[-empyre-] Week 4: “Convergence: expanding time-base media”

[naxsmash]

Ken,  
Could you offer some online links to some of the images from these works, "Box of Men" and "Hell" ?

-Christina


On Oct 25, 2013, at 4:58 PM, Ken Feingold wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Friends and Colleagues,
> 
> In this post I will send along an update on some of my activity, and later
> I will post further on the subject of convergence.
> 
> I have been writing personalities for talking animatronic sculptures and
> virtual characters for some time now.  As the work has gone along – coding
> the applications that run on customized computers and microprocessors
> which control sculpted, molded and cast figures fitted with pneumatic
> actuators, or, alternately, the digital processes control virtual 3D
> figures – the central problem is in the creation of a time-based “scene”. 
> So what is materialized is first imagined, written, sculpted, cast,
> assembled; a convergence of processes, the “mise-en-scène” for what,
> finally, becomes an artwork, usually something of a time-based
> installation or sculpture.  This much has been the case for a while, and
> working in this way continues to attract my attention.  To a large extent,
> the focus of the work is, as mentioned above, “writing personalities” and
> letting them “run” and interact with each other.  The characters need to
> be doing their scene perpetually, but without explicit dialog or
> repetition.  What is involved in writing a personality, or a scene, in
> this way?  First, each needs a vocabulary, a database of words they can
> speak.  The organization of these words becomes the unconscious mind of
> the characters, and from here there is a coming and going between this
> database and the surface of their language, their syntaxes and most
> importantly, their ability to link one thing to another.  The speaking
> character is a fountain of associations, and what serves as their mind is
> a configuration of algorithms which model and remodel these links, and
> through their articulation of responses to the language of each other (or
> an other) they enact.  The scene becomes an image – in some cases, as in
> my work “Box of Men”, a talking, moving sculpture as virtual scene/moving
> image (a projection or screen); in others, as in “Hell”, it is a talking,
> moving sculpture as object/image.  The continuum between them is what what
> I think of as the Image-Action; and finally the screen itself is found in
> the perception of the work - its mental representation - and its relations
> to the experience of affect in the viewer.  This Image-Action, for me, is
> a primary site of convergence, located within the subject who is
> constituted by the convergence itself, and where, as I will discuss later,
> we can observe with some introspection how we are experiencing affect and
> representation.
> 
> All the best,
> Ken
> 
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