Leave No Trace

It was a great meeting again at the School of Art last night. Like the previous session, I was impressed and excited by the enthusiasm shown by everyone there. It’s great to be part of a project where people are so keen to take part and develop something new. I’m really looking forward to seeing the proposals when they’re submitted.

Perhaps this could be the start of a new way for the museum and art gallery to work with local artists, keeping in touch more closely with what’s going on in the area and discussing ways to improve the activities and events at the museum to encourage more people to take part in different ways.

Here’s the first of those links I promised: the Ideas Before Their Time Symposium in London on 3rd February. I really want to go. There’s a long list of speakers in different sessions:

• computer art and cybernetics
• computer art and time
• computer art and space
• computer art and output
• computer art and technocultures

Starting the following day is the two-day conference at the V&A on Decoding the Digital. Bonnie Mitchell, one of the speakers at the symposium, will also be talking in Brighton on 2nd February on Interactive Art Environments and Experimental Animation. There’s suddenly so much going on – it’s a shame it’s all down south. Or do you know of things away from the capital?

I’m ashamed to see how long it’s been since my last post on this blog. What can I say? Christmas, New Year, bad weather, other work commitments… the usual reasons/excuses.

Anyway, there’s another meeting tonight at 5pm at the Burslem School of Art. If you’re on our mailing list, you should have received an e-mail reminder of this recently. Tonight’s meeting will have less of a clear agenda than the last meeting. Its main purpose is a general discussion of progress and ideas – more of a chance to catch up and ask any questions that may have arisen since the previous meeting.

I can’t promise to post on this blog quite as much as I did before Christmas, but I’ve been accumulating a list of links to interesting digital and multimedia activities, so perhaps for the next few weeks, this blog may become more of a referral site.

Remember, if you find anything you think is relevant or intersting to the Leave No Trace exhibition or the people involved in one way or another, feel free to add a post on this blog. (You’ll have to register first, if you haven’t already done so.)

Hope to see you this afternoon/evening.

This week we went down to see the Decode exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what we got. The first piece we encountered was a series of fans at the Underground entrance to the museum, this was amusing as it required a little interactivity to get the fans moving, but not obviously linked to the show. The second was ‘bit.code’ a specially commissioned piece in the main entrance of the museum, this involved a little more technological ingenuity; it was a series of black and white belts spinning around to a series of codes.

It wasn’t until entering the exhibition that the three underlying themes became apparent; Code, Interactivity and Network. The code, whilst perhaps interesting to the code connoisseur, was little more than a display of pretty patterns that the average Joe Bloggs on the street might relate to screensavers or those annoying sound responsive illustrations on Microsoft Media Player. There seemed to be little concept behind what was essentially a demonstration of the different techniques available to Digital Artists. Then came Network; in the style of The Public in West Bromwich half of the exhibits in this section were turned off and re-booted whilst we were there. Of those that were working there was one of note ‘We Feel Fine: an almanac of human emotion’ where text found on weblogs including the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’ has been collected and arranged for your perusal. By far the most popular section of the exhibition was the Interactive display. There were many fun digital based activities that you could explore, mostly consisting of wall based projections that responded to you moving past. Again there was little concept behind the artworks but that didn’t seem to matter when there were children and adults alike running around excitedly trying out all the activities.

The exhibition as a whole was made an exciting experience with the use of atmosphere. Darkened lighting and black walls created a sense of discovery; there was an anticipation of what new and exciting technology would be waiting around the next corner. It was great to see an exhibition focussing wholly on digital media but I do feel a little disappointed that all we were shown was essentially a demonstration of the different techniques available; would a theme have been too ambitious?

Anyone going to Spain in the near future? This Playlist exhibition in Gijon looks interesting:

PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms and alikes.

Following my previous post about external video projection, here’s another example, this time on Waterloo Station. Warning: the grimy hand of commerce has left its fingerprints on this!

The public lecture at Wolverhampton University last night, on ‘Building Intelligence:  Autonomous Characters in Virtual Environments’ wasn’t quite what I expected. I had interpreted the phrase “interactive multimedia applications” to suggest a wide variety of contexts, possibly including art installations. The lecture, however, after listing different types of environments and purposes, focused entirely on games. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, and The Guardian coincidentally points out today that games tend to be overlooked by critics.

The University claims to be researching artificial intelligence, but something troubled me about the descriptions used in the lecture. It was aimed at a non-specialist audience, so I assume that they do far more than was described, but it seemed to me that the examples given were of merely evaluating options from pre-defined lists until a successful outcome was found.

I know that the definition of intelligence in this context is debatable, but I had hoped to hear some discussion of systems reaching logical conclusions from basic precepts, even if that’s still a distant goal. At the end, I asked if they’d had any experience of unexpectedly complex behaviour spontaneously occuring, but all he responded with was a brief description of the concept of emergent behaviour and mentioned flocking.

I’m no expert in the subject, but there seems to be potential in the cross-over between genetic algorithms and neural networks to allow systems to experiment at random and learn from the results, which could then inform future experiments. I’d like to explore this further, but at Wolverhampton they write a lot of code in C++, which I wouldn’t dream of learning. Life’s too short for that.

The Decode digital art exhibition has opened at the V&A in London, and Create Digital Motion has posted a slideshow of photographs taken at the exhibition. I’ll be going next week, but in the New Year there’s a whole programme of associated events, activities and conferences. One of the opportunities is to adapt an artist’s programming code (known as Recode Decode), and have your work featured on the London Underground. Download the source code and user guide here.

Here’s a link to Body Paint which is one of the items in the exhibition, and to onedotzero’s events website page, which lists all of the works.

There’s a free public lecture at the University of Wolverhampton at 6pm tomorrow (Wednesday) on Building Intelligence: Autonomous Characters in Virtual Environments:

This talk aims to shed some light on the current research and techniques that can be employed in the creation of challenging and sophisticated autonomous artificial intelligent characters used in interactive multimedia applications.

It’s part of a programme of lectures that included one examining criticisms of the lack of craft in contemporary art. I didn’t know about that one in time, but it sounds interesting. I’ll certainly be going to the one on Building Intelligence.

(the teeming void) has just published an interesting essay that touches on the philosophical implications of the nature of digital media, with reference to the work of HC Gilje. I like Blink, with its connotations of distorted squash court markings and glowing reflections on polished wood surfaces, but I’m not convinced by the rest of the work discussed. Nevertheless, the analysis of the aesthetics of digital media is interesting:

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values – fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make – which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

It’s a subject that appears to fascinate the author of (the teeming void) because he’s touched on it several times before. I particularly like the phrase: “…the digital is just the analog operating within certain tolerances or threshholds.”