Steve’s Stuff

My team met again today (March 2nd) to discuss the project status. Muhammad is confident that he’ll have the car moving by Monday - Kendra is going to spend some time getting the canvas ready and fabricating the car’s body - Lauren has researched abstract expressionism and is going to record some vocal samples - Aaron is working with the sensors some more - I’m writing some Pd code and generating a lot of strange sounds. Overall, it looks like we’re in great shape for March 12th (the due date).

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.

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!