Architectural Art.... And Advertising?

Just a quick post, as I was discussing the idea of "architectural projection" this morning and its considerations in Art, Advertising, Technology, and the public space.

This is an amazing example of what these types of projections are all about. Spend some time on Vimeo looking around at others... What do you think? Where is this headed? And how come we don't see more of this in the US (projections are a common public art performance around Europe)?

555 KUBIK_ extended version from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Telenoika Audiovisual Mapping @ Kernel Festival, Desio, 1 & 2 july / 2011 from Telenoika on Vimeo.

When Things Get Surreal

A week ago, during a discussion on John Cage, someone asked me about theories on "random order" and synchronicity out of chaos. There were a few people who, during the presentation of John Cage that I was giving with my teammate, did not understand the rhyme or reason for music as chaotic as what Cage was putting forward.

But I do, and I'd like to share a bit of why, or what, has led me to have an understanding about chaos and its role in control and creation.

1) This book.

 I read this back at the end of high school right when I was applying to schools (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Olin, Stony Brook) for an EE/EME major. I love this book for the way it is written and tied together, and the way it is phrased to a nontechnical perspective just as much as it is to a bioengineering grad student. But mostly I love it because it helped change my life. The perspective and thought that shapes and patterns (which turn into crowds and events when human hands become involved) evolve out of pure random order made me look at things differently. It explains why trees grow like they do, how lightning is formed and how you win the lottery. 

 I am also a fan of Strogatz's book on Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos which I read during my sophomore year at Stony Brook. Something about it just worked with my brain at the time, I was learning signal analysis and microfabrication. One of my professors was working on Effects of zinc and tellurium doping on thermophotovoltaic cells, and talked about his work during lectures a lot. A few months later something clicked in my head and I realized I wanted to be a designer, not an engineer, and was left realizing that life was going to change if I wanted to do what I wanted.

2) The I-Ching and Buddhism.

My parents raised me to be rather open minded, and part of my childhood involved lots of explorations of foreign culture. This was mostly due to my extensive traveling from age 2 and on. I was made aware of the tenets of Buddhism when I was very young as my grandfather was a practicing Buddhist, American living in Brazil. While traveling in Japan in 2002, I was at the hight of my interest in Eastern religion and took the opportunity to read my i ching in a temple in Kyoto. I would recommend everyone come to understand what this is and how it can impact their life, regardless of their belief in the guiding forces of order that exist around them.

3) Lots of music.

Artists like Chris Clark, John Cage, Amon Tobin, even Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the growing-in-popularity Flying Lotus or harsher sounds like Skrillex or lots of drill'n'bass/dubstep musicians utilize this chaos in their music. It is not a new theme. Dizzy Gillespie was making crazy, uncoordinated notes before most of these people lived (née Cage), and his music was as popular as ever. Constantly exploring new music and putting up with the things that don't make much sense will open your mind faster than anything to the understanding that a lot of things can be called music. I'll leave this blog off with some examples to hopefully spark some further music interest and mind expansion.

Speed of Thought, Looking for Fulfillment

Sometimes I wonder why I am so busy.
Every morning, before my alarm goes off, my phone makes plenty of noises and chirps and squeaks to let me know that robots are sending me email. In a half-dreamy state of grog, I pick up my phone and look. Sales on car parts. Free movie rental when you buy a soda. Write to your senator to encoura..... zzzzzzz.
Twenty minutes later it's the same thing. Half an hour after that, my alarm actually goes off and I sit up.
And check my email.
Why? Who am I waiting to hear from, God? A supermodel? Someone offering me a job? What makes my brain make my body think that they might be emailing me at such ungodly hours when even most birds are upset that there are birds already chirping. All I know is, when I do get a relevant tidbit - not necessarily e-mail, or a phone call, or a face to face conversation - it excites my brain and makes me feel alive. Dopamine, rushing in because what I've been looking for is finally there. It's like love. You don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
But it is a smaller event than that, something much more immediate and visceral, but fleeting. It is falling in love with a moment, an object, an email, someone's smile, for just a minute. It excites our brains and makes us feel alive, fulfilled. The view from the top of a mountain can do that, so can walking through a park with your headphones on at just the right moment.

So what does this have to do with technology? Recently I watched an ABC special called Science and Spirituality where they were creating "religious experiences" in the brain. Well, if that's true, couldn't we shoot lasers into our brain to trigger dumps of dopamine and endorphins? I do not mean the uncontrolled rush that comes from certain illicit drugs, as the nature of their illegality makes finding the right "amount" something best left to Timothy Leary. But what if we could zap ourselves - and make ourselves smile, fulfilled, happy, for just a moment out of the day? Not to say we are all depressed - and neither is the author - but sometimes a moment of pure joy is a blissful spark to a dull day.

Now, while there are drugs that do this, as have been mentioned, some of them apparently do it well. A major bit in the written news lately (as I do not consider much TV News worth watching) mentioned that Johns Hopkins University had found the "sweet spot" for doses of psychoactive mushrooms, stating that small but effective doses over long periods of time are amazing for the human brain and mood. Sounds like a natural Paxil - and some part of me wonders why we don't take nature more seriously more often, but medicine is just a part of the technological machine as anything else.

Sexuality and Singularity

As part of the Art & Tech class, I've read Slavoj Zizek's No Sex, Please, We're Post-Human! which touches on a wide variety of topics from the Turing test in relation to male/female conversations, Kurzweil'd theories of a biotech singularity, and the sexuality of the internet as a facet of perversion in our lives.
The full essay is available at http://www.lacan.com/nosex.htm, but to continue on a point I must quote most of a paragraph from the writing

...Even advocates of cyberspace warn us that we should not totally forget our body, that we should maintain our anchoring in the "real life" by returning, regularly, from our immersion in cyberspace to the intense experience of our body, from sex to jogging. We will never turn ourselves into virtual entities freely floating from one to another virtual universe: our "real life" body and its mortality is the ultimate horizon of our existence, the ultimate, innermost impossibility that underpins the immersion in all possible multiple virtual universes. Yet, at the same time, in cyberspace the body returns with a vengeance: in popular perception, "cyberspace IS hardcore pornography," i.e. hardcore pornography is perceived as the predominant use of cyberspace. The literal "enlightenment," the "lightness of being," the relief/alleviation we feel when we freely float in cyberspace (or, even more, in Virtual Reality), is not the experience of being bodyless, but the experience of possessing another - aetheric, virtual, weightless - body, a body which does not confine us to the inert materiality and finitude, an angelic spectral body, a body which can be artificially recreated and manipulated. Cyberspace thus designates a turn, a kind of "negation of negation," in the gradual progress towards the disembodying of our experience (first writing instead of the "living" speech, then press, then the mass media, then radio, then TV): in cyberspace, we return to the bodily immediacy, but to an uncanny, virtual immediacy...

What comes to mind about this thought of "internet sex" is something that has been brought up recently in recent news but something I don't want to delve into beyond what I need to. For those who don't know, someone (important) tweeted something (inappropriate) on the internet in the form of a picture. He got in trouble for it, sort-of admitted to it, then admitted to it when he couldn't deny it much more. Well, this guy is now seeking "rehabilitation" and counseling for his inappropriate use of the internet. He fell into the hole of hardcore internet "pornography" (where everything is pornographic and lewd; aside from being a place filled with actual pornographic images) and came to a point where the appropriateness of real life was removed from his being. He forgot that he lived in the real world, and made a decision on the internet that impacted everything about his real life.

(Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

 This brings up an interesting point. When an addiction to the internet warrant rehabilitation? I understand that this man's case is at one end of the scale - as he basically published lewd photos while in office - but people have been sent away for this because of playing too much WoW. If we're all moving towards a singularity where our bodies are combined with computers and we're all connected to a global/international/interplanetary network, who is going to go to rehab for an addiction to being on the internet? Is my addiction to car parts going to translate over to the bionet and get me in trouble there? Hell, are we even going to have cars? Maybe some of us can be built into cars. I don't know if I'd like that as a permanent thing, but I'm sure it's better than being shamed for putting my "manly silhouette" on the internet.
So as part of the singularity, who are you going to be? We're no longer going to be able to chose what we put on the neural network as we will all be thinking together. Where your head is and where you want your head to be is not only a major part of what you'll be when the singularity comes, but what you'll be in real life. Fill your head with thoughts of girls across the country and your life in "tweets"?
Well, that's what you'll get known for, Weiner.

Intellectual Property and Skating... LOCALS ONLY!

When skateboarding started en masse (in different pockets across the US in the mid 70's) as more than just a novelty item, and people began to skate manmade items and find the joy in gleaming, people began to treat some of this property as "theirs." This created problems with skaters - groups of skaters and other groups of skaters would come to fight with each other as if they were gangs (Thrashin' is mandatory viewing, Romeo and Juliet set with skateboards).
Today, this still happens. People argue with each other about what "spot" belongs to who. I'll agree - sometimes there are secret plots you want to keep to yourself. But in a world of millions of people, and more importantly, living in a country like the US, people are going to come, and find what you have found. Sometimes they'll find the same place or start developing the same style as you, right around the same time, devoid of contact with you. But some people will take it personally, even though it has nothing to do with them.
How does play into technology? Technology is much like style (an idea visualized) or spots (the idea of property). Sometimes, technologies are developed simultaneously. Sometimes not. Ideas can be built upon - if we didn't have the black and white tube TV, we'd never have our flatscreen plasmas. If a skater takes your trick, gets used to it, and then builds upon it, that's progress.
What's my point? Let's all relax a little bit about ideas - they should be shared, and built upon, instead of hoarded. Because when people take things too seriously, ideas - like spots, styles, or entire sports - can be stifled.

Actor Meets Artist

While browsing the internet's more wonderful pockets of fact and memorabilia (some would call this procrastination, but I prefer to call it "research") I came across an interview of Maria Abramovic, a performance artist who has been credited with being a strong forward force in the field. However, unlike being interviewed by a reporter or TV personality, she is interviewed by James Franco (Freaks and Geeks, Pineapple Express, 127 Hours) which makes it seem more of a blending of the arts. They cook together and talk about religious practices in foreign cultures, amongst other things.



I am trying to find a longer copy of this (it's from the Wall Street Journal), but in the meantime, I should mention that I came across this on Awesome People Hanging Out Together, a photoblog which is inspiring and sometimes rather curious, like this gem - Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails), Jon Stewart, and Marilyn Manson hanging out together.

Kurzweil's Singularity

As this blog is part of an Art & Technology class, I'll be using this post to further the discussion of Raymond Kurzweil's theory of a Technological Singularity, both as a valid scientific theory and as a self-fulfilling prophecy - much as most science fiction and futurism seems to fall into.

Kurzweil's theory doesn't necessitate my full explanation. In short, he states that in 2029 we will have technologically advanced (especially through biotech, quantum computing, and genetic modification) far enough that our technologies, our computers and our networks, will be tied in as one with our biological selves. Some people believe this is complete hootenanny, while many people agree that this seems like a theory worth listening to. To add some credit to Kurzweil's theory, he has correctly predicted the creation of the internet along with other current technologies not only in description, but in time.

Another part of this theory that becomes a bigger picture piece is the fact that strongly backed and widely believed theories like this end up becoming more-or-less true either because people force them in that direction (through science, marketing, change in public image), or people justify seeing them as having happened, i.e. in 2029 we may have computer screens implanted in our skin, and some people might take that to be some sort of singularity. Part of this is a social movement towards technology. Another part of this has to do with the people making, creating, and solving major technological movements - usually "nerds." In Lawrence Krauss's The Physics of Star Trek, he makes the major argument that sci-fi - things like Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, science fiction books even bleeding into Kurzweil's realm of futurism - are a major force in where we go with technology because the people creating technology find their inspiration in their joy. Their love for the ideas of new technologies and advanced computers is not founded by the enjoyment of taking in these creative works, but it is certainly fueled by it. Who doesn't want to be beamed back home at the end of the day? Who doesn't want to take the load of their brain and their body with benefits of biotechnology?

All I know it it has to be better than a Josh Hartnett movie.