iPad

a month or so ago i mentioned apple's anticipated computer tablet format. well folks, they just announced it: The iPad

coming in 16, 32 and 64GB, its basically just an oversized ipod touch. honestly, i was expecting it to be a bit more like a tablet computer, but as mentioned previously, its main competition asnd purpose seems to be the Kindle as well as providing a portable screen format for the printed(ing) press to move to.

you can get yours now, but ill wait until summer when they come out with the 128GB and these models are a little more obsolete....aka cheaper.

Camille Utterback and Digital Interactivity

The Myers School of Art really has a great program. Had the chance to attend a (few) lecture(s) from Camille Utterback at school today dealing with her work, her work process, etc. Utterback has been working with (and dare i say pioneering?) digital interactive media since the late 90's. Her work deals with translating movement in visual imagery. One of her more recent works, Abundance, was commissioned as a temporary installation for the city of San Jose by ZER01, for their 01SJ Biennale. i thought that her work looked familiar, and indeed it did; part of the show toured the country as Superlight, one stop being at MoCA Cleveland. And (surprise) the School of Art was able to get the curator to give us a lecture in conjunction with the show.

At any rate, Utterback's work, as i said, translates movement into visual imagery and in turn creates a social interaction between people collaborating together within the visual space to experiment, explore and figure out the way a piece works. Most of her work resembles Abstract Expressionist paintings (in scale of the projection, abstractness of line and the expressive quality of movement), but her most recent piece i find the most interesting. Aurora Organ, was commissioned for the an atrium in the mall at the City of St. Louis Park. (Fuck You, Aurora!!....sorry, i've been on an alkaline trio kick.) The piece translates touching hot spots on the atrium railing into color patterns on corresponding tubes hanging over the stairwell int he atrium. definitely an interesting step from Utterback's 2D projection approach up until now.

Camille Utterback, untitled interactive sculpture, The West End from Steve Dietz on Vimeo.

While her work is interesting, however, there is another approach to this digital synesthesia (synesthesia being a neurological disorder characterized by the mixing and confusing of senses, see Dr. Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes) that i find more interesting. Utterback's work translates visual movement into visual imagery, but taking a more far-reaching approach was (is) David Rokeby's Very Nervous System all the way back in '88, that translated body movement into song and sound

this is by far one of my favorite interactive pieces to date. that may have something to do with my involvement in music long before the visual arts...

On another (last) note, while Utterback's work deals with social interaction, there are also interactive artists who deal with programming and installation that elicit an emotional response. mostly what comes to mind is fellow ZER01 commissionee Bruce Charlesworth's Love Disorder, which i had the pleasure of seeing at MoCA's Superlight exhibit.

LOVE DISORDER documentation 2009 from Bruce Charlesworth on Vimeo.

LOVE THIS PIECE!!

The Thing that i find most interesting about this piece and similar pieces is the fact that at its base, this is all programming. its a computer generated response to your presence, and yet it elicits and fills you (and is filled itself) with emotion. The computer reads your movement, proximity, etc, nothing more, and yet it moves you to feel something. This is an interesting idea, and one that is only beginning to be explored. im very excited to see the future of digital and interactive media within the realm of art, as its just beginning to peak and really get exciting.

The Future of the Media and Living Photographs

In a recent post on afterphotography.org, Fred Ritchin discusses the future of the media and print in what is being called the probable "golden age for journalism."(in the post iChaos) Print media is dying, photojournalism is dying, and technology (the cause of death) marches forward, unphased, like death itself. But every creation needs some destruction to make room for its place.

Apple is working on a new computer tablet that would bridge the gap between an iphone and a laptop. With a bigger screen like that of a laptop, this tablet will be connected to internet at all times, like the iphone. News print media, having already started the exodus from print to the world wide web, could use this platform to take journalism to a whole new level. Like Kindle, the page would appear on screen for reading, but instead of consisting of photographs and links to videos, the video, the moving photograph, could actually exist right on the page. imagine a Harry Potter-esque newspaper, on your Apple tablet. Some organizations have already started exploring this possibility such as Outside Magazine:

What they seem to be suggesting, however, is an actual physical copy of the story and the magazine to hold in your hands, with flexible screens to replace the paper of print. Personally, i don't see the advantage or practicality of this platform. The screens are much more expensive than paper, and the staged video shoot much more expensive than a news photograph. They seem to be suggesting though (and through example of already implemented video advertisements shown in the video) that these staged shoots would replace the staged photoshoots magazines and advertisers use now; i suppose they are are the same level of production cost.

I do see living photographs overtaking still photography in the photojournalism to come, and it is very exciting! However, i only imagine this done through way of practicality and cost efficiency that would match the standards already in place. Photographers holding video cameras the same way they do cameras and personal lighting gear now, not big video shoot productions. And through a universal platform like that of a kindle or other tablet systems of the future to come, not through expensive, impractical screen-paper in development (though it is very interesting to see). I imagine these screen-page magazines would be universal and download different stories and magazines and display them in their own format. But the question i ask is, is the multi-screen-page platform more practical than a solid, single screen tablet, whose pages are turned by the click of a button or the swipe of a finger?

We are undoubtedly moving out of the age of news print and into the age of news-post. but in order to do this, the future must meld with the cost and production standards of today. and we must answer these questions and solve these puzzles soon in order to give journalism the digital footing it needs to stand against blogs and wikis.

Modern Media and It's Temporal Distortion

“…if I consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being in it. Change presupposes a certain position which I take up and from which I see things in procession before me”

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Modern Mass Media: The Internet, Video and Film, Photography, they distort our traditional notion of time by accelerating our internal sense of timing as we input increasing amounts of data and move it across the globe at rapid speeds. The more compact and readily available the internet is at the tip of our fingers, the more our inner sense of time melds with this structure, this web, and accelerates. As our communication and connection to anywhere and everywhere in the world increases – spatially and temporally – day by day we get closer to witnessing an event on the other side of the globe, as it happens, seconds after it begins; seating us directly in front of the present tense anywhere in the world, seated in any one spot in the world: temporal distortion is spatial distortion.

“When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced water which is passing at this moment, I am tacitly assuming the existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world, and I am comparing his successive views…..The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world.”[1] The future(as time), at its source, is flowing towards me. Like the water at its source at the top of the mountain, it will in a few days time flow towards me and become my present; so it is not I who moves towards the future, but the future which moves towards me, and the past which moves away from me.

---

[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Kegan Paul (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945).

this is the beginning of an essay i am writing considering the the use of mass media in the work of Sam Taylor-Wood, or perhaps post-modern art in general

bleakness is innate

its what youre born into

and what you die with

Better quality image of above flier

Scream Until You're Coughing Blood!

screw ups and achievements

well thanks to working 2 jobs in the middle of the day i was unable to make it out to the midwest SPE. shame too, it was right in my backyard. one day i'll start getting out more.

on a better note. i finally have an image from this semester that i'm half way happy with. and more to come, i think. i just met some new people who are willing to model for me, though i may have weirded them out a bit. "hi, i just served you coffee and i dont know you. care to model?"

and oh yeah, the abe morell critique was a messy crash and burn. i dressed up like borowiec for halloween and neither of them seemed too amused....until i informed them it was halloween, but by then the embarrassment had been done. who the hell forgets halloween, anyway?