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

[Ken Feingold]

Sure.

documentation clips can be found at

Box of Men
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbyUaS4G0HM

Hell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weP3JKC-IRI

and a bit more info in general at http://www.kenfeingold.com

-Ken


> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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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