Erasing with digital media
The creators of this music sequencer (based on light levels from a webcam) describe it as too compex but a fun experiment, and I’d have to agree – but I couldn’t resist posting a link to something described as “what might happen if Terry Riley did chiptunes”.
Given what Marcel Duchamp famously did to the Mona Lisa, I’m not going to claim that this version created with Processing isn’t art, but I’d say the most interesting effect is the tiny variations make it look like the texture of tapestry.
I posted yesterday about zenbullet’s video projection on a church in Brighton. Some people expressed an interest at the meeting the other night about external video projection, so here are a few more examples:
There’s a lot of other good work around, including a fantastic piece inside a cathedral in Holland, where the organ pipes appear to float off into space, but I can’t find the link. If anyone knows the piece, please post it in the comments.
If you’re interested in video projection, you should check out Create Digital Motion. They frequently blog about vj equipment and performances, both outdoors and indoors.
Zenbullets frequently produces interesting work, using both Flash and Processing, including his 100 abandoned artworks project, which is due to be published in book form next year. He posted on his blog yesterday about some of his recent work, including a reminder of his video projection on a church in Brighton, complete with source code for the various sections. That’s right – not only does he do great work, but he lets other people see how he’s done it and encourages people to come up with improvements. What a guy!
Wow! Everone was so positive and enthusiastic at last night’s meeting. Thank you all so much for attending and making such useful suggestions and just generally being so supportive about the idea of the exhibition. It sounds like some people are already working on ideas that are relevant, while others immediately started thinking about possibilities. I particularly liked Ben’s idea of skill sharing – I’ll post about this in the next few days.
If you weren’t able to attend last night – don’t worry. It wasn’t a one-off opportunity. We’ll arrange another meeting, possibly around the middle of January so that everyone can chat about progress as well as allow others to come along and get involved.
In the meantime, I hope lots of people will post on this blog, to start discussions and to provide links to interesting stuff.
Tonight’s the night for the meeting at Burslem School of Art, to discuss with artists the forthcoming Erasure exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. I have no idea how many people will turn up, but quite a few have expressed interest and promoted it to their circles of contacts, so I hope it’s a good sized crowd.
The programme is simple: we start at 5pm, available for informal chat with anyone who wants to (light refreshments available), then a short presentation at 6pm followed by open discussion, ending at 7pm in time for the Blurb sessions at ArtWaves gallery/studio.
I posted recently about the forthcoming Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London, opening on 8th December. There’s an article in the Autumn/Winter 2009 edition of the V&A magazine about the exhibition, written by Michael Horsham. You can’t read the article online, which is a shame because it’s very interesting, though if you’re really keen, you can subscribe here at £11 per year.
In brief, accompanying sixteen images of work on show, there are short statements from several of the artists, including a tribute to the role of Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the creators of Processing, whose influence is threaded throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition looks fascinating, and I for one will be going to see it as soon as possible.
A famous example of artistic erasure, although not digital, is Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg (1953), described as “drawing: traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame”.
With the meeting at Burslem School of Art looming tomorrow evening, it’s time to turn this blog towards some thoughts about the theme of the exhibition: erasure. What happens when you erase something digitally? Can you really remove something, or do you create something new? What traces do you leave behind?
Rhizome has a post about a self-deleting website:
Virtual data isn’t subject to decay like traditional media. Despite this, we can still lose personal data to disk failure, viruses, or accidental deletion. Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.
Temporary.cc eschews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.
That’s certainly one way to look at erasure.
Even at 24,000 LEDs, this illuminated dress is very low resolution. We’re still a long way from the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly.