nonsite

July 1, 2009 8:04 am

July 2009: welcome to nonsite

Nonsite represents my digital arts research over the past two years.

I have been reflecting on how my memories of being an undergraduate art student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada from 1974 to 1976, relate to my experience as an MA student in Digital Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London from 2007 to 2009.

I have been writing about the formation of my identity as an artist, on how a sense of community is created by a school or college within a university, and in particular I’ve been considering the art world as an imagined community of artists, regardless of our actual geographical location.

This research has become a memory work. My goal is to create a place for the reader to locate themselves and to help them make sense of the world. I’ve been reflecting on art events, artworks, exhibitions, people and artist talks, that I remember from the mid-1970s and how they contributed to me becoming an artist and as such, part of a larger art world and contemporary art community.

One of my challenges has been to determine a design for the content that appropriately reflects and collapses the content from these two distinctly different times: 1974-76 and 2007-09. I have dated each post and time stamped the postings in order to arrange the sequence by day and month regardless of year.

June 23, 2009 2:15 pm

June 23, 2007: Michael Somoroff’s Illumination

While walking around Chelsea I was struck by several gallery spaces showing early 20th century modernist furniture and lights. The lights were always beautiful in their elegant simplicity as was the furniture. We went into one showroom with several beautiful pieces- a beautiful sofa and an armoire that were set in a room lit by florescent tube lights behind an elegantly etched frit glass scrim.

I had a chance to see Michael Somoroff’s exhibition Illumination at the BravinLee Projects space on 26th Street in Chelsea. It was in interesting example of a good idea- create sci-fi like projections of sound and light. He had several different projection pieces- one on a large monitor as you entered the dark space and two more facing each other as you went further into the space.

michael-somoroff-illumination

I like the idea of using video projectors with slowly transforming abstract light projection. Good possibilities there.

The problem for me with this work, was that not only were the images science fiction like, but there were 2001 A Space Odyssey soundtracks composed for each piece. It was hard for me to separate the presentation from a trailer to a new sci-fi film, and perhaps that was the intention. Reading the Press Release after leaving I now understand “the artist’s interest is in sacred architecture, spirituality and politics provoked by light patterns on March 20, 2003 when the US first attacked Iraq.” That intention was absent for me in the Illumination project.

June 20, 2009 4:36 pm

June 20, 2009: what do artists know?

The question that keeps coming up the more I reflect on what I’m doing- on artist’s research projects and considering what the creation of new knowledge means is: what do artists know?

What knowledge do artists know that other people don’t know. are we talking about tacit knowledge, things I know intuitively over a lifetime of making art? I am aware that I have a more refined sensibility- a hight level of connoiseurship. Over the years, I have experienced artists who make interesting work, but who don’t understand what they are doing.

Is your artwork better if you are more reflective and articulate? If you can talk about your artwork and ideas- that doesn’t necessarity make the art better.

June 19, 2009 1:04 pm

June 19, 2008: CAPTCHA and Folksonomy

Monday’s chat introduced me to folksonomy, a term I was unfamiliar with- which relates to collaborative or social tagging. Jonathan posted some notes from Charles Leadbeater from his new book We-think and his thoughts on various forms of collaboration including folksonomy. As wikipedia notes: “Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy.”

Folksonomies like del.icio.us have recently become a very popular way to store links. BibSonomy is similar to del.icio.us (which I’ve been using in a sort of ad hoc way) but it seems more academic, in that it relates to bibliographies and links to articles more that websites.

I was signing in to BibSonomy, an academic social bookmarking site out of Kassel, Germany and I had to fill in a CAPTCHA before I could register. I became intrigued by these images of distorted words, that evidently spambots can’t read. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), as a term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, for a program designed distinguish whether the user is a human or a computer.

So I began thinking about how beautiful they were and could they be generated and printed. I also enjoyed how random the words seemed to be.

Following up with a little research led me to the reCAPTCHA project out of Carnegie Mellon. It sets up a very noble ambition, whereby as we type in the CAPTCHA images, we translate words from digitized books, one word at a time- words that have been scanned and are currently illegible. According to the reCAPTCHA site about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans daily around the world. As no computer can currently read CAPTCHAs as well as humans, bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs. This relates closely to my research into Claude Shannon and his interests in cryptography and steganography.

I’m wondering if an interesting project would be to use specific CAPTCHA images generated out of historically interesting art texts or articles. It would be an interesting way to focus and draw attention to a topic- say theosophy or early conceptual art and to build out a vocabulary.

Then it would be interesting to generate these CAPTCHA words as embroideries. So, starting with something at that is analogue and printed, using OCR to generate images that are then distorted and then embroidered and then rephotographed digitally and enlarged.

June 18, 2009 2:00 pm

June 18, 2008: the Needles ferry

Driving back from Banff with Kent in my Nissan pickup, waiting for the Needles ferry.

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June 17, 2009 12:56 pm

June 17, 1975: Elizabeth Murray

she’s making the paintings I wish I was making

June 15, 2009 6:19 pm

June 15, 2007: Interview with Andrew Stiff

I had an online interview with Andrew Stiff, the course leader for the MA in Digital Arts at Camberwell College, University of the Arts London. This course is taught online, part-time over two years, so it’s hard to get a sense of how it actually works. In this Digital Arts MA there are online students, regular students and part-time students. Andrew’s main questions related to my research, and my sense was that he was trying to get some sense of the depth of my knowledge of the field in particular in relation to the context. I had been asked to frame my interests around a research question, context, methodologies and resources.

This course seems like an ideal way for me to get a better understanding of how to articulate an art practice as research. The beauty of this course is that I can continue working at Emily Carr University and be enrolled in this MA at the same time. There is no residency requirement, however as an international student- it is expensive compared to Canada.

June 13, 2009 2:34 pm

June 13, 2008: how small

How small can an image be to still resonate? I’ve been thinking a great deal about images and remembering what I think is probably the only photograph my father has of his father. It a small image no more than one inch tall, and yet it carries so much presence- and has such an aura. I also am recalling an exhibition we saw in Barcelona a few years ago of surrealist photographers and some of the images were contact prints- framed in large mats,a nd I remember being struck, not only be how beautiful they were, but also by what a great presence they had- particularly in relation to how big everything else seems to be.

I’ve also been struck by how easy it is now to make a print and I think the impulse is to enlarge. I think my plan it is research smallness, things that are a modest scale. I’m going to dig out my old negs and look at them again. This sounds so nostalgic, but I think there’s something there.

Somehow I got around to researching Edwin Land today. It was because I remembered Land Polaroid cameras and polarizing filters. What a great story! Similar in many ways to Claude Russell and compression theory. Both ended up working for the military during the war- Russell on encryption and Land on target finders and stereoscopic viewing systems.

I found this amazing photograph of a thin film polarizer, which got me thinking further about my ideas about smallness.

Further to this there are many photographs that are now part of the creative commons, are available to be used openly, many images that are part of explaining scientific terms and ideas. This is a wonderful resource that should be researched further.

June 12, 2009 7:30 pm

June 12, 2009: getting ready for travel

We’re getting ready to leave for Europe on Monday and I’m finding as I get older that it takes more time and better organization to travel. I don’t remember it being this complicated. I’ve been focused on finishing up nonsite before we leave as well as my Unit 3 written report, as I’m not sure how easy it will be to connect to the internet while traveling. We’re flying into Paris, then taking the train down to Venice to see the Biennale on Thursday.

Since I’ve been working on this project, I’ve been thinking a lot about when I went to see the 1976 Venice Biennale. I was still an art student and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I arrived in Venice for the opening. I found a pensione near the train station (single bed, 7500 lira) and once I got to the Giardini it was very exciting to see that many people coming to see contemporary art.

In 1976 for me the highlights were mostly in the Aperto exhibition that Germano Celant curated. I remember the Jannis Kounellis horses that were led into the converted gallery space every day for a couple of hours and the clean tile floors. Dan Graham installed his amazing two rooms.

Joseph Beuys installed Tram Stop in the German Pavillion. I’m trying to remember, but I think Greg Curnoe was in the Canadian Pavillion.

June 8, 2009 12:29 am

June 8, 2008: contextualizing the field

I’ve been working out of a beautiful studio at the Banff Centre for the past four weeks and for the first time in about a year I’ve been able to start to feel like I’m getting caught up on some of the many strands I’ve had floating around in my head for the past few months and certain themes, issues and ideas are starting to float to the top. Recently mapping, locative media, geo-tagging have been strong, but not as strong as my more recent interest in Claude Shannon, lossy data compression, image fidelity and encryption. I wish I was clearer where this research might end up, but I’m following my research instincts and I will worry about outcomes later.

The best thing I did this week was download Markus Gebhard’s JavE 5 ascii generator. This ascii editor has a very elegant interface that can draw and convert images into ascii. It seems very robust. It saves images as .txt files so you can open them as quite large files even though they are very low resolution- an interesting contradiction.

I haven’t really taking much time to reflect on the contextualization exercise two weeks ago. I have to admit to being a little disappointed at the level of engagement- again I think it must be hard for my colleagues if they don’t have the background or the interest in what I’ve been thinking about. I think Jonathan did the best he could, but I don’t know that I learned much new. I’m also not sure how helpful my comments have been for my colleagues- other than Ayhan, as I happen to have some older knowledge that relates to his project.

It feels pretty anticlimactic at the moment, hopefully tomorrow will be useful.

June 7, 2009 8:58 am

June 7, 2008: Bodies in Flight

I heard an interesting talk this week by Simon Jones and Sara Giddens- he’s from Bristol where he teaches drama at the University and she’s from Nottingham. They have been collaborating on drama/theatre performance projects since 1990 with a group they call Bodies in Flight. Simon gave a lecture on practice based research in performance within the academy. He defined their methodologies as part of Professor Baz Kershaw’s larger 2001- 2006 PARIP: Practice as Research in Performance research project out of the University of Bristol, funded by the Arts and the Humanities Research Board which looks like the British equivalent to Canada’s SSHRC. The project is a good example of a well documented university research project in practice based performance research. Listening to them talk I kept thinking how much Susan would enjoy their research- in particular Sara’s interest in choreography derived from normal body movements.

The AHRB website is also a good place to look for the kinds of research that are receiving funding and to get a better understanding of some of their terminology like knowledge transfer.

June 7, 2009 8:11 am

As artists, the language that we use to distinguish our practice as research has been complicated by vocabularies from the social sciences and the humanities. We need to find a way to come up with our own vocabulary to describe what it is that we do.

June 4, 2009 9:23 pm

June 4, 2008: mapping an art process

One of the big things that’s been happening here in Banff, is that a number of the participants have been working on diagrams and mindmaps to better understand the practice based art research we’re involved in. Adelheid Mers has been making maps for a number of years and she just gave me this art-process map based on a discussion from a presentation I did yesterday.

June 3, 2009 9:06 am

June 3, 2008: compression artifacts

image research on compression artifacts

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June 2, 2009 5:44 pm

June 2, 1975: David Rabinowitch

David Rabinowitch seems like a very serious sculptor. He is into flat, heavy materials, stone and steel mostly. He talks about mass. Cuts seem to be very important to him, and he drills small holes at precise points. Everything seems to be based on mathematical calculations. He has come to NSCAD to make a print.

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June 1, 2009 4:08 pm

June 1, 2009: final month, wrapping up

A month from today I will be arriving into London for a week installing in the Camberwell Summer 2009 exhibition. Today’s chat was mostly technical. There was not really any feedback from last week’s symposium, other than that Andy said our presentations were great- which is nice to hear.

The symposium was really focused on the students who were at Camberwell, and were there to present their videos. Personally, I was disappointed that there were no mechanism for questions to be directed towards online students. In hindsight it feels like I sent a video off into the ether.

We’re in our final month. Everything is now focussed on exhibition details and wrapping up loose ends. I’m trying to decide how much to hyperlink the entries from the 1970s. I’ll continue to do some experiments.

June 1, 2009 12:34 pm

I thought one of the intentions of this symposium was that we would each post a video related to our research in advance for everyone to preview, so when it came to the actual presentations there would be time for thoughtful questions that had been prepared in advance.

May 22, 2009 10:05 am

May 22, 2008: following up on leads

Raining lightly, walking into town, feeling like a tourist, spent the day following up on leads from others.

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May 21, 2009 4:28 pm

May 21, 2008: noise is human

Lossy compression artifacts create information that’s not there. Noise is human- messy and imperfect. Introducing compression creates distortion. These errors serve to remind us of the fragility of life- of aging, deterioration and entropy. They approach the conditions of abstraction and are important as they exist stark contrast to the perfect ambitions of digital reproduction, cloning and replication.

There should be room here for a great breadth of research- distortion, compression, the invention of imperfections. I’m reminded of dot matrix printers and old photocopy machines. The challenge is how not to romanticize the retro beauty of these obsolete technologies, but rather to use them as a technique for research.

In the early 1990s I took a series of portraits of friends and family, which I had printed into 4×6″ prints and then scanned on a 8 bit flatbed scanner. At the time I didn’t realize why these files were so small and pixelated- I couldn’t enlarge them at all without them breaking up. I didn’t understand how resolution worked.

May 20, 2009 9:23 pm

May 20, 2008: compression artifacts

Claude Shannon’s important work on information theory in the 1940s gives us the theoretical bounds for rate–distortion theory and how much compression can be achieved through redundancy using lossy compression methods.

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I’m doing some experiments to see what king of images I get when I shoot at a low resolution and then compress using jpeg compression and then enlarge. I’m curious how much interpolation the output devices need to make in order to create a large scale version of a low resolution image.

I’m reminded of seeing a Sigmar Polke retrospective I saw many years ago in the early 1990s at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where in the large gallery Polke had made two enormous vinyl banners on each of the two main walls. From a great distance the images held together, but when you approached the work up close you could see the stochastic dot patterns of the inkjet printing.

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