Byte's Digital Processes

Mr. Dot

2010-11-22T21:43:00.001-08:00

Artist Statement:

Imagine, if our eyes can only capture a single picture per minute. The only thing that matters to other people's eyes is that single moment of every minute. You can do potentially anything in that minute to perfectly portray yourself to others. For example, each minute, you can jump at the exact time that people can see. To others, you are flying! This is what inspired me for my shot film stop motion animation, Mr. Dot.

Synopsis:

Mr. Dot is a stop motion film with a playful taste of different interactions between objects in two and three dimension. The main character, Mr. Dot, is a black colored dot on a whiteboard. He never was satisfied with his current life. One day, he decided to set off for a new adventure. Lost in his world, Mr. Dot travels from place to place seeking for something new in his life. By some dumb luck, he finds a strange hole that leads him from the two dimensional whiteboard into the three dimensional world. He meets new objects, slowly opening his eyes to the new world. What is going to happen?

What is New Media???

2010-11-12T21:17:00.000-08:00

Lev Monavich

Let me first say this, I have never heard of the term "New Media" until I read the book The New Media Reader. Apparently the new media has something to do with internet and society. Well, I am a computer scientist, born with a keyboard in my hand. Anything to do with internet is within my grasp, yet this term has never made it to me. After reading New Media from Borges to HTML by Lev Manovich (one of the author of The New Media Reader), it seem that I have missed something important.

Manovich talks about the new media by listing the following eight propositions:
- not cyberculture
- distribution platform
- digital data
- mix between culture and software
- aesthetics that accompanies the early stage of every new modern media and communication technology
- faster execution of algorithms
- metamedia
- parallel articulation of similar ideas of post WWII Art and modern computing

After reading all this, I think to myself, "and?". Sure, Monavich can come up with all this stuff and talk about it for many pages. I just don't see the point of coining the term and go on so long about it. It does not seem to concern me, a hardcore computer scientist. Maybe I am just pessimistic or tired of reading such a useless long article that holds no new information for me. Maybe it is for Art community as some people mentioned. Maybe there is actually someone who can use this stuff out there. But I for one, do not salvage anything from reading it.

People who kind of agree with me. They know their stuff, yet does not really care:

On an unrelated note: I have also read "From A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They try to describe the Rhizome. What I get out of it is, the idea of something being connected to other things. In the end it is all connected. I guess it is a structure reference. Like the internet per say, one website in connected to other website and those connect to others, and so on.

Nam June Paik: The Elvolution of His Work

2010-11-08T21:55:00.000-08:00


Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was an artist who was quite ahead of his time. Some referred him as the father of video art. Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932. His early interest was music but with a fortunate luck, he met up with John Cage and George Maciunas. He then found the Happening and Fluxus. From then he start to take on interest in art. By 1963, he has his first art piece up, TV Clock. His fascination about television led him to spend the rest of his life creating video arts.

TV Clock, 1963

He transformed from his early works that deals with only a single straight line on 24 black and white televisions to dealing with 1003 televisions with full color display playing different things at different time. His most renowned work was the Electronic Superhighway in 1995.

Electronic Superhighway (313 TVs)

The More the Better, 1988 (1003 TVs)

In 1984, he was the first one to do live satellite installation work. It was called Good Morning Mr. Orwell. The piece refers to a book from 1949 written about 1984. The book talks about Mr. Orwell's dystopian. The community where free will and privacy and taken away by all the surveillance and mind control. I linked the video down below. Enjoy!

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Messy Age => Mess Age => Message!

2010-11-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

Early Portrait of professor Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a media theorist who wrote a book called The Medium is a Massage. The infamous book title was a misprint of his original quote "the medium is a message". To understand the statement, we need to explain his definition of medium and message. In our society, we always separate technology and its contents into two different categories. Technology refers to television, telephone, electricity, and etc. Whereas the content refers to television program, speech from the telephone, messages on billboard with lights and etc. Medium in this case is the technology that carries the message, hence the medium. On the other hand, message is the content that came through the medium, hence the message. For McLuhan, there is indeed no difference between the two.

The gun replica was a cut-out from the book The Medium is a Massage

Here is why: McLuhan believed that the content distribution is made possible by the medium. Without one, the content could never have been published. Thus the making of the medium is the beginning of a message and is a part of the content. Some people said that the 'content' (ie, TV programs) is what moves us forward, but McLuhan said otherwise. The technology is what moved us forward and it is the change in technology that shape the society.

A page from The Medium is a Massage

I say, while that is very insightful and deep in a way, I don't agree with it totally. McLuhan claimed the absolute and ignore the 'content' (refereed above). I think it is the combination of both worlds. Side to side the technology and the content shapes up our society. Take Facebook for example, the making of it helps us to connect to other people. But to actually connect to one another, one needs to post pictures and messages. Otherwise, the website has no meaning. Even if the implementation of the website could not have been better, the lack of content will render the website useless.

After the book publication took off so well, he published an audio that contain a similar technique he used in his book. This is the visual recreation of it by celestial elff.

The Medium Is The Message - Watch today’s top amazing videos here

There is something in the water!

2010-11-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

Photo of water drops by *Corrie* from Flickr

It has been told that human body is made up of 60% of water. The world is made up of 75% water and the rest land. It is simply amazing how we take water for granted. I can be all green and environmental about water but that is not my intention of bringing the topic up. We see water drips everyday everywhere but most of us did not take time to appreciate it. Look at the picture above. It is taken by dropping two drops of color water. Of course, we cannot see such a thing everyday, and when it happens, it is too fast for us to appreciate. So as a tribute to the beauty of water, I dedicated my project to water and its beauty.

For my first video, the task was to shoot a minute video without editing. I once learned a trick with wine glass and water. Yes, it is the glass harp. I gathered up all the wine glasses I can find (from Dorothea) and fill the water up to the exact frequency of different sound waves. The rest is simply setting the angle and make some music! The result? Check it out below:

The second video was to find the footage on the internet and remix them into some meaningful way. So going back to my water theme. I found a couple of water footage in slow motion. With a bit of cutting and looping, I was able to make some connections between them. I also found the song Will of the Heart from a Japanese Anime Bleach that fits perfectly into what I am trying to bring out. With a little cut up and remix, the song lines up like magic! To ensure the copyright people do not come to take me away, I added water dripping and soft rain sounds. However, it hinders the full experience. Anyways, here it is, Sounds of Water.

To be completely honest, I ran out of ideas for the third video. The rules were that I suppose to find some footage online, create some on my own, and mix them up in a meaningful way. So I thought I should just combine the two ideas above. The making of it was painful. Glass harps are not easy to make when you have access to only one kind of glass. I wanted to play the harp with a selected song. I ended up spent 2 hours filming different notes from the glasses. Then I notice that some notes were simply impossible to achieve. So I have to work with what I got and find a song that matches it. Unfortunately, 1 more hour of song search did not turn up well at all. So I gave up on the song that match, just went with whatever I feel like, and worked with it. So I found this Arabic music. it sounds really relaxing and goes really well with the sounds of glass harp. I sync up my harp notes with the song and some really really cool footage of water droplets. I call it Arabic Water Motion, to honor the song.

I hope you enjoy the show!

labor view as a function of media development

2010-10-30T07:48:00.001-07:00


Frank C. Lewis

L.J.M. Daguerre, Parisian Boulevard, 1839

Frank Lewis, an instructor in Art History, director of exhibitions and curator of the Wriston Art Gallery, gave a lecture yesterday (10/29/10) opening for the show, Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait. His lecture revolved around the change in media towards labor through time. He started with a photograph taken in 1839, Parisan Boulevard. He pointed out that since the camera takes a long exposure time, even the busy street (Parisan) looked empty. The only one that stood out was the person who stopped to get his shoes polished. From there, he pointed out that the shoes polisher was not photograph, and that symbolized how the labor in those days were ignored.

Power House Mechanic by Lewis Hine 1910

Kingfisher by David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson, 1845

Through time, he said, the labor got recognized as individual. Before, it was all about the landscape and individuals that expressed their love for the land. Right around 1845, labor took on a different turn where individuals are getting recognized (photographed) for what they do. Then the age of machines started. In 1900, machines started to gain significance. Picture by Hine depicted a true sense of man becoming one with the machines. At this stage, one can say that the machine and man works together. That was true until the study of Frederick Taylor, Movement Analysis. He changed labor from individual with specialized skills to a replaceable machine cog. He researched on what each individual can do to optimize the efficiency. As a by-product, man became a part of a machine and lost their individuality, as portray in the picture by Edward Burtynsky.


Manufacturing #17, by Edward Burtynsky

And here is the "future" depiction played by Charlie Chaplin.

It is not a one way ticket, but a round trip

2010-10-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

Who comes first???

After reading "The Technology and the Society" by Raymond Williams, it hits me; the society depends on technology and likewise technology depends on society. There is no clear cut answer to which what influence one another first. It is like asking which came first the chicken or the egg? As far as human history goes, we always have some sort of technology and culture. For example, the expansion of knowledge causes one to implement television. The television phenomena causes people know more. And so on.

William Wegman

One of the big influence of technology to society is the making of cameras. The ability to capture a moment in time and store it forever the way it looks and sounds changes a lot of things in society. William Wegman, an artist, took advantage of this and made many artistic/comical videos. One of his video shows him putting on his deodorants onto his armpit. For the whole video which lasted 49 seconds, he talked about why he liked the deodorants and sprays unstopped stream of the deodorants onto his armpit. It is funny and artistic in a way.

5 semi-naked Anthony(s)

Another artist, Anthony Goicolea, also made use of this technological change. He photographed himself and multiplied his image to portray his artistic ideas. His work is very strange. It is very sexual but not in a normal way. Most of the picture, like the one on the left, contains only semi-naked multiple of himself. This strangely reminded me of something I saw a year ago. It was Megan Fox making out with a dummy which made to look exactly like her. Maybe her producer is a secret fan of Goicolea? Below is an early video made by Wegman which I found to be pretty cool.

Snip snip snap snap.. Here is my master picece!

2010-10-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

"Everything worth discovering, has been discovered" is a quotation taken from a movie Around the world in 80 days. Reading through William S. Burroughs' article on The Cut-Up method of Brion Gysin reminded me of the above quote. He strongly believed that we are not bringing anything new to this world as an artist. We only "cut-up" the existing materiel(i.e. articles, art and etc.), put it together and publish it as our own. While that might be somewhat true, it disturbs me how much he over generalized it. What about Mathematicians and Scientists? They are artists in a way. They do research using other people's work, but they build new things on top of it. As a result, we enjoy our advancements in knowledge and technology.

A still image taken from Decasia

Sure, cut-up can generate a different point of view of the existing materials, but it can not be an excuse for the lack originality. Sometime cut-up can transform the meaning of the existing material into something new. Sound interesting? For what I have seen, this "transformation" does not quite meet my expectation. I am referring to Decasia, a film produced by Bill Morrison. I can only describe my feeling towards the film as painful, both physically and mentally. In my highly opinion, (and that is to say, I am not suggesting that everyone feels the same) I think watching the film is equivalent to listening to this squeaking noise made by scratching a chalkboard with a fingernail. Imagine the sound repeatedly played over and over again for the duration of 67 minutes. Having fun yet? If you are not convinced that cut-up might not be the best method around, take a look at the following.

One of the many photos Levine steals from Evans

Let us change our angle to something we are familiar with, plagiarism. When a student take an excerpt from the internet and say that it is his own, the student gets punished for it. But why do I see the "artist" like Sherrie Levine who re-photograph Walker Evans' photos, gets recognized? Isn't it the same concept as plagiarism? To me, it is. Burroughs would probably argue otherwise. I think it is only fair when other people's materials are used as a reference, or when a small part of their materials is incorporate into a big picture.

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One of the type of plagiarism is called the Remix (3:12). I think it is the most similar to the Levine case.

The world is watching!

2010-10-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

Let us imagine a situation where you are walking down a busy street. How likely would a person stop you? Stare at you? Examine you? Follow you? ... Not likely, unless it was your unlucky day and a swamp of creepers happen to be next to you. But guess what? It is not as unlikely as you might think. Every hour of your life outside your own space, you are probably captured and recorded in one of the millions of surveillance cameras around the world. On top of that, your picture could as well be distributed over the internet and currently viewed by millions of people without your knowledge.

Elevator operator taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson

How is that possible you asked? Let us go back to Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom I have mentioned earlier in my post on Friday, October 1. He was one of the most well-known street photographer back in the late 50's. He traveled around the world taking pictures of people and displayed it at his museum. Without knowing, an elevator operator's picture was taken and viewed by millions of people before she was made aware of it. Back then, it was one person with one camera. Now, things are different.

Samsung Seek cell phone

Majority of people carry at least one cell phone with them all the time. Since 97, cell phones started to have embedded camera in them. Now, it has become uncommon for a phone to not have one. These cameras used to be of bad quality, but now, may can take as equal quality picture as a point-and-shoot camera, if not better. Imagine 10% of those like to shoot pictures like Henri. Do you still think, your pictures has not already been circling around the internet?

Security camera at Lawrence university building

If you are still convinced, then the next time you walked down a busy street, take a look around you. From a bank to a convenient store, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. It is impossible to walk into a building without being recorded by one of the cameras. It is also impossible to know whether that footage of you is going to stay inside that building or has already been uploaded to the internet. We are constantly being watched, without even knowing it. Below is the footage captured by a surveillance camera at a convenient store, and it was uploaded on to Youtube.

So my project revolves around the idea of the world is watching. The project is divided into 3 sets. The first set contains 10 pictures of camera phones. The set shows different varieties of phones which varies in size and shape yet shared a common aspect, camera. The second set contains pictures of stationary surveillance cameras from wall-mount to webcam and laptop cameras. They shows different types of visible cameras around you. The third set was inspired by Henri and the combination of first two sets. They are pictures that could have been taken from any of the cameras in the first two sets. Below are some examples.

1.0, 2.0 and 3.0? when does it stop?

2010-10-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

Netscape Navigator mid 90's

Hearing Rachel Crow mentioning "Netscape" brought back my old memory when I was about 12 years old. I remember the first time I learned about this thing called "internet". I was intrigued by how much I can do sitting in front of a little screen with a keyboard and a mouse. The first web browser I knew about was this "Netscape Navigator," approximately in mid 90's. That time, there was no Google, All I had was a website called sanook, which translated to "fun" in Thai language. I remembered I was just sitting and waiting for at least 5 minutes for the page to load and there would be mostly text with hyperlinks on them. The content were just news and entertainment. If one wanted to make a website like that, s/he has to be a professional. Only thing I could do was to post a comment feedback to the website. (maybe because I was twelve and does not know a word in English). Even just knowing that, I thought I was a hot stuff, know it all 12 years old boy.

But now it is all different. If I walk around my primary school, I am sure at least half of the students are comfortable with the idea of internet and probably have their own Facebook and Hi5 (Social networking site popular in Thailand) profiles. I will even go as far as placing a bet that more than half of you reading this blog, just pressed the facebook hyperlink above and signed on to your profile, or already have the page up while reading this! (Well, I do). Things have changed and we are responsible to keep up with it. This is the age of Web 2.0!

Some well-known websites of web 2.0

So what exactly is Web 2.0? According to the article written by Lev Monovich, Web 2.0 refers to enabling website platforms that allow end-users to publish their own content without any expertise in computer programming. The main difference between web 1.0 (my childhood) and web 2.0 is that end-users could not publish their ideas in the way professionals could. Taking this website for example, there are underlying ten of thousands of computer codes that one has to write in order to present this look. But since web 2.0, this look is just a click away. Web 2.0 sounds really good, but is it? At the end of the day, I realized all these Facebook and twitter that came with the web 2.0 package is not always good for us. We forgot what it was like to actually hang out with people just to keep in touch, a birthday wishes reduced to a merely 20 characters "happy birthday man!!" on Facebook. The question is, what's next?

Just this last 10 years, things have changed so much, I could only hope that it stops right here. My prediction is that there will be no more face to face contact. Things that needed to be said can be said through twitter and text. Just the thought of that gives me a chill down my spine. Let this lady explain to you in a simple words.

From the Streets

2010-10-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

Sample picture of Medieval Architecture

Dan Leers, a Lawrence graduate, gives a talk about his career path today at Lawrence University. He has been changing his interests from medieval era architecture to Greek & roman coins to photo journalism and ended at Museum of Modern Art. One person Leers believes has inspired him into the photojournalism is Henri Cartier-Bresson. Henri was a French photographer who had been actively searching and capturing a magic moment in time and space around the world. Below are couple of pictures that Henri captured.

Henri Cartier-Bresson and his favorite camera

A silver Roman coin of Tiberius

The technique Henri used to take the pictures is called street photography. Nobody knew at a time that their pictures were taken. They presented their natural habitat. there was no pose, no act, just a reality.

As we can see in any of these pictures, the people were not at all aware of the present of the camera. They act as they feel and we can feel what they feel. It is inspiring to something real once a while in photos these days. In the modern society, every picture we see on the magazine, Internet and billboard, are acted and retouched. I think these pictures by Henri is just brilliant. I am inspired by his work and hope that one day I can have a good collection like that too.

Through the looking glass

2010-09-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

Errol Morris, an American director, directs a short documentary "Harvesting me" and a film "Standard Operating Procedure". At a glance, these documentaries seemed unrelated. However, they share common aspects, surveillance and its effect on people. Harvesting me is about Josh Harris, who decided to live in public. He put up cameras around his house and broadcast it to the world. Disturbing as it was, people actually paid to watch him. In fact, he earned a lot of money doing it. On the other hand, Standard Operating Procedure deals with issue in Abu Ghraib where photographs of prisoners were leaked. These photographs portrays the mistreatment of the prisoners there. The film investigated the possibilities of what could have happened in the moment the pictures were taken. Many of the participants in the picture were interviewed.

The picture portrays a dead body of a prisoner and a US military smiling with a thumb up

By watching both the documentaries, I have found that when a person is made aware of the surveillance, s/he behaved as if it is some sort of show s/he needs to perform to. In Harvesting Me, Harris said that after his argument with his girlfriend, he and his girlfriend both went to their respective corner and check-in with the 'viewers'. Normal people, after a fight, would either talk it out with each other or think about what just happened on their own. This is as if, the viewers are the referees and will judge how the "show" went. In Standard Operating Procedure, the women in the picture, Sabrina, said that she did not know what to do when the camera is pointing at her. Even when she feels wrong about it, she smiled and have her thumb up.

Even though, Sabrina's excuse seem a bit shallow, there is still some truth in the picture (pun intended). We "perform" in front of camera. We act differently knowing someone is watching. This might say something about us as a whole. Is the person you know through the looking glass, the same person when s/he alone?

 wasdad
Beware of the photos...

1974 vs 2010

2010-09-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

Theodor Holm Nelson in 1974 published a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Tempus). He believed that everyone should know about the computer and mentioned how it would change their way of living forever. It is true. Our lives have changed since computer become more available. Most, if not all, household own at least one computer and use it to improve their lives one way or another. College students, for example, write their papers using computers rather than pens and papers, because computers save them time as well as spell check their writings. It would seem that Nelson vision was right but I beg to differ. A little research has brought me two illustrations of what a computer was like in 1974. Below video demonstrates the most advance computer created by Xerox company in 1974.

Another video below shows a man ordering pizza using a computer (by phone).

As we can see, the computer in 1974 seemed clunky, difficult, technical and expensive. It would have taken more time and effort doing something with computer than without. I see no point for the book to have come out until early 90s where computers were faster and less technical (non-geek friendly?). All in all, I think he was not wrong, but was a bit too advance for his time for his work to be fully appreciated.