Steve’s Stuff

Generative art refers to art generated, composed, constructed, or somehow produced with an algorithm in a computer, mathematical, or other autonomous process. Prime examples include certain works by John Cage and, most currently, Brian Eno’s “77 Million Paintings”. During a recent visit to the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE), I saw first-hand many different generative art projects. I noticed an interesting thread throughout - each description included a phrase to the effect of “we’re ______ and then looking at all the possible outcomes to find the best results.”

The key is the “all possible outcomes”. Imagine if Stamitz had mathematically calculated every possible symphony in the 1700s. There would be nothing left to explore and the most respected of all forms would have disappeared almost as quickly as it began. Mozart and Beethoven surely wouldn’t bother composing symphonies because Stamitz had, in a sense, written them all. Sure, one could make a case for composers creatively breaking the rules of the algorithm to produce original results, but this is a hollow shell of an argument because no composer wants to use a form that has been played out, so to speak.

One could also argue that we would still have seminal works such as Haydn’s “London” symphony or Beethoven’s 9th, but they would be credited to Stamitz who would have discovered them while sifting through the results of his compositional algorithm. However, I counter this with two claims: first, generative “composers” are overwhelmed with a multitude of possibilities making them unable to examine every possibilities, thus ensuring that many of the results will go unnoticed; second, it’s likely that many symphonies that we now regard as classic would be discarded because they didn’t fit into the current style of the period. Bernstein’s “Kaddish”, for example, certainly wouldn’t make the cut, to say nothing of Schoenberg! If Stamitz had generated every possible symphony, and even if he lived long enough to examine each one, he would most certainly discard anything beyond what the 1700s regarded as musically beautiful and we would never get to hear Beethoven’s “Eroica” with its lopsided development or and of Mahler’s monster creations.

From this point of view, I pose the question: how many masterpieces did Brian Eno kill when he synthesized 77 million paintings? How many great works are we deprived of by generative artists everyday? Are these artists exploring a radical new creative methodology, or are they ruining art for everyone?

My final thought is that the human mind is creative beyond all understanding and if the symphony didn’t go on to become the preeminent art music form that it did, Haydn would have written equally great works using a different form. However, if all artists began composing algorithmically, finding original forms would quickly become difficult. As Umberto Eco points out, once we have the blank canvas, the ripped canvas, and the charred canvas, where can we go from there but backwards?

Team 5 met for the first time today to discuss plans for the mini project. Our project consists of a motorized toy car that drives around a canvas making marks with mounted paint pens. The canvas is covered by motion sensors in a random configuration set to interface with Pd. The Pd patch monitors the car via the sensors and changes the audio parameters. Meanwhile, infrared sensors control the direction of the car, redirecting it when it reaches the end of the canvas.

Our project is mainly conceptual, looking at the act of painting itself, rather than being concerned with the finished product. I doing so, we’re questioning the role of the human artist in the 21st century. Although the question itself isn’t new, it also doesn’t have an answer and so we are exploring it for ourselves. Where many artists such as Brian Eno develop generative algorithms to create works of art on a computer (see Eno’s “77 Million Paintings” project - link below), we’re doing it mechanically thus replacing the predictability and precision of a computer program with the unpredictability of a moving, mechanical device. Even though Eno’s project likely incorporates random elements, and even though certain aspects of our project are ultimately controlled by a computer, there are still many opportunities of aberrant behavior on the part of the motorized car and various other environmental factors.

We are expecting the result of the automated/automotive painting to have an abstract expressionist quality, thus we are referencing that particular aesthetic in our artistic concept. We are drawing further parallels with abstraction expressionism with the use of audible statements (triggered by Pd) describing certain aspects of abstract expressionism. This also serves to distance the spectator from the subsequent painting and to force them to concentrate on the act of creation.

http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/eno/

For thing #4 I worked with Tyler and Nick. We did most of the work on my board so that we could get to the programming sooner, but Tyler is planning to finish his board this weekend and Nick already had it done. The soldering was a little too intricate for me, so Tyler helped a lot with that.

During the switch portion of the assignment, we found that port A5 didn’t work for the LED. We changed the program to port A3 and everything worked perfectly. By the end of lab time, we had the potentiometer sending values. We got the speaker wired, but didn’t get it sounding yet. Since Tyler helped do the difficult soldering, I spent my time soldering wires to the switch, potentiometer, and speaker.

Nick and Tyler are getting together on Sunday to finish the assignment. I’ll be communicating via email because I’m flying to California to visit some schools for next year. Check out the links below.

http://crca.ucsd.edu/ - Center for Research in Computing Arts - UCSD
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/ - Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology - UCSB

The Technology: Art and Sound by Design class (and many like it) pose a novel dilemma for the idea of a “work” (i.e. the expressive product of an artist or artists). The goal of the class at hand is a unification of two seemingly unrelated disciplines: science with its positivist empiricism and art in its current state of postmodern incredulity toward the meta-narrative of empirical thought. The dialectical energy of science (hereafter technology) and art has the power to produce an explosion of creativity, if we can find a true synthesis.

We must ultimately classify the course itself as an “art” class because, after all, the end result (or goal) is to produce a work of art that utilizes technology. This is not, however, to suggest that the artist is dominating force, as the engineer, in this unique situation, is called upon to engage in the process of artistic production. Ideally, the artist and engineer contribute equally working together as two artists: one familiar with aesthetics, the other familiar with technology.

The goal is a gestalt—a unified whole, irreducible into an aesthetic portion and a technological portion. The technological component must not intrude on the aesthetic component and the aesthetic component must not resist the introduction of the technological component. The spectator must be unaware of the synthesis and experience the work as a gestalt.

This is well and good in theory, but very difficult in praxis. That is why the two artists with their respective backgrounds must develop a means of communication—a common ground. This will be, I suspect, one of the more difficult aspects of the class, but also one of the more useful. The common ground must be the creative act itself. Both artists and engineers engage in creativity on a daily basis, but for different means where the former creates objects of art while the latter uses the creativity for more practical purposes. These two approaches to creativity can only benefit each other and they are the key to successful interdisciplinary communication.

It will be up to the artist and engineer to find this common ground and to exploit their complimentary skill sets. The potential is nearly limitless.

In From Work to Text, Barthes provides a very compact summary of the topics explored in S/Z (1970): namely, the idea of an open text with, not simply multiple possible meanings, but a simultaneous multiplicity of meanings. What Barthes referred to in S/Z as the “readerly text” becomes the Work and what was referred to as the “writerly text” now becomes the Text. Where the Work is a physical object that one can hold in three dimensional space, the Text is a living, changing, flow of signs that defy hermeneutic treatment. If in 2007

One interesting aspect of Barthes writing is the requirement of a meta-language to describe his ideas. He writes about the slippage and play of signification in the Text, but when he describes it in his flowing prose, he cannot afford to engage this play without sacrificing the clarity and direction of his thesis. The same is true of Derrida who is sharply critical of the Western supposition of logocentricity—he must resort to a meta-language in order to communicate concepts that he wishes to be interpreted in a very specific, “correct” manner. I can appreciate the difficulty of the situation and I forgive Barthes for being somewhat hypocritical in this way, but I wonder what a self-descriptive writerly text would look like. This relates back to the criticism of postmodern thinking in that if one calls for the resistance of absolute meaning, shouldn’t the reader also resist the meaning of the call to resist absolute meaning?

This is why Deleuze is so remarkable. His writing reflects his rhizomatous network of philosophical concepts. He encourages the reader to enter A Thousand Plateaus from any chapter, laughing in the face of the West’s obsession with teleological reasoning. Deleuze goes as far as to avoid absolute definitions of his many concepts (e.g. becoming, deterritorialization, the refrain) thereby sacrificing accessibility for a dedication to his ideas. This is a major sacrifice for any philosopher for, despite what some may claim, they surely wish to be understood (Lacan notwithstanding). Deleuze leaves the reader no choice but to jump right in and start because a definition of one concept always involves at least one of his other concepts.

Returning to Barthes, his reliance on meta-language is entirely forgivable because his ideas are so wonderfully stated. Even if the abjuration of logocentricity seems, in 2007, axiomatic, his statements of the ideas are clear, succinct, accessible, and useful. From Work to Text is nearly perfect as an introduction to the writerly and readerly text. If one wishes to understand this concept in greater detail and see it in practice, S/Z is waiting.

“Viva la Muerte” (Long Live Death - 1970) is the first and best film by Spanish surrealist, Fernando Arrabal. It’s an unusual aesthetic experience (even by surrealist standard), but an aesthetic experience worth having. If you’ve heard of the film before, chances are it was described similar to the Amos Vogel (author of the amazing “Film as a Subversive Art”), “Viva la Muerte is a paroxysm of anguish, a scream for liberty and probably one of the most ferocious, violent films ever made.” I was expecting something even more vicious than “Last House on the Left”. What I got was a sweet, wistful story about a young boy growing up amidst state-sponsord repression in Franco-era Spain, although the context isn’t explicitly stated and can thus stand for a more general reading of the human spirit versus the hegemonic political monster.

How could Vogel, who wrote a fantastic book on subversive film, get it so wrong? The only explanation I can offer is that his readers know him as an expert on extreme films and he wanted to see Viva as such. Sure, there’s some violence, but from the perspective of surrealism, it’s comical. It’s shocking and there are some disgusting images such as the slaughter of a cow, but we know that the surrealists desire to shock us and they we shouldn’t take it too seriously. They’re just trying to be provocative.

The story involves a boy, Fando, who is fascinated by his father, a free-thinker leftist who was turned into the police by his moralist, and crazy, wife. He has fantasies/visions/dreams throughout the film of his mother torturing and murdering his father. He dreams of becoming a radical and following in his father’s footsteps, though he can’t reject his mother. Incidentally, Freud would have a field day explaining the bizarre Oedipal implications!

My criticism is that these dreams and fantasies look terrible due to awful camera work and annoying color filters that obscure the action. Arrabal goes to a lot of trouble to set up very bizarre and disturbing images, but then films them in such a way that you can hardly tell what’s happening. If it was an aesthetic choice, that’s one thing. However, I think it’s probably more the case that Arrabal isn’t much of a film maker and in the process of wanting a way to differentiate between filmic reality and fantasy, he ended up making these scenes look pretty bad.

Another interesting feature is what these actors are willing to do for art. One lady eats a LOT of mud, another wrestles the main character in spaghetti, the mother slaughters a cow, spilling massive amounts of the blood in the process which she then rolls around in, you get the idea . . . I wouldn’t even wear the stretchy pants required to perform Vinko Globokar’s “Corporel?” for body percussion, so there’s no way someone is forcing fistfuls of sand down my throat!

OK, maybe the film does have some extreme content, but the mood is one of discover and wonder. It’s a semi-autobiographical look at Arrabal’s childhood, a time he happily remembers. I would highly recommend it to any fan of surrealism. He goes a lot further than Bunuel ever did (not necessarily good or bad), so make sure you know what you’re getting into. That said, it’s a unique cinematic experience. Just don’t try to rent it at Blockbuster.

This week’s project is a program that manipulates five LEDs. It has three sequenced patterns. There are four red LEDs and one Yellow LED in the center. The outer LEDs use different resistors to make the outer LEDs dimmer. Programming was simply a matter of modifying Keith’s code and renaming some stuff. You can find the program below.

zip1.txt

I was flipping through “Two Regimes of Madness”, a collection of texts and interviews 1975-1995 by renown French continental philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze is primarily associated with postmodernism, but his work is much more than that. He’s a wild man who provides a radically different approach to philosophy using Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson when everyone else was stuck on Hegel Husserl and Heidegger. His ideas are amazingly complex and, in my experience, quite useful if one takes the time to understand them.

Anyway, I was flipping through his book when I found a brief article entitled “How Philosophy is Useful to Mathematicians or Musicians” (no date listed). Deleuze is arguing for the cross-fertilization of disciplines, encouraging students to seek out other disciplines, not as secondary to their “focused” goal, but as primary support. His example is a lecture on philosophy attended by mathematicians, musicians, psychologists, historians, etc. where each student is finding a way to relate this field back to their own.

Jump ahead ten to twenty years and you’ve got programs like CRATEL popping up all over the country. I’m not suggesting that Deleuze invented the interdisciplinary program (neither is he), but he recognized its importance long before it was available to students. We should feel lucky to have a center such as CRATEL actively encouraging communications between disciplines. It’s not about getting accountants to appreciate music or about getting musicians to understand macro economics. It’s about helping an artist find a way to make engineering benefit his or her craft or vise versa. Since few will become *truly* interdisciplinary individuals themselves (i.e. intimate knowledge of two or more fields with equal facility), interdisciplinary communication and understanding is crucial.

Yeah, maybe it seems axiomatic now, but I just thought it was cool that, dans un sens, Deleuze supports CRATEL!

I have this wonderful image in my head. People are learning to play instruments, not for a teacher, not because their mother made them, and not necessarily even for public performance: they’re learning the instruments for themselves. They’re home alone making music for themselves only. There are no teachers, no critics, no others to judge them - just themselves and the music. I can’t take credit for the idea - it came from concert percussionist, publisher, and contemporary music advocate, Sylvia Smith. In an interview, she described how she tries to play a little xylophone everyday because she enjoys it. It’s music that no one hears (other than her husband, Stuart Saunders Smith - one of the most important contemporary composers today). It’s not practicing, there’s no goal, there’s no frustration, only the pleasure of creation.

Why don’t we have more people learning to play instruments for themselves? The closest thing we have are amateur guitarists. You’ll find an average of 1.4 guitars in every college dorm room*. Many of these guitarists have the right idea. You find them all over the place, playing songs that they write for themselves, not for anyone in particular - just for them, or a few close friends. They don’t need to be great and they don’t even need to be “good”. As long as they are happy with the sounds they make, that’s good enough.

Unfortunately, todays society tells us that if we’re going to do something, we’d better be amazing at it, or it’s not worth doing. Maybe we’re to blame. The guitar playing college kid is a stereotype that gets a lot of heat because “they suck”. By what standards do they “suck”? If you’re comparing them to Buckethead or D’jango Reinhardt, yeah - they do suck. But who are they hurting? They aren’t posing as professionals, they aren’t asking you to pay them, and they aren’t really hurting anybody.

With today’s overabundance of available media, there’s a constant flow of entertainment . Thus, there’s no need for us as individuals to create - we just let other people do it for us. After all, they come up with better stuff than we would, right? We’ve lost the sense of personal creation and the joy that comes with it. Muhammad from the TASD class understands this. On his blog he writes, “I simply make some noise, but it’s my noise and I love it.” This is exactly what we need more of. Now, lets see about something other than guitar because, seriously guys . . . :-)

*statistics made up on the spot by me.

With the age of the digital upon us, Mulvey takes the opportunity to revisit some previous critiques of cinema concerning the relationship between still photography and film as well as the presence of still images within a film (or motion picture). This topic is worth reassessing because digital media technology allows the spectator a greater degree of control over issues of playback including stopping the film, pausing the film, rewinding and re-watching, and other such techniques. Barthes’ book, Camera Ludica, is critical of the cinema because its images are less focused on one specific moment in time, one specific composition of subjects; and therefore the images don’t have the strong indexical moment of still photography. She wonders if this relatively new ability of the spectator to view motion pictures in various temporalities will reveal any changes since Barthes’ time.

To begin, I feel that Barthes’ critique of the cinematic image may be biased due to his long-standing love of photography. Barthes knows photography, but does he know cinema in the way that he knows photography? Surely many stills from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary are nearly as effective as the expressionist paints that inspired its distinctive mise-en-scene. Similarly, Carl Th. Dreyer’s absolute mastery of mise-en-scene produces still images that communicate volumes as in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Ordet. His points on the indexical moment are well taken, but I wonder how different the indexical moment of a photographed dancer is from a still image taken from a film of the same dancer.

Although I know that the artist’s intentions are different between still photography and film, I believe that the masters of mise-en-scene always produce images that can function both in motion and still. Furthermore, I believe films, when viewed as still images have another important difference from photography: by looking at subsequent stills, we can see “what happens next”. A great mystery of photographs, especially portraits, is the conditions surrounding their production (e.g. why the Mona Lisa is smiling, what was the morbidly obese transsexual doing prior to his/her arrest when Weegee captured the image on film?). Film can provide a still image, but it can also provide a context, should we choose to be interested. Photographs of figures in motion are interesting in the fact that we can stop time and study them at our leisure, but they’re also limited in the fact that we don’t know what happens after Lois Greenfield’s dancers land, or if they land at all. I should note that this applies strictly to directors who use mise-en-scene effectively. There are plenty of films with a sort of “practical” mise-en-scene where the camera is simply there to record the action without much regard to framing, staging, sets, blocking, and the like.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles provides a particularly interesting case. The lack of activity in the frame allows us time to explore the image much in the way we would a still photograph. As we watch Jeanne for over four hours pealing potatoes, cleaning the house, or washing every single dish from supper, we have plenty of time to analyze minute details with only slight variations. Akerman’s film, or in a similar manner, De Sica’s Umberto D, functions almost as photographic portraits—the lack of onscreen activity gives the viewer time to examine the image in detail while the creative mise-en-scene and depth of character gives the viewer something worth looking at.

Mulvey brings up the issue of narrative linearity because narrative films have a certain forward momentum. Bellour makes an interesting point about the manner in which a still photograph within a film can “stop” the forward momentum of the film itself. Though thought provoking, I feel this is a bit short sighted. When we look at a photograph in real life, we don’t have a sense that time has stopped because we are in the act of looking, analyzing, and thinking. When we are presented with a still photograph in a film, we’re still looking, analyzing, and thinking, but there is an additional layer of complexity that Bellour seems content to ignore: namely, the act of looking through another’s eyes. Say there is a photograph of a clown in a film. We’re seeing the clown ourselves, but we’re also seeing the clown through the eyes of a diegetic character whose father was killed by a clown last year. We’re wondering how the character sees it and how they feel. The use of a POV shot requires us to search for clues to answer this: does the character stare for a long duration, is it a quick glance, does the camera move up and down the image as if to suggest the character is searching for something? Because of this, I don’t think a still photograph within a film necessarily has the halting, jarring effect that Bellour claims. Additionally, there is the popular “Ken Burnes Effect” that attempts to show still photographs in artificial motion. Would Bellour also feel this technique is a “jarring” sensation to the spectator?

Finally, to address Mulvey’s idea of the pensive spectator, I agree to the point that digital technology allows the curious cinephile new ways to view experience film, but to use such a loaded word as “fetishistic”, seems unnecessary. Her description of the “fetishistic” spectator seems, to me at least, in line with the work of a film scholar or a connoisseur. Then again, perhaps Roger Ebert’s famous frame-by-frame analyses at the University of Colorado are not entirely for the benefit of the students!

Pelzer examines technical reproduction, its rapid expansion in the twentieth century, and its ramifications through the philosophical writings by media critics, Benjamin, McLuhan, Debord, Baudrillard, and even a little Adorno. Because each of these thinkers did most of their work before the 1980s, and therefore missed the advent of personal computers and the explosion of easily accessible information via the internet, Pelzer provides some commentary and analysis of how history progressed in relation to each thinker’s forecast.

Both Benjamin and McLuhan saw great potential for the global dissemination of ideas, and Benjamin in particular, sees mass media as a means for distributing political ideology although his positivist perspectives failed to account for the inevitable subversion by the culture industry. Pelzer points out the failure of his overly hopeful prospects for mass media in relation to Adorno’s fundamental distrust of mass-anything. I personally find Benjamin’s idea of the “aura” to be his most interesting contribution as it predates Barthes semiotics. In S/Z, Barthes describes the complex and unpredictable nature a text where the signifier/signified relationship is called into question. Barthes’ idea of signifiers always leaving traces of other signifiers seems very similar to Benjamin’s idea of the aura giving a sense of something not entirely present.

Baudrillard provides an interesting idea of “hyperreality”, where simulations provide a level of reality beyond what one would normally experience in the same situation. The all-seeing camera allows the spectator to view every important detail of a situation in a super-human manner while providing and interpreting a wealth of information thus transforming the viewer into a Sherlock Holmes of sorts. Baudrillard is wary of the accessibility and increasing presence of simulations and fears that eventually society will begin to confuse simulated reality with true reality.

Pelzer makes the interesting point that most people will experience a situation vicariously through a TV show or film before actually experiencing it in real life. This is an interesting idea because this doesn’t seem entirely bad. There are many situations best avoided in real life. A simulated car accident serves to warn young drivers of the danger they will be facing once on the road, while protecting them from injury. Along the same lines, many people wish to travel and see the world, but are unable for a variety of reasons. An Imax feature on mountain climbing provides them a simulated journey that they themselves would never be able to take. It is once these simulations venture into the territory of the mundane that they become problematic. Virtual relationships are no substitute for the real thing and in this sense, Baudrillard is correct to be skeptical. Therefore, I conclude that we must approach these simulated experiences with a degree of caution and in doing so, we can enjoy the benefits they provide.

My main issue with the article is that Adorno is only mentioned in passing, while Pelzer would do well to read some of his work such as The Curves of the Needle (1927/65) or Opera and the Long Playing Record (1969). Adorno’s death in 1969 halted his long-standing project Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction (2006), a book on the transcription and interpretive performance of music. Where the reproduction of a painting is simply a matter of taking a photograph and generating as many prints as desired, music exists as graphic notation (which may or may not be the most effective method of communicating the composer’s intentions) and must be realized, often with a variable degree of interpretation by each musician.

Although Adorno is primarily concerned with music, his essay, Opera and the Long Playing Record, is equally applicable to visual art. Adorno was strongly opposed to the 78 acetate records that could scarcely contain a single movement of a Schoenberg string quartet, but when the LP allowed fifteen minutes per side, Adorno offered praise. Furthermore, he argues that the LP is the ideal medium for certain genres such as opera for many reasons including the senseless attempts at modernization of sets and staging. Similarly, he states that “it is obvious that Mozart’s operas cannot be performed in oratorio fashion with an unintentionally comic effect” (248).

Changing the medium drastically effects the consumer’s engagement with the work itself, and not necessarily for the worse. Perhaps a work of monumental proportions, such as Barney’s Cremaster cycle is best experienced through a medium that permits multiple viewings over a period of time. How can one expect to comprehend ten hours worth of highly metaphoric film art without revisiting the work a number of times? Along the same lines, a work such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, renown for its soporific nature, may be more effective viewed alone, free from the distractions of bored and restless spectators. A DVD would also allow the viewer to watch at multiple speeds, thereby possibly uncovering structural features that would be difficult to detect if sufficiently spaced during the performance.

Overall, Pelzer provides a concise overview of important media theorists showing the benefits and hazards of the burgeoning media industry. Just as Benjamin and McLuhan saw great potential, I too see potential, but as a disingenuous disciple of Adorno, I doubt it will work out that way.

Emerging from Jameson’s dense prose, I find the message: video art provides a “total flow” of meaning (meaning in a very qualified, postmodern sense) where signifiers are constantly in flux, constantly redefined, constantly re-contextualized, and where the only referent possible is that of indisputable historical fact, or in other words, the Lacanian Real. Thus, video is, as Jameson concludes, the ideal medium of transmission of postmodern thought. Over the course of the article, Jameson uses a particular video work, AlienNATION , to demonstrate his points. Jameson refrains from offering any sort of aesthetic judgment, preferring to describe video as a medium, to analyze interesting features, and to explore a variety of interpretive methodologies.

Jameson makes an important phenomenological distinction between video and film because where film (even art film) has a lengthy history of concept and technique, video is (at the time of his essay) slightly over twenty years old and thus doesn’t have the same foundations or expectations.

Although Jameson seems as neutral as possible, he has what appears to be a pessimistic view of the possibilities of postmodern textual manipulation. When he writes, “we are left with that pure and random play of signifiers . . . which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production”, he is presenting the situation as if postmodern works are doomed to randomly repeat segments of the past without any sort of intelligent design. While it’s true that, as Derrida shows us, we cannot reasonably assume any sort of logocentricity, if there was no possibility of, say, ironic juxtaposition, there would be no point in making postmodern works—they would just be meaningless jumbles of infinitely meaningful (and thus meaningless) signifiers.

In Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading, Eco shows how he uses this freedom of signification to generate a surplus of meaning within his literature. Similarly, Tarantino’s cinema is filled with intertextual elements such as the briefcase scene in Pulp Fiction, where the viewer is reminded of the myth of Pandora’s box, the final scene in Repo Man, as well as Raiders of the Lost Arc. The briefcase scene generates at least three specific and purposeful meanings, hardly the random jumble that Jameson describes.

While Jameson may have a dim view of postmodernity in art, he does an excellent job explaining why other forms of interpretation fail to say anything useful about postmodern works. He writes that if the “ephemeral” and “disposable” text is the building block of postmodern art, then there can be little gleaned from an analysis of any one fragment. Similarly, no video work can be viewed in isolation from the whole of the video art world. He goes on to contend that though one may attempt to “sort the material out into thematic blocks and rhythms and repunctuate it with beginnings and endings, with graphs of rising and falling emotivity, climaxes, dead passages, transitions, recapitulations, and the like”, the result will be different upon every viewing.

Insofar as that is a true statement, is it necessarily a positive or negative characteristic of postmodern art? There must be a certain value to a work that allows one to return over and over again for a completely new experience. Again, Jameson language is telling: phrases such as “____ is reduced to” indicate that he doesn’t see this potential for varied readings as a positive characteristic because if the author cannot control the message, there must be no message and therefore no art in creation. I see the potential for multiple and diverse readings as an intriguing characteristic of postmodern art. Furthermore, this whole notion of interpretive impossibility is specious. Again referring to Eco, the author creatively engages multiple levels of signification and though there are always already infinite readings, certain readings make a lot more sense. Even if one cannot definitively state the “correct” reading of a text, one can find a range of readings that generate the most coherent and meaningful interpretation. Jameson is correct to poke fun at the standard interpretive question—“what does it mean?”—because this assumes a single “correct” reading, but just because there is no definitive reading, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no readings that are better than others.

The scope of Jameson’s article is, perhaps, its best feature. It’s fascinating how he manages to describe such a wide range of postmodernity in art while talking only about video art. If I take issue with certain points, it doesn’t mean that the article on the whole is flawed. Simply, everyone will approach the concepts of postmodernism from a different perspective and now I’ve presented mine.

This is my first LogoChip Logo program. The colors on my run light are backwards, so this description might seem a little weird.

I used “runlightoff” to turnoff the light, thus enabling me to program a slightly more complicated morse code message with spaces. Dots are represented by a red flash, lines are represented by a green “wait” light, and breaks are represented by the run light turning off for one second. I also programmed a thing called “flashpause” to that instead of putting “waits” between dots, the light turns off instead of turning green so they won’t be confused with lines.

When the logochip is powered up, the runlight says “hello” in morse code -

…. . ._-. .-..—

Friendly, huh?

steve_logo.txt

–
Steve

After viewing/experiencing Peter Sarkisian’s wonderful piece, Dusted, in the Ulrich Museum, I started to wonder - how does one position themselves so as to have the ability (financial and otherwise) to create such a thing. Dusted involves five projectors each projecting video onto five sides of a cube as well as an audio track with two speakers. Additionally, five DVD players are necessary to power the projectors plus a CD player and power amplifier for the soundtrack. That’s a lot of equipment, a lot of setup time, and a lot of expense.

I came away feeling inspired by Sarkisian’s creation, but also frustrated because I lack the resources to create something comparable in the foreseeable future. What if your artistic ideas are bigger than your available resources? This problem isn’t necessarily related only to installation art either. I spent the summer of 2005 learning most of Charles Wuorinen’s fiendishly difficult Janissary Music for solo multi-percussion only to discover that when the Fall semester rolled around I could no longer keep the massive percussion setup maintained. Not only were the instruments required for large ensemble use, but we didn’t even have room to keep it set up even if there WERE available instruments. Janissary Music is famous for being one of the most unwieldy setups in the whole of the repertoire requiring 26 instruments that take well over an hour to assemble, so maybe I was asking for it. Nevertheless, this piece is out there and I put in the work to learn it and was unable to perform it, not due to desire or ability.

This is a frustrating situation. How did Sarkisian come to create the installations that he does? How do you experiment and learn if you don’t get to even try until you’re a “financially stable artist” (if indeed such a thing exists)? Until I get to make my own video piece for ten independent projectors with octophonic sound, I’ll continue to make my electronic music in good ol’ stereo. One day . . .

Jean Baudrillard is a French philosopher commonly associated (against his will) with the postmodernism movement. He’s best known as the author of “Simulations”, the imaginative text that was the direct inspiration for the Matrix. His theories on the presence and effects of the ever-present simulacrum is fascinating and worth a read. He recently published a collection of his writings on art as “The Conspiracy of Art”. My review of his book and his thought follows.

This is a fascinating collection of some of Baudrillard’s most polemical writings on art. He freely admits in one of the interviews within that he is, by no means, an art expert. He doesn’t appreciate it and he doesn’t necessarily *like* it. He does respect traditional/classical art’s beauty and importance. This positions him in an excellent place to offer remarkably disinterested observations. He’s not partial to any one movement, any one school, or any one artist (with the possible exception of Andy Warhol) and he pulls no punches in his critique of the meaninglessness of contemporary art.

It is important to note that Baudrillard is NOT an art hater. From his interviews and from other writings, I get the impression that art is simply “not his thing”. I believe this is a positive factor because he isn’t required to tip-toe around issues for fear of being rejected by the art community, a community he is happy to avoid altogether.

As a student of contemporary art, and as a contemporary artist myself, I don’t always agree with Baudrillard, at least to the extent that he goes. In his essay, “The Conspiracy of Art”, he tends to make sweeping generalizations. Such is the format of his polemic - a brief essay. Had he developed these ideas in a longer format, I’m sure some points would be smoothed by further explanation and clarification. Fortunately, this book includes and number of interviews where he explains some of his points and gets a chance to defend himself against his many critics.

I believe this text would be most useful to any student of contemporary art. Baudrillard does raise many important issues, even if his conclusions are questionable. Even if you hate every word, it’s at least an amusing read. I’ve always enjoyed his style. It’s very conversational - a welcome relief from reading the prolix, convoluted texts of Deleuze and Lacan. He is clear, cogent, and concise.

I recently purchased a set of ER-4Ps and while the glowing reviews presented on Amazon.com are pretty much justified, I must take issue with a few points. In my experience, these earphones do not have the bass presence that so many reviews mention. I would definitely describe it as anemic. Even bass-heavy music such as drum ‘n bass or jungle comes across incredibly weak. It’s as if listening to music through a high-pass filter. As a composer/producer, I’ve listened to a lot of audio transducers and I trust my ears. I am not one of those guys who turns the “bass knob” all the way up and such. I believe in flat frequency reproduction to yield the most accurate representation of the composer’s creation.

That said, these largely depend on the style of music you enjoy. I find listening to acoustic music very rewarding with these earphones. Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste” has never had such amazing clarity. Bartok’s dense weave of strings each find a space in the mix and the dynamic range is quite good. Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” is also particularly nice with its haunting mixture of small, delicate sounds. However, if you’re a fan of electronic music (or any music that has a strong bass component), these are going to disappoint. You’re much better off with a pair of headphones (such as the Grado SR60s) than the ER-4Ps.

I know the idea of the 4Ps is to work well without a dedicated headphone amp (are they are much more efficient than the 4Ss), but I’m not satisfied using them with my iPod nano. While I’ve never thought the iPods had amazing sound quality, the 4P/nano combination is particularly bad. I’m sure part of it has to do with the use of MP3s instead of uncompressed WAV or AIFF files, but since most people load their iPods up with MP3s only, this is an important point. If your music is compressed, these earphones will only exacerbate the problems. A lot of people still claim they can’t tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio, but with these earphones, you surely will. The sound is just a little too analytical to make a bad recording (or a compressed recording) sound good. Where other headphones, such as the Grados, provide a very smooth, rich sound that glosses over imperfections, the 4Ps simply reproduce the audio with painful accuracy. Again, this is invaluable for a lot of occasions, but if you’re planning to use MP3, ACC, or whatever, these will not sound as good.

Finally, nobody has sufficiently stated the annoyance of the cable sound. Of course, when you stick something this far in your ear, any motion in any part of the cable is amplified substantially. It really is a big problem. You simply can’t move when you’re using these. Sure, you get a shirt clip with the set, but that doesn’t come close to eliminating it. It’s very distracting and sometimes painful. If you’re going to use these, plan on sitting still.

I don’t mean for this to be a negative review. Not at all. These are some of the finest audio transducers that I’ve ever heard. The midrange is flawless. I just wanted to bring up a few points that I would have liked to know before I bought them myself. The ER-4Ps are not perfect, but they’re worth the money.