting.
>>>
>
> Andreas Maria Jacobs schreibt:
>
>>> Interface functions as an intermediate of something 'happening'
>>> simultaneously in real mind-space or in real body-space, where the mind/body
>>> dichotomie is that field of interaction wich is 'touched' by the agency of
>>> acting upon it, i.e. it's teleologics
> Real space is 'still' conditional for the functioning of our sensory apparatus
> and as such imperative to out 'worldy' understanding
> Mapping the (invisible) information layer to a visual or sensory field of
> experience
>>>
>
> My thoughts, briefly, are:
> Yes, The Living Theatre and "Paradise Now" (in 1969) happened, and happenings
> happened. Folks took their clothes off and jumped in (or were "led" into the
> fray).
>
> Expanded cinema expanded cinema and de-framed and dissolved. Inflatables
> inflated, and i remember trying it also, for visual/aesthetic effect, and it
> was beautiful at times.
>
> In the 1990s, amongst performance practitioners (and theorists), we thought,
> Artaud is dead, long live Artaud, It seems that Artaud's poetics of space, and
> the incantations, playful affective athleticisms, and sonorous streaming
> resonances were beginning to be celebrated and validated in the new age of
> immersivity (and so-called interactivity).
>
> Brecht was forgotten, and though his plays are still performed, his
> participatory, political testing arrangements (Lehrst?cke or learning plays)
> are entirely forgotten and may also be considered an artistic failure, failing
> to produce the (later: Boalian) social transformations or pedagogies that
> workers in the audiences could apply to "appropriate" decision making, not to
> speak now of urban space. What are "public interactions? Rafael?
>
> Why is there so much credit given to "playful" immersion? why is the sensory
> valued over the cognitive and pro-active political organization of behavior
> and decision making, interpretation, withdrawals, denials or choosing?
>
> Why is it considered "passive" to be amongst an audience that observes and
> witnesses? I have not fully read Ranci?re, but tend to think he is arguing
> on behalf of the discerning "emancipated spectator" that Brecht had in mind.
>
> So much theorizing on agency, isn't there. But what does it mean for the
> users? to have agency, to download? Alternative modalities seemed inscribed
> into the myth of interactivity, it seems to me, but what is this intermediate,
> in terms of the screens pushing you?
>
>
> respectfully
>
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:22:32 +0000
> From: Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines
> Message-ID:
> <56BC3EC1095EAB45AD6F538E6BCACB56273202B0 at 000S-EX-MBX-QS3.unimelb.edu.au>
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Delightful mail from Savatore, and fascinating response from Johannes . . .
> Too much to think about (I came in through street theatre: Living Theatre
> doing Frankenstein and a little later J?r?me Savary's Grand Magic Circus at
> the Roundhouse, doing Mo?se ? Mao ? both in my mind very much out of the
> Brechtian tradition.
>
> If tere is a problem, it lies in the way "we" (culture critics) who are so
> wary of making value judgements, like to describe things we like as "playful",
> as if that was enough. Play comes in many formsmost of them structuring and
> ordering, which may well be a good thing, indeed I believe we have an instinct
> towards order, but like other instincts it can turn nasty ? fascist in this
> case ? or into its opposite (Freud's entropic death-instinct) - somehting the
> Living Theatre played on in Frankenstein. Participatory theatre has always
> felt utopian from Beuys to Boal, because we all need a temporary autonomous
> zone to make it through the daily Xit.
>
> There might be another way. If the "private" art of the oil painting can at
> times give us deep, lasting but very personal experiences on an individual
> basis, should a"public" art aim to give a slight, passing, but still
> experiential experience to lots of people? If instead of W?lfflin swooning in
> front of a statue, a whole population walks six inches to the left of its
> usual path across a city square . . . .
>
> One other footnote: as a cinema usher in the 80s, I used to love watching the
> faces of the audience lit by the big screen. Now on winter's evenings, seeing
> a face illuminated by a handheld. Both make me think that screening is a
> mutual thing: that humans are media too, mediating between screens (among
> other things). Screen images use humans to pass themselves on, to reproduce,
> specifically because humans can be trusted to mutate whatever they mediate,
> churn it, forget, misunderstand, misremember, and so when they retell a story
> or frame a shot in the style of something seen, it is always altered
>
> Against which we have to place the enormous system of standardisation, patents
> and copyright, governance and standards bodies, preemptive law suits and the
> practice of buying out start-ups that militates towards us all mutating
> furiously in a tiny patch (thinking of Cl?ment's third landscapes) of ground
> that only masquerades as natural, while in fact based in genetic modification
> . . .
>
> Which is perhaps why certain extreme (sometimes extremely formalist) works are
> as significant as utopian TAZs: Jarman's Blue, for example, on whatever type
> of screen (I used to screen it from a really poor off-air VHS for years) is
> always the impossible imagination of blue, in this case as memory of blue in
> the mind of a blind filmmaker, its purity always only intimated, described,
> represented, in its absence, by the blue you can see ? the blue of a perfect
> sky we yearn to stand under
>
> sean
>
> From: "xDxD.vs.xDxD" <xdxd.vs.xdxd at gmail.com<mailto:xdxd.vs.xdxd at gmail.com>>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space
> <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
> Date: Wednesday, 18 July 2012 19:55
> To: soft_skinned_space
> <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] stepping out of the frame/konnecting airlines
>
> hi Johannes and everyone!
>
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 4:32 PM, Johannes Birringer
> <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>>
> wrote:
>
>> Surely not in real-time interactive art installations, and
>> I wonder or worry about crowdsourced raising of
>> political consciousness/cognitive compasses, too...
>
>
> i'm glad you're bringing this up.
>
> we obviously know that the objective of neutrality is technically unreachable
> for human beings, but in our practice we try to be at least honest :) and
> highlight all the points of view that we are aware of.
>
> the case of the technologies i mentioned earlier (harvest real-time info from
> social networks, use natural language analysis to understand topics/issues and
> expressions/emotions, make info accessible in a variety of ways, from AR to
> screens to body augmentations) is no exception. Even considering the fact that
> it touches many open issues for which we're passionate about ( the
> dictatorship of the algorithm, privacy/intimacy/anonymity, privately owned
> public spaces.. and we could go on and on )
>
> this is why, for example, we used the same exact technologies for radically
> different projects
>
> for example as in the Atlas of Rome, where we built a large urban screen in
> which citizens could publish their visions about the city in a variety of ways
>
> http://www.artisopensource.net/2010/06/13/atlante-dell-visioni-atlas-of-the-vi
> sions/
>
> or as in VersuS, where we analyzed the digital life of the city of Rome during
> the violent riots in the city of Rome on October 15th 2011
>
> http://www.artisopensource.net/2011/11/06/versus-the-realtime-lives-of-cities/
>
> but also as in "Enlarge your Consciousness"
>
> http://www.artisopensource.net/2012/02/12/enlarge-your-consciousness-in-4-days
> -4-free-2/
>
> here we used the same technologies to sell unaware social network users'
> emotional states for 9.99 euros at the Artefiera contemporary arts fair in
> Bologna, capturing their emotional flows as expressed on
> Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare and basically, turning them into human
> tamagotchis.
>
> we sold hundreds of them at the fair. and the most common question we received
> was "but... i could be in one of those boxes?" exposing multiple interesting
> things about the common perception of the processes which are behind these
> techniques and methodologies.
>
> Yet we perceive opportunity and, most of all, possibility behind this.
>
> but it's an "old" question, isn't it? Is the "hammer" a tool to drive nails
> into the walls or to smash your head?
>
> Fact is that all these technologies correspond to specific business and
> strategic models which are relevant to corporations, large cultural operators,
> institutions, governments and many other forms of "power".
>
> this obviously applies to screens, as well: fixed, urban, ubiquitous,
> body-related, square, key-stoned and frameless
>
> for example, sticking to my personal research focus, Mitchell's idea of the
> City of Bits, or of McCullough's Digital Ground, or of Zook&Graham's DigiPlace
> are very interesting when brought to the domain of the screen, especially of
> the urban and ubiquitous quality, as they in someway describe the possibility
> to achieve a multi-layered, emergent version of the city, in which multiple
> points of view can be freely expressed across cultures and perspectives.
>
> This is a very interesting point of view, as it places enormous questions on
> the practices of design and architecture which are authoritarian by their own
> nature: the Designer and the Architect, in the end, make the Plan that will
> shape what i see/traverse/live in the city.
>
> There is a wonderful liason with this concept in Cl?ment's Third Landscape,
> where he describes the presence of natural environments in urban contexts.
> Normally nature is present in cities under the form of synthetic
> administrative boundaries (the flowers at the center of the roundabout, the
> vegetables in the supermarkets, the "park").
>
> The Third Landscape, instead, is a place for possibility and opportunity, and
> it is emergent, real-time, temporary, autonomous (the grass in-between the
> bricks).
>
> And it is the possibly most important factor in determining our cities'
> biodiversity.
>
> One thing about the Third Landscape is that its existence really depends on us
> and on our "sight", and our sensibility in seeing and recognizing it while we
> lead our daily lives in cities.
>
> Seeing creates a perception (of the "possibility" of this kind of natural
> environment) and, thus, a spatial affordance ("this type of natural
> environment can exist") and, in turn, a series of critical, constructivist
> practices which can be based onto it (one for all: urban gardening).
>
> I see a beautiful parallel between this and the theme of the screen in urban
> contexts, be it fixed or ubiquitous or of the many types which can exist
> nowadays.
>
> people constantly re-program public space. mobile devices and screens
> radicalize this process. If you're jogging in the middle of a park, you
> receive an office phone call on your mobile phone, the park transforms into an
> ubiquitous office for a few minutes, careless of urban planning, zoning and
> administrative boundaries.
>
> In the same way, if your pocketable (or wall-mounted) screen enables you to
> freely and easily perceive (or "publish") multiple, independent, autonomous,
> emergent interpretations of the same space, space transforms, and other
> practices can emerge.
>
> in my research, this greatly enhances the ideas of de Certeau's "strategies vs
> tactics", of Lefebvre's "social construction of space" and of Soja's "Third
> Space".
>
> In this, great insights can be collected by focusing on de Certeau's idea of
> "daily practices", meaning that it is interesting how Lefebvre wanted to
> capitalize on these kinds of possibilites for the sake of a political agenda
> and, instead, in de Certeau, politics should emerge from the creativity of our
> daily practices, in an interesting inversion.
>
> and, so:
>
> whether the vision of the ubiquitous urban screen-net-to-end-all-screens is a
> globalized metropolitan vision for the hyperdeveloped, leaving out the
> regional, the less developed, underdeveloped and non developed (along these
> predicted lines)?
>
>
> this is focal issue to confront, in the wider range of issues which we
> commonly call digital inclusion and digital access.
>
> both at technical and cultural levels.
>
> "solutions" can never be as simple as "smartphone", "urban screen" or "app".
> They need to confront with the context (cultural, political, social,
> economic...) and, probably, the architectural diagrams of "solutions" should
> have a big box at their base with the word "anthropologist" inside it, before
> sensors, cloud computing, expert systems, screens of any form and type. And,
> possibly, a box with "citizens", as well :)
>
>
>
> And Salvatore mentioned a performance in which bodies "displayed"... (body of
> the performer was a "display" [screen?] of user interactions and, in turn,
> everything that was heard/shown as sound and video of the performance was
> generated my the dancer's movements and biological data.); Salvatore, could
> you please elaborate on that, and how you, and others here, think about the
> performance side of interactive behaviors and what they might or might not
> indicate? Following Sean's critique, have consumer relations changed at all
> in principle?
>
> In Turner's anthropological definition, performance is liminal: it exposes
> conflicts and highlights discontinuities with predetermined order.
>
> I particularly enjoyed Luisa Valeriani's book "Performers".
>
> Performers break crystallizations of meaning, recombining imaginaries in
> creative ways: they subvert by playing. Knowledge is not confronted through
> academic discussions, but through practical performative actions.
>
> Nowadays, consumers are performers, and business models are based on this.
> "Products" have changed, and have become "places for performance".
>
> Even more, people's (users', consumers') performance has become the "product".
> Think Facebook, the iPhone etc. When we observe iPhone's design with our
> students for the first time we really focus on the fact that most of it's
> success is due to the fact that it's "empty", ready to be used by its "owner"
> to express him/herself by populating it with apps which describe personality,
> desires, perspectives, points of view, daily practices, needs.... iPhone is a
> performative object.
>
> and (coincidence?) it is a screen. there's practically nothing more to it,
> than a screen.
>
> a performative screen.
>
> now: iPhone is, obviously, a very controlled screen
>
> but its characteristic of being "an empty, ready to be performed, screen which
> constitutes a platform for personal expression" changed everything.
>
> We see the scenarios of interactivity and (ubiquitous) screens along these
> directions, with the idea of exploring spaces/modalities for liberation of
> these "platforms for expression".
>
> in the example of the performance i mentioned, all was dedicated to this.
>
> radicalizing the idea of reactive/interactive environments, we tried to create
> constructivist experience which would shape the sensorial environment
> according to people's interactions in extreme ways, to disclose a set of
> opportunities which we perceived as being critical.
>
> as suggested in the practice of multiple performers before us, including
> Stelarc, Orlan, Marcel-li Antunez Roca and others, as well as in the ones of
> queer performers, the body is a fundamental space for construction, resonating
> with the ideas of architecture and mutation to explore the possibilities for
> expression and liberation.
>
> this is why the "construction" was performed at the level of the body.
>
> people could use interactive toys (interfaces and gadgets) to generate stimuli
> which propagated onto the body of a performer. Patterns of stimuli were
> interpreted as symbols of a choreography. The effect was that multiple people
> could establish physical dialogues to transform the center of focus of the
> performance: the body of the performer. This, in turn, was observed through
> sensors, whore readings were used as parameters of the generative sounds and
> visuals which filled all sides of the environment. Furthermore, sounds and
> visuals were designed to create feedback loops with people, counterbalancing
> their interactions (oversimplifying it: lack of interaction=strong, arousing
> A/V stimulations; lots of interaction=soothing, meditative A/V).
>
> on one side: the necessity to collaborate (each interface produced only parts
> of the stimulation patterns, so that people contributed to parts of the
> symbols of choreography, with each action producing visible results and only
> coordinated actions produced predictable results once the collaborative
> approach was understood) produced performative dialogues among individuals,
> who worked together to achieve agreed transformations in the body-->space
>
> on the other side: there was an untold story which was clearly perceived
> this was a mediated, authoritarian experience.
> we decided all the parameters,algorithms, colors, sounds, strategies etc.
> to "modify and liberate space" people could have just stopped using the
> technologies and starting to physically touch/move the body of the performer,
> or even radicalizing everything and tearing the whole place up in pieces,
> turning the location into a chaotic, physical, 4D screen displaying in
> real-time their strong desire for liberated spaces.
>
> We were prepared for this option, but it didn't happen. Yet we received
> explicit questions about it. People, who enjoyed and actively participated to
> the performance, explicitly asked about this possibility: "Could I just have
> stepped on stage and moved the performer's body with my hands? What would have
> happened?"
>
> This was an extremely interesting response for us, as it displayed how these
> kinds of experiences are still authoritarian, in the sense of "design": they
> are walled gardens, aquariums, in which "designers" establish various degrees
> of mediated freedom according to which "users" are able to move, act, express,
> perform, inform, communicate, interact.
>
> This has been enlightening for us, and we transformed our practice towards
> different forms of performance/interaction, aiming at creating frameworks for
> expressions under the form of free/libre tools, hardware/software and
> methodologies for autonomous, ubiquitous expression which are free to use and
> which are, after all, our "artworks".
>
> After that show we stopped producing "closed" artworks and started to adopt
> the methodology of 1) present opportunities 2) workshop to disseminate and
> recombine knowledge 3) disappear 4) co-create scenario
>
> in this the idea of screen becomes of fundamental importance, as we refer to
> urban contexts and with emergent, open, recombinant, temporary communities
> which take active part in the performance (be it about art, consumption, city
> governance... ) by "writing" onto the world using ubiquitous publishing
> techniques and by becoming aware of the multiple layers of info/action created
> by other actors through "interactive screens" of multiple types, such as the
> fixed ones in the Atlas of Rome, or the synthetic sense we created with the
> Electronic Man
>
>
> after writing this, i just realized i wrote an enormously long email!
>
> sorry! :)
>
> ( passionate about the topic.... )
>
> i'll just stop now
>
> all the best!
> Salvatore
>
> --
> Salvatore Iaconesi
>
> Art is Open Source
> http://www.artisopensource.net
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> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 21:30:29 +0200
> From: Karen O'Rourke <mapper at wanadoo.fr>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Sceens (week 3) Anri Sala
> installation
> Message-ID: <50086055.6020409 at wanadoo.fr>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
>
> Hi Scott, hi everybody,
>
> That's how I remember it (2X2+1) - it may have felt like more because of
> the outside window screening passers-by, as the press release suggests.
> With his time-coding and orchestration of viewer movements, Sala does
> give the impression that it is possible to piece together a somewhat
> complete experience. But it is no more complete than seeing a film once
> in the theater. Looking now at the material the Centre Pompidou has made
> available online makes me aware how many aspects I didn't fully explore
> when I was there! But I suppose that is also cruelly part of any museum
> experience today...
>
> I'm not sure myself where my piece will end up. I originally planned to
> deal with psychogeography and the moving image, with the idea that I'd
> view some films on my computer screen (the format most compatible with
> my present whereabouts). But the more I write the more it seems
> necessary to unpack other kinds of mobile screen-based experiences,
> using of course that same computer screen.
>
> Another interesting use of the screen was Simon Fujiwara's performance
> The Personal Effects of Theo Gr?nberg. Did anyone see that? Fujiwara sat
> at a desk, telling his story while manipulating objects that were filmed
> from above & projected onto a large screen like an overhead projector
> in a classroom - show and tell.
> http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/0/5072D8BC1803628AC12579B3004
> FF8AF?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.10&L=1
>
>
> Best,
> Karen
>
> Le 18/07/2012 06:42, Scott Mcquire a ?crit :
>> Hi Karen,
>>
>> Was the Sala show 5 screens? It felt like more! Shows how
>> reconstructing from memory can play tricks on you.
>>
>> I like your point about the interlaced mode of display 'preclud[ing]
>> viewers watching any one of them from beginning to end'.
>>
>> In the traditional museum experience viewers had a different kind of
>> autonomy over the time of viewing -- the object is fixed and stable,
>> the spectator mobile. But time-based work like video alters this
>> situation. For some, this is a threat. As Jessica Morgan puts it, the
>> video projection 'makes us the victims of its timing'. Boris Groys
>> extends this to argue that the reception of the artwork is now marked
>> irrevocably by /incompleteness/.
>>
>> "In so-called real life, one is forever haunted by the feeling of
>> being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If during a museum visit,
>> we interrupt our contemplation of some video or film work in order to
>> return to it at a later point, we will inevitably be filled with that
>> very same feeling of having missed something crucial and will no
>> longer be sure what is really happening in the installation." (Stan
>> Douglas exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Basel 2001)
>>
>> Like you, it seems to me Sala's 'symphony' was treating this condition
>> more affirmatively, less about loss or missing something, and more
>> about new articulations of images and of bodies. And I agree that
>> part of the experience is actively composing and recomposing different
>> narrative trajectories as you move around.
>>
>> I'd like to know where you piece is going to end up...
>>
>> Best, scott
>>
>>
>>
>> On 17/07/12 8:37 PM, "Karen O'Rourke" <mapper at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Scott and Empyreans,
>>
>> Your description of Anri Sala's installation has prompted me to
>> break my lurking silence, as I was in the process of writing about
>> it .
>> Forgive me if I go back over some obvious points with
>> relation to contemporary presentation tropes:
>>
>> Traditionally moving pictures are projected to a seated audience
>> in the confined space of a theater, while still pictures are
>> viewed one after the other by visitors moving through an
>> exhibition space. Video art often assumes one of those stances
>> identifying either as tableau (Bill Viola's slowly moving figures
>> being an extreme instance of this) or as film unfolding in time.
>> Installations, it is true, can be somewhere between the two,
>> combining screen(s), environment and other objects, allowing
>> visitors to alternately move around the screens or flop down in
>> front of them. Anri Sala brings the two strains together in his
>> recent five screen, hour-long symphonic installation at the Centre
>> Pompidou (2012). Scenes from four different videos appeared on
>> different screens (moved from screen to screen) throughout the
>> exhibition space, viewers followed them from one section to
>> another, plunging into one, then the other, or glancing back and
>> forth at two playing simultaneously on neighboring screens. Each
>> video played out on several screens, alternating with the others
>> so as to preclude viewers watching any one of them from beginning
>> to end. In 1365 Days without Red, a reenactment of Sarajevo under
>> siege, people walking through the city would stop on corners, then
>> dash across the street (presumably to minimize exposure to sniper
>> fire). The audience too moved quickly, not to escape action but to
>> follow it (and grab a seat whenever possible), spurred on by the
>> roaming sound and moving pictures. Though Sala denies any
>> storytelling motives, a story of sorts could be pieced together
>> from this kind of juxtaposition (one easily imagines something
>> resembling Robert Altman's choral films).
>>
>>
>> The opposite tactic was adopted by Patrick Keiller in the
>> /Robinson Institute/ at Tate Britain (2012). It involved
>> displaying short sequences from his full-length film /Robinson in
>> Ruins/ on small screens throughout the exhibition next to framed
>> paintings, prints, diagrams and maps. They became moving landscape
>> paintings, something out of Harry Potter---as if to deny the
>> film's narrative, functioning instead as animated hyperlinks
>> within the exhibition.
>>
>>
>>
>> Forgive this long description, but it does seem to bear out your
>> point about screens' shifting status as well as Martin's about the
>> screen being a "part of a larger system - a membrane between
>> content , landscape and the user".
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Karen
>>
>>
>>
>> Le 17/07/2012 03:15, Scott Mcquire a ?crit :
>>
>> Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Sceens (week 3) Hola Sean,
>> empyricists
>>
>> I like your formulation 'the screen is a relation that
>> appears as an object', but suspect, like a screen, it is
>> reversible: the screen is also an object that appears as a
>> relation. Hence the uncanny oscillation of
>> material/immaterial, visible/invisible.
>>
>> There is a strong logic of standardisation in current uses of
>> screen technologies --- their location and inscription in
>> specific socio-technical, architectural and cultural
>> configurations. We can see this with the production of
>> handhelds and personal screens in their 10s of millions (the
>> iPhone is more than 50% of apple's profits ). It was also
>> what I was getting at in relation to cinema as a specific
>> screen architecture.
>>
>> In fact, we notice it more today when screens are
>> non-standard --- for instance, when content cannot move from
>> one place to another because systems are not interoperable. We
>> had this experience trying to link up 2 large screens (one in
>> Melbourne, one in Seoul) for a live interactive art event.
>> Re-rendering the image in real time for different screen
>> sizes was tricky.
>>
>> I wrote yesterday about the standardisation of screens in the
>> art gallery situation. But I also wanted to mention one of
>> the most striking exhibitions I've seen recently --- Anri
>> Sala at the Beaubourg in Paris
>>
>> http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/AllExpositions/3DAA34E4B9D96
>> 668C125795F003AF5E2?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.2.1&L=2
>>
>> <http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/AllExpositions/3DAA34E4B9D9
>> 6668C125795F003AF5E2?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.2.1&L=2>
>>
>> Unfortunately no images on the website, so I'll do my best to
>> describe.
>>
>> There were about 8 separate screens built with individual
>> proscenium shells in large a singe space. They were all about
>> 6m X 3m, but were not situated against the walls. Rather,
>> they were all angled within the space to form divisions and
>> passages so you could see 2 or 3 at a time. They displayed a
>> number of separate video works and still images. Sometimes
>> one screen was on, sometimes 2 or more. So all the works
>> melded into one another --- quite deliberately exploring the
>> conjunctions, rather than trying to seal them off by building
>> separate black boxes to avoid sound/image bleed. The screens
>> were also linked --- or delinked -- by a really complex use
>> of sound (a 24 track soundscape) with multiple speakers
>> throughout the space: the work is described in publicity as
>> 'symphony'.
>>
>> What was really interesting was the way the audience shifted
>> around the space to watch. It wasn't the platform that moved
>> (like the old diorama with rotating floor) but the people who
>> would stand, sit, lie in one place then turn around or get up
>> and move elsewhere as another came on. The afternoon I saw it
>> there were about 60 people doing this together for over 30
>> minutes. This creates a really fascinating spatial ambiance,
>> where screens are simultaneoulsy material objects (blocking
>> passage, blocking view) and surfaces that open into
>> heterogeneous spaces.
>>
>> At one stage, all the screens are just red, then pale with no
>> image, while the sound is dispersed throughout the entire
>> gallery. Everyone kind of wandered around, not really looking
>> for or at anything, but enjoying a promenade among the screens
>> in each other's company.
>>
>> Scott
>>
>> On 17/07/12 12:32 AM, "Sean Cubitt"
>> <sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi Scott, Ho Empyricists
>>
>> Persistence in the fun and fury is a great description:
>> everything in flux, but there are objects in the flow that
>> crystallise, even for a short moment, the relationships we
>> have with each other, with technologies and with the world
>> -- in short with images. Gunter Kress a few years ago
>> wrote about 'Screen': Metaphors of Display, Partition,
>> Concealment and Defence (Visual Communications 9(2),
>> 2004): responding to it in a very useful discussion of
>> screens in Cinema Journal 51(2) 2012 -- wh. also has a
>> great contribution from Erkki Huhtamo who joins us later
>> this month - Charles Acland writes that there's virtue in
>> sticking with the 'simplest notion of a screen -- that a
>> screen is a surface for animation' . We would need to have
>> another discussion about what constitutes an image (in the
>> age of data visualisation) to describe the screen as
>> intermediary between observer/user and image/text/diagram
>> -- and a detailed account of how such different screens as
>> handhelds, electronic billboards, domestic, theatrical etc
>> screens of specific affordances, sizes, shapes etc act as
>> conduits and/or barriers and/or filters of content (which
>> as McLuhan told us is always another medium) - let alone
>> (as many of the contributors to this discussion are expert
>> in) the valences of animated text
>>
>> The screen is a relation that appears as an object:
>> interestingly enough that is a close pass to one of Marx's
>> formulations about the commodity -- a real relation
>> between people that appears to them in the fantastical
>> guise of an object. Leading to a supposition -- that the
>> specificity of any individual screen design (and
>> associated experience?) is an expression of the specific
>> form taken by the commodity at a specific moment in the
>> evolution of capital. Taken at its largest scale: the
>> ubiquity of screens expresses the ubiquity of capital.
>> Taken at the microscale: the 960x640 iPhone 4S display is
>> designed (though disputed) to match the maximum resolution
>> at 12 inches of normal human eyesight. The demon is the
>> word 'normal': the standard observer (invented in 1931 for
>> purposes of calibrating colours) is a biopolitical
>> construct. The screen is intended to give the impression
>> of continuity in a device whose principle is discrete. It
>> is "good enough" technology, a principle of modern screen
>> design. It could be described as an attempt to articulate
>> device and physiology of the eye into a single seamless
>> continuum articulating the myth of instant personal and
>> biologically-integrated satisfaction at the heart of the
>> atomistic personalisation of neo-liberal consumerism.
>>
>> This kind of analysis (okay, you might not like the
>> Marxism, but the articulation of design with socio-cutural
>> formations) is a kind of rock in the stream: an empirical
>> notch to anchor, even if only momentarily, and materialise
>> the complex of relations between us and what we view -- to
>> make the immaterial and invisible screen material and
>> visible -- which is what I think Simon was kicking us off
>> towards?
>>
>> The more transparent (AR) and weightless (wearable) the
>> screen, the more important it is to notice that, however
>> briefly and intermedially it exists, it exists.
>>
>> Sean
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *Scott McQuire <mcquire at unimelb.edu.au>
>> *Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> *Date: *Monday, 16 July 2012 07:14
>> *To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> *Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Screens (week 3)
>>
>> Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Screens (week 3)
>> Hi everyone
>>
>> I haven't had a chance to participate in the discussion
>> so far but now that I'm back in Melbourne I figure that
>> I'm ahead of you all (in time zone terms at least!). So,
>> after an enjoyable read of most of the posts so far, let
>> me launch into week 3.
>>
>> One of the things that many people seem to agree on is
>> that there is a new screen paradigm emerging defined by
>> ubiquity, interactivity and so on. I agree with this
>> analysis in part, but
>> I am also struck by the persistence of certain
>> configurations. In his introduction, Simon suggested that
>> older screen modalities such as cinema and television were
>> disappearing. I think this is far from the case. Cinema
>> numbers in fact grew rapidly in the 1990s and early 2000s
>> (especially in Asia) and today there are probably more
>> cinema screens in the world than ever before. This is
>> not to say that cinema in 2012 is the same thing as it was
>> in 1990 or 1950 (half those cinema screens are now digital
>> --- a term which covers a plethora of different projectors
>> and operating systems, not to mention social and cultural
>> affiliations).
>>
>> What I want to underline here is the incredible stability
>> of screen architecture over the century-plus history of
>> cinema. Understanding why change to screen architecture
>> is slow is partly a way of attending to the specificity
>> that those such as Sean Cubitt and Ian Bogost have been
>> insisting on throughout this discussion. It's also a way
>> of resituating debates over the current emergence of new
>> screen locations and modalities.
>>
>> I would argue that there has only ever been one major
>> change to the cinema screen in over one hundred years ---
>> the change from the academy ratio format that was
>> standardized in the 1920s to the widescreen formats that
>> took over the from the mid-50s. This stability reflects a
>> number of factors such as the need for standardized
>> formats to enable the industrial mode of content
>> production that characterizes cinema from the 1920s, and
>> the fact that changing screen image ratio demands changing
>> the most expensive aspect of exhibition --- the real
>> estate. In other words, to have a taller or wider screen
>> often demands a different building.
>>
>> Widescreen could have been introduced much earlier ---
>> all the technical capabilities were there in the 1920s
>> when filmmakers such as Abel Gance experimented with
>> multi-screen formats. But, as John Belton points out,
>> unlike the introduction of sound in the 1920s, there were
>> no influential corporations such as AT&T, RCA,
>> Westinghouse and Western Electric/,/ which all held sound
>> recording patents, and thus had a vested interest in
>> expanding the market for sound equipment. So it wasn't
>> until the 1950s that widescreen was introduced as a
>> necessary response to the crisis caused by plummeting
>> audiences who were all turning on to television.
>>
>> I'd add two partial exceptions to this argument. One is
>> IMAX. This is definitely a different screen format and
>> one worth discussing more. But it really only survived
>> thanks to the long-term support of Canadian tax-payers,
>> who sustained it for several decades and allowed the
>> format to overcome the perennial chicken and egg problem
>> of content and venues (why make large format films if
>> there's nowhere to screen them? Why build venues if
>> there's no content?)
>>
>> The other, of course, is the digital threshold which is
>> now significantly impacting cinema exhibition after a
>> decade or so of slow take-up. I agree this a major change
>> to the cinema apparatus, assuming this term extends beyond
>> technology and equipment to embrace new forms content
>> (live events) and relations to audiences (3D, interactivity).
>>
>> However, in many respects the basic arrangement of the
>> exhibition space, in which the spectator sits immobilized,
>> silent, and in darkness facing a magnified luminous image,
>> has been there for a century. Arguably the experience of
>> sound in cinema that has changed far more radically in the
>> last 20 years than has the screen--- I think Johannes
>> Birringer mentions this ---but agree that's a different
>> issue.
>>
>> This is a long way round of saying that cinema is not
>> disappearing, but is now complemented by a range of other
>> screens, both mobile and embedded. If we understand cinema
>> as a specific viewing situation, we can see how it
>> continues in some respects elsewhere: for instance, with
>> the growing standardization of video art displayed in
>> galleries where the model of single-channel projection
>> onto a wall has become a de facto standard exhibition
>> format. The key variation here is the (potential)
>> mobility of the spectator, and the variety of points at
>> which they enter/exit the screening (Boris Groys etc). We
>> can also appreciate the way that some of the newer
>> modalities, such as large screens situated in public
>> space, are capable of recreating something like the
>> collective experience of film watching that was a key
>> aspect of its political valence for theorists like Walter
>> Benjamin.
>>
>> I did want to keep this post short -- something I haven't
>> managed to do! -- so I'm not going to
>> broach the changes introduced by the personal screen of
>> the handheld device. But I do want to want to make a case
>> for recognizing continuity and persistent elements midst
>> the fun and fury of paradigm change.
>>
>> Warm regards, Scott
>>
>>
>> ___________________________________________________________
>> Dr. Scott McQuire,
>> Associate Professor and Reader, School of Culture and
>> Communication,
>> University of Melbourne, VIC 3010.
>> Office: Rm 124 John Medley (Building 191, enter at gate 10)
>> T: +61 (0)3 8344 8194 F: +61 (0)3 8344 5494 E:
>> mcquire at unimelb.edu.au
>>
>> http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/study/mediacomm/staff/scott-m
>> cquire
>> www.spatialaesthetics.unimelb.edu.au/
>> <http://www.spatialaesthetics.unimelb.edu.au/>
>> _________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 16/07/12 8:02 AM, "Simon Biggs"
>> <simon at littlepig.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Welcome to week three of the empyre discussion on the
>> topic of screens. We would like to thank this past
>> week's invited discussants Simone Arcangi and Charlie
>> Gere, as well as all the empyre members who have
>> contributed to the discussion.
>>
>> After the, at times, intense debate of the first
>> week, considering what defines a screen as a screen
>> and the scope of our topic, the second week has
>> focused more on the inter-agency of the apparatus of
>> (or around) the screen and its viewers/users. That the
>> screen has shifted from being primarily an object of
>> visual contemplation to something we employ in our
>> interactions with other things has been noted.
>> However, the screen has its histories and theoretical
>> baggage and it remains a challenge for us to consider
>> it anew - and perhaps it would be erroneous to
>> dispatch that historical baggage.
>>
>> This weeks invited discussants have been key in the
>> theorisation and historicisation of the screen. They
>> are recognised for their panoramic overview of the
>> subject and having contributed at critical moments to
>> debates around both old and new media. They are:
>>
>> Sean Cubitt, University of Southampton, UK.
>> Sean is currently Professor at Winchester School of
>> Art but starts at Goldsmiths, University of London, in
>> August, previously working at Melbourne and Waikato
>> (New Zealand) Universities. He edits the Leonardo Book
>> Series for MIT Press. Forthcoming publications include
>> anthologies on ecocinema, media art history, the
>> history of British video art and transitions from
>> analog to digital imaging. He is working on a new book
>> on environmentalism, globalisation and political
>> aesthetics. His recent work includes a history of
>> screens, tracing the form of LCD and plasma displays,
>> as well as cinema and data projection, from printing
>> technologies of the 19th century onwards. With luck, a
>> book tracing this history, alongside histories of
>> colour and other visual technologies, will be
>> published in 2013. Its central theme is that Western
>> media have moved from a semantic and hierarchical
>> model of vision to a democratic but arithmetic one
>> which shares its formal properties with the demands of
>> bio-politics and the commodity form of the 21st century
>>
>> Scott McQuire, University of Melbourne, Australia.
>> Scott McQuire has a strong interest in the social and
>> cultural transformations surrounding the deployment of
>> new media technologies. In 2004 he co-founded the
>> Spatial Aesthetics program for interdisciplinary
>> research linking media, art, social theory and
>> urbanism. Scott is author or co-editor of 7 books
>> including The Media City: Media, Architecture and
>> Urban Space (2008) and the Urban Screens Reader
>> (2009). His work in the emerging field of urban
>> communication has pioneered new ways of understanding
>> the social impact of large video screens situated in
>> public space. He teaches in the School of Culture and
>> Communication at the University of Melbourne.
>>
>>
>> Simon Biggs
>> simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>> <http://www.littlepig.org.uk/> @SimonBiggsUK skype:
>> simonbiggsuk
>>
>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University
>> of Edinburgh
>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/
>> http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
>> MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
>>
>> http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php
>>
>> <http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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>>
>>
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