The Rise of Art World 2.0, Ted Mooney

Two years into what we seem to have agreed, in full supine position, to call the Great Recession, it is clear to almost everyone that something has indeed taken its course, and that in many respected fields of endeavor things will never be the same. As someone who has pursued with equal commitment two parallel careers throughout my life─one in the art world (as an editor, a writer, and now as an educator at Yale’s graduate School of Art), and another in the literary world (as a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer)─I am struck, if not exactly surprised, by the similarity of the changes the recent financial meltdown has wrought on both fields, changes long in development but only now openly validated. I say changes, but in fact they are paradigm shifts, since both the art and literary worlds are undergoing transformations that will prove to be game-changingly radical. This much is certain: what was before, will be no more. The sooner we realize this, the more options we will have in the future.

Talking about this paradigm shift in regard to the art world is strangely difficult, for the very reason that the term “art world,” so casually bandied about by almost everyone, is most often used to refer to something that is at best a suspiciously convenient myth. No such all-encompassing art “world” exists. Most likely it is this misuse of the word “world” that has left the term “art world” itself open to such a wide range of misunderstandings. But in fact “art world” does have a very specific meaning, one quite different from the fuzzy globalist entity most often summoned up by those who use it so indiscriminately. Simply put, the art world consists of all those involved in the commission, creation, valuation, promotion, presentation, sale, criticism, documentation, and preservation of art. And with that established, many other matters grow a good deal clearer.

While we have always had artists in the U.S., for example, the American art world─one including all the elements listed above─is a much more recent development. Borrowing from the nomenclature of the software industry, I will call the U.S. art world’s earliest incarnation Art World 1.0 and locate its emergence somewhere in the mid- to late 1930s, when a number of forces came together in New York to create it. These forces included the sudden arrival here of European artists fleeing the onset of World War II; the convergence in New York of other European emigré artists who had moved to the U.S. much earlier but now joined their fellow exiles in the nascent art capital; and a similar movement of American artists away from the heartland to the growing artistic ferment in the East. In addition to these historical migrations, the federal Works Progress Administration, at that time the largest employer in the post-Depression U.S., provided substantial support for the arts, allowing, for example, Willem de Kooning (who had reached New York in 1927) to earn more than three times the salary of a typical Macy’s employee of the same period, all while painting public art works for which he was paid with federal dollars. What’s more, several other elements of the art world as I have defined it were already in place: among them Alfred Barr’s then artist-friendly MOMA, such prescient commissioners of art work as Peggy Guggenheim, a handful of important galleries, soon followed by art and culture periodicals like In the Tiger’s Eye, and View—enough of the necessary elements, anyway, to give critical mass to the first genuine U.S. art world.

Money was certainly made within this self-contained enclave, but not very much, and the institutions and collectors who acquired the art works emerging from these artists’ studios did so mainly out of their acute awareness that this was a historic moment, unprecedented in the U.S. Few if any of these collectors imagined that the works they were buying would in a very short time increase astronomically in monetary value, so speculation was a negligible factor. It was sufficient that enough money be circulated through the art scene to keep the artists alive and productive. And with only short periods of stasis, indirection or revolt, the New York art world evolved from that first iteration into what we know today, its characteristic elements continuously shifting in relative importance as the art eco-system grew in volume and self-confidence.

I will leave the reader to decide when exactly the art world’s incremental upgrades occurred─when 1.0 became 1.1, and so on─confining myself instead to a few obviously watershed moments. By the late 1940s and early ’50s, the Abstract Expressionists had became pop-cultural stars whom the average American saw in equal measure as perplexing oddities (“My kid could’ve done that”) and gratifying emblems of postwar American dominance (“Take that, Europe”). Indeed, they became such accepted emblems of a newly prosperous U.S. that the federal government (in the form of the U.S. Information Agency, now known to have functioned abroad as a propaganda arm of the C.I.A.) sent their works on extended worldwide tour as a potent psychological asset in waging the Cold War.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s another major change occurred, as the soul-baring feats of the Abstract Expressionists and their progeny gave way to the cool ironies of artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and all those other artists so hastily lumped together by the media under the rubric of Pop art. I’ll call this moment the arrival of Art World 1.5, since, in my opinion, it brought us halfway to where we are now. With it came a shift in sensibility that suggested a new detachment of artist from artwork, one that allowed the expansion into that same ironic distance of the other art-world elements, those that till now had usually played a secondary role. The valuation, promotion, presentation, and sale of art began to take on more weight, and the normative practices in these areas showed signs of changing and evolving in ways till then unforeseeable.

Simultaneously, a new breed of collector emerged, exemplified by people like Robert Scull, who made his fortune from a Manhattan taxi fleet inherited from his father-in-law, had no real background in art and simply bought what he liked—in quantity. Pricing became more aggressive, promotion took on a glamour of its own, and the social aspect of the art world veered increasingly toward spectacle. Not only did this period mark the peak of postwar prosperity in this country, but it was also a genuinely thrilling time for U.S. art, one as innovative in its way as that ushered in by the Abstract Expressionists. What’s more─and here Warhol is the obvious example─the subject of much of this art was commerce, money, glamour, and popular culture. So for the first time the economic elements of the art world were unapologetically accorded billing equal to the art and the artists themselves. And with this acceptance, the ethos that has brought us to our present pass was unequivocally established.

To be sure, there were those who worked in explicit rebellion against the overall commercial trend of the art world─the Conceptualists, the Earthwork artists, performance artists, and others─many of whom produced art that, though intended in part to be “uncollectable,” must be accounted major work by any standards. But the expansion and increasing commercialization of the art world─punctuated by the booms and busts intrinsic to any market-linked community─continued apace. Among the innovations that contributed to the art world’s rapid development from the 1960s on were the decreasing cost and consequent proliferation of color reproductions in art magazines, the rise of graduate art-school programs (which implicitly presented art as a solid career path, comparable to, say, dentistry, in the security it offered), the increasing acceptance of the nakedly commercial art fair as a legitimate forum for presenting art, the ascension of the artist super-stars of the 1980s, the exploding resale market for contemporary art at venerable auction houses, the construction boom for contemporary art museums as they became more and more widely perceived as tourist magnets that no respectable mid-sized municipality could do without, and, finally, the vastly accelerated exchange of ideas and images that the Internet allowed. By the time the Museum of Modern Art reopened its doors after its lavish renovations of 2002-04, it is safe to say that Art World 1.9 had reached its apotheosis and begun its ongoing decline. Art World 2.0, a complete reset of the original, with consequences only beginning to be known, was taking shape.

Why do I locate this changeover at that moment? It’s tempting to point to the example of the newly expanded MOMA, a grotesquely misconceived distortion of its former self. As far back as the 1970s there had been talk, both within the museum and outside it, of declaring MOMA a historical museum, a museum precisely of modern art, which is generally seen as having come to a triumphant end with Minimalism. Watching MOMA continue to show contemporary art in its ostentatiously corporate, quintessentially modernist quarters seems to many like watching a 75-year-old man (the Modern opened in 1929, the very year the Great Depression began) attempt a kickflip indy at the local skateboarding park─a sight unseemly at best, but in any case a clear indication that all self-awareness has long since departed the scene. That may sound like a cheap shot, but within it lies a kernel of ineradicable truth. Every three generations (and I’m using “generation” to mean the traditional 25 years, not the five to ten years implied by advertisements and over-wrought publicists) the living memory of how the world was “back then,” what its inhabitants at that time aspired to and how they went about getting it, begins to die off. The number of eyewitnesses rapidly diminishes until we become reliant on second-hand accounts, self-serving memoirs, and conflicting rumor to summon up a vision of the original. Soon nothing can be verified with certainty, the “real” past is lost, and it can only carry on as a simulacrum of itself. Not until then, paradoxically, can the genuinely new, brought into being of its own necessity, be born and thrive on its own terms. Now, for the American art world, that time is upon us.

While it must be emphasized that Art World 2.0 remains in its earliest stage of development, it currently seems characterized by a studious rejection, quiet but steely, of the corporatization of art so enthusiastically and profitably pursued during the Art World 1.9 years. Among my grad students and many of their confreres in their mid-thirties or younger, there is a strong preference for art that in one way or another emphasizes “secrecy,” subversion, withholding, ephemerality, word-of-mouth invitation, sub-visible presence, intimate one-on-one interaction between artist and “viewer” and strong artist-to-artist dialogue. Where there’s institutional critique (and there’s a lot of it) it’s unlikely to be cast in the flamboyantly confrontational style of, say, Hans Haacke. Instead it might take place within a chosen “major New York museum”─the default term proposed by some leading museums after the almost Talmudic deliberations of their legal departments─among a group of invited participants, the results to be documented, if at all, by the museum’s security cameras. (It seems significant in itself that “surveillance”—both inside museums and elsewhere--is a hot topic among Art World 2.0 artists, who are acutely aware of the demise of privacy and ingenious in their attempts to resuscitate it.)

In addition, widespread revelations about the recent criminal activities of respected banks and international corporations, crimes that have almost without exception gone unpunished, have made virtually all corporate practice suspect to a sizable proportion of Americans, and to many of the Art World 2.0 artists it is, at least for now, anathema. As they attempt to reclaim for artists the freedom and respect once naturally accorded the best art work, independent of the by-now customary financial indices and career-path signposts, they have begun to seek alternative ways of structuring their art world. And they have learned how to adapt for their own purposes the near-universal corporate response to the recent financial meltdown; they have developed ways to eliminate (or at least minimize) the middlemen.

This strategy is only possible because the old Art World, as well as modernism and the various morbid offshoots that followed its demise, is dead to them. They accept this as a fact, but don’t dwell on it, since the corporatization that marked Art World 1.9’s endgame is of little relevance to them, except as a warning. What most concerns these emerging Art World 2.0 artists from a practical standpoint is regaining control of how their work is presented and, given the ever-greater importance of the Internet, how the reproduced images of that work are disseminated. To those ends, many prefer to avoid long-term gallery affiliation altogether, seeking instead the most suitable venue for each new project as it is completed. By stringing together a series of one-shot appearances in places of their own choosing, they are better able to maximize their freedom and shape their work’s development. This may be seen as a direct response to the financial hysteria of the Art World 1.9 years, which led to the virtual extinction (though always with magnificent exceptions) of long-term, even life-long relationships between gallery and artist. In times not nearly as distant as they now seem, galleries saw it as their role to nurture and develop their artists, eventually to arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome through patience and hard work. But the frenetic financial pace of Art World 1.9─whereby new artists would typically be given two or three shows to demonstrate their financial viability before, if their work failed to sell impressively, being summarily dropped─did away with these nurturing relationships, and Art World 2.0 artists have quite sensibly concluded that their best option is to nurture themselves. This shift in thinking explains the primary emphasis Art World 2.0 artists place on building and maintaining their connections with other artists; they want a mutual support structure that they can depend on. Not only does this preference mirror their widely shared interest in reconnecting with their audience personally, in many cases on an intimate one-to-one basis, but underscores their deep-seated resistance to any form of outside control whatsoever, from any quarter. This insistence by Art World 2.0 artists on setting their own terms is yet another bit of bad news for galleries, who have already begun to see their high-end artists’ new work bypass them altogether, going straight from studio to auction house, where a successful sale can establish an artist’s financial worth much more effectively than a sold-out gallery show, which is by nature not at all transparent. The gallery dealer can and does make use of a whole range of tricks to achieve the desired public perception of a given show’s outcome, including under-the-table discounts, non-existent waiting lists for a particular artist’s work, failure to disclose the prices at which works really sold, and many other sleights of hand. At auction, the process is far more transparent: a work is sold to the highest bidder, conferring on the artist a more certain status and financial validation. Foreign collectors, especially from emerging markets such as Asia, are far more comfortable buying the work of an artist with whom they may not be familiar if that artist has already received the imprimatur of a respected auction house.

Obviously, auction houses are unlikely to accept a consignment from an untested artist, and that fact, along with the innate predisposition of Art World 2.0 artists to avoid entangling commercial alliances, assures that there will be many more artist-organized shows in the future. This polarization of sales venues corresponds, interestingly enough, to the drastically increased concentration of U.S. wealth into far fewer hands, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and grossly accelerated during the Bush years. I have heard more than a few highly informed art-world players speculate pessimistically about the continued viability of art galleries in Art World 2.0. Personally, I think this is more a form of complaint than prognostication, but the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand. At the very least it is a recognition, however indirect, that the reset implicit in the arrival of Art World 2.0 has already occurred.

What direction Art World 2.0 will eventually take cannot, of course, be known at this early date, but its initial aspirations are clear. Precisely because the monetary valuation of art, while based on some established indices, is at base irrational and subjective to the point of arbitrariness, the artist who is alert to these matters can work with a freedom unavailable to virtually all other workers in all other professions. This freedom was highly valued in the early stages of Art World 1.0─not only by artists but also by those composing the other necessary elements of the art world eco-system. Somewhere along the way, however, that freedom was lost to many artists as the art-world “support system” arrogated to itself more and more power, which came to influence artists themselves to an equally inflated degree. Those days may not be entirely over, but Art World 2.0 has arrived with the express intention of reclaiming its freedom and resisting outside influences, especially institutional ones, with all the energy and inventiveness its members can bring to bear.

They have already dismissed any notion of a master scenario for art’s development, simply by virtue of their arrival. They have the tools and weapons to take back their freedom, with its mix of blessings. Now we will see if they have the will.

Copyright © 2010 by Ted Mooney

Author: Ted Mooney was a senior editor at Art in America magazine for more than 30 years and now teaches a graduate seminar at Yale University’s School of Art. He is also the author of three award-winning novels, as well a number of essays and shorter works of fiction. His most recent novel, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 11, 2010, is titled The Same River Twice. A video trailer for this book was created in collaboration with new-media artist John Gara and can be found at http://tiny.cc/TSRT-video .

above copied from: http://artistorganizedart.org/commons/

Image Future, Lev Manovich

Uneven Development

What kinds of images will dominate visual culture a number of decades from now? Would they still be similar to the typical image that surrounds us today—photographs that are digitally manipulated and often combined with various graphical elements and type? Or would future images be completely different? Would photographic code fade away in favor of something else?

There are good reasons to assume that the future images would be photograph-like. Like a virus, a photograph turned out to be an incredibly resilient representational code: it survived waves of technological change, including computerization of all stages of cultural production and distribution. The reason for this persistence of photographic code lies in its flexibility: photographs can be easily mixed with all other visual forms—drawings, 2D and 3D designs, line diagrams, and type. As a result, while photographs truly dominate contemporary visual culture, most of them are not pure photographs but various mutations and hybrids: photographs which went through various filters and manual adjustments to achieve a more stylized look, a more flat graphic look, more saturated color, etc.; photographs mixed with design and type elements; photographs which are not limited to the part of the spectrum visible to a human eye (night vision, X-ray); simulated photographs done with 3D computer graphics; and so on. Therefore, while we can say that today we live in a "photographic culture," we also need to start reading the word "photographic" in a new way. "Photographic" today is really photo-GRAPHIC, the photo providing only an initial layer for the overall graphical mix.

One way is which change happens in nature, society, and culture is inside-out. The internal structure changes first, and this change affects the visible skin only later. For instance, according to Marxist theory of historical development, infrastructure (i.e., mode of production in a given society, also called "base") changes well before superstructure (ideology and culture in this society). In a different example, think of technology design in the twentieth century: typically, a new type of machine was at first fitted within old, familiar skin (for instance, early twentieth-century cars emulated the form of horse carriages). The familiar McLuhan idea that the new media first emulates old media is another example of this type of change. In this case, a new mode of media production, so to speak, is first used to support old structures of media organization, before the new structure emerges. For instance, the first typeset books were designed to emulate hand-written books; cinema first emulated theater; and so on.

This concept of uneven development can be useful in thinking about the changes in contemporary visual culture. Since it beginnings fifty years ago, computerization of photography (and cinematography) has by now completely changed the internal structure of a photographic image; yet its "skin," i.e. the way the image looks, still largely remains the same. It is therefore possible that at some point in the future the "skin" of an image would also become completely different, but this has not happened yet. So we can say at present our visual culture is characterized by a new computer "base" and old photographic "superstructure."

The Matrix trilogy of films provides us with a very rich set of examples perfect for thinking further about these issues. The trilogy is an allegory about how its visual universe is constructed. That is, the films tell us about the Matrix, the virtual universe which is maintained by computers—and of course, visually the images of the Matrix which we the viewers see in the films were all indeed assembled with the help of software (the animators sometimes used Maya but mostly relied on custom-written programs). So there is a perfect symmetry between us, the viewers of a film, and the people who live inside the Matrix—except while the computers running the Matrix are capable of doing it in real time, most scenes in each of The Matrix films took months and even years to put together. (So The Matrix can be also interpreted as the futuristic vision of computer games at a point in a future when it would become possible to render The Matrix-style visual effects in real time.)

The key to the visual universe of The Matrix trilogy is the new set of computer graphic processes that over the years were developed by John Gaeta and his colleagues at ESC Entertainment. Gaeta coined names for these processes: "virtual cinema," "virtual human," "universal capture," "image-based rendering," and others. Together, these processes represent a true milestone in the history of computer-driven special effects. They take to their logical conclusion the developments of the 1990s, such as motion capture, and simultaneously open a new stage. [1] We can say that with The Matrix, the old "base" of photography has finally been completely replaced by a new computer-driven one. What remains to be seen is how the "superstructure" of a photographic image—what it represents and how—will change to accommodate this "base."




Reality Simulation Versus Reality Sampling

In order to understand better the significance of Gaeta's method, let us briefly run through the history of 3D photo-realistic image synthesis and its use in the film industry. In 1963, Lawrence G. Roberts (who later in the 1960s became one of the key people behind the development of ARPANET but at that time was a graduate student at MIT) published a description of a computer algorithm to construct images in linear perspective. These images represented the objects through lines; in contemporary language of computer graphics they can be called "wire frames." Approximately ten years later, computer scientists designed algorithms that allowed for the creation of shaded images (so-called Gouraud shading and Phong shading, named after the computer scientists who create the corresponding algorithms). From the middle of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, the field of 3D computer graphics went through rapid development. Every year new fundamental techniques were arrived at: transparency, shadows, image mapping, bump texturing, particle system, compositing, ray tracing, radiosity, and so on. [2] By the end of this creative and fruitful period in the history of the field, it was possible to use a combination of these techniques to synthesize images of almost every subject that often were not easily distinguishable from traditional cinematography.

All this research was based on one fundamental assumption: in order to re-create an image of reality identical to the one captured by a film camera, we need to systematically simulate the actual physics involved in construction of this image. This means simulating the complex interactions between light sources, the properties of different materials (cloth, metal, glass, etc.), and the properties of physical cameras, including all their limitations such as depth of field and motion blur. Since it was obvious to computer scientists that if they exactly simulate all this physics, a computer would take forever to calculate even a single image, they put their energy in inventing various short cuts which would create sufficiently realistic images while involving fewer calculation steps. So in fact each of the techniques for image synthesis I mentioned in the above paragraph is one such "hack"—a particular approximation of a particular subset of all possible interactions between light sources, materials, and cameras.

This assumption also means that you are re-creating reality step-by-step, from scratch. Every time you want to make a still image or an animation of some object or scene, the story of creation from the Bible is being replayed.

(I imagine God creating the Universe by going through the numerous menus of a professional 3D modeling, animation, and rendering program such as Maya. First he has to make all the geometry: manipulating splines, extruding contours, adding bevels...Next for every object and creature he has to choose the material properties: specular color, transparency level, image, bump, and reflexion maps, and so on. He finishes one page of menus, wipes his forehead, and starts working on the next menu page. Now on to defining the lights: again, dozens of menu options need to be selected. He renders the scene, looks at the result, and admires his creation. But he is far from being done: the universe he has in mind is not a still image but an animation, which means that the water has to flow, the grass and leaves have to move under the blow of the wind, and all the creatures also have to move. He sights and opens another set of menus where he has to define the parameters of algorithms that simulate the physics of motion. And on, and on, and on. Finally the world itself is finished and it looks good; but now God wants to create the Man so he can admire his creation. God sighs again, and takes from the shelf a set of Maya manuals...)

Of course we are in somewhat better position than God was. He was creating everything for the first time, so he could not borrow things from anywhere. Therefore everything had to be built and defined from scratch. But we are not creating a new universe but instead visually simulating a universe that already exists, i.e. physical reality. Therefore computer scientists working on 3D computer graphics techniques realized early on that in addition to approximating the physics involved they can sometimes take another shortcut. Instead of defining something from scratch through the algorithms, they can simply sample it from existing reality and incorporate these samples into the construction process.

Examples of the application of this idea are the techniques of texture mapping and bump mapping which were introduced already in the second part of the 1970s. With texture mapping, any 2D digital image—which can be a close-up of some texture such as wood grain or bricks, but which can be also anything else, for instance a logo, a photograph of a face or of clouds—is mathematically wrapped around virtual geometry. This is a very effective way to add visual richness of a real world to a virtual scene. Bump texturing works similarly, but in this case the 2D image is used as a way to quickly add complexity to the geometry itself. For instance, instead of having to manually model all the little cracks and indentations which make up the 3D texture of a wall made from concrete, an artist can simply take a photograph of an existing wall, convert into a grayscale image, and then feed this image to the rendering algorithm. The algorithm treats grayscale image as a depth map, i.e. the value of every pixel is being interpreted as relative height of the surface. So in this example, light pixels become points on the wall that are a little in front while dark pixels become points that are a little behind. The result is enormous saving in the amount of time necessary to recreate a particular but very important aspect of our physical reality: a slight and usually regular 3D texture found in most natural and many human-made surfaces, from the bark of a tree to a woven cloth.

Other 3D computer graphics techniques based on the idea of sampling existing reality include reflection mapping and 3D digitizing. Despite the fact that all these techniques have been always widely used as soon as they were invented, many people in the field (as far as I can see) always felt that they were cheating. Why? I think this feeling was there because the overall conceptual paradigm for creating photorealistic computer graphics was to simulate everything from scratch through algorithms. So if you had to use the techniques based on directly sampling reality, you somehow felt that this was just temporary—because the appropriate algorithms were not yet developed or because the machines were too slow. You also had this feeling because once you started to manually sample reality and then tried to include these samples in your perfect algorithmically defined image, things rarely would fit exactly right, and painstaking manual adjustments were required. For instance, texture mapping would work perfectly if applied it to straight surface, but if the surface was curved, inevitable distortion would occur.

(I am using "we" here and in other places in this text because I spent approximately seven years working professionally in the field of 3D computer animation between 1984 and 1992, so I still feel a certain identification with this field. At IMAGINA 2003 festival in Barcelona I met John Gaeta and Greg Juby from ESC, who were there to lecture on the making of The Matrix. Slowly it became clear that the three of use were connected by multiple threads. In 1984 I went to work for a company in New York called Digital Effects that at the time was one among seven companies in the world focused on 3D computer animation for television and film. Company president Jeff Kleiser later founded another company—Kleiser- Walczak—where Greg Juby worked for a few years in the 1990s. Juby graduated from Syracuse University where—as we discovered over dinner—he was my student in the very first university class in digital arts I ever taught [1992]. While working at Kleiser's company, Juby met John Gaeta and eventually went to work for him at ESC. Finally, it also turned out that before we turned to computer graphics both Gaeta and I were students at New York University film school.)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the "reality simulation" paradigm and "reality sampling" paradigm co-existed side-by-side. More precisely, as I suggested above, the sampling paradigm was "imbedded" within the reality simulation paradigm. It was common sense that the way to create photorealistic images of reality is by simulating its physics as precisely as one could. Sampling existing reality and then adding these samples to a virtual scene was a trick, a shortcut within the otherwise honest game of simulation.




"Total Capture": Building The Matrix

So far we have looked at the paradigms of the 3D computer graphics field without considering the uses of the simulated images. So what happens if you want to incorporate photorealistic images into a film? This introduces a new constraint. Not only does every simulated image have to be consistent internally, with the cast shadows corresponding to the light sources, and so on, but now it also has to be consistent with the cinematography of a film. The simulated universe and live action universe have to match perfectly (I am talking here about the "normal" use of computer graphics in narrative films and not more graphical aesthetics of TV graphics and music videos which often deliberately juxtaposes different visual codes). As can be seen in retrospect, this new constraint eventually changed the relationship between the two paradigms in favor of the sampling paradigm. But this is only visible now, after The Matrix films made the sampling paradigm the cornerstone of its visual universe. [3]

At first, when filmmakers started to incorporate synthetic 3D images in films, this did not have any effect on how people thought about 3D image synthesis. The first feature film that had 3D computer images was Looker (1980). Throughout the 1980s, a number of films were made which used computer images but always only as a very small element within the overall film narrative (Tron, which was released in 1982 and which can be compared to The Matrix, since its universe is situated inside a computer and created through computer graphics, was an exception). For instance, one of Star Trek films contained a scene of a planet coming to life; it was created using the very first particle system. But this was a single scene, and it had no interaction with any other scenes in the film.

In the early 1990s, the situation had started to change. With pioneering films such as The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), computer generated characters became the key protagonists of film narratives. This meant that they would appear in dozens or even hundreds of shots throughout a film, and that in most of these shots computer characters would have to be integrated with real environments and human actors captured via live action photography (or what in the business is called "live plate.") Examples are the T-1000 cyborg character in Terminator 2, or dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. These computer-generated characters are situated inside the live-action universe (obtained by sampling physical reality via 35mm film camera). The simulated world is located inside the captured world, and the two have to match perfectly.

As I pointed out in The Language of New Media in the discussion of compositing, perfectly aligning elements that come from different sources is one of fundamental challenges of computer-based realism. Throughout the 1990s, filmmakers and special effects artists dealt with this challenge using a variety of techniques and methods. What Gaeta realized earlier than the others is that the best way to align the two universes of live action and 3D computer graphics was to build a single new universe [4] .

Rather than treating reality sampling as just one technique to be used along with many other "proper" algorithmic techniques of image synthesis, Gaeta turned it into the key foundation of his process. The process systematically takes physical reality apart and then systematically reassembles the elements into a virtual computer-based representation. The result is a new kind of image that has photographic/cinematographic appearance and detail yet internally is structured in a completely different way.

How does the process work? The geometry of an actor's head is captured with the help of a 3D scanner. Next, an actor's performance is recorded using three high-resolution cameras. This includes everything an actor will say in a film and all possible facial expressions. [5] (During the production the studio was capturing over five terabytes of data each day.) Next special algorithms are used to align the three images by tracking a number of points on the face in order to stitch three images into one. This new image is then mapped onto the geometry model. The information in the image is used not only as a texture map but also as a kind of bump map to transform locally the geometry of the model, in correspondence with facial movements. The end result is a perfect reconstruction of the captured performance, now available as 3D computer graphics data—with all the advantages that come from having such representation.

This process is significantly different from the commonly accepted methods used to create computer-based special effects, namely "keyframing" and physically-based modeling. With the first method, an animator specifies the key positions of a 3D model, and the computer calculates in-between frames. With the second method, all the animation is automatically created by software that simulates the physics underlying the movement. (This method thus represents a particular instance of the "reality simulation" paradigm I already discussed.) For instance, to create a realistic animation of a moving creature, the programmers model its skeleton, muscles, and skin, and specify the algorithms that simulate the actual physics involved. Often the two methods are combined: for instance, physically based modeling can be used to animate a running dinosaur while manual animation can be used for shots where the dinosaur interacts with human characters.

At the time of this writing, the most impressive achievement in physically-based modeling was the battle in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), which involved tens of thousands of virtual soldiers all driven by Massive software. [6] Similar to the Non-human Players (or bots) in computer games, each virtual soldier was given the ability to "see" the terrain and other soldiers, a set of priorities and an independent "brain," i.e. an A.I. program which directs a character's actions based on the perceptual inputs and priorities. But because Massive software, in contrast to the A.I. of games, does not have to run in real time, it can create the scenes with hundreds of thousands of realistically behaving agents (one commercial created with the help of Massive software featured 146,000 virtual characters.)

Gaeta's method uses neither manual animation nor simulation of the underlying physics. Instead, it directly captures reality, including color, texture and movement. Short sequences of the actor's performances are encoded as 3D computer animations; these animations form a library from which the filmmakers can then draw as they compose a scene. The analogy with musical sampling is obvious here. As Gaeta pointed out, his team never used manual animation to try to tweak the motion of a character's face; however, just as a musician may, they would often "hold" a particular expression before going to the next one. [7] This suggests another analogy—editing videotape. But this is second-degree editing, so to speak: instead of simply capturing segments of reality on video and then joining them together, Gaeta's method produces complete virtual recreations of particular phenomena— self-contained micro-worlds—which can be then further edited and embedded within a larger 3D simulated space.




"Image Rendering": Reality Re-assembled

Such a method combines the best of both worlds: physical reality as captured by lens-based cameras, and synthetic 3D computer graphics. While it is possible to recreate the richness of the visible world through manual painting and animation, as well as through various computer graphics techniques (texture mapping, bump mapping, physical modeling, etc.), it is expensive in terms of labor involved. Even with physically based modeling techniques, countless parameters have to be tweaked before the animation looks right. In contrast, capturing visible reality through lens on film, tape, DVD-R, computer hard drive, or other media is cheap: just point the camera and press the "record" button.

The disadvantage of such recordings is that they lack the flexibility demanded by contemporary remix culture. This culture demands not self-contained aesthetic objects or self-contained records of reality but smaller units—parts that can be easily changed and combined with other parts in endless combinations. However, because the lens-based recording process flattens the 3-D semantic structure of reality, converting a space filled with discrete objects into a flat field of pixels, any kind of editing operation—deleting objects, adding new ones, compositing, etc.—becomes quite different.

In contrast, 3D computer-generated worlds have the exact flexibility one would expect from media in the Information Age. (It is not therefore accidental that 3D computer representation —along with hypertext and other new computer-based data representation methods—was conceptualized in the same decade when the transformation of advanced industrialized societies into information societies became visible.) In a 3D computer-generated world everything is discrete: objects are defined by points described in terms of their XYZ coordinates; other properties of objects such as color, transparency, and reflectivity are similarly described in terms of discrete numbers. To duplicate an object a hundred times requires only a few mouse clicks or typing a short command on a command line; similarly, all other properties of a world can always be easily changed. Just as a sequence of genes contains the code, which is expanded into a complex organism, a compact description of a 3D world can be quickly transmitted through the network, with the client computer reconstructing the full world (this is how online multi-player computer games and simulators work).

Beginning in the late 1970s when James Blinn introduced texture mapping [8], computer scientists, designers, and animators were gradually expanding the range of information that can be recorded in the real world and then incorporated into a computer model. Until the early 1990s this information mostly involved the appearance of the objects: color, texture, light effects. The next significant step was probably the development of motion capture, which during the first half of the 1990s was quickly adopted in the movie and game industries. Now computer-synthesized worlds relied not only on sampling the appearance of the real world but also the recordings of movements of animals and humans. Building on all these techniques, Gaeta's method takes them to a new stage: capturing just about everything that at present can be captured and then reassembling the samples to create a digital (and thus completely malleable) recreation. Put in a larger context, the resulting 2D/3D hybrid representation perfectly fits with the most progressive trends in contemporary culture which are all based on the idea of a hybrid.




The New Hybrid

It is my strong feeling that the emerging "information aesthetics" (i.e., the new cultural features specific to information society) has or will have a very different logic from Modernism. The latter was driven by a strong desire to erase the old—visible as much in the avant-garde artists' (particularly the Futurists') statements that museums should be burned, as well as in the dramatic destruction of all social and spiritual realities of many people in Russia after the 1917 revolution, and in other countries after they became Soviet satellites after 1945. Culturally and ideologically, Modernists wanted to start with a tabula rasa, radically distancing themselves from the past. It was only in the 1960s that this move started to feel inappropriate, as manifested both in the loosening of ideology in Communist countries and the beginnings of a new Postmodern sensibility in the West. To quote the title of a famous book by Robert Venturi et al (published in 1972, it was the first systematic manifestation of the new sensibility), Learning from Las Vegas involved admitting that organically developing vernacular cultures involved bricolage and hybridity, rather than the purity seen, for instance, in "international style" which was still practiced by architects world-wide at that time. Driven less by the desire to imitate vernacular cultures and more by the new availability of previous cultural artifacts stored on magnetic and soon digital media, in the 1980s commercial culture in the West systematically replaced purity by stylistic heterogeneity montage. Finally, when the Soviet Empire collapsed, Postmodernism won the world over.

Today we have a very real danger of being imprisoned by a new "international style"— something which we can call "global style." The cultural globalization, of which cheap international flights and the Internet are the two most visible carriers, erases certain cultural specificity with an energy and speed impossible for Modernism. Yet we also witness today a different logic at work: the desire to creatively place together old and new, local and transnational, in various combinations. It is this logic, for instance, which made cities such as Barcelona (where I talked with John Gaeta in the context of Art Futura 2003 festival which led to this article) such a "hip" and "in" place today. All over Barcelona, architectural styles of many past centuries co-exist with new, "cool" spaces of bars, hotels, museums, and so on. Medieval meets multi-national, Gaudi meets Dolce and Gabana, Mediterranean time meets Internet time. The result is the incredible sense of energy which one feels physically just walking along the street. It is this hybrid energy, which characterizes in my view the most successful cultural phenomena today. [9] The hybrid 2D/3D image of The Matrix is one such hybrid.

The historians of cinema often draw a contrast between the Lumières and Marey. Along with a number of inventors in other countries all working independently from each other, the Lumières created what we now know as cinema—the effect of motion based on the synthesis of discrete images. Earlier Muybridge had already developed a way to take successive photographs of a moving object such as horse; eventually the Lumières and others figured out how to take enough samples so that when projected they perceptually fuse into continuous motion. Being a scientist, Marey was driven by an opposite desire: not to create a seamless illusion of the visible world but rather to be able to understand its structure by keeping subsequent samples discrete. Since he wanted to be able to easily compare these samples, he perfected a method whereby the subsequent images of moving objects were combined within a single image, thus making the changes clearly visible.

The hybrid image of The Matrix in some ways can be understand as the synthesis of these two approaches which for a hundred years remained in opposition. Like the Lumières, Gaeta's goal is to create a seamless illusion. At the same time, like Marey, he also wants to be able to edit and sequence the individual recordings.

At the beginning of this article I evoked the notion of uneven development, pointing out that often the inside structure ("infrastructure") completely changes before the surface ("superstructure") catches up. What does this idea imply for the future of images and in particular 2D/3D hybrids as developed by Gaeta and others? As Gaeta pointed out, while his method can be used to make all kinds of images, so far it has been used in the service of realism as it is defined in cinema—i.e., anything the viewer will see has to obey the laws of physics. [10] So in the case of The Matrix, its images still have a traditional "realistic" appearance while internally they are structured in a completely new way. In short, we see the old "superstructure" which still sits on top of the new "infrastructure." What kinds of images would we see if the superstructure would finally catch up with the infrastructure?

Of course, while the special effects of Hollywood movies so far follow the constraint of realism, i.e. obeying the laws of physics, they are not exactly the same as before. In order to sell movie tickets, DVDs, and all other merchandise, each new special effects film tries to top the previous one in terms of showing something that nobody has seen before. In The Matrix it was "bullet time"; in The Matrix Reloaded it was the Burly Brawl scene where dozens of identical clones fight Neo. The fact that the image is constructed differently internally does allow for all kinds of new effects; listening to Gaeta it is clear that for him the key advantage of such images is the possibility it offers for virtual cinematography. That is, if before camera movement was limited to a small and well-defined set of moves—pan, dolly, roll—now it can move in any trajectory imaginable for as long as the director wants. Gaeta talks about the Burly Brawl scene in terms of virtual choreography: both choreographing the intricate and long camera moves and also all the bodies participating in the flight (all of them are digital recreations assembled using Gaeta's method as described above).

According to Gaeta, creating this one scene took about three years. So while in principle Gaeta's method represents the most flexible way to recreate visible reality in a computer so far, it will be years before this method is streamlined and standardized enough for these advantages to become obvious. But when it happens, the artists will have an extremely flexible hybrid medium at their disposal: completely virtualized cinema. Rather than expecting that any of the present pure forms will dominate the future of visual culture, I think this future belongs to such hybrids. In other words, the future images would probably be still photographic—although only on the surface.







[1] Not all of special effects in The Matrix rely on new process by Gaeta, and of course many other Hollywood films already use some of the same strategies. I decided to focus on his process as it was used in The Matrix in this text because it articulates a new approach to image construction most systematically—and also because in contrast to many others in the special effects industry, Gaeta has extensively reflected on the process he developed, coming up with a number of terms to describe its different stages such as "universal capture" and "image rendering."

[2] Although not everybody would agree with this analysis, I feel that after the end of 1980s the field significantly slowed down: on the one hand, all key techniques which can be used to create photorealistic 3D images have already been discovered; on the other hand, rapid development of computer hardware in the 1990s meant that computer scientists no longer had to develop new techniques to make the rendering faster, since the already developed algorithms would now run fast enough.

[3] The terms "reality simulation" and "reality sampling" were made up for this text; the terms "virtual cinema," "virtual human," "universal capture" and "image rendering" belong to John Gaeta.

[4] Therefore, while the article in Wired which positioned Gaeta as a groundbreaking pioneer and as a rebel working outside of Hollywood contained the typical journalistic exaggeration, it was not that far from the truth. Steve Silberman, "Matrix 2," Wired 11.05 (May, 2003).

[5] The method captures only the geometry and images of an actor's head; body movements are recorded separately using motion capture.

[6] See www.massivesoftware.com.

[7] John Gaeta, presentation during a workshop on the making of The Matrix, Art Futura 03 festival, Barcelona, October 12, 2003.

[8] J. F Blinn,."Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces," Computer Graphics (August 1978): 286-92.

[9] From this perspective, my earlier book The Language of New Media can be seen as a systematic investigation of a particular slice of contemporary culture driven by this hybrid aesthetics: the slice where the logic of the digital networked computer intersects the numerous logics of already established cultural forms.

[10] John Gaeta, a workshop on the making of The Matrix.



Lev Manovich is an artist and new media theorist. He is the author of The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) as well as over fifty articles which have been published in twenty-eight countries. He is in high demand worldwide as a lecturer on new media. Manovich's awards include: Guggenheim Fellowship 2002-2003, Mellon Fellowship from Cal Arts, 2002 Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara, and 2002 Fellowship from The Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin.


Above copied from: http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/image-future.html

YOU TUBE AND THE ACCIDENTAL VIDEOART, Monica Ponzini

YouTube has radically changed not only the way we look at video, but also the role of the audience and the language of video. No longer a mere spectator for the images created by the Author, Youtube users are increasingly involved in the making of unique and peculiar videos, unexpected “viral” trends that generate in turn new influences – and all shared on the Web.

Certainly YouTube is the product of a technology revolution that allows practically anyone to record, film, edit and perform postproduction tasks with basic means – which are almost intuitive by now. But the originality and variety of products that circulate on video portals (Youtube, ma but also Vimeo, or the more recent Seesmic), has exceeded all expectations. From extremely basic segments such as the “long portraits” – where a person stares at the camera, to the message chains – like the one started by MadV; from “hallucinated” videos made by fans -where a whining Chris Crocker tells the world to leave Britney Spears alone, to real music videos, that sometimes brought a band to its commercial success – like with the band OK Go…

And the lifespan of a video on the Web doesn't stop here: once it's posted and shared, it can be recast, mashed-up, and mixed to create a new piece of art where the original author's images and purposes are mixed with other authors' purposes and means (that could be other images, thematic connections or even software).

An example -among many- of the artistic and social effects of the ” YouTube phenomenon” was the evening dedicated to video triptychs held at Postmasters Gallery in New York. Organized by the art collective “Artists Meeting” and curated by Thomas Hutchison, Maria Joao Salema and James Andrews, the event showed a compilation of “accidental video art”: video triptychs where the most diverse products of the Internet were aggregated thanks to a custom software, You3b, an Eyebeam project produced by Jeff Crouse and Andrew Mahon.

These three-channel videos –that have extremely diverse features and themes- are products of the “YouTube” mine: “The project takes off from the freedom that you find in YouTube itself, from the eclectic nature of it. These videos are a sort of modern narrative, made not with words but with images. There's a hunger for information, for images, for stories and there's also a library that is expanding very rapidly” explains Raphaele Shirley, one of the organizers.

“For me, what was interesting about YouTube are just the crazy, fascinating, wild videos that people publish” says James Andrews, “It's a little bit like public access TV, a kind of ad hoc personal media that can be very serious and profound, or can be very absurd and random. My favorite discovery on YouTube was the subculture of people who documented their own washing machine -- and this is a very large subculture, pretty massive at this point-- from the aesthetic or technical point of view –. In the end I made a triptych of washing machines and I'm convinced that on social level in a way is connected to the American tradition of tinkering with your own car or motorcycle…”

An interesting aspect of the event is definitely the “authorial shift” of the final works: “This show mutilates the whole idea of ownership”, notes James Andrews, “You really can't figure out who on Earth owns these triptychs: you have one set of people who created the triptych software, then you have three different groups of people who potentially created the three videos, you have the three different YuoTube accounts that published the videos – which may or may not be the same people who created them, you then have the curators, then you have Artist Meeting and you then have Postmasters Gallery. And each of the original videos could be removed from the Net at any time…”

In a sense, this project takes to the extreme not only the concept of authoriality, and the fact that new media art often needs team work in order to be produced, but also, says James Andrews, “it could simply obliviate the human factor, which I think is even more interesting. No one in particular got credit for anything in the show – it was just something that happened…”

An event in which each viewer – the last link of this long chain – looks at the triptychs, getting his or her own, very personal narrative: for Raphaele Shirley “this kind of triptych really lends itself to non-linearity: you can't grasp a single image or a single story and follow it through from beginning to end. It's really about cross connections, cross pollination of ideas, like unconscious thinking and the way you create a dream, or the way you connect data…”





www.postmastersart.com/

www.artistsmeeting.org

www.you3b.com

www.raphaeleshirley.com/



above copied from:

PATHOSFORMEL FEVER, Massimiliano Schiavoni

Eng: Valeria Merlini e Monica Fontana


26 January 2009. Pathosformel received the special prize UBU 2008 with the following award : “young company aiming at an abstract and physical theatre to be pursued with an already distinct and layered sign, by which the research on material and form is the starting point to evoke a fragmented and deconstructed visionary theatricality of great charm, which exploded in the national and international scene, achieving a significant relationship between conceptual art and theatre.”

They have been staging for more than four years and their innovative style revolutionized and turned upside down contemporary theatrical scenes that needed continuous lifeblood, when the Made in Italy was enormously flourishing. And this is possible thanks to such companies, as Pathosformel, that aren't intimidated by experimentation and comparison, in a multimedia society which is always growing and nevertheless watching attentively and giving critiques on those works masked by dramatic techniques. Daniel, Francesca and Paola create woolly works of art appearing on a stage or in a room, where the scene and the audience, the artist and the user, breathe together, where the eye comes into drama and the sound comes into opera.

There is nothing to envy in the theatrical projects by Aleksej Krucenik or by Malevic, when the timidity of the bones uncovers bit by bit, and shows scenic and physical abilities, accepting personal imagination, suspended trainings, tuning and “dancing algebraic equations”. A relaxation we tend to love through the white colour, when the absence of the body is that little bit extra and where we can watch a sort of natural birth; a cautious performance, a palpable acrobatics, an impudent delicacy. An elegance that elbows and suddenly disappears as long as wax is melting, being this material pure and ephemeral, malleable and spiritually erotic. The mise en scène is not much traditional or at least it disperses alternations, still tasting the typical materiality of a Joseph Beuys or a Marina Abramovic. We are in front of a new theatrical aesthetics, a new poetics that embraces sculpture and sound, performance and choreography, cosmopolitan scenography of the invention.

If the main element in a drama is the audience, in Pathosformel the quibus is characterized by the potential unconscious ability to bring together a generation of users, from the most oddly assorted cultural and social corners of our country, as well as of Europe . That's an important centre for thousands of fans and experts who feel the call from the Venetian collective, who “peregrinate” all around Italy and fill up Festivals e theatres sometimes acting as fans of singers crowding the stadium.

A work was presented at the Alboreto – Dwelling Mondaino Theatre in Summer 2008 who “took off” among the other cities in Dro and in Brussels : "The shortest distance" is the last effort represented as work in progress . New materials and visions, live music plunges us into a bar at the Folies-Berg, but we can still decipher free will and subjectivity, or simply dream gasping behind the passing of suspended squares. “Each of these squares on the lines now corresponds to a sung note, as signs of a Gregorian score that can be continuously modified. Everything we hear is manifested by the sliding presence of forms on the lines. Everything we see is accompanied by its corresponding voice. There is an evident, even ambiguous synchrony between song and image. Does the movement of this ever-changing music generate the melody or is it the song driving these geometric inhabitants? Is it the behaviour of the forms that gives birth to liturgy, or is it the interweaving of voices imposing choreography to this dance opera without stature? (Pathosformel)

On 19 th April the Pathosformel will be present at the Palladium Theatre in Rome. In May they will take part in two events, that is the Egg Festival in Milan and Another Theatre 2009 in Forlì. Meanwhile, I tried to investigate on some issues related to the training, the project phase and the artistic creation of this new collective through a short interview

Massimo Schiavoni: Who were Daniel Blang Gubbay, Francesca and Paola Villani Bucciero? Who are they now?

Pathosformel. Daniel Blangé Gubbay, Francesca and Paola Villani Bucciero were three students at the University of Venice IUAV that associated at the end of 2004 to build a work project called pathosformel, that could investigate through works the limit between theatre and performance. We come from different cities (Milan, Bologna and Parma ) and from different experiences that range from a rather more theoretical mark, and a more developed dramatic practice, to more technical experiences..

We shared all our specificities, and we knew we wanted to work together without any other preconceived idea about drama or any other clear poetic reference. We always had to build a new strategy of work, to understand the techniques and to compare with any other possible language. At every time we need to have a confrontation with a new material that can be represented.

Now we are people who share a passion for this work and who try to make it a consolidated activity. We work together but at the same time we do other things, because we need it and because we are interested in it. Our differences and specificities are still there; they are probably the most important aspects that can enrich a project and that give different contributions to every new work.

Massimo Schiavoni: But what I'd like to know is: did you look around? and what did you see before creating this project? Was it already inside your minds or did it generate from other needs, from other interests in progress.

Pathosformel: The meeting was born from our compatibility, apart from a common vision on the type of work that we wanted to conduct. Surely we looked around, and we studied many things together as we needed – and we still need – to see as much as possible, we believe it happens to most people who face an artistic creation. We trained together at the university and we discussed about everything we found around us, even non-theatrical matters.

Meanwhile we deeply wanted to “do something”, but it was not too much clear yet; life circumstances in Venice and our own interests determined our way to begin work and this influenced work, as well.

Massimo Schiavoni: “La timidezza delle ossa”, could you tell me why it was born and how? And does it reflect, according to you, the beginning of an alternative process or at least an original process inside contemporary drama.

Pathosformel: “The timidity of the bones” comes from a theoretical reflection : there are many of us who think about performance and live show as immediate arts, or the absence of any material medium – as can be the canvas for painting or the film for the cinema – between the observer's eye and the actor's body. The idea was to reflect on the one hand this immediacy, deny expectations for the body's visibility on stage. We thought its presence before the public was no longer the basic element from which we could build the rest, but the heart that must be called into question.

At the same time this is bound to a theoretical approach linked to defiguration, to those artistic techniques that sketch the shape , that put signs, that give it a new power – going beyond the entirety of the shape itself: the shape will be completed by each observer in a different way and it is as if it already possesses in itself the power to become all these forms. The idea of the show was to cover the body, not to hide it, but to let it emerge in a new form every time and to let the observer rebuild it in an anatomical or imaginative way. The project in this sense is for us the beginning of a process of delegation or extreme confidence in the observer's imagination. This is simply to give clues that can be taken for what they are or completed within a kind of narration.

If in “La timidezza delle ossa” we offered a "dotted body" to be ideally completed and rebuilt in its entirety, later in "The smallest distance" we have built a geometric-musical system from which the audience could find their own abstract or narrative intimate structure. They are squares flowing in two directions, still for us they represent exactly this delegating instrument that maybe allows each spectator to find, in the loneliness or in the shapes' crossings, a different life or a total musical abstraction in which he is allowed to lose himself

Massimo Schiavoni: What is the meaning of the body in " Volta "? What role does the metamorphoses have here?

Pathosformel: " Volta " was born at the same time than “La timidezza delle ossa ”, always within our reflection on the relationship between body image and support of the representation. If in “The timidity of the bones” the canvas was the - almost classical - support that allow the presentation of the body image, here we chose to take the problem further.

Space is completely dark, and the bodies are completely covered in black therefore invisible - or only visible on the limbs covered in a layer of white wax. The game is ambiguous: on a side, wax is the support that makes the body visible, on the other side the body itself is a support for the wax. They are bodies of wax, forcedly temporary and fragile, that blend and separate while creating human figures not always recognizable.

Metamorphosis is inevitable in this work: there is one voluntary component, and one typical of the material. Wax is an organic material, and of course it starts immediately to melt and crackle progressively diminishing the body's visibility. It is a disappearance by fragments; in the end we find scales on the ground, like a constellation born from the body's evaporation.

Massimo Schiavoni: You've been chosen for the first part of the "Fies Factory One" project, together with four other young artistic realities like Sonia Brunelli, Teodora Castellucci, Francesca Grilli e Teatro Sotterraneo. How do you live this, and what benefits were taken by this creative experience in close contact with different ways of working and other stylistic codes in the Dro residence?

Pathosformel: Fies Factory One surely represents an opportunity and a support like we couldn't imagine before. First of all, it gave us a three-years funding not related to a single project, which allowed us to plan more completely the times at our disposal for a production: it allows us to develop a project in an articulate way, and to take time to research the next project.

Furthermore, the relationships with the other selected artists was for us especially interesting. Beginning with evident analogies and differences (some of us come from theatre, some from dance or visual arts, and at the same time none of us can be listed in only one definition), the confrontation during the common residence times and the rare but very important collaborations - i.e. during the event in October 2008 for the firts anniversary of the Factory - have made our work richer with a vision that we would otherwise hardly find.

Massimo Schiavoni: Your works stand out in the artistic panorama also for their personal and original scenic presence, and for the use of innovative technical and spatial solutions. How did the creative passage go from the previous works to "La più piccola distanza", and why now a sort of "bodiless concert" suggests more than squares in motion?

Pathosformel: The passage towards "La più piccola distabza" has been for us quite immediate: we wanted to continue in the sign of the previous research, while distancing from the kind of image that we had represented in our early works. We wanted to continue creating a system that played with the imagination of the audience, that allowed them to complete in infinite manners a system of abstract signs loaded with a human imprint.

In case of this work, though, we were not interested in working on an anatomic reconstruction of the body, but more on a study on movement that could be translated into the intentions and relations behind human movements. For this reason, we worked on the idea of a staff in movement, a system of signs in which every element moves following its own speed, and through these springs and stops, enters in some kind of relationship with the nearby shapes.

The "Concerto per harmonium e città " was born from this research and as a result of this first performance. We still needed to investigate the relationship between music and behavioural geometries, and in this case we chose to relate music reading to an actual geographical map of an ideal city. A cartography in movement, that is played live while it forms and dissolves: it is as if every urban path traced on the map a line, and at the same time was accompanied by a note that - together with the hundreds of paths that we cross everyday - creates music.

Choosing a geographical map was for us very meaningful, almost a manifesto, because in it we found that hybrid system, in balance between abstract sign and allusion to the real world, that we had been constantly looking for.



www.pathosformel.org
www.myspace.com/pathosformel

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1436

DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY MODELS: THE CROWD-SOURCING, Giulia Baldi

It was maybe predictable and it is definitely significant: Creative Review's has included crowd-sourcing among the topics covered in their 'Year in Review' December issue.


I haven't checked the magazine yet, but I am researching on digital creative crowd-sourcing models since a while and I think they represent such an interesting opportunity for creatives that we should celebrate here.


Known in academic terms as a "distributed problem-solving and content-production model", and in marketing ones as "the outsourcing of functions normally performed by a supplier or contractor to a crowd of people or a community", crowd-sourcing is a neologism first used by Jeff Howe, editor of Wired US, in an article that dates back to 2006. There, he describes the shift that creatives (mostly copywriters, designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, videomakers, directors... or wannabe so) are taking in the networked society.


With the development of web technologies and communities, in fact, the global creative workforce is finally connected, and can finally be active online. Thus, it can decide to move from being represented by offline exclusive and expensive agencies to online accessible and inexpensive platforms


It has all started with websites like Istockphotos.com, a marketplace developed for non-professional photographers that allows anyone to upload his/her own works and to sell them directly to clients, at a fraction of the usual costs. This way, talented emerging artists are now competing with the privileged establishment, and cutting all middlemen and their top rewards. As content producers, they are earning more and they are allowing their clients to spend less than before (for products which are as good as the average professional ones).


So far, so good. These new adventures are just confirming the crowd-sourcing principle that a creative collective can produce better (and cheaper) results than an individual, and making it real. As many other times in the past, technology is slowly but steadily disrupting the status quo of an old industry and creating a new one. But then, even more disruptive stories follows.


With 99desing (AU), BootB (IT), CrowdSpring (US), IdeaBounty (SA/UK), RadarMusic (UK) and Zooppa (IT/US/BR), a new crowd-sourcing model for creativity has emerged. On one side, these new online marketplaces/communities engage with brands offering them the chance to launch contests on specific briefs and get bespoke creative proposals... for smaller fees than those of the traditional agencies. On the other, they engage deeper with professional and non-professional creatives allowing them to participate to real global competitions, based on real brands' briefs... and to participate easily and remotely, i.e. wherever they live and whatever else they are doing, without any agency to represent, and exploit, them.


Furthermore, some of these platforms even delegate to the community the selection of the best entries. Because, again, in the web 2.0 ethos, we are better than me.


Everyone happy? Not yet. There is a problem, in fact... Maybe even two or three.


1) With these platforms, all participants need to do their bit as speculative job and have very limited chance to win. In the offline advertisement industry the pitch-to-brief system has always been the custom; online this process has reached another level: in the average, there are loads of contestants for every project and just little reward for the winning ones. So much so that a proper professional movement called 'no-spec job' has recently made a lot of noise against this practice, based on the assumption that open and cheap competitions are unprofessional and unfair. At the same time, the brands, platforms and users that instead have embraced this model, reclaim the freedom of choice: once that the process is clearly presented, everyone should be free of participating, considering pros and cons from a personal perspective. And in fact, while some have probably kept doing things the old way (they maybe live in big metropolis and have loads of useful contacts), thousands are instead sending now their ideas and projects through these platforms, and hundreds are gaining valuable visibility and good money (that would have not obtained otherwise).


2) the average quality of the outputs isn't that bad, but isn't even that good;


3) brands can rarely build a meaningful relationship with creatives and long lasting strategies virtually;


4) when the selection is not up to the community, it can be definitely too time-consuming for anyone in the industry...


All in all, maybe a new breed of online platforms/agencies is needed, one that will maintain traditional agency project management and campaigns creative curatorship while introducing new remote collaborative practices. And, in fact, a revised model, based on both top down and bottom up principles, has recently been adopted by one of the 'old' platfroms, GeniusRocket (US), and more will probably follow.


In their words, 'We have always understood that crowdsourcing is a process of evolution. From that, we believe that there is still plenty of room to improve upon creative crowd-sourcing. We plan to address the three biggest requests of the creative community; higher awards, more feedback, and less risk, while addressing the request of the client; more polished, selected, creative content.'


How are they planning to achieve it? ' Launching GRSelect. 'The three most important differences between GRSelect and other crowdsourcing sites (including GeniusRocket.com) is that artists will be required to apply in order to participate in each project. First, applicants will be vetted based upon their past work and their submitted proposal. Second, GRSelect projects will work across iterative rounds allowing the artists to receive feedback directly from the client prior to production or final submission. Finally, while not everyone will be accepted to participate in a project, everyone that does make into a project will earn awards based upon their efforts.'


Now, this sounds really good. And this is even becoming a trend: in the last few weeks, a new platform based on the same mixed approach has been launched, and it is called... Victors and Spoils (US). While another one will be launched soon, with the name Guided By Voices (UK).


Creatives out there, no more excuses! Now you can submit your portfolios, be selected, participate to contests, and win your 15 mins of glory and even some pocket money (that now can reach peaks of 10K$), without risking to waste too much of your time. And, yes... Next year you could be on Creative Review.

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1678

BIOLOGICAL STRATEGIES AT THE SERVICE OF DESIGN, Carla Langella

Eng: Luisa Bertolatti


With the definition of “hybrid design”, a project planning approach is intended so that it may borrow the complexities embedded in the logic, in the codes and the principles of the biological world and insert these into the culture of the project itself. In hybrid design the complex qualities drawn from the biological world are transferred to the design of products and innovative services as if it were a sort of “new genetic code”.

To obtain this objective the most recent achievements in biological science and their correlated theoretical speculations are taken as a reference point, with the will to overcome the common basis of aesthetical and formal metaphors and face a more difficult path of scientific substance, based on a specific methodology put into use and verified through theoretical and planned research.

The current biological knowledge has revealed that biological systems don't always function in an “exact” way, but rather it is their complexity that allows them to survive despite changes in external or internal conditions. These complexities are borrowed by Hybrid Design through the transferral of biological strategies into design itself, in order to “un-reveal” new fields of conceptual and operative experimentation

Cycles of Nature

To adopt codes, principles and logic drawn from biology into design means not only to be inspired by how nature creates its products, but most of all how it develops them, makes them grow and keeps them alive. In this way there is an evolution of the bio-inspired planned paradigm that is no longer based on the question: “how does nature develop biological systems” but adds: “how does nature make them grow and keep them alive?”.

From the answer to these questions the main principles targeted at the closure of the cycles of useful resources for the design and the development of artefacts compatible with biological cycles can be drawn, which regulate the lives of men and the natural environment in a zero emission or cradle to cradle view. The concept of a cycle is actually connected to that of a biological time cycle. Natural processes happen in cycles, the refusals of certain systems become resources for others. The durability of materials must be in proportion to the durability of the life of the products where they are used. To learn to design projects in nature also means to learn how to apply cycle patterns that are closed and belong to biological processes.

There is a substantial difference between the way man produces and the way nature produces. Man develops his own artefacts, takes primary materials from nature and transforms them in order to obtain products that, when their function has terminated, become waste, mostly unusable waste that accumulates in the environment and damages it.

Nature, on the other hand, takes primary materials, transforms them and creates its own products that grow, reproduce and at the end of their life return to biological cycles and are integrated into them. In nature everything is reused and recycled. According to the biological metaphors used by bio-inspired design, every product, or system of products, can be compared to an organism where every part, even if with different life cycles, is connected to each other through complex relationships. Often the different components of a product are characterised by their different durability and different obsolescence times. The choice of materials to be used and the eventual ad hoc design of some of these must, therefore, keep in mind the necessity to prepare for the different technical elements connected to different life cycles.

In prefiguring these cycles it is necessary to dedicate the utmost attention to their environmental impact and their durability, which must be compatible with the estimate, in relation to their specificity in their appliance. In particular, it is indispensable to pre-evaluate the environmental performance of all the materials and components in the phases that come straight after their dismissal, such as re-usage, recycling and new possible cycles of life.

The attention toward temporal cycles of material induces the use of recyclable materials, which come from renewable primary materials or biodegradable materials that can be composted, for products that have very short life cycles, like packaging systems or so-called “disposable” products, like the “moscardino” developed by Matteo Ragni and Giulio Iachetti for Pandora Design. In these cases the capacity that the material has in being disposed into the environment avoids increasing volumes of solid deposited waste.

Autonomy

In design the concept of autonomy can be interpreted and transferred as an autonomy from maintenance operations, from cleaning, restoration and substitution, which are precious qualities as they avoid the environmental impacts connected to them. Main principles targeted toward the autonomy of artefacts can be drawn from biological systems throughout their life cycle in energy terms, and at the end of the cycles and resources. Environmentally-friendly design can learn from nature: for example, the most adapt strategies in order to use renewable energy resources, or to recycle un-renewable energy resources, to reuse waste products, up until the most complex strategies such as those based on the capacity of self-monitoring or self-healing.

Many biological systems are capable of modifying their own characteristics in function of the change in external factors, so that they may survive despite such changes. This is what happens in the phenomenon of self-healing many plants and animals posses. In living organisms, for example, a wound generates a self-healing mechanism.

In the human body, when a wound is inflicted, there is an immediate flux of liquids corresponding to the direct area of the body involved, that activates a series of physical reactions capable of closing up the wound. By using analogous strategies, some researchers from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology from the University of Illinois, coordinated by Scott White, have developed "self-healing polymers", composite polymers capable of repairing themselves (1), that could be used, wherever there is a small rupture, in the design of various types or products in order to avoid the entire substitution or dismissal of the whole damaged object. Microcapsules are integrated into these composites that open and release a resin that instantly polymerises the rupture and closes the fracture in the matrix (2). The research in the field of new materials and the evolution of new production technologies offer increasing opportunities in terms of energy autonomy like photovoltaic technologies in very fine and flexible films, that allow for the autonomy of electrical appliances of all shapes and sizes.

Self-organization and adaptation.

The concept of self-organisation has crossed many disciplines and so has adopted various definitions. According to complexity theorists, self-organisation seems to be one of the most important principles in the capacity for evolution, as it is translated into a capacity to generate potentially successful structures in the natural selection. The systems capable of organising themselves spontaneously increase their own probability of further evolution. The self-organised characteristics are also more easily remodelled, and so are more flexible. In order to survive the change in external or internal conditions, organisms tend to modify themselves and evolve over time, so that they may use their own resources in the most efficient way possible. The concept of self-organisation has been transferred onto various disciplinary fields.

In design, the transferral of concepts of self-organisation and adaptability onto artefacts means to intervene and make the relationship between the essence of the material and its performance more complex. The adaptability of a product can be intended as the capacity to modify its own characteristics according to the mutation of external conditions, so it could be translated as a flexibility of performance or multi-functionality. The French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, who obtained the Carte Blanche VIA 2006 by designing the "Elements" collection, made up of elements for the home, capable of self-adapting dynamically to the variations of external conditions, in order to create comfortable conditions. Objects that modify their performance in relation to stimuli from their use or from the environment.

The concept of self-organisation is important from the point of view of being eco-friendly in terms of saving material and energy resources. A system is made to be adaptable by forecasting possible changes that it must adapt to, even if this regards a mere part of it. In this way it is possible to extend the useful life of a product considerably. Design products must therefore be adaptable and upgradable in relation to the variations of the technological scenarios, of the economical environment and the conditions and user requirements. The planned and developed objects must be flexible, modular and reconfigurable be it from a performance point of view to a dimensional and aesthetical point of view; these are more likely to last longer and therefore can be used for a longer period of time and so gain a considerable environmental advantage connected to saving material and energy resources necessary for its maintenance or substitution for the longest time possible.

The Holographic Principle

The holographic principle of complexity, which living organisms are based on, foresees that: not only is a part a fraction of the whole, but the whole is included in that part (3). The cell, for example, is part of the organism, which also contains the genetic information of the whole.

Based on the biological metaphor, the artefacts can be interpreted as organisms, where each part, each element, participates in a global planning strategy extended to infinite levels that go from nanometres to macro-metres.

Hybrid design adopts a bio-mimetic metaphor, where in the design of artefacts these are considered as organisms, where each element, according to the holographic principle, to all the scales, from those of the materials to the macroscopic ones, participate in a common global concept. In the design field for eco-friendly products, this approach can offer a methodological structure where eco-friendly and bio-inspired strategies are reflected in all the dimensions and all the phases of the life cycle of the product, as a sort of “genetic code” capable of creating a system coherence for the project which can be very useful in obtaining the best possible result in terms of minimisation of environmental impact.

Redundancy and Multi-functionality

Biological systems posses a quality defined as “redundancy”, which allows them to survive despite the most unpredictable and dangerous events, responding to these through the use of elements or characteristics that are apparently “superfluous”, whose existence proves vital only when there is a necessity for them. Often design strategies oriented toward environmentally friendly products tend toward a certain minimisation. The concept of redundancy seems therefore to be the antithesis of this kind of approach. But in some cases, redundancy constitutes an efficient solution in order to avoid wasting resources. For example, the use of protective films applied to highly perishable surfaces or surfaces that are in constant use, like flooring in places where there is the frequent passage of people or equipment, make the conservation of components or parts of buildings last longer, which would otherwise require continuous replacement with consequential environmental relapses.

Redundancy can also be functional. In nature the majority of elements are multifunctional because the environmental conditions change from moment to moment and the biological systems must be ready to respond with one of their possible functions. Some insects, for example, have different pairs of legs; each one has a different function. Multi-functionality is a consolidated tendency in contemporary design, life rhythms are increasingly frenetic and their constant changes require that products for daily use be transformable, mutable, capable of adapting to changes in necessities and external conditions.

Multi-functional or redundant objects and components can adapt more easily to different applications from the point of view of performance, and therefore are capable of “surviving” for longer.

Devices that incorporate different functions like electro-chromic glass, that combine glass and sun screen in one unique object, or electroluminescent and photo luminescent materials that combine different elements necessary to create a lamp such as a light source, electrical cables, switches, stand and diffusers in one material system.
To integrate functions into one unique product means to save, in economical terms as well as environmental terms, material and energy resources necessary to create the different products that are to e substituted



Notes

(1) S.R. White, N.R. Sottos, P.H. Geubelle, J.S. Moore, M.R. Kessler, S.R. Sriram, E.N. Brown, S. Viswanathan: "Autonomic healing of polymer composites", Nature. 2001 409, 794-797.

(2) Brown, E.N., White, S.R. and Sottos, N.R. "Retardation and repair of fatigue cracks in a microcapsule toughened epoxy composite-Part II: In situ self-healing". Composite Science and Technology, Special Anniversary Issue. 2005: 65, 2474-2480.

(3) Morin E., Le Moigne J.L. (1999). L'Intelligence de la Complexité . L'Harmattan. Paris.

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1381

A COLLECTIVE RESOUNDING BODY AIMING TOWARDS AN AUDITORY TACTILITY, Enrico Pitozzi

/ Eng: Luisa Bertolatti


Among the more interesting figures on the international circuit, the choreographer Isabelle Choinière has been developing a journey connected to sound qualities in movement for many years. She founded and currently directs the Corps Indice of Montréal (Canada) company with which she develops research projects on the relationships between dance and technologies.


From 1995 her creations have been present in many international festivals: in France, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and the USA. Among her main bodies of work are Le Partage des peaux I (1994), Communion (Le Partage des peaux II) (1995-1996) – La Démence des Anges (2002). Alongside her work as a choreographer she also works intensely in research: her texts have been published in 2008 at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2009 one of her contributions appeared in the book Point of being by Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program of the University of Toronto. In 2006 she began developing a new project called Meat Paradoxe dedicated to the concept of a collective resounding body, working in collaboration with the French composer Dominique Besson.


I. Intro


We are currently in an epistemological passage point which marks a real movement in the scenic arts and that primarily regards the role of the performer favouring other – plural – manifestations of their physicality.





This break passes through a relationship that the contemporary scene has initiated with technology: here we will look at a particular aspect, specifically interrogating the definition of scenic soundscape derived from the movement of the performer in the work of the Canadian choreographer Isabelle Choinière.


It is here that the concept of “resounding body”, which is at the centre of this intervention, takes on meaning as an audible expression and manifestation of the relationship that movement and perception create with sound. The resounding body does not look to something that is simply anthropomorphic, the sound reconstruction of the shape of the body is not an issue: the investigation of the issue of “resounding body” - a voluntarily ambiguous term – means to penetrate into the matter of sound and at the same time, of the body. It means to operate inside a fine limit where the shape of the body and sound are dissolved leaving a plot made up of different intensities that operate within it: we will therefore speak of a “molecularised” form of the body and sound that resonate with each other. In other words, it means to work on a series of internal tensions that allow the shape of the body and of sound to be in constant mutation.


II. Toward a collective resounding body


To come close to an initial manifestation of this relationship between body and sound, we will cite the work La démance des anges (2002) by Canadian choreographer Isabelle Choinière where thanks to technological means, the presence of the body is extended to a different place to where the performance is physically taking place. Two different spaces and two different bodies live in these two different spaces. Two dimensions of presence are in relation with each other inside the same physical space: a physical body of the performer and a “synthesis” body that is “present” as a projection. This way the dancer who is physically present sees her performance replicated in the image and the sound track of a second dancer (spatially collocated in another place, even in a different continent, if necessary) transmitted by a MIDI data system via the internet. Therefore in this case the resounding body is the result of an encounter between physical and material bodies, spatially distant with reciprocal projections.





In other words the voices and gestures of the performers are captured by a series of microphones and sensors that are positioned on their bodies, and this data is transferred simultaneously into the space of the performance and on the net to form what could be defined a long distance duo. It’s as if the two performers generate and exchange sound and images in real time, which come from the composition of movements producing a sort of net-like persistence of their image in the spectator. We can therefore see and hear every performer, present in the space of the other. This process is an invitation to a reconfiguration of the perception of the performer in relation to action and creates an overlapping and confusion of real dimensions.


In order to create this aspect of the performance, the two dancers have captors capable of capturing the sound qualities of gestures that are executed and attribute an equivalent to these on a sound level through a synthesizer.


In order to create this, the choreographer had to develop a series of particular sensors to be applied to the body. The need was to elaborate captors that restored the possibility of composing and capturing a movement in a decisively more subtle and slow way, and at the same time allowed to intervene on the opposite diametrical quality, in other words according to a dynamic of acceleration or fragmentation of the flux of movement, so as to compose – in the space of the scene – a real auditory space that interrogated the perceptive asset of the performer in action and the audience’s method of perception.


The resounding body that transpires from this is something that comes from the real body, but is not a double of the body, but rather a manifestation of it, a new sensorial organisation of the perception developed from a technological integration. Technology becomes a way to interrogate the potential of the body in this work, to develop a kind of depth of perception of physical knowledge in order to act on it so as to modify the score of movement constantly (and it’s sound declination). It’s evident that, in this case, we are beyond the pure instrumental use of technology. Technology becomes a way to investigate the body and expand its potential (1). Thanks to this particular use of technology – where technology becomes a way of thinking about the body – the choreographer works by integrating the sound dimension.





III. Placement of the resounding body


By pushing this process of work connected to sound, it is in the Meat Paradoxe (2008/10) project that Isabelle Choinière developed a concrete and radical vision of the concept of the resounding body. Thanks to the collaboration with the French composer Dominique Besson – among the figures who generated software of sound specialisation of movement called Ring – the choreographer developed an organised system around the capturing of the sound of five different dancers that – composing their movement in the space of action like a real sound mass – produced what we could define a collective resounding body, inside which the dancers could feel a shared sensorial experience, on the level of movement and on the level of sound production in real time. The elaboration of a soundscape responds to the mass-movement of the performer on stage, of an intense graininess that seems like a cloud of sound, a dense and articulated atmosphere of sound particles.


In this sense the “resounding body” recalls a dimension of the body (or of movement) that originates in real time starting from the movement of the dancers on the scene and it is inscribed in a context of broadened choreography that the choreographer has been developing for some years now. The “resounding body” is, in other words, an emanation, a dilation of the real body into the shape of sound; it is a vibration. The body becomes an eardrum, a resonator of sensorial dimensions that becomes scenic sonority. Therefore the body is almost molecularised, subdivided into elementary particles and recomposed in the shape of sound. Once again we are outside a purely logical formality of gazing at the body; the intensities – its articulation in movement-particles – are at the same time part of the choreographic and research work on sound thanks to the alteration and modification of different frequencies.


What is extremely interesting, in this perspective, is that by working on the resounding body it is possible to intervene – to renovate it – on sensorial aspects and the perceptive arrangement of the performer. This leads to the abandonment of ways of composition that have already been experimented with and opens up to a gesture that is in continuous transformation and, therefore, to a scenic sonority enriched and redefined each time. It is here that the sensorial aspect is reorganised and the internal part of the body becomes a medium. It’s as if sound, in this project, plays the role of an added dancer: it participates in the organisation of the “collective resounding body”. Just as Dominique Besson underlined when speaking of Ring software used in this process of the work: “The Ring is oriented toward a direction of open system of specialisation in real time of functions of gradual memorisation of the signal and its trajectory. Interfaced as entries in the Ring system, the sources of sound generated from the dancers become manipulable in space and time”(2).





Thanks to the placement of sound obtained via a device consisting of 8 speakers in the hall, the spectator is projected inside the body of the performer, and at the same time, is induced into a radical rethinking of his or her sensorial arrangement. In other words the spectator is very close to the body of the performer, in a proximity that induces him or her to a “tactile vision” of their bodies in movement. The spectator is immersed in this living form. He or she is inside the form, in contact with the intensities that animate and sustain it; inside the flesh thanks to the sound that moves around him or her, that crosses and ploughs through the space. Therefore there are two forms that his or her perception is not used to and that must be redefined.


IV. Toward an auditory-tactile perception of reception


We can speak therefore of a tactile aspect of the working of sound. The sound elaborated according to the strategy of moleculerisation and spatial disposition operates with very high and very low frequencies and tends to articulate itself through a continuous wavelength that installs a constant relationship with the bodies that are listening. This proximity between the body of the performer (visibly or auditorily) does not however take the audience into a situation of extreme sound: the communication passes because of the different chromatic levels of sound, different levels of vibration. The spectator is therefore immersed in the continuous vibration, of a segment of sound as a gesture, and it is on this scale of variations that the attention must fall. What is being affirmed is that the parameters that the spectator must put into action are not simply optical-visual or auditory-sound, but the process of composition of the choreographer Isabelle Choinière requires a synaesthetic glance and mode of listening, an active and contemporary relationship of the senses. It’s necessary to configure the bodies in another way in order to receive these signals. It isn’t enough to have eyes to see the invisible or to have ears to ear the inaudible.







http://www.corpsindice.com/



Notes:

1 - Si veda su questo aspetto anche L. Boisclair, Isabelle Choinière de Corps Indice ; Autour des Demoiselles d’Avignon, dans « Inter, art actuel », no 98, hiver 2007, p. 52-56.

2 - Si veda in tal senso il contributo di Dominique Besson come testimonianza della fase di lavoro cui si fa riferimento: D. Besson, Le corps sonore, entre écriture chorégraphique et écriture musicale, Actes de Colloque Journée d’informatique Musicale – JIM’09, Ecole Phelma – Minatec di Grenoble. Edition AFIM-ACROE-Phelma, 2009 http://acroe.imag.fr/jim09/index.php/descrip/conf/schedConf/actes

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1703