Category: ProjectToShare

In addition to reading about Marmalade Type, Tom Sachs’ Tea Ceremony, Water Pendulum, and Rapid Recap, I chose to respond to Philippe’s post of  Christian Marclay’s the Clock.

Being able to compile a full 24 hour clock from movie clips demonstrates how important time and checking clocks is to us and to progressing the plot of a film. It’s interesting because the same does not go for equally ubiquitous (if nor more ubiquitous) tools in our culture such as smartphones, which seem to make an incredibly rare appearance in most contemporary, mainstream film, especially when compared to the portion of our daily time is sunk into using them. Obviously the smartphone is a lot newer than the clock, so only films released within the past decade or so would feature smartphones at all, but I’d be willing to bet clocks still play a larger role in film than smartphones do. The juxtaposition here shows how clocks have cemented themselves as an experience of information that warrants capturing. They can show something necessary that the audience is also interested in. The vast majority of phone usage (emails, social media updates, texts, etc), despite it maybe making the film more realistic, does nothing to progress a plot and is of little interest to the audience despite its obvious reliability.

Olafur Eliasson is one of the big names when talking about how materiality can be produced and perceived in unconventional ways. In contrast with other projects where he focuses on the use of light and visual effects to mislead our vision, this one explores the nature of time by diminishing our seen reality. It comes to my mind another artist that has also explored time in his pieces, again with strobe lights, to obtain that low-framerate effect.

‘kinematope [gare d’austerlitz]’ (2014) and ‘kinematope [croisement]’ (2018) are some of the immersive light installations created by the Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena that explore the manipulation of time to transform an architectural space. In these installations, a set of spotlights ignite keeping up with a fluctuant rhythm that speeds up in time. The dark space becomes timeless, and the visitor loses his conscience of movement. The shadows freeze and space turns into an expanded zoetrope.

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Other projects reviewed: Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’, Dirk Koy’s ‘Escape Route’, Richard McGuire’s ‘HERE’, Charles Lohr’s ‘Non-Euclidian Renderer’.

 

Art and Surveillance Project

The Art Surveillance Project has an ongoing online database that “catalogues artists, artworks, and exhibitions addressing surveillance within Canada post-9/11.” Founded by Dr. Susan Cahill at the University of Calgary, the directory was a response to the “War on Terror” in 2001. The artworks on the site range from glass engravings to huge googly eyes to mirrored domes.

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Other Reviewed Articles:

 

This is a response to Steven’s post about Marmalade Type:

I know that the primary interest of this piece seems to be its optical illusion, but it got me thinking about how one could merge ExCap with typography. I am 90% sure that in a past class with Golan I saw someone make a project using Kinect where the shape of one’s body controlled various details of a font, so they could dance around and create their own personal typeface. I looked for it a while and couldn’t find it, so instead I offer you a link to this website about manually manipulating fonts (still pretty fun): https://v-fonts.com/

Also read: Joyce’s post on “Delusional Crime and Punshiment”, Philippe’s post on “The Clock”, Izzy’s post on “Learning to See”, and Stacy’s post on “Tea Ceremony”.

I resonate with the point that Sean made in his review of the BriefCam, that the re-purposing of surveillance technologies can lead to creative opportunities. Surveillance footage plus analytic functionalities allow for the manipulation of visual information across space and time. BriefCam superimposes different moments of the same place together, which is ‘eerie,’ as Sean calls it, and I quite feel it. I also want to add that surveillance camera gives a sense of power, because in a way, BriefCam offers a type of ‘god-view.’ Demonstrated even in the graphic novel HER, which Sean mentions, the ability to collapse images over the course of thousands of years empowers the user/reader/audience to experience history with a new perspective.

This reminds me of Dragonfly Eyes, a feature-length narrative film by Xu Bing. It is made entirely from surveillance footage in China. Seemingly disconnected, random, transient slices of life in the form of security footage are pieced together by the artist to tell one cohesive story. Unlike works of surveillance art that emphasize the critique of and resistance towards oppressive use of the technology (as in Joseph’s post), this feature film does not quite strike me as a critique. As the film creates narrative with surveillance footage, it also creates a type of romance. Instead of acknowledging that China is a surveillance state,  the film seems to (try to) prove that there is something poetic about it (and that the person who understands such poetry is the one who can collect, access, and own these surveillance footage). I wonder what the artist felt like when he was editing this film, and if he felt like a god.

Other posts reviewed:

• Jacqui’s “Project To Share: Unpainted Sculpture by Charles Ray”
• Philippe’s “Christian Marclay’s The Clock”
• Joseph’s ‘Triple Chaser’ by Forensic Architecture
• Stacy’s Tom Sachs’ Tea Ceremony

Reviewed Posts By:

• Izzy
• Christian
• Olivia
• Steven
• Philippe

In response to Izzy’s shared project, the concept of GANs/Style Transfer has been popping up a lot in the world of Art. https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com is a popular example of where we are currently with our generative abilities, and large companies such as Nvidia are always pushing out new algorithms that get us farther from the uncanny valley to a point where we can’t even tell reals from fakes. Machine Learning is based on the idea that with enough data, you can approximate any function to such a precise degree that not even us humans can tell the difference. With such a large database of images on Google, people can easily scrape larger and larger datasets to train on. Not only are our models growing more accurate, but our datasets are always getting larger.

Gloomy Sunday was posted 2 years ago, and we’ve made such large progress in machine learning over this time. I wonder what type of results we would get now if we were to retrain the model on the must updated Pix2Pix algorithm with a larger dataset (could we make it so convincing that humans would think it’s real?)

What does it look like to wield machine learning algorithms for good? In “Triple Chase,” the act of building an image recognition system serves here as a way to level power differentials between innocent victims, activists and global arms traders. In this case, the knowledge of where a company is distributing weapons can be wielded against that company’s reputation for justice.

What’s fascinating about Forensic Architecture at large is the use of footage to reconstruct the layers of events that have been lost. Indeed, the leveling power in Forensic Architecture’s approach is this notion of revealing unseen, or intentionally suppressed, relationships. In this sense, I ask what power dynamics reside in the ability to know, uncover, or suppress these relationships?

Speaking of power, the democratization of machine learning processes in libraries like Ml5.js (among others) serves as a way to open up the privilege of new ways of knowing about the world. In what ways can we, as educated technologists, further open up the power of computer vision to artists, activists, and non-technologists?

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