process book

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Page 1: Process Book

calvin holmes

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expanded cinemadice man

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expandedcinema

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p i p i l o t t i r i s t

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When given this brief, one of the first artists that came to mind was Pipilotti Rist. Rist is a Swiss visual artist whose work generally explores issues related to sexuality, gender and the human body. However, it ’s not the meaning behind her work that interests me most, it ’s how she displays and exhibits it .

One of Rist’s most interesting works is a large scale piece entitled “a peek into the west - a look into the east” Three horizontal pyramids protruding from the wall at eye level. in order to see the videos inside, the viewer must enter peep holes on the underside of the structure. in this piece Rist was trying to combine video with installation and exploring how video can be used in partnership with these with architectural structures. This in particular is what i f ind interesting! Another work that uses a similar way of exploring the exhibiting space is ‘selfless in a bath or lava’ in this piece rist installed a LCD monitor underneath the floor which appears to show her drowning in lava.

Having researched Rist’s work, the direction I’m interested in taking this project in is with the exploration of the exhibiting space and how video art can be used in tangent with sculptural objects and architectural spaces.

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T O N Y O U R S L E R

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Tony Oursler is another art ist whose

Work explores the use of projections, video,

sculpture and installation. In contrast to Rist ,

Oursler focuses more on projecting onto objects

and sculptures, rather than using architectural

space. I ’m interested in combining these two

concepts together and exploring how video art and

projections can be curated with both sculpture and

the architecture of the space, in mind.

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Whilst in the research stage of this project, I was also researching for a CTS essay exploring the curation of new media art and a particular movement within NMA simply known as CCTV art. CCTV art uses pre-existing and live footage from closed circuit surveillance systems to create works of art exploring privacy and Britain’s culture of surveillance. Some of the particular works I’ve been looking at are from Manu Luksch’s ‘the faceless project’ which aims to interrogate the culture of surveillance by redeploying authentic CCTV images recorded in London, the most surveilled city on Earth. These images are heavily inscribed by laws relating to privacy and freedom of information and are in effect ‘legal ready--mades’. ”The movement also has a manifesto for CCTV filmmakers which “declares a set of rules, establishes effective procedures, and identifies issue for filmmakers using pre-existing CCTV systems as a medium in the UK The manifesto is constructed with reference to the Data Protection Act 1988 and related privacy legislation that gives the subject of data records access to copies of the data. The filmmaker’s standard equipment is thus redundant, indeed its use is prohibited.” (Luksch, 2008)

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selected research

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Having researched quite heavily into CCTV art and the faceless project for my CTS report, one area I found the movement to be lacking in was presentation and curation. I feel the works make an interesting and thoughtful statement however they were rarely presented to the viewer in an interesting or interactive manner. Having looked at the work of Rist and Oursler I began to think about how I could use similar techniques inspired by theirs to create my own work with within the CCTV art umbrella with emphasis on the presentation as well as the content and meaning behind it .

I decided I wanted to create a sort of public CCTV control room using found CCTV streams and projection mapping. I just needed to figure out what to map onto. I experimented with a number of objects including boxes and blocks of Styrofoam before I happened to watch the fi lm ‘Lost in Translation’ and noticed that in one scene, set in a club, they had projected fireworks onto giant balloons. I thought it looked pretty cool so decided to give it a go myself and see how it would work with CCTV projections.

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My next task was to try and track down various sizes of balloons without getting them online and having to wait ages for delivery. This was surprisingly easy as it turns out there is a ‘London Balloon Shop’ in the distant North of London. I then had to blow them up. This was by far the biggest challenge faced within the entire project as I only had a tiny balloon pump designed for blowing up regular sized balloons.

Peter blew one up for me, but then popped it. This was his punishment.

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After the mammoth task of blowing up 3 of the giant balloons and losing one, I decided to stick to smaller prototyping for the time being and experiment with just the two larger balloons and a bunch of smaller ones.I watched some Youtube tutorials on how to use MadMapper and began experingmenting with projection mapping.

I really enjoyed this stage of the project and could tell through out the development that the direction I was going in had potential, which is rare! The projections mapped easily to the balloons however the projector I was using at this point wasn’t very good and left a rectangle of light around the projections. This isn’t much of an issue for the time being but definitely something I’d need to sort out. I stuck the balloons to the wall using selotape, which didn’t work very well but was again, ok for the time being.

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Following the prototyping I took down the balloons from the wall , rearranged them and hung them with fishing line from the ceiling. I found that any sort of breeze sent them waving all over the place so also had to anchor them to the floor. I then remapped the shapes and these images show the results and my final piece.

I do feel that the project is stil l kind of in a prototyping phase and given more time (and an electric pump) I’d l ike to add lots more balloons and produce this on a much larger scale. I feel that visually the projection mapped balloons are really interesting however the meaning and statement I intended to make may have got slightly lost along the way. The balloons as they are looked better with interesting visuals (I used a ‘l iquid l ight show’ video I found on youtube). I think that on a larger scale and with a large number of different CCTV streams available to the public, it would make a much bigger statement, hopefully giving the viewer a small insight into just how much we are surveilled by CCTV cameras on a day to day basis.

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dice man

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My first task for this brief was to try to understand exactly what randomness was. I understood the basic fundamentals of random and what the word means, however upon starting my research I realised that randomness, in the grand scheme of things and in relation to academic areas such as maths and science, can be quite a difficult and in depth concept to understand.

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One of the most prominent examples of randomness in science and mathematics is Chaos Theory. Chaos theory is the science of surprises. According to fractalfounation.org“While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on. These phenomena are often described by fractal mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature. Many natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including landscapes, clouds, trees, organs, rivers etc, and many of the systems in which we live exhibit complex, chaotic behavior. Recognizing the chaotic, fractal nature of our world can give us new insight, power, and wisdom. For example, by understanding the complex, chaotic dynamics of the atmosphere, a balloon pilot can “steer” a balloon to a desired location. By understanding that our ecosystems, our social systems, and our economic systems are interconnected, we can hope to avoid actions which may end up being detrimental to our long-term well-being.”

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One of the clearest ways to il lustrate chaos theory is by using a double pendulum. Compared to real world systems such as the weather; molecular vibrations; fluid dynamics; or solar systems and galaxies, it is an extremely simple system that can be easily modelled and understood mathematically. However, unlike a simple single pendulum, it is impossible to predict the long-term behaviour of the double pendulum.

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As fascinating as chaos theory and double pendulums were, I didn’t really feel that that side of my research was going anywhere productive. I began to look elsewhere and research into how ‘randomness’ has been used by artists and musicians.

One of the most prominent (USERS) of randomness in art is John Cage. Cage is perhaps best known for his avant-garde music, particularly his silent 1952 composition 4’33” but also for his use of randomness in “aleatory music”. Aleactoric music (Alea being a latin word meaning “dice”) is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance. For example, In Cage’s ‘Music of Changes’ (1951), cage selected duration, tempo, and dynamics by using the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book that prescribes methods for arriving at random numbers. Another example of Cage’s use of randomness is within his exhibition at The Kettles Yard gallery in Cambridge. One work featured was a fi lm of Cage’s assistant reading computer generated random numbers which determined which of a row of stones would be chosen, which brush to use, and the position of the stone on the paper. Cage then paints around the stone. He also chose to use chance and random numbers again when curating the exhibition, using computer generated coordinates to determine the placement of his paintings.

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Other artists who have used similarly random processes include Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Martin and Gerhard Richter.

“The points of intersection on a grid of squares are numbered and the numbers are written on small cards and picked at random…A line is made between each successive pair of numbers as they are picked out”.Kenneth Martin

“It was a chance system for the placement of colours on a grid. Numbered slips of paper each referred to a colour, one of eighteen different hues to be placed on a grid 40 inches by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages used a different process.”Ellsworth Kelly

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Having researched into how various artists have used randomness within their work, I wanted to see how I could modernise their techniques and processes by exploring the use of randomness using visual programming languages such as Max MSP and Processing. My first port of call was the Processing reference library.

Using this information I can begin to create randomly generated visuals.

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Using fairly simple coding it’s pretty easy to make some interesting visuals using processing. The image on the left shows a program in which circles are generated in random colours, size, opacity and random areas of the workspace. The image on the right shows a randomly generated line drawing constantly changing direction.

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Whilst exploring the openprocessing.org library, I stumbled across a program someone had written that generated random poetry from an existing poem. It worked by extracting words from the chosen poem and rearranging them on new lines of random lengths. The poems it produced were generally nonsense but it’s definitely an interesting idea to be worked on.

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Expanding on the random poetry program I wanted to see if I could generate poetry from randomly selected tweets. In order to do this I used Max MSP to write a short program that util ises Twitters API streams. The API stream is basically Twitter’s global stream of Tweet data that is accessible to anyone interested. I didn’t want the tweets chosen to be totally random so I told the program to only pick tweets containing a certain word. I would then choose another word for the next l ine. I wanted to create a rhyming poem so this process was very hit and miss. It was because of this that I ended up hitting a brick wall with this project.

Had I been more experienced with Max I would have set perameters which would only search for tweets with the word I wanted as the last word of the tweet, allowing me to easily make rhyming poetry. I would have also programmed it to remove and hashtags and @s’

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Having completely exhausted my technical ability in Processing and Max MSP I f igured it was time to go back to basics and try something completely low tech.

Although I’ve never really had any tuition or teaching on the practice, I ’ve always been quite interested in typography and had been looking for an opportunity to include it in one of my projects. I decided to do some experimentation and see how I could use a random process to create my own typeface. I began by doing some basic research typography and typographers normally create typefaces.

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Whilst doing my research on typography, I realised there are lots of very strict rules to creating typefaces that would make creating a random typeface quite arduous. Therefore I decided to disregard most of these rules, experiment, and see what I could come up with.

I started by choosing a number of different serif and sans serif fonts and printing them out A-Z. I then split each letter from each font into 3 - top, middle and bottom. For my first experiment, as shown in the images I decided chose sans serif for the bottom and top of the new letters and serif for the middle. Using a dice roll ing system I then randomly chose the top, middle and bottoms for each letter, using randomly chosen existing typefaces to create a new one.

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My next step was to then scan on my new typeface and meticulously trace each glyph, using Il lustrator. Whilst doing this and looking at the interesting shapes the new letters made I began thinking about how I could take this further and create an entirely new set of letters using the chopped up fonts. I wanted to create some sort of cipher that would only be able to be solved with a key.To create the new alphabet I place all the cut up pieces of font in a hat and using a blindfold chose two for each new letter. I then decided how to place the two together to create a shape that could be used in place of a regular letter. Again I then scanned them into il lustrator and traced them.

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While I do feel that I ’ve learned quite a lot throughout the Diceman brief and explored some fascinating subjects, I do not feel that my final outcome really reflects the amount of research I did. I think that perhaps I should have tried to stick to some of my earlier exploration around chaos theory or Processing and not have been scared away by the difficulties faced with those subjects. That said, I did find learning about typography incredibly interesting and I would like to continue to develop both the random typeface and the random alphabet code in order to make them downloadable and usable. To do this I need to get my head around the FontLab software and recreate each letter/symbol in there.

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Selected research and files available at....

http://calvinimi2.tumblr.com/

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