STEIM

Touchstone
Sally Jane Norman, Michel Waisvisz and Joel Ryan

Listeners are transported by good musicians. Similarly, the artful deployment of gesture over time, as in dance, in juggling, or in puppetry, triggers instant, almost intuitive recognition amongst viewers. We sense the mix of control and risk taken by creators who play with time, eliciting uncanny architectural rhythms from its predictable flow. This is what makes their art breath-taking.

One working principle in designing electronic instruments is that they should demand the same level of playing effort as traditional musical instruments. Every instrument has its difficult and easy fingerings, its rough and smooth terrain. A singer's effort in reaching a particular note is precisely what gives that note its beauty and expressiveness. The effort that it takes and the risk of missing that note forms the metaphor for something that is both indescribable and the essence of music.

At STEIM we have come to the conclusion that the resultant streamlined aesthetics, purged of the seamy residues of physical exertion, is totally artless : unfelt execution has given rise to unfelt and unfeeling work.

STEIM is currently working with a tightrope walker, tracking her small incidental movements rather than her actual steps. When the «noise» of her efforts to maintain her balance is translated into raucous sound, the audience dramatically rediscovers the instability of the tightrope. We cross the rope with our ears, and we cross the rope with our inner ears.

Hybrids are thus wrought by two strategies: raw data can be tracked and culled from the flesh of the living world, then sublimated to yield computer-generated chimeras, but the reverse holds true, when digital entities are wedded to and steered by real phenomena tracked in the physical world.

This essay covers some essential elements of electronic performance. Since the late sixties, the members of STEIM have been engaged in the design and performance of electronic instruments, and their writing offers incredible insights into these two parallel topics.

This discussion revolves around performance, something that is not necessarily narrative. However, it does seem evident that an engaging physical performance is inherently narrative, as a story develops over time with the performer at the center. I am looking for a ways to tell a larger story, something beyond the performance. At the same time, it is important to be aware of the nature of electronic performance, and the ways in which the performance itself can become narrative and dramatic.
Combining a dramatic, physical performance with a larger narrative unfolding in time is the ultimate goal of sosolimited.

Manifesto in Performance Captioning

I now have a clearer idea of what I want to accomplish this semester. I began studying memory and narrative so that I could bring these ideas to the work I have been a part of in sosolimited. I was also concerned with increasing my skills with mobile hardware. Merging these two goals has been problematic. Here are my proposals for two specific projects. One explores narrative, the other memory, but they both come together in a live performance.

Narrative project: Text Sampling

Earlier in the semester I was designing a reading machine that would try to remember a key phrase in a nearly endless stream of words. This machine used an algorithm to rate the phrases it encountered and saved what it believed was the most interesting text. My original sketch of the piece was limited by the predictablity of this algorithm and its inability to find actually meaningful phrases. Furthermore, there was no real connection between the work and the audience, and there was no compelling reason to watch the machine in action.

Addressing these shortcomings, I am proposing a change in direction. Rather than try ot have the microchip pick the relevant phrases, the user should be able to do so in real time. I am interested in converting this reading machine into a text-based sampler/sequencer - kind of a silent MPC-2000. The input and output are text, but like the MPC, the user is composing with existing streams of data. This sampler will specifically be used in live performance.

I will begin by using the Closed Captioning from a television signal as the input stream. By changing the channel, the user can control what is entering the system.

Sampling: The ability to reecord a phrase on the fly
A unique story can be told by selecting specific parts of a text. In fact, given enough input text and time, any story can be told. The relation between the new story and the original text becomes interesting and adds to the narrative. Once sampled, these clips can form part of a library.

Sequencing: Organizing these pieces in terms of how they connect to one another and how they loop.
How will the samples form a composition? Will it become a static graphic layout or something that is changing with time? In what ways can a text perform?

Because this project deals with text, it needs to address that fact that there are many additional layers to the medium. It should have some functionality that we don't find in an audio sequencer/sampler.

1. Setting key words and searching for them
2. Counting occurances of words
3. Associating a word with its neighbors
4. Archiving the incoming text so that it can found later

These additional features will help the user establish themes within the narrative. You can link remote parts of a text or to connect the incoming stream of text to previous parts of the performance.

Memory project: Visual Recording

I am interested in a leaving physical traces as part of a performance or as the result of a performance. A recording can be made of a live audio performance and this recording can be played back at some time in the future. I am concerned with finding a way to record a similar performance in text so that the results of the performance can be saved in some way.

As I develop the text sampler, I want to keep in mind this ultimate output. This device will most likely be some kind of printed, but could be abstracted in a number of ways. It doesn't have to print the words themselves but could look at characteristics of the narrative.

Giving a physical quality to both the performance and the output has become a goal of the semester. I feel that I'll be in a better position to think about this output stage once I have successfully created the text sampler and performed with it. I plan to keep this ultimate goal in mind and return to it when I have made significant progress with the first project.

Bergson : On the Survival of Images

In describing the relation of the material world to our present and future, Begson establishes the power of the objects surrounding us. These physical objects form the limits of our future; they define the set of possible new memories we might create. I think it is useful to keep this in mind while designing any work concerning memory. Not only can a work envoke past memories, it will also create new memories. In Bergson's opinion, matter defines memory.

"We have shown that the objects which surround us represent, in varying degrees, an action whcih we can accomplish upon things or which we must experience from them. The date of fulfilment of this possible action is indicated by the greater or lesser remoteness of the corresponding object, so that distance in space measures the proximity of a threat or of a promise in time. Thus space furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for its property to remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open." -144

"If matter, so far as extended in space, is to be defined (as we believe it must) as a present which is always beginnning again, inversely, our present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say a system of sensations and movements and nothing else." -139

He clarifies his conception of the present as a state of "universal becomming." The present is constantly making itself anew.

"We reply that the question is just whether the past has ceased to exist or whether it has simply ceased to be useful. You define the present in an arbitrary manner as THAT WHICH IS, whereas the present is simply WHAT IS BEING MADE. Nothing IS less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisble limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past" -150

We move between our near and distant past in varrying degrees. In order to return to memories, we make them part of our present. Another way to look at it is that we physically place ourself in the past in order to remember, or the past becomes material when we remember.

"But the truth is that we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it. Essentially virtual, it cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day." -135

"... from the moment that is becomes image, the past leaves the state of pure memory and coincides with a certain part of my present" -140

"What we have to explain, then, is no longer the cohesion of internal states, but the double movement of contraction and expansion by which conciousness narrows or enlarges the development of its content." -166

From this conception of the mind, we can see how any two images might be in some way connected.

"To take similarity first: however profound are the differences which separate two images, we shall always find, if we go back high enough, a common genus to which they belong, and, consequently, a resemblance which may serve as a connecting link between them" -163

I think last point is interesting when we compare it to the narrative techniques of Legrady and Calvino. Given a number of images, we can draw connections between the two and begin to form a narrative out of the distant pieces. The result is more than the individual images alone as the connections between the images become the foundation of the story.

Feedback and Blowup

In Antonioni's film, the protagonist draws a story out of a sequence of photographs he takes of a pair lovers in a park. As the photographer Thomas sequentially blows up certain regions of the photographs, he believes he has uncovered first a plot and then a murder. The turth behind the images is never revealed, and the audience is left to question whether such events actually transpired.

This process of teasing a dark narrative out of seemingly innocuous footage is repeated in The Conversation. In the case of Blowup, the author of the images actually photographs one of his prints and enlarges that in order to see deeper into the original. This feedback loop first reveals the figure of a gunman hidden in the trees and then shows a the outline of the victim's body. The images themself are ambiguous enough to suggest that they might simply be the result of the feedback loop. Thomas returns to the park and does indeed see the body, but there are no signs of foul play. There is not enough evidence to verify the rest of his story.

I think the idea of pulling a dark narrative out of spontaneous footage is interesting and worth persuing. When given a sequence of images, the audience naturally tries to tie them together into a story. In this film, as well in The Conversation and the work of George Legrady, the artist is curating the selection of source material in such a way the audience can develop their own narrative.

Jack Burnham and Duchamp

Burnham, Jack. Beyond Modern Sculpture. George Braziller, 1967

"He brings to light what has always been suspect concerning the artistic use of machines: namely, that it is extremely difficult to produce a physical system which strives towards psychic ambiguity and liberation and, at the same time, remains a devcie conceived upon the precepts of physical restraint (i.e., conceived as a mechanical artifact) -218

"Kinetic Art has been a gradual attempt throughout this century to produce non-representational art using the parameters of real time and motion" -218

"Ideas have a way of seeming unthinkably passe and then, all at once, remarakably relevant, even to the casual observer" -224

"Ever present in Duchamp's efforrts is the intimation that nothing is gained in art without losing something of equal or greater value." -226

"Duchamp maintained that the physical properties of mechanics had been falsified in their practical artistic value. In a word, they were "unartistic" - a strange sobriquet from such an iconoclast. By this, he was alluding to the direct application of machines to art so that the machines could "produce" art - as they might be sent to work producing goods for a manufacturer. The machine, he seemed to imply, was only an object worthy of philosophical speculation, not a philoposher or creator in its own right." -229

"The perhaps it could begin to live, in doubt and indecision, as human beings do" -230

Some further investigations of Duchamp

from: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/duchamp.htm

"One of the features of this work is that it subverts the conditions described by Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here is a work that simply cannot be reproduced technically. If you want to view it you must go to Philadelphia. The artwork, taken as a whole, is an experience that connot be achieved with out a single and present observer—viewing it is part of the action comprising the work—one looks through two holes and then on through another. Duchamp has argued that the work of art is not performed by the artist alone: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” There is a feeling of paradox in this, however, given that “given” does not exploit the spectator’s creative capacities in any active or direct way but rather positions the spectator, whose “act” the work engages."

The Large Glass:

"Some figures are bumpy and cloudy, and contain the dust left on them during the time which the unfinished work lay dormant, which seems to be an attempt at capturing the dynamic passage of time in a sedate work."

George Legrady Studio

Transitional Spaces : Siemens Kulturprogramm

"I use the term narrative primarily to mean the passage from one state to another. And i use it in an active sense: the fire goes out, I drop the wineglass and it breaks, etc. Such actions are transitional and consist of three states. First there is a siutation, which is disturbed in some way and then results in a new situation that refers back to the first." -13

quotes Tzevtan Todorov:
"An ideal narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established, the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical." -5

"So, for me, narrative implies an analytical approach whereas phenomena implies a kind of mythifying process--it is the creating of an experience without the revealing of how it works" -15

From his own site:

"Emerging from digital media there is a kind of transformation of several traditions: montage, narrative, temporality. A rethinking or extension of the issues surrounding the simple semiotic constitution of the image, and a concern with the "space" of electronics become vital. In electronic media, a new range of problems invoke not merely the formal issues of juxtaposition and association, but those of the interplay (or collision) of text, image, and sound in space and time. Instead of resolving as a singular images, the flow of associations emerges as a diversified temporal narrative."

Impressions:

Legrady is too generous with his use of the term narratve. Within Transitional Spaces I don't see a narrative component per se. A dynamic display of content is not necessarily narrative, and my research actually focuses on adding a narrative element to an already dynamic content. It seems to me that he applies it to any situtaion that alternates between an active and static state. In my opinion, this periodic motion is not inherently narrative.



I'm interested with the development of a story over time. In some of Legrady's projects, audience participation and the archive of data help define a narrative. From what I can gather of the project from his description, I think he is successful at this in "Slippery Traces." A series of postcards, linked together through a database of associations, can be naviagted by the user to form a meta-narrative. The postcards are chosen to represent certain themes and the personal history of the author. In a way, he is curating the narrative, but allowing the user to define the development of the story. This is a powerful idea. Much of the Calvino's text also revolves around the idea of the reader creating their own narrative out of a fragmented collection of texts. Curation allows the author to narrow the content in such a way that a meaningful story can develop, but at the same time, interaction allows the audience to participate in the development of the story.