“pickledweller—16 November 2007 — Granular material often jam when flowing through an orifice. These photoelastic disks are flowing through an opening in a quasi-2D hopper. Photoelastic material polarize light passing through them if they are squeezed, so you can see by their colorful signature how the particles push on one another and the hopper’s walls. They jam at the end of the clip by forming and arch at the opening.”
I started looking around youtube today for industrial processes that might make interesting sounds and stumbled upon these. I’ve been using some of the videos from the ‘basingstoke of the internet’ post for a sound/music project I’m working on and got hungry for more. The reactor pulses are fascinating little clips of video, there is something really nice about them being “one-event” videos, where nothing happens other than a change of light. The uppermost of the two pulse videos particularly - with it’s entirely black section. They are eerily sci-fi, looking like models from half-life and yet narrated in a dull, practical or even, tour-guide-esque way. Sometimes its quite easy to forget that nuclear power is a reality, a mundane part of the everyday - where Homer Simpson goes to work.
The google method of science (link to Kevin Kelly) is one in which all data from scientific experiments are uploaded to a database and phenomenal numbers are crunched. Google’s algorithms can already translate most languages to a reasonable degree of understandability through search and comparison. And the hypothesis is that there will come a time when science is entirely a job of number crunching. This got me thinking about a database of all artworks, described succinctly but in sufficient detail to discern the major characteristics.
This is the impossible part, how do you sufficiently describe Mona Lisa’s smile or something like that? All sufficiently powerful artworks rely to a great extent on being indescribable. Maybe the database would have to involve MRI scans or similar to gauge the type of psychological affect the artworks had on a audience survey. The database would have to include hard data, year of creation, dimensions, materials, value etc as well as subjective description.
Perhaps it would operate in a similar way to lastfm but with tags that could be rated - for example people would be able to *like* a description of a Warhol as Marilyn Monroe, print, New York, bright, pop, famous, red, obnoxious etc. with the best descriptions receiving more votes. Therefore pitching this description an an axis along with others with that tag.
The beauty of the idea would be to then explore the database in a computational manner, with all the artworks ever made we could make steps to understand the creative impulse, the art market, the flow of fashions and find new relationships between artworks, movements etc.
Once such a database was created it would be trivial to create maps and diagrams of all these works, maps of the psyche of the (art) world. Aesthetic timelines, semantic geography or visualisations of materials used around the world. Solidifying the ephemeral into a multi-dimensional object.
What shape would be the best way to visualise such a database? I imagine a simple sphere, with cave paintings in the centre and the avantgarde at the circumference. Played back in real time the connections between works trigger flashes of jerkily forked lightning reaching down to the core. Or perhaps we would see twisting trees spiralling around from aboriginal art to Damien Hurst or find unexpected architecture bridging art scenes in renaissance Italy and contemporary Williamsberg (I highly doubt that one though) or repeated trends in social concerns - watching the fluctuations of competing religious ideas. Visualising the decay of motifs and structures and seeing them emerge later with new meanings as their companions.
It would be fascinating to play back, like watching a little universe of thoughts inflate. With all this data could we then predict a big crunch? or a slow freeze? Could we generate a set of laws in this universe? Are the psychological constants? Could we generate a parallel universe with one of these constants slightly altered?
Once you have watched all of these, and maybe Ma by Takahiko Iimura (in a cinema) come back and look at the internet. Not the internet of posed GIFs, the aesthetic collections of images that shy people wear as clothes or the graphic designed universe of drop tables and CSS, nor the formal world of proper writers or enthusiastic bloggers. But the undercurrent of tedium. Dull scientific demonstrations, business meetings and people attending powerpoint presentations, the badly made corporate videos and the neo-geo-cities of research papers matched with hobbies. People say the internet is 90% full of pornography but I imagine that figure is much lower, the internet is probably 90% drab, scruffy and pop-up filled.At the end of the information superhighway there lies a vast, tedious, Basingstoke of imagery. Before YouTube you had to search through reams of FTP to find badly presented pieces of scientific data. Now they are all there if we choose to ruin our viewing history.
The hallmarks of this genre are naïve filming, clipped audio, no drama just stagnant data. Facts, presented to board meetings by the computer illiterate, product demonstrations from carboard box manufacturers, the in depth details of sandblasting different materials, picking and packing. Each a small showcase of the tedium of automated manufacturing, contextless graphs and presentations in foreign languages. It is easy to see these as accidents, like how run-down shop fronts create an undesigned aesthetic experience of a city.
Cassette Master
Recently I have become obsessed with an autistic teenager’s vision of the media. Cassette Master’s YouTube channel fascinates and amuses me. I love his belief that his dry, unedited analyses of tape recorders are what is important to broadcast and I find that I agree most of the time. These are important, unsaid things about, er… things and I find the implied relationship he has with these objects almost touching.
Everyone of my generation has a tape recorder that they grew up with, learned the knacks and got attached to. My friend Katie had one where you had to press pause on the second tape deck to stop it from clicking all the time, mine needed cable wiggling to get a line in and the audio was still bassless. The way Cassette Master investigates these as facts, gives them an importance as if they were fundamental natural laws, he either is incapable of or shies away from applying nostalgia and familiarity to the objects and appears to be living in a conceptual world of stiff record buttons, tape hiss and write-protect tabs.
Cinema of Things
All of our thoughts are anthropocentric, we watch films of emotional journeys, we watch videos of cats and give them human characteristics. We see movement as having character, we design cars to have the right smiley face/angry frown. We spend more time in the company of objects than people, in every room with two people there will always be four walls*. Yet we give so little appreciation to things. The architecture of our lives is made of ‘those little bits of fluff’, the accidental piles of folded post-it notes, the way keys rest on a table, the shambolic way coins don’t tessellate inside pockets, bookshelves that aren’t full (or are over-full) that become leaning stacks, fallen leaves and Cageian interactions of sounds as much as it is made up of our explicit emotional interactions with other human beings or with the designed world.
I’d like to argue that there is become a vast genre of stuff-video, the internet is crammed with videos of accident, a subterranean datascape of bits and pieces, odds and sods. And that this important not only as an historical archive but as something else, something more deeply connected with Ma and our perception of time-space/image-time-space/image-time-audio-space perhaps.
I’ve had many soups that have been on the verge of edibility, there’s half a tub of the Co-op’s carrot and coriander that’s been sitting in my fridge and is probably about to turn.There are non that I would class as unstable, I’ve never come across one that fluctuates between tasty and horrible. (Ok, maybe I’ve had hot and sour soup that I suspect was radioactive.) What if it repeatedly changed colour back and forth between red and blue for an hour? The soup doesn’t even have to move to become video - the soup==the film. The most hands off film imaginable, right? Just put a light under it and focus on a screen…
Emergent Film
Oscillating chemical reactions discovered by Boris Belousov are chemical reactions in which the concentration of one or more components exhibits periodic changes. In thin films these produce beautiful patterns which are governed by simple mathematical rules similar to those discovered in Alan Turing’s studies of morphogenesis. (There is a great documentary on the BBC iPlayer at the moment that explains this far better than I can called The Secret Life of Chaos.) But this got me thinking, this is the demoscene in reverse such as I have been looking for. Visible mathematical patterns that occur in real life in a controllable physical media. It’s the first time I have seen non-simulated versions of these equations which are quite frequent in a-life that could easily be watched in real time. There are a wealth of these videos online.
Chemical Oscillators
What about building a chemical shutter? It switches between transparent and black every 40ms so that another frame can be moved in front of the light?
What if we built a light sensor to operate like the optical-sound-head inside a projector? We have a perfectly functioning talkie made from goop. Goop!
Some Anti-Narrative Arcs
Above oscillating between chemicals within a Briggs-Rauscher reaction.
Below oscillating between actors within Jurassic Park. From XKCD see the whole chart here.
Above a video tracking Iannis Xenakis’ score for Mycenae Alpha - frequency in the Y axis.
Below excerpt from Anti-Narrative Comic #1 Pete McPartlan 2009 - ? in the Y axis.
So before I get back into writing here are some excerpts from old/incomplete posts and my lame excuses for quitting them:
From Les Dennis to Scrambled Eggs
I felt like I was watching a particularly bad episode of T4, with its self knowingly badly rehearsed, ramshackle style but without even the charisma of Steve Jones - which is saying something… I found it a complete insult to my intelligence, a pathetic string of in-jokes in silly costumes.
A short excerpt from a really scathing review of some local artwork that I thought better of - I have to live in this city…
The Hip-Hop Post
This was a long essay about hip-hop and it’s relation to materialism (like structural-materialism, not cash-money…). I tried to imagine a world where De La Soul made records called “Record In Which There Appear Scratches, Dirt-Particles, Dust and Mistakes” in a reference to George Landow aka Owen Land. I think what finally killed my enthusiasm for writing this post was writing this note, below.
Textural Harmony - So Why Is It Fresh?
It sounds great - but what the hell does it mean? I am entirely sure it was the basis of a fascinatingly salient point - but cancelled out by it’s own ridiculousness. My best guess, looking at it now - over 5 month later, is that I was making a point about improvisation and I was trying to find a way to discuss ideas of competitiveness, tension and harmony within free improvisation. Ultimately I think I was going to make a genuine argument that hip-hop is an extension of John Cage’s philosophy. The Wu-Tang as a (non-imperialist) embodiment of Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra…
I think it was a bit of a stretch to say the least.
Lost Ramblings
I now actually have a draft saved on here titled ‘The Hip-Hop Post’ but I keep getting lost - trying to argue with imaginary people about the conceptual importance of Roc Raider’s set at the 1996 DMC finals or the similarities between Prince Paul and Christian Marclay - and the former’s superiority. I realised as I was writing it that what I was saying was half-bullshit so I’m keeping hold of it until I can write down what it is I actually want to articulate…
Hmm, am I repeating myself?
I was completely surprised by this, the way in which Sharits described himself as similar to Rothko. I can’t stand Rothko, sure he knows his spectrum but the paintings don’t have the viscerallity to me that others seem to give them credit for. Experientially Rothko’s paintings are like a warm glow, a mug of horlicks or that ready brek feeling but watching Ray Gun Virus or Shutter Interface feels genuinely transendental - how I imagine witnessing a nuclear explosion wearing red-blue 3d glasses as your only means of protection. Being utterly transfixed by light and color, wiping your dead pixels away - describing it as a narcotic experience would be childish and unsatisfactory, but there is a hallucinatory element to it especially when you’re new to the films and don’t know what to expect. So whats the similarity? It appears to be maticulous attention to the visual pallette, mixing colours inside the viewer, pushing meaning from being the author’s responsibility. I think the last idea is what confuses and excites me about his work. When your ingredients are so minimal how do you then make an informed intelligent decision about mixing them together to create a complex, rich composition.
Hmm I think I disagree with some of this now - I think my description of the experience of watching Ray Gun Virus or Shutter Interface was a bit contrived for the sake of the article - it’s not easy this writing lark is it?
Epilepsy Theme Park - visceral experience vs naunced artwork
The post ended with this curious note. Hmm…
Recombinations, de-contextualisations, abstractions etc.
So… life is experienced, yeah? I think I can agree that much with myself. But experiences are quickly folded into memories, carted off and stacked up on shelves in the big ol’ library that is our minds. Some stored at different levels, some locked away in the precious room, some locked away because they are too dangerous… but most float around at reasonably accessible heights having been somehow tagged with the mental equivalent of a Dewey Decimal number (but probably more efficient). Describing that number is beyond me, but lets say we have a system that tags narratives with symbols for people, faces, words, objects, feelings, thoughts etc. What they are at this point isn’t important just the fact that all of these different concepts are equally malleable little nodes in our brains - I can just as easily think of a dog, the feeling of melancholy, my face, a cup of tea, chocolate, people, Buckminster Fuller or sellotape.
So lets not deal with symbols themselves because its hard to think of “a dog” as just an arbitrary dot in the landscape of the mind. So for simplicity’s sake I’ll deal with a further level of abstraction and just refer to my thoughts as letters. What I’m trying to describe is the rhythms and patterns of thoughts and see if they can be manipulated - or imagine a world where they can - in another manner to the way my ‘free will’ tends to do things.
During an hour maybe I have 26 thoughts, or twenty six nodes are activated (I hope it’s usually more…) if I could record those somehow that would give me a chronological list A-Z of symbols. There would be some order to that, one activation leads to another, occasionally there are tangents but they all make sense and are in some way connected. Now what if I could some how fold that alphabet in half and have my A thought at the same time as my Z thought. Is there a new symbol created for AZ? Would I get AZBYCX.. or AZ????BY????CX????? I feel we would now have to deal in two dimensions
I feel I’m talking gibberish….
I’ve included this one in its entirety I think it fairly comprehensively explains its own demise.
Summary
Phew, that felt like taking a huge mental dump. I’m now four bad essays lighter and that should help me get back to work and start writing more.
I blame the previous post, its earnestness and daft subject matter killed this blog. Dead.
Now somehow I have to perform a kind of resuscitation, thump it in the chest to get it moving again. It hasn’t been for lack of trying - there are 5 unpublished posts - each withering out as they lacked a conclusion… You can’t end an essay with “…” or “etc.” but I forget where I am, this isn’t a research journal. There is only one way to revive something like this and that is to just do. See if I can make a done.
I had the great fortune to see Mekas introduce a couple of films whilst staying in NY, Echoes of Silence by Peter Emmanuel Goldman at Light Industry and Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith at an event organised by the Film Maker’s Co-Op. The films were both very interesting that gave a glimpse 60s film scene New York maybe (I’ll write about them another time), but Mekas really stole the show. For an old (drunk?) guy, quite quiet and seemingly frail he was amazingly charismatic. I saw the title of this video and couldn’t resist watching it. He turns this very mundane (or glamorous if you prefer) tabloid story into a profound, meaningful, convincing argument to the human race.
Either that or I’m conned by the Mr Miagginess of his old-wise-man persona.
I like my soup chunky, none of this pureed nonsense.
Recently I’ve been thinking about a recipe for video soup. Film soup is easy. All you need is some stock and you can pickle it like Conrad, soak it in penny royal tea (see below) or leave it in the sea. All involve a physical process of erosion, corrosion - but the ingredients are conceptual.
Above: JENNIFER WEST Nirvana Alchemy Film (16mm black & white film soaked in lithium mineral hot springs, pennyroyal tea, doused in mud, sopped in bleach, cherry antacid and laxatives) 2007 , 2 minutes 51 seconds
So what is Video Soup and how do I make it? Lots of electronic devices all wired up to make ‘random’ decisions? The problem is electronics have to obey some logic - and that logic has to be decided at some point. Will it be gaussian noise? Uniform? Or maybe some kind of perlin noise, all of these are mathematical constructs and design decisions rather than conceptual decisions. In the real world this problem does not exist - the chemistry is decided for you by the great omnirigorous one, and kodak. Using elecronics one needs to define the world (set up the video matrix) before allowing it to run its course. You can’t pickle video.
So perhaps our video soup has to rely on something external - we may have to employ a camera. And soup.
Reality Bisque
Lets make a batch of soup. First you will need coloured objects, lego, hundreds and thousands, smarties or anything brightly coloured, try to vary the geometry and scale. Then you will need lights, these too could be different colours maybe these could be leds stuck to watch batteries so you can just shove them in the pan with the other ingredients. Now set up a camera above the ingredients and stir. You now have a cyclical kind of noise, unpredictable (or at least complex)- but obeying the laws of the real world.
But again this isn’t video soup, this is a cop out - this is just disgusting inedible soup, videoed. Damn.
Virtual Chowder
So maybe we just have to pick a world and use that. Let someone else define the parameters and let the soup supper commence. This is the world of Mario Clouds, the Radical Software Group etc. Is there a difference between exploting the properties of emulsion in the sea and exploiting the properties of Tony Hawks caught in a glitch. The code occasionally has holes that can be used for visual effect in the same way that film was never really designed to be eaten by crabs. ‘What the Water Saw’ is a film/world exploit to RSG’s player/game exploit.
We have video soup! But, it stinks of virtuality. Maybe thats just what video is - its a synthesised media. Trapped within layers of electronics, chips built by robots, CCDs encoding things into waveforms or worse still - bits, bits that can be translated into anything within a universal turing machine. Its maleability is a trade-off for opacity. Maybe digital video is the alchemy of turning information into data.
This blog is named after an installation by Wojtech Bruszewski titled “Od X Do X” in Polish (which is a lot nicer than the clunky English equivalent). I became aware of his work at a retrospective at Evolution experimental film festival in Leeds 2003. I found his investigations and ‘reality traps’ fascinating but it was the performance “Points” that really struck me. A piece where Bruszewski randomly placed dots on the screen, projecting multiple layers over the top of one another. A long shot with him placing them on the wall of his studio, a silhouette of a hand edging them into the frame and live on a huge ladder sticking 4inch dots to the actual cinema screen. “Points” illustrates an idea I that I call subjective randomness and managed to do it with a level of virtuosity that made me chuckle - it was such a simple, pure idea: position dots to appear random.
The positioning of dots to appear random is a difficult activity, the procedure is simple but a level of judgement is required to make sure that you don’t place the dots too evenly, you need to constantly reassess the densities, proximities and shapes. Constantly trying to escape accidental representation, running from geometry and dodging uniformity. And yet it is easy to do, there is no way to lose or win - everything about it is subjective - making it not only a test of your own boredom thresholds but a test of your internal pseudo-random number generator.
Star Trek - DECUS
The Star Trek Game
Star Trek video games are all shite. I’ve never played a good one and frankly the idea of playing any of the games on general release bores me to death. They all involve tedious role play, point and click narratives and space combat. But after (I’m ashamed to admit) a phase of going through charity shops and buying VHS tapes of Next Generation, DS9 and especially Voyager, I became obsessed with trying to hunt down a Star Trek game which is more of a galaxy simulator. In the series frequently the crew would come up against some space-time ‘anomlie’ and have to fix it with their ingenuity. The game would be an open ended affair where you fly from system to system firing tacheon beams into wormholes, zapping nebulas with chronoton particles all that kind of stuff. Based on real feeling but advanced physical laws. Balancing a richly complex ecosystem of hyper-physical phenomena within a living galaxy.
Obviously, this game doesn’t exist. So I’ve spent a lot of my brain’s spare CPU cycles thinking about how I could implement this myself. First off I would need an Elite style generative galaxy (preferably small enough to fit on a floppy disk too…) but it would need, not only a realistic Newtonian physics engine (although maybe Einsteinian would be better) but also, an invisible layer that included all the Star Trek tacheon nonsense - the hyper-physics. I gave up. But I still occasionally check home of the underdogs to see if maybe I missed something.
The problem with my idea lies in the level of abstraction. I was thinking about something that works on a very low level of representation. When you think about the mechanics you realise you would have to maybe use colours to represent different physical properties, use screen readouts or even blips on a radar. So the game would have to incorporate a simulation of itself in order to convey anything to the player. What if the game just used the radar blips? Points on a grid, different coloured markers and so on. The fun I’m imagining would come from balancing a physical economy of space, the mutation of time and the re-ordering of events. I got to thinking that maybe this game does already exist - and I have just been looking in the wrong place.
Dots and Lines - Pete McPartlan
Infinite Go
A continuous galaxy, an analogue frontier where every interaction is possible. Where placing pieces disturbs a spatial field, the game I’m looking for is Infinite Go. It took me a long time to realise that I’ve been playing it for a long time: Making marks on paper. Trying to corner off territory, win some areas, but know in advance where I am losing and allow white to keep half the board, tightly encircling elsewhere. Trying not to annex your pieces, creating loops or ko. At its most simple level it is again the game of attempting to place random marks on a piece of paper. At its most complex it could be a Sol Le Witt wall drawing or an intricate Nasreen Mohamedi. But it need not end there, the game of Infinite Go is more nomic than Go. A typical game could end in Van Gogh’s sunflowers or an erased De Kooning - the interaction with the page is elastic in many dimensions: geometric, psychological, intellectual or physical. Like the Glass Bead Game each result can be classified in terms of the game, its elegance, eloquence and intelligence. In this mode we can look at Bruszewski’s performance as an absurd game of Tri-Dimensional-Infinite-Go, using film to play against a temporal third dimension.
Afterword
I hope this random scattering of ideas will eventually take on some meaning and act as an introduction to some of the writing in the rest of the blog. Hopefully as it goes on it will build up a better picture of my semantic web. Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to comment.
