Experimental Media s09

Blogpost 5 - Allison Macedo

There are many themes and topics that are a part of digital media that were a part of previous types of art, but there are also many unique to digital media (Digital Art, 139).  An example of something that was done virtually but affected by what was done in the real world is the Interactive Plant Growing project.  There were computerized plants shown on a screen that changed and grew depending on what people did to the real plants in front of them (Digital Art, 143).  It is hard to change other forms of art right on the spot, but with computing changes can be made instantaneously.  Programs like Eliza and Alice can be created to act like humans and the users not even realize.  Tools like text recognition, speech recognition, language processing, personality algorithms, and text to speech can all be used to create art with computers (Digital Art, 146-147).  Another garden project was “Telegarden” by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana which was a real garden that was controlled by users of the website.  A robotic arm would do what the visitors to the website told it to (Digital Art, 155).  Nothing like this could be created without the digital quality of the internet, but the internet is not the only quality unique to digital art.  Video is another quality which is exhibited by Lynn Hershman’s Tillie, the Teerobotic Doll.  This doll is an actual doll, but she has cameras for her eyes and those cameras can be controlled by people on the website.  Another way is through computer games and the reason that they are so tied together with the computational history is because they are rule based and procedural (Games, 71).  Computer game mods are like ready mades, and the games that are taken from others but created from scratch are the more liked by game artists (Games, 76, 78).  Games are a lot like Fluxis games and could actually bring some of their ideas to light (Games, 86).  Someone even created a game engine from Microsoft Excel, as well as a electric shocking game, Tekken Torture Tournament, using a modified Playstation (selectparks.net).  Digital art is also generally participatory; games are created for the players’ experiences and their relationships with other players (Sustainable, 6).  Media that is created by regular people and not impartial is called tactical media.  People use the cheap electronics and internet access to create their digital pieces of artwork (ABC).  Hacktivist.com is a site with a bunch of different sites attached.  Maphub.org is a site with an interactive map of Pittsburgh that has information about the local neighborhoods (Hacktivist).  The Critical Art Ensemble is a group of five artists that create digital art, lots of tactical projects, with the use of technology, critical theory, radical politics, and art (Critical).    Preemptive Media takes new technologies that are not yet common to everyday people and they do tests, make predictions, and do research.  They use this to create discussion and hope others will get involved and maybe come up with new ideas (preemptivemedia.net).  R TM Ark is a site that lists all projects that meet their standard of “attack without physical injury” (rtmark.com).  The digital age created a whole new way of making art.  Things can be participatory with the whole world, things can happen instantaneously, they can be changing for forever, all of these things and more are unique to the digital art medium.

Works Cited

Pearce, Celia; Fullerton, Tracy; Fron, Janine; Morie, Jacki. (2005). “Sustainable Play: Towards a New         Games Movement for the Digital Age.” In Conference Proceedings Digital Arts & Culture 2005,              Copenhagen, December 2005.
Pearce, Celia. (2006). “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play.” Visible Language 40.1, Special Issue:          Fluxus After Fluxus, January 2006.
Select Parks: http://www.selectparks.net
Web sites: Garcia, David & Lovink, Geert. (1997). The ABC of Tactical Media
Paul, Christiane. (2003). Digital Art (World of Art). New York: Thames & Hudson.

Blogpost 5- Lauren Burkhart

            The digital medium is a relatively recent home for artists. Inside this medium artists are able to really utilize its unique qualities in order to illustrate the expressive capabilities unique to the digital media. Christine Paul said in her book Digital Art that, “A number of themes in digital art are in many ways specific to the digital medium” (Digital Art, 139). In many pre-digital art pieces, artists, like Duchamp, used the physical medium as an illustration of how that physical object could be expressive. For example, Duchamp’s Bottle Rack used the physical object itself to be the artwork and to show the extent of the expressive qualities of that physical object by using it so simply. Similar to this, many artists’ were focused on how their medium was actually their message. In this same light, digital artists want to utilize the components of the digital realm in order to show how expressive the medium itself can be.

            An affordance of the digital medium is certainly the ability to connect over the internet to various spaces around the world and be able to interact over that space. An art piece entitled PRoP uses this technology involved primarily to explore remote human communication and exchange. The project has internet controlled telerobots that establish video and audio links to the space they inhabit and allow their users to engage in various activities in the space among them wondering around, talking to people, examining objects, and reading (Digital Art, 159). Similarly, Nancy Patterson’s Stock Market Skirt, takes a physical dressmaker’s mannequin wearing a blue taffeta dress that is attached to a stepper monitor, weights, and pulleys. A computer analyzes stock market prices from online stock market quote pages and sends the values to an application which raises or lowers the helm line of the skirt depending on the rise or the fall of a stock market price (Digital Art, 183). Lynn Hershman’s Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll uses an actual doll that has camera eyes that can be controlled through a website (Digital Art, 163). These are good representations of pieces that use internet space and abilities allowed by the internet and digital technologies to alter physical pieces.

            Some internet art pieces simply use the internet resources to create purely digital art pieces. The website 0100101110101101.org has a piece called life_sharing. This consists of the organization’s hard disk which is published in its entirety on the web and can be reproduced by anybody. This piece highlights issues of intellectual property and copy write which have become a pressing issue in the digital age (Digital Art, 210). The website Hacktivits.com has a member, Maphub.org, which is an online interactive map of the city of

Pittsburgh

and is used primarily to share deeply local information about neighborhoods (Hactivist, 1). This interactive map is a good example of how to use the internet to create interactive digital art. Other online art pieces like Zapped! and R TM Ark are ever changing. Zapped! is an effort to learn about and respond to the tags that industry is embracing for product tracking, the government for border control, schools for attendance-taking and public libraries for automatic checkout (Preemptive Media, 1). R TM Ark is a market-driven system (R TM Ark, 1).

            Critical Art Ensemble uses tactical media, which makes ‘do-it-yourself’ media possible by the use of consumer electronics. This type of media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media (The ABC of Tactical Media, 1). Critical Art Ensemble is explores the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory (Critical Art Ensemble, 1). This type of media is extremely particular to the digital medium because it encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular social context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture (Critical Art Ensemble, 1).

            In the same way that tactical media comments on the real world through the use of the internet and other digital mediums, artists can use the internet to connect these two worlds: virtual and physical.

            Many artists have used the digital medium to explore the connection between the physical and virtual forms of life. Interactive Plant Growing and Life Spacies the Telegarden are great examples of this combination. Telegarden consists of a small garden of living plants and an industrial robotic arm that can be controlled by the project’s website (Digital Art, 155). Eduardo Kac explored the connection between natural and virtual environments through his installation Uirapuru, which juxtaposes organic and artificial life forms with a telepresense situation (Digital Art, 158), similar to Telegarden.

A significant aspect of all these projects is the direct intervention and communication with the virtual environment that responds to the physicality of the human body (Digital Art, 143).

            “The topics of body and identity, which obviously have been issues in art throughout the century and before, also figure prominently in digital art due to the changes that networked environments and distributed presence have brought about” (Digital Art, 139). Emergence is a software system developed by Rebecca Allen and a team of collaborators creates 3D computer generated environments that are geared towards the exploration of social behaviors and communication through gestures and movements (Digital Art, 145). This uses the body and the unique aspects of the digital world to create an interesting ‘digital-specific’ art piece. Ken Feingold created a whole series that incorporate animatronic heads and make use of speech recognition, natural language processing, conversation or personality algorithms, and text to speech software (Digital Art, 147), all of these conventions being specific digital affordances. In a more physical combination of digital and real world, Stelarc made Exoskeleton. This extended the artist’s body through a six legged pneumatically powered walking machine that allows movements forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as turning on the spot (Digital Art, 167). Another way the physical body has been incorporated into the virtual world is through Tekken Torture Tournament. This is C-Level's completely radical performance-game-mod combining the latest video game technology: untapped public aggression and painful electric shock. Willing participants were wired into a custom fighting system (modified Playstation). This system converts virtual damage into bracing, non-lethal, electric shocks (SelectParks, 1). This combination is a little scary, but also a very interesting way to look at combining digital gaming, the body, and art.

            The body and identity have also become prominent themes in the digital realm.  While our physical bodies are still individual, physical “objects”, they have also become increasingly transparent; exact surveillance and identification seem to threaten the idea of the individual autonomy (Digital Art, 165). Victoria Vesna created Bodies, Inc. which allows visitors of a website to create a ‘cyberbody’ out of different components (Digital Art, 168). This type of online identity allows a simultaneous presence in various spaces and contexts, a constant reproduction of the self without body (Digital Art, 165), which can only be found in digital technology. One of the attractions of online presence consists in the possibility of remaking the body, of creating digital counterparts released from the short comings and mortal limitations of our physical “shells” (Digital Art, 168). This release from the physical world can also be found in gaming, and game art.

            In MUDsand MOOs and online chat environments people choose avatars to represent themselves and slip in and out of character (Digital Art, 165). Video games early on explored paradigms of “point of view” that manifest themselves in the classic categories of the first person or third person shooter (Digital Art, 198). This distinction between a player experiencing the world of the game from their own position and point of view and the player creating or choosing a visual representation acts as a stand-in throughout the game (Digital Art, 198). In one digital game art piece, Feng Mengbo placed himself inside of the game by using the software from Quack 3 to create Q4U. In this, he inserted a “skin” – a visual representation of himself equipped with a camera and gun – into the game as the main character. He populates it with an army of clones of himself that can be played by the audience (Digital Art, 203). There is a digital art piece that takes Duchamp’s Ascending the Staircase, and creates an avatar that looks like this image (SelectParks, 1). Another interesting way to look at digital art games is, rather than creation, modification.

            In digital game art moding: although intervening or exploiting existing games is a key practice in game art, creating ground up mods especially with designs that differ dramatically from the source games is a favored practice of most game artists (Games As Art, 78). The challenge of mod based art is that the basic play mechanics differ little from the original in general (Games As Art, 75). One other means of subverting mainstream game culture is by “patching” which makes patches both a cultural intervention and a form of “digital ready made”.  One example of this is called Nude Raider (patch for Tomb Raider 2) where you can play as Laura Croft naked (Games As Art, 76).

            There is also the ability to use the randomness and chance in digital game art. The use of chance and randomness as a creative medium is another Fluxis-like strategy by (Games As Art, 84). In computational game based artworks ideas around chance, failure and letting go of results often takes form through harnessing the inherent unpredictability of computers.  While in theory computers are devices that compute elegant mathematical procedures, in reality they are often unreliable, inconsistent, and quickly obsolete, while software is often unstable, incomplete, and riddled with bugs (Games As Art, 84). One art piece inspired by the bugs and chance of the computer entitled, Max-Miptex, Julian Oliver and Chad Chatteron describe the piece as part hack part accident (Games As Art, 85). Aside from cultivating errors, artists can also take advantage of other forms of chance operation that computers are particularly good at.  One is the phenomenon of emergence, which means unpredictable outcomes that occur as a result of the implementation of a rule set (Games As Art, 85).

            Games are deeply wed to the history of computation precisely because they are procedural or rule based in nature (Games As Art, 71). So it is good to think of digital art as, by definition, not a “thing”. It does not exist with the “art as object” paradigm but exists as a pure “score”. With digital art, score means code.  It does not exist except in a conceptual sense until it is played (Games As Art, 73). Digital games create a particular inhibition to reinscription of rules due to the fact that the rule structures are encoded in the game construction itself (Sustainable Play, 4). In creating game art, the artist is making a choice to invite the viewer in as a co-creator of the work (Games As Art, 70). Digital art games are created by and for the players within a safe digital environment built not to wield authority over them, but to provide and even playing ground in when they themselves are empowered to play; a temporary world that encourages a new, participatory relationship with each other, rather than to a machine (Sustainable Play, 6).

Similar to Fluxis digital game art will continue to have a certain amount of unease with the constraint of the museum context (Games As Art, 88). Regardless of weather the art medium is analog, performative, digital, or mediated in some other way, creating something that is framed as a game expresses a certain attitude, a particular posture towards not only the work itself, but the “audience, and the practice of art making in general” (Games As Art, 69-70).

            Like in games, digital technologies have induced an increased flexibility and instability of the printed text, from typography to the book and the construction of narrative which has become a large field of artistic exploration (Digital Art, 190).

Electronically linked environments have already had a profound impact on how we think about reading and writing by emphasizing the position of words in a contextual and referential frame work (Digital Art, 189). In one piece, Beyond Pages, traditional reading conventions are explicitly juxtaposed with the possibilities brought about the digital medium (Digital Art, 189). In this way, the affordances of the digital medium have increased the expressive capabilities of text.

            A purely digital concept is artificial intelligence. The piece, Eliza was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, and it is a computer chatbot that actually does not have much intelligence but works with what could be considered more or less tricks, like string substitution and preprogrammed responses based on keywords (Digital Art, 146). This chatbot led to the creation of more intelligent AI like

Alice

. She was created by Richard Wallace, and was a chatbot in which users customized how she would respond to various input statements (Digital Art, 147). These types of development are very important for the realm of digital art, because through the use of AI technologies, not only can digital art be intriguing, it can be very interactive or performative.

            While art constitutes a cultural value in itself and does not need to fulfill a purpose, it certainly has a function in that it can be an open play field for aesthetic, emotional, or political exploration (Digital Art, 214). The use of digital affordances only increases the ways in which artists can be expressive. Digital art can be used especially to critically examine technology. Art in general has always employed and critically examined the technology of its time, and the art of the future will equally reflect the cultural changes induced by developments in information technology as intersects biotechnology, neuroscience, nanotechnology, and other disciplines (Digital Art, 214).

Works Cited

Pearce, Celia; Fullerton, Tracy; Fron, Janine; Morie, Jacki. (2005). “Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” In Conference Proceedings Digital Arts & Culture 2005, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia. (2006). “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play.” Visible Language 40.1, Special Issue: Fluxus After Fluxus, January 2006.

Paul, Christine." Digital Art"

Websites:

www.hactivist.com

The ABC of Tactical Media

Critical Art Ensemble

SelectParks

www.preemptivemedia.net

www.rtmark.com

Nick Poirier: Blogpost 5

    Digital media offers us new methods of creating, viewing, and responding to works of art. The computer is capable of recreating all previous forms of media in its own way as encoded strings of ones and zeros. Additionally, the computer offers up a myriad of new tools and methods for viewing and interacting with these old media. But the computer’s strongest affordance is that it allows users to create, appropriate, and express themselves in ways that were either impossible or much more difficult before.  With interaction and user contribution a major focus in the digital world, the computer has created brand new ways for us to play and create.

    Digital media can easily be copied and transferred between computers. It is this affordance that has allowed artists to use appropriated material in new and original ways. Photographs can be modified and manipulated with no fear of losing the original copy. Digital video can be re-cut and edited by anyone. Video games can be “modded” and changed into drastically different forms from their originals. Some Dada artists, like Marcel Duchamp, experimented early on with the concept of appropriation. Duchamp’s piece titled, “Fountain” is a urinal with his signature on it. It asks the viewer to discern for themselves who the true artist of the work is and whether such appropriated works can even be considered art. Video game mods have acquired the same form of authorial ambiguity and rely on an underlying appropriated engine for their creation.

    The computer also offers us new forms of interaction and play for individuals and groups. The Ludica group has suggested one method for approaching the style of play expressed by the computer with inspiration from the “New Games” movement introduced by Stewart Brand. The “New Games” movement was created to encourage intense physical interaction and to subvert the common “us vs. them” mentality present in most games. They suggest that, a “new, new games” movement occur which would take advantage of the flexibility of the computer and the potential for ingenuity and change created by the introduction of human players. They state that, “The game should not measure the players, but serve as a focal point for social interaction.”(Ludica 6). One example of a game mod which encourages social discussion and interaction is a modification to the game Counter Strike. Velvet-Strike:  Counter Military Graffiti encourages players to decorate virtual spaces with anti-war sprays inside the Counter Strike world. This mod subverted the common idea that all that could be done within the Counter Strike world was shooting and killing. Author Celia Pearce states that Velvet Strike "tranforms the weapons into an artistic tool"(Pearce 77). Velvet Strike was a return to the playful nature of games and also a statement about both digital and real war.

    With a definite nod to the old Fluxus movement and Happenings of the 1960’s, sites like RTMark.com suggest games and performances which place the artist in a unique, spontaneous, and subversive work. Much like the aforementioned mod Velvet Strike, these types of performances can result in some very enlightening and unexpected interactions between individuals. Other art groups, like Preemptive Media and Hactivist.com use technology to subvert our techno-centric culture. They take advantage of the potential for dynamism and change within the computer to create works which create a new dialog between users, artists, and the computer.

    What we are seeing as a result of the computer is a collection of works which are inherently participatory, culturally subversive, and ever-changing. Digital artists of the future must continue to take advantage of what the computer offers us by making works which require interaction and are time and space dependent. By utilizing the computer’s ability to change itself, artists can make works which have lasting expressive power well into the future. In addition, web technology offers us new ways for encouraging play, trust, and discussion amongst players from any number of social and cultural backgrounds. The future holds an infinite number of possibilities for digital discussion and creation.

Works Cited

Pearce, Celia; Fullerton, Tracy; Fron, Janine; Morie, Jacki. (2005). “Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” In Conference Proceedings Digital Arts & Culture 2005, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia. (2006). “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play.” Visible Language 40.1, Special Issue: Fluxus After Fluxus, January 2006.

Websites:

www.hactivist.com

www.preemptivemedia.net

www.rtmark.com

Nick Poirier Blogpost 4: Interaction

            With advances in digital technologies coming faster every day, we constantly witness the line between content “creator” and “recipient” growing thinner. With blogging and news aggregation sites becoming more and more prevalent online, those individuals who used to act only as audience members can rethink, modify, and comment upon news stories which used to come from only a small number of sources. The same can be said for all forms of media, be they commercial or artistic in nature. Songs can be re-mixed, paintings and photographs appropriated and manipulated, and some works can spring up out of nowhere as a result of the combined effort of any number of individuals. Some visionary artists of the 1960’s predicted and experimented with this concept. John Cage and Alan Kaprow sought new ways of blurring or eliminating that line between artist and audience. With the advent of digital technologies, modern artists have taken this notion even further by creating new media through which participants are able to become artists in their own right. What this requires is an understanding of the core concept that serves as a necessary element of any work which demands audience participation: Interaction.

            Artist and visionary John Cage was one of the early individuals to examine this subject. He wrote, “The audience is any one of us, just a human being. […] Looking out towards the mountains, he sees the setting sun and hears his own symphony: it’s nothing but the sounds happening in the air around him.” (Multimedia 94) Fueled by these concepts, Alan Kaprow created the notion of Happenings, which surfaced in the 1960’s. The main goal behind a Happening, Alan stated, was that, “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”(Multimedia 308) Happenings could take place over an indistinct period of time and could involve an unknown number of participants. While very simple in their construction, Happenings were created as a way to show that all actions in life, especially those which occur spontaneously, uniquely, and at random, were a form of art. Cage’s piece 4’33” was a musical composition which was simply four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. Any sounds perceived during the piece would come from the ambient world around the audience of from the audience itself. In this way, the “art” created was inherently linked to the participation of those perceiving it.

            In the digital age, artists have created computerized works which respond and develop as a direct result of audience interaction. Janet Murray explores the world of the digital interactive narrative. She refers to the audience’s ability to interact with and see changes in a work as “agency”. In her writing, she points out that, “We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double click on a file and see it open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. However, we do not usually expect to experience agency within a narrative environment.” (Multimedia 381) The computer has offered us a way to transform the path of a narrative in ways that were not previously possible. Participants can navigate through and interact with an environment and get constantly new and changing results. These emergent behaviors can sometimes be exciting and unexpected, resulting in creations and permutations which even their author may not have been able to predict.

            In Digital Art, author Christine Paul explores a vast array of digital technologies through which these computer mediated Happenings are made possible. The examples below all share some very common traits. The rules which govern most of these works are often simple or intuitive. Many of the works approach user participation from drastically different directions. And finally, they all share the common trait of allowing the participant to have a say in their output.

            One common form of interactive art works is the installation. I found Jeffery Shaw’s The Legible City (Digital Art 72) to be an excellent example of an installation which used interaction for exploration. In The Legible City, participants navigated virtual city blocks composed entirely of text using a stationary bike. The speed and direction in which they traveled was determined by their interaction with the bike. No two experiences with the piece might turn out the same way as users had the freedom of choice, or agency, to decide how to navigate through this virtual world. Another interesting installation work is Perry Hoberman’s Barcode Hotel (Digital Art 91). Participants in this piece were common hotel visitors. They were given a bar code scanning wand which allowed them to create a modify objects within a virtual world by scanning different barcodes which determined such properties as the object’s shape and size. With one object representing each guest, the combined result is an interesting abstraction of the hotel’s inhabitants.  Installation pieces are of special importance because they allow the artist to present individuals with original and unique methods of interaction which would not otherwise be possible through a home computer.

            A digital interactive method which is of great interest to me is virtual and augmented reality. Participants commonly wear some sort of head set which projects a virtual world in front of their eyes. The user’s actions and motion then dictate their motion through the virtual space. Some of the more abstract examples, like Charlotte Davies’ Osmose (Digital Art 126), invite participants to explore completely alien worlds in unique ways. Osmose users wear a headset which monitors their breathing and balance to determine their motion through an abstract space. Some virtual reality works, like Thomas DeFanti and Dan Sandin’s The CAVE (Digital Art 128) seek to do away with the restrictive headset and instead place the participant directly in the virtual world. The CAVE allows users to stand inside a room where they are completely immersed in the virtual world and can interact with it by manipulating a wooden puppet. The puppet becomes their interactive avatar within this virtual world.

            There are hundreds of other works with similar unique interactive properties. Commercially, interaction has taken center stage with the introduction of the Nintendo Wii, which turns physical action into simple game play commands. There is seemingly no limit to the number of different ways and tools we could create for interacting with a computer. We could play a game using only our GPS location or the rate of our pulse. What is important is that these interactions are meaningful. This is one reason why many games which were intended for the standard controllers of the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3 feel distorted or shallow on the Nintendo Wii. Developers tend to abuse the unique method of interaction the Wii offers and it detracts from the overall impact of the game. It is through the work of past, present, and future digital artists that we can discover when and in what way to best utilize human computer interaction.

Jordan, Ken & Packer, Randal, eds. (2001). Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York: Norton.

Paul, Christiane. (2003). Digital Art (World of Art). New York: Thames & Hudson.

Blogpost 5: Expressive Affordances- Daniel Stensland

There are of course many aspects of digital media which are new, but as a whole the facilities of digital technology are a refinement of ideas stewing in the public mind for decades with the addition of various novel modes of interaction and expression.  The structure of digital technology is interesting in that it mirrors life.  It consists of very small operations which when combined together on a mass scale allow for quite complex interactions.  The result is a generative approach to creation, similar to the Happenings and the ready-mades of the Fluxus movement.  Each relies on a script and the primary aesthetic is found in the emerging result.  Generative art is less concerned with aesthetic or narrative form that arises, but rather the experimental space it inhabits.  

The increasing sophistication of the technology associated with digital art creates a growing ability to interact with a medium in an intuitive and engaging fashion.  As the user gains further levels of control over the input received by the relevant device and advanced, detailed feedback is returned, a greater synthesis will result between man and machine allowing for further exploration of realms previously unimaginable.  Exposure to new stimuli will create new creative spaces to populate with new creations.

Perhaps the most important and most unprecedented, at least on this scale, aspect of new media is the ability to network and share digital information at near instantaneous speed.  The ability to organize and interact en-masse encourages the spread of ideas and revolutions in thought.  Or at least a collection of cat photos with poorly spelled captions. 

Blogpost 4: Interactivity- Daniel Stensland

With the rise in video games and increased online activity it's easy to come to the conclusion that interactivity  in art and media is a new emergence, which the most recent slew of readings reveals is not the case.  Inspired by his interaction with other cultures and the way their audience would engage with the performers, Cage similarly broke the 4th wall and demanded his audience be aware with their relation to his work.  His most famous work it 4'33” which is that length of time in silence as the piano player sits in silence on the stage.  The resulting score is the usually unwanted noise a crowd of people sitting together- breathing, the occasional cough, in this case no doubt hushed whispers of confusion.  Instead of art as a portal to an abstract world of some inspired soul's creation, this creates a heightened awareness and appreciation of the world surrounding.  A similar concept led to the creation of Cage's inspiration for this melody, Robert Rasuhenberg's White Painting. This is, as the title may hint, a canvas painted white, with no other decoration or narrative.  On the wall in the Gallery Cage saw shadows from around the room and dust particles settle playfully on this otherwise blank slate.  Like his own music, Rasuhenberg's White Painting was a reflection of the world around it. (MM 10, TAOP 82)

A true hint to the procedural nature of interactivity made popular in modern media came in the happenings of the Fluxus movement.  Alan Kaprow's own first line serves as an indicator to the prominence of interactivity in these events, “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible” (MM 308). Happenings consist of a set of procedures which operate within certain boundaries with some exploratory or challenging object in mind; or perhaps just to question the otherwise unnoticed scripts in which a person might engage in every day life.  Such methods are central to many forms of digital art- a program itself being an automation, like a script. (MM 30)

While interesting, sure, neither of these art forms appealed to the masses, at least not with the mass appeal of, say, a video game.  A reason for this, and perhaps the right one, is that both Cage and Kaprow sought to eliminate the ego by focusing on the interactions between people and the environment. The video game, or at least the generic profile of such discussed by Murray, elevates the Ego to heroic proportion.  Aside from just the mechanics of interaction, the controller or keyboard may seem, at least superficially an awkward device, the video game appeals to the narrative aspect of self understanding and taps into the same areas of the brain that awards accomplishment in non-digital realms.  This is Murray's “story of the maze” (MM 383).  The video game taps into archetypal manifestations of reality and resolves the inherent conflicts in an abstract form.  The player becomes involved as they would if confronted with similar travails in real life, only this version is designed to let you win.  This is a refinement of the procedural antics of the Fluxus movement and the art which seeks create a space for interaction (MM 37).

Blogpost 3: Immersion- Daniel Stensland

Since so much has been said of Wagner we may as well bring up his once pupil and greatest critic- Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche there are two aspects to art.  The Apollonian, named for the Greek sun god, represents order and form.  The plastic arts would be included in this. Values prized by the Apollonian would order, beauty, individualism, creation, and discipline.  Contrary to this is the Dionysian: chaos, pleasure, destruction, dissolution of borders and wholeness of being. It is in the Dionysian, if we are to accept this dichotomy, that immersion becomes relevant.  Immersion is about destruction; of the self, of the senses, of the artist, of reality.  And it is because of this destruction that a new and potentially interesting substitution can be created. 

One method of creating immersion is the innovation of technology to engage the senses.  By the mid 20th century sight and sound had become common in 2 dimensional form by way of cinema.  Morton Heilig sought to expand this and build systems to provide more complete feedback. He viewed true art as being under the complete control of the artist- a reversal on Wagner's Total Art.  It is with machines, however, that are able to become a natural extension of the human experience and complete his vision.  Heilig's most well known creation was the Sensorama a sort of personal theater capable of simulated 3D movie, surround sound, limited motion, as well as wind and odor.  Future artist-engineers such as Ivan Sutherland and Scott Fisher would lead projects to expand on the multi-sensory approach both in feedback to the user and as input to manage the user's interaction with the virtual space. (MM ch 22-24)

Besides activation of the senses there are other ways to create immersion.  Instead of creating a new world why not reframe the one we already have?  The manifestations of this idea become interesting with modern media.  For instance, Roy Ascott's telematic art was less about anything aesthetic or controlling the experience of the observer. Rather, in telematic art the observer becomes the participant and any message arises from the interaction of the participant(s) and the tools constructed to facilitate this. (MM 33). Web 2.0 focuses on a similar concept. Instead of the former relationship of Content Creator-> User the most active sites came from either aggregators, gathering the work of the masses, or  tool sets allowing users to create and share their own content. Social media taps into the same instinct that allows us to be immersed in our own lives.

Blog 5 - Kimberly Wong

            Digital media is an ideal form to create extraordinary works.  There are certain affordances that are available only to digital media as opposed to non-digital media.  Reworking existing electronics allows for the creation of different forms of expression.  Artists use these changes to create works that are exclusive to digital media.  Such affordances are what make allow digital art to stretch to the extremes that it does.  Select Parks has numerous examples of how this is done; levelHead is the perfect representation of this because it combines simple cubes with 3D space.  The digital cameras and interactive value make this game very interesting and a good illustration of what can be done in the field.  In their article, Garcia and Lovink note that the Polish artist Krzystof Wodiczko believes that one must “…learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a migrant polis”.  By saying this, they are intoning that the spaces can be used to redesign what is already there and use it to their advantage.

 

            As mentioned in “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play” by Celia Pearce, game art combines two different arenas as one.  It causes the user to envision themselves in an alter-world where their common beliefs are suspended and they are transported to a different world where everything is done to the specifications of the artist.  There is a fine line between the boundaries of what keeps a game in play and the freedom of art to allow for a limitless canvas.  Growing out of board games and expanding to include more of a digital aspect, most game art aims to exist in a state that makes people want to play and find out the meaning.  

 

            Earlier pre-digital med also hint at these same affordances.  They do not specifically allude to them, but rather skirt all around the actual issues.  The New Games movement, as mentioned in “Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age” by Ludica, is an example of this because it deals heavily with creating new experiences and games, but does not include a technical aspect.  Initially, the games contained a purely physical aspect to them, such as in Slaughter, the Lap Game, or Knots.  Players played these games with a large group of people and the rules were simple.  As time progressed, the games became more complex and slowly started to incorporate more technology.  Squidball, the game where players wore reflective jackets to drive the game play pushed the movement a step further to the present day.  After a while, the game environment started to morph and tried to incorporate more interactive activities to them.  Pretty soon, new games were developed that were combinations of other games or activities.  Some examples include Rock-Paper-Scissors Tag, Dum-Dum-Da-Da, or Hug Tag.  These games are less about a digital media than they are simply about enjoying the creation of their “art” work.   Later, games such as Lineage 1, Uru, and Myst were introduced as technologically advanced that convert the outside events to a digital spectrum.

Works Cited

Pearce, Celia; Fullerton, Tracy; Fron, Janine; Morie, Jacki. (2005). “Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” In Conference Proceedings Digital Arts & Culture 2005, Copenhagen, December 2005.
Pearce, Celia. (2006). “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play.” Visible Language 40.1, Special Issue: Fluxus After Fluxus, January 2006.
Select Parks: http://www.selectparks.net
Web sites: Garcia, David & Lovink, Geert. (1997). The ABC of Tactical Media

Jared Caldwell Project 4: PC Load Letter

For this project, I wanted to parody the frustrations of being a Windows user.

When you click on the web browser, multiple browser flood the screen. When you click on the "My Computer" icon, you get an error message. Upon closing the error message, another error message box pops up.

http://jaredcaldwellav.googlepages.com/JaredCaldwellProject4.zip

Project 5: Blarger- Daniel Stensland

For this project I had two ideas.  One was to create a maze like program based on Ivan Sutherland's idea of a shape which morphed while tracking the movement of the eye- which would have potentially been cool.  Instead, inspired by Ray Earnes' Powers of Ten and the ability to use media to illustrate scientific principles, I decided to create a program illustrating the various dimensions (1-5 in this case) and demonstrating them by virtue of a set of agents controlled by a genetic algorithm.  MY logic behind this was that the 2D computer screen is often utilized to portray 3D images, why not crank it up a notch? This is of course fallacious due to the fact that the user is a 3rd dimensional creature (projected on the 4th) and is interpreting the computer image, but that shouldn't hinder the computer's ability to model.  

Due to my own 4th Dimension constraints the only aspect of the program I was able to complete was the prototype for the genetic algorithm to be known as Blarger.  The red spheres are Blargs and follow a parametric trajectory to the upper boundary of the universe where they die.  Dropping from this boundary are nubbins.  Should a Blarg collect 3 or more nubbins it spawns an egg, the green sphere,  which will in turn spawn into a new Blarg when it reaches the floor.  An unimplemented but intended functionality to this would be the aggregation of 'DNA' as Blargs collide which would eventually result in a diversity of color, trajectory, and volume of Blargs which would, given enough time, become optimized for nubbin consumption.

Here's the link: http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gth821h/humanitech/applet/index.html

I'll probably end up completing the program as I believe there's a lot of potential in the concept and I have already filled various pages of notebook paper and several unsuccessful C++ programs with possible applications of the concept. Also, if the Blargs are given a translucent, jelly fish like quality (out of processing's league) it should look pretty cool aesthetically when viewed 4th dimensionally.