Paid Programming

sosolimited presents:
"PAID PROGRAMMING"

have you been looking for an audiovisual
performance that includes incredible video
filters and crisp typography?

you're tried diets, you've tried exercise, and still
nothing satisfies your craving for projection?

well, for six easy payments of absolutely nothing
you can try sosolimited FREE for the entire evening!

// TONIGHT!
// WEDNESDAY april 26
// middlesex lounge
// 10 PM

similar shows can cost up to $25 at a nightclub.
sosolimited would be a STEAL at $10, but we're
making this special offer available to you for
nothing, and on top of that we're throwing in a
LIVE dj set by our good friend Brynmore.

operators are standing by.

www.sosolimited.com
www.middlesexlounge.com

On April 26, sosolimited performed a live set with source footage that was entirely infomercials. A series of text filters parsed the incoming closed captions and searched for specific text. These useful snipets controlled a set of infographics throughout the performance. If the program recognized a price, it added it to an ongoing tally and displayed the subtotal on the screen. If it found a sentencing that began with the word "you" it displayed it on top of any other graphics. These filters were attempting to direct the audience to specific moments of consumerism and desire in the endless stream of words and images flickering on the projection screen.

These filters were a first attempt to bring specific elements of a live media broadcast to the foreground of an artwork. Specific moments of an unpredictable feed were highlighted and separated from the endless stream. This is the direction I plan on taking any work involving broadcast. My goal is to prepare a system to find and expose certain aspects of a television feed that might otherwise be ignored. This example was carried out as part of an audiovisual performance that had to satisfy a number of goals, most importantly to encourage people to shake their ass and buy more alcohol. I plan on expanding on these themes in a physical installation.

What story down there awaits its end?

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

In her discussion of Calvino's novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, N. Katherine Hailes believes that the story is concerned with the nature of literature in a world were the words are represented as digital information, subject to mutation, deletion, and error.

"The textual body may be dismembered or ground into digital word dust, the narrative implies, but as long as there are readers who care passionately about stories and want to pursue them, narrative itself can be recuperated." -42

I found her description to be connected to my own exploration of narrative and returned to Calvino's novel for a critical read along these lines. In my opinion, Calvino is looking at reading and writing a novel from countless angles, one of which involves a rethinking of literature based on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. He is primarily creating a story for readers about the endless possibilities of reading.

Calvino is able to weave a tale of a seemingly random stack of novels, but it is important to realize that he is responsible for all the content in the book. The novel is a display of his finesse as a writer, as he is able to write chapters in a dozen literary genres. To me, this is an argument about the power of the writer over any algorithm. Calvino writes circles around any generative text. He painstakingly curates the content and its delivery.

In the beginning of the semester I was exploring algorithms for reading and textual analysis. It is becoming clear to me that without a focused curatorial approach, there is no power in these computer programs. At first I was looking at ways to draw meaning out of streams of text, but now I am looking at ways to highlight specific content within these streams. The algorithm is powerful when it has to find and emphasize, or even act upon a specific target. Otherwise it is nothing more than a glorified random number generator.

Although the Hailes might argue otherwise, it is not the reader who creates the story, it is the author. By seemingly doing the opposite, Calvino proves again that authors still write the best books.

A selection of quotes:

"You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into atoms and molecules passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flows of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy." p26

"'I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.'" p49

Leaning from the steep slope:

"There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive." p55

"How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?" p72

Looking down in the gathering shadow:

" I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime ... " p109

"The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-- for example the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both --- must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which break off from their common story." p153

"... in the case of the novel you must consider that in the succession of sentences only one can pass at a time, whether it be individual or general, whereas the breadth of the visual field and the auditory field allows the simultaneous recording of a much richer and more complex whole." p203

White Noise

Media Saturation and Consumerism

White Noise sets the stage for an exploration of media saturation and consumerism, the two themes I am beginning to focus on. Don DeLillo offers a satirical but poignant look at the ways broadcast media is penetrating the American home and family unit. He offers examples of our obsession with technology and the mesmerizing power of the television signal. His vision of American society is an exaggeration of trends that were present in mid-eighties America and are even more truthful today. It is obvious that broadcast media influences our lives, our goals and desires, and our family structure. I am concerned with the political power it exerts over us by encouraging consumerism and the desire for material goods.

The power that consumer products exert on us:

"I like clearing my arm from the folds of my garment to look at my watch. The simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish. Decorative gestures add romance to a life. Idling students may see time itself as a complex embellishment, a romance of human consciousness, as they witness the chairman walking across campus, crook'd arm emerging from his medieval robe, the digital watch blinking in late summer dusk" p9

"'Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.'" p23

"Here we don't die, we shop." p38

He sees the American household as signal:

"Murray came over to talk to the two girls and Wilder, something he did from time to time as part of his investigation into what he called the society of kids. He talked about the otherworldly babble of the American family. He seemed to think we were a visionary group, open to special forms of consciousness. There were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed." p100

"I'd been seeing colored spots for years but never so many, so gaily animated." p39

The television signal and its presentation of reality:

"Waves and radiation. Something leaked through the mesh. She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed." p102

"It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself." p137

The production of stimuli:

"'Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of intercommunication is awe-inspiring. It's like a galaxy that you can hold in your hand, only more complex, more mysterious.'

'Why does this make you proud to be an American?'

'The infant's brain develops in response to stimuli. We still lead the world in stimuli.'" p180

To overcome the fear of death:

"You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature." p272

In Search of Lost Discourse

In this sketch I was concerned with how a small device with limited physical memory could possibly remember something as expansive as Proust's "In Search Of Lost Time". I looked into a number of natural language processing algorithms, all of which depended on huge internal data sets and intense computational power. In my research I came across the ideas of discourse analysis as defined by Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas and specifically the idea that phrases of words are in constant competition. I decided that one way to remember Proust would be to remember a meaningful phrase from the book, something that stood out from the rest.

I designed a fitness algorithm that tests a phrase for the average length of words, the longest and shortest word (and the distance between these values and the average), as well as the frequencies of each letter. Each incoming phrases is tested against the currently stored phrase and if it is found to be more fit, it becomes the phrase stored in the device's EEPROM memory. The device will load this phrase from EEPROM when it is turned on, so it can pick up the story where it left off. In this way, the hardware is not only remembring Proust as it reads, but it is remembering the novel as long as it remains functional. As time passes however, the remembered phrases looses some of its luster and decays in fitness, allowing it to be replaced with a newer one.

This sketch was simulated in C++ and tested using the WinAVR compiler to make sure it fit the memory requirements of the Atmega32. After seeing the simulation, I decided that there were huge flaws in sketch and abandoned it. First of all, this was a project that had no need for an audience or any form of human interaction. It was simply an algorithm processing a body a text. This project did, however, became the seed for the text-based sampler. My plan is to allow the user to determine what is memorable within a huge stream of text, and give them the tools to generate a narrative out of these pieces. Allowing human control over the fitness algorithm will completely change the nature of the work, making it something that grows by human and audience participation.

rotoreel memory module

This drawing machine is a sketch that experiments with leaving physical traces. It combines the functions like a clock and a data recorder in order to paint a picture of activity over a duration. There are numerous problems with this piece, but it should be viewed as a quick test of a few technical and aesthetic ideas.

The rotoreel looks at an infrared range finder, filters and processes the data, and actuates a servo-controlled arm based on this distance and its internal clock. A pen mounted to the end of the arm leaves a continuous mark on the disk based on the speed of the turntable platter and the rotation of the arm.

A number of early program loops aimed to duplicate aspects of Duchamp's rotoreliefs. I aimed to translate the distance of the range finder into an offset circle in order to create an illusion of depth based on an actual physical distance. The physical setup of this design has none of the fine control necessary to achieve these lofty goals. In order to do this I would need to eliminate all servo noise and add gearing to allow me to convert the 8 bit servo resolution (over 180 degrees) into a linear translation of the arm over approx 3.5 inches.

The problem with the sktech as it stands is that the information contained on the disks folds over itself at the high rate of 33 and 1/3 rpm. The disk quickly becomes an illegible mess. Again, the lack of fine linear control prevented me from making a graceful spiral that could be read as a single line with noise.

As it stands, the project did achieve some of my technical goals. I am using ISP programming of a AVR Atmega8 microcontroller, and have interfaced it to a Sharp range finder and a Hi-Tec servo. Internally, the program makes use of a number of the LibC libraries. I also tested EEPROM storage of data so that aspects of the hardware could adapt over time.

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.

The Conversation

Including analysis by Brenda Austin-Smith

"The Conversation has been described as an "Orwellian morality play" in which the spy becomes the spied upon, and technology is used against the user. (1) In generic terms, the film is a psychological thriller that pays stylistic homage to Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) in its use of repetition and its parsing of sounds rather than images to create ambiguity, and to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in its depiction of a hotel murder"

The narrative of The Conversation relies as much on the subjective reality of a single character than on the world outside him. The sound of the film reaches the audience through the surveillance microphones, filters, and amplifiers of Harry Caul. The whole film hinges on his personal interpretation of a single line of dialogue: "he'd kill us if he had the chance." Caul's past work might have been the cause for the murder of his subjects, and he is paranoid his current assignment will lead to the same end. His work does play a role in murder, but the imagined victim turns out to be the perpetrator.

The complexities of Caul's personality are presented to the audience through a series of relatively insignificant moments. The sum of all these layers gives us a picture of a disfunctional man, paranoid to the point of paralysis. The audience is presented the story through the eyes, and more importantly, ears of Harry Caul, and the narrative comes to resemble his personality.

"In his creation of a narrative of Ann's oppression, persecution, and possible death, Harry acts as a film editor, marrying image track to sound track to produce a coherent story. And like the film viewer, Harry fills in narrative gaps and ambiguities, supplementing what is visible and audible with what he believes to be the truth."

The film succeeds because the protagonist is so compelling that the story surrounding him is irrelevant. The audience cannot help but become transfixed by the subjective reality of Harry Caul.