(グラフィティの共通マークアップ言語GMLを書き出すロボットアーム「ROBOTAGGER」)

This quick project came together over the past weekend in CMU’s Digital Fabrication Laboratory (dFAB), directed by my friend and colleague, Professor Jeremy Ficca. Inspired by a tweet from Evan Roth, one of the co-creators of GML, we reckoned it would be easy to transcode GML into a file format suitable for robotic CAD/CAM machining. The result is a small Processing utility that converts GML into DXF and CSV (you can download the GML-to-DXF source code here). After tinkering around for a while we developed a pipeline for converting the GML/DXF strokes from 000000book.com into machining paths for the dFAB’s ABB IRB-4400, an eight foot tall industrial robot arm. Our first test was a “hello world” scrawl which, not coincidentally, was also one of the first GML files ever created (148.GML at 000000book.com). But our real objective, which you can see in the video above, was to give physical form to GML tags produced by TEMPT ONE (Tony Quan), a graffiti writer with Lou Gehrig’s disease who produced the digital GML recording with the FAT Lab’s well-known EyeWriter software. Although there’s been a lot of data loss and translation along the way, it’s not completely unreasonable to think of the Robotagger as a prosthesis for Tony. I hope we can pursue this possibility a little further.

Speaking of future directions, there are lots of interesting research topics latent here in automated calligraphy. We were astonished to realize just how important the force-feedback of pressure is to the visual quality of the drawings. (The first 20 seconds of the video shows what I mean in an extreme way – we shattered a marker and sent ink everywhere when our estimate of the Z-plane turned out to be off by a quarter-inch. Looks like we need to get that force-measuring software extension that ABB sells.) Going forward, we’re interested in exploring robotic performances of higher-dimensional gesture data, such as that produced by Wacom tablets, which provides high-resolution information about the pressure, azimuth and elevation (yaw and pitch) of the tagger’s stylus. Watch this space — I’ll be developing some tools to help the next version of GML encode this information.

The Robotagger Unmanned Graffiti System is a collaboration of Jeremy Ficca’s dFAB at CMU; the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, which I direct; and the FAT Lab’s GML initiative. We used the Sharpie Magnum and the wonderful 2-inch Montana Hardcore markers, which (AFAIK) are the largest magic markers in commercial production. (And of course, for the deep history of prior work blending graffiti and automation, don’t forget to check out the spraycan-enabled Graffiti Writer robot [1998-2000] by the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Jürg Lehni’s wall-spraying Hektor robot [2002].) [Extra links: RoboTagger on Youtube]

Maps represent, maps reveal, maps entice, maps distort. They selectively omit, they unwittingly exaggerate, and they even make outright lies. Though maps strive to project authority and objectivity, they cannot help but embed the biases, blind-spots and idiosyncrasies of their human authors. As our lives are played out in increasingly networked realms, we have become carto-literate as never before; we read maps produced by governments and corporate interests, yes, but also collaboratively author maps online, inscribing new representations of ourselves and our priorities. Contestational Cartographies introduces the thoughts of leading “experimental geographers” who employ mapping techniques in new modes of critical practice and cultural research and, in so doing, help us “read between the lines” of the world around us.

For more information, see the Contestational Cartographies web site, or download our programme:

The loosely-organized materials I’ve cited below provide starting points for discussions about image manipulation from several perspectives, including: photojournalistic standards of truthtelling; the construction of idealized beauty in vernacular advertising; and the early history of 19th-century photocollages as an extension of narrative romantic painting. I’m grateful to Paolo Pedercini and Rich Pell for their pointers to some of the resources below.

Unit Learning Outcomes:
To demonstrate development of skills in the use of techniques for pixel-based (bitmap) image acquisition, editing, compositing, and output. To demonstrate an awareness of the issues surrounding photographic “truth” and verifiability in the digital era.

Readings:

• Collins, Lauren. “[The World of Fashion] Pixel Perfect: Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality.” The New Yorker, 5/12/2008.
• Farid, Hany. “Photo Tampering Throughout History“. Web site. A thorough chronological compilation of photo-tampering examples, and one of the best classroom resources of its kind.
• Farid, Hany. “Seeing Is Not Believing” IEEE Spectrum Magazine, 8/2009.
• Jesella, Kara. “The Remix: The Skinny, Something To Smile About” The New York Times, 10/22/2006.
• Mitchell, William. “How to do Things with Pictures”. In The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post Photographic Era, MIT Press, 1992. pp 190-223.
• Mitchell, William. “When is Seeing Believing?”. In Scientific American, February 1994. pp 68-73.
• Paul, Christiane. “Digital Technologies as a Tool”. In Digital Art, 2004.
• Williams, Alex. “I Was there. Just Ask Photoshop.” The New York Times, 8/15/2008.
• Wilson, Eric. “Smile and Say No Photoshop“. The New York Times, 5/27/2009.
• Software giant Microsoft apologizes for editing a photo to change a black man’s head to that of a white man. 8/26/2009.
• Newman, Jared. Ten More Tech Company Photoshop Disasters. MSNBC, 8/28/2009.

Images:
Examples of historic photographs, artworks and hoax images produced in various ways through photomanipulation.

• Oscar Rejlander: Two Ways of Life (1857)
  
• Henry Peach Robinson: Women and Children at a Country Party, Study for A Holiday in the Wood, Bringing Home the May, Fading Away (1858)
  
• Keith Cottingham: Fictitious Portraits (1992) [keep clicking]
• Nancy Burson: Early Composites (1982), Human Race Machine (1999), Jesus Guys (1999).
• Jim Campbell: Illuminated Averages
• Jason Salavon: 100 Special Moments, Homes for Sale, Every Playboy Centerfold
• Mariko Mori: Birth of a Star (1995), Burning Desire
• Aziz & Cucher: Dystopia (1994)
• Andreas Gursky (example)
• “Fauxtography” at Snopes.com, e.g. iceberg, teddy bear cloud, etc.
• Wim Delvoye: Mountains (2000)
• Sabrina Raaf: Test People (2004-2007)
• Snopes: Bert the muppet accidentally collaged into pro-Qaeda propaganda posters.

Video:

• Epstein, Jesse. “Op-Ed: Sex, Lies and Photoshop“, The New York Times, 3/9/2009.
• Epstein, Jesse. “Wet Dreams and False Images“, Independent film, 2008:
  
• Piper, Tim. “Dove: Evolution“, Advertisement, 2006:
  
• Additional viewing: Davis, Kiri. “A Girl Like Me.” Independent film, 2006.

Interactions:

• Roth, Evan (fi5e). Detouch. Interactive Processing applet. (+blog post). An interactive applet which allows the viewer to see exactly which pixels have been modified in a before/after retouching comparison.

Assignments:

Keywords: digital photography, digital imaging, computer imaging, image editing, image manipulation, photo manipulation, image tampering, photo retouching, exaggeration, doctoring, doctored, re-touching, alteration, digitally altered, compositing, composite, collage, software, Photoshop, photoshopping, curriculum, course unit, course materials, classroom materials, educational resource, lecture notes, course prep, curricular unit, slimming, beauty, body image, unattainable, normativity, advertising, imagery, art, illustration, journalism, photojournalism, truth, veracity, forgery, critical approach, contextual study, media literacy, visual literacy, education, educators, teachers.

TED kindly provides the same video for download in additional formats as well:
Zipped MP4 video file / Podcast MP4 video for iTunes.

The snappy formatting of the TED video doesn’t allow space or time for thorough credits, attributions and acknowledgements. For this reason I would like to use this space to mention the following organizations, collaborators and other individuals whose work is cited in my presentation:

• Slide #1 (Telegram) is courtesy ACCAD and The Charles A. Csuri Project at OSU.
• Slide #3 (Desktop) is courtesy Mateo Zlatar.
• Slide #4 (Baby mirror) is from Wikipedia.
• Interstitial Fragment Processor is by Golan Levin.
• Slide #5 (Interstitial Fragment Processor) is courtesy Bitforms Gallery NYC, photo by John Berens.
• Slide #6 (Maluma/Takete) is from Wolfgang Kohler, Gestalt Psychology.
• Slide #7 (Phonesthesia) is from Shelly Wynecoop, unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1997.
• Slide #8 (Re:MARK) is courtesy Ars Electronica, Linz. Photo by Pascal Maresch.
• Re:MARK is by Tmema (Golan Levin + Zachary Lieberman) with the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
• Slide #10 (Ursonography) is photo/courtesy Juha Huuskonen.
• Ursonography is an interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, by Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin.
• Slide #11 (Ursonography) is courtesy Ars Electronica, Linz. Photo by Pascal Maresch.
• Slide #12 (Staring contest) is from Wikipedia.
• Opto-Isolator is by Golan Levin with Greg Baltus.
• Double-Taker (Snout) is by Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White.

The Interstitial Fragment Processor, Ursonography, Opto-Isolator, and Double-Taker (Snout) projects were all created using openFrameworks. Thanks to Emily, June, Martha and Matthew at the TED organization for the high production quality of the video and its subtitles.

In other instances, we detect a whiff of outright theft. This may be difficult to prove, or at least, challenging to litigate, particularly for ideas which have simmered in the stew of the public domain for a few years. We simply pity, or perhaps snicker at, the artist who seeks redress from a behemoth corporation like Microsoft for its callous disregard of his Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Well, earlier this month, I experienced yet another day of cognitive dissonance in which

• I struggled to justify the value of new-media arts research to an audience of Silicon Valley businesspeople;
  while simultaneously,
• Some new-media artist friends of mine discovered that their work had been ‘appropriated’ by a large corporation.

There’s a clearly a cultural blindspot, here, folks. In the hope that these artists and others like them may receive some recognition for their pioneering prognostication and belated cultural influence, I here offer A few examples of New Media Artworks which Have Predicted the Future, Perhaps Too Successfully:

Myron Krueger (born 1942) is a pioneering American computer artist who developed some of the earliest computer-based interactive artworks. Krueger is also considered to be among the first generation of virtual reality and augmented reality researchers. Pictured at left is a scene from Myron Krueger’s landmark interactive artwork, Video Place, which was developed continuously between ~1970 and 1989, and which premiered publicly in 1974. Camera-based computer play begins here. The Video Place project comprised at least two dozen profoundly inventive scenes which comprehensively explored the design space of full-body camera-based interactions with virtual graphics — including telepresence applications, drawing programs, and (pictured here, in the “Critter” scene) interactions with animated artificial creatures. Many of these scenes allowed for multiple simultaneous interactants, connected telematically over significant distances. Video Place has influenced several generations of new media artworks, including some of my own (see, for example, my short essays, “Hands Up! The Media Art Posture“ and “Computer Vision for Artists and Designers“). By 2003, techniques for full-body camera-based interactions were considered inexpensive and reliable enough for mass commercialization. Pictured here, at right, is a screenshot of the Sony EyeToy, which was released in 2003 and has sold, according to Wikipedia, in excess of 10.5 million units. Today, the Sony EyeToy weighs a few ounces and costs just $29, and offers games featuring mass-market character properties (Harry Potter, Sonic the Hedgehog) and popular sports (basketball, football, Formula One racing, etcetera).

Michael Naimark (born 1952) is a new-media artist and researcher interested in “place representation.” In addition to his influential work exploring cinema-based virtual and immersive realities, Naimark is also notable for his advocacy of media art as a stimulus for technological innovation — having directly helped establish a number of prominent research labs including the MIT Media Laboratory (1980), the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), Lucasfilm Interactive (1989), and Interval Research Corporation (1992).

In the late 1970s Naimark was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT. Working in collaboration with Peter Clay, Bob Mohl, Andrew Lippman and others from the MIT Architecture Machine Group (“ArchMac”), Naimark helped create the Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980), a landmark hypermedia installation which allowed visitors to interactively explore and navigate the roads in a small town in Colorado. The Aspen Movie Map was made possible through an “artistic abuse” of the world’s first laserdisc player — namely, by taking a device which had been intended for the storage and playback of large movies, and instead using it for random access under interactive control. Naimark, who went on to create similar maps for more than a decade, says, “One could argue that the roots of two movements went through the Aspen Movie Map in the earliest days: the roots of multimedia and the roots of virtual reality.” More information about the Aspen Movie Map can be found at Michael Naimark’s web site for the project, including a remarkable video and some additional historic writings. Below are photos showing the automobile rigs used to create panoramas of the streets, then and now.

Built with financial support from DARPA, The Aspen Movie Map artwork was awarded the dubious “Golden Fleece Award” in 1980 by then-U.S. Senator William Proxmire — a sarcastic recognition he bestowed on projects which he felt were egregious wastes of taxpayer money. Nevertheless, the core ideas of the Aspen Movie Map live on, three decades years later, in Google’s widely-used Street View service (launched 2007), a feature of Google’s networked-based mapping tools that provides panoramic views of streets in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Jeffrey Shaw (born 1944) has been active in new media arts and research since the mid-1960s. Currently the director of the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Shaw was founding director (1991-2003) of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1988, Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld created Legible City, an interactive artwork with a sensor-enabled stationary bicycle interface, which allowed visitors to navigate and explore a 3D virtual environment by pedaling and steering. The work is well-known within the media arts literature, where it has been recognized for its advances in the poetics of immersive synthetic experiences and in the field of experimental physical interfaces.

Pictured above at right is a recent (ca. 2008) piece of digital exercise equipment from E-fitzone, a sports promotion “pilot lab” which purports to be Europe’s “first gym for interactive gaming”. An industry press article states: “According to Carla Scholten, director of Embedded Fitness, which initiated the project, ‘The idea for E‑fitzone was based on initiatives in the U.S. where a combination of gaming, entertainment and fitness training has become commonplace. It not only makes training fun, but also offers the option of creating an online account through which you can track your high scores, heart rate and energy consumption.’” It is difficult to judge from the photo, but the E-fitzone interactive cycling station appears to include a trigger-enabled joystick which Shaw’s artwork did not.

Art+Com is a collective of German new-media artist/technologists, founded in 1988, which has since evolved into a small company providing custom interactive installation projects for clients in the industry, culture and research sectors. In 1996, Art+Com developed Terravision, a networked virtual representation of the earth based on satellite images, aerial shots, altitude data and architectural data. According to the Art+Com website, “Terravision was the first system to provide a seamless navigation and visualisation in a massively large spatial data environment. Users can navigate seamlessly from overviews of the earth to extremely detailed objects and buildings. In addition to the photorealistic representation of the earth, all kinds of spatial information-data are integrated, and are streamed into the system according to the user’s needs.”

Pictured at right is Google Inc.’s Google Earth, a “virtual globe, map and geographic information program” that “lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean.” Google Earth was originally called Earth Viewer, and was created in 2001 by Keyhole, Inc, a company acquired by Google in 2004. One significant difference between Terravision and Google Earth, is that the newer project takes advantage of user-generated cartographic annotations, allowing users to save their favorite places, and share these with others.

It has sometimes been suggested that interactive new media art is propelled by two different strands of research: technoformalism, an inquiry which is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and experiential potentials of new technologies, and hacktivism, which is concerned with technology’s critical and sociopolitical possibilities. To the extent that technoformal artworks can be interpreted as neutral “media frames”, and are thus more easily adapted to commercial ends — as illustrated, perhaps, by the first examples in this article — it may be surprising and instructive to note that politically-challenging hacktivist work is not immune from such adaptations, either.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as an anonymous artist’s collective dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. For more than a decade, the IAA has created tactical media technologies, including various forms of “contestational robotics”, which are intended to extend the autonomy of human activists. In 1998 the IAA developed GraffitiWriter, a small “tele-operated field programable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometers per hour,” whose “printing process is similar to that of a dot matrix printer.” GraffitiWriter provoked controversies on a number of occasions; for example, during an award ceremony on live Austrian television in 2000, at the height of Austrian governor Jörg Haider’s xenophobic campaign against immigrants, GraffitiWriter went scandalously ‘off-script’ and printed the activist slogan Kein mensch ist illegal (“No person is illegal”).

IAA’s subsequent project, StreetWriter (2001-2004) consists of a substantially larger computer-controlled industrial spray painting unit that is built into a van or trailer. The system is capable of printing text messages hundreds of feet long, and as wide as a lane of traffic. StreetWriter was developed in order to protest the militarization of robotics and the privatization of public space through corporate messaging. In 2004, for example, the project was deployed in protest of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, where it printed Asimov’s first rule of robotics (“A robot must not kill”). Video of the IAA StreetWriter can be seen here.

In mid-2009, the sports apparel manufacturer Nike and its PR agency, Wieden+Kennedy, commissioned Pittsburgh design studio DeepLocal to create a similar device, Chalkbot, for use in its “LIVESTRONG” advertising campaign for the 2009 Tour de France. The Chalkbot system was used to print inspirational messages sent (via SMS and the Web) by Internet users, as well as Nike’s campaign slogans and logographs. The Institute for Applied Autonomy group was not involved in (or informed about) Nike’s appropriation of its Streetwriter concept, and posted a press release stating their objection to “the corporate appropriation of ‘outsider’ research projects without acknowledgement of the amateur, collective, hobbyist, and activist communities upon which projects like Chalkbot are built.” Deeplocal posted a response to this, asserting the value of Chalkbot for spreading messages of hope for cancer survivors, and more generally for connecting a very large public, so directly, to such a messaging device.

I’m grateful to the artists listed above, all of whom, in full disclosure, are friends or acquaintances. I’m also grateful to Eric Paulos, who alerted me to some important examples, and to the many others online who responded to my request on Twitter for similar instances. I learned that there are many, many examples of new-media artworks which laid the conceptual groundwork for everyday commercial products. (Want some more? How about Motoi Ishibashi and Motoki Kouketsu, whose G-Display artwork (1999) anticipated most modern tilt-based interactions. Or contrast Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s well-known media-art classic, Text Rain (1999), itself a descendant of Myron Krueger’s Video Place, with the new Word Wall “donor recognition system” (2009) by SnibbeInteractive.com.)

There’s also another question I’ve left unaddressed here, which concerns the shifting artistic (as opposed to economic) value of artwork-inventions which become commonplace tools and products. These stories are ultimately, for me, inspirational yet grimly depressing — and so for now, I’ll let the bittersweet job of making a comprehensive list of such projects fall to someone else.

For those not familiar with this phenomenon, here are the basic facts:

• About 8,000-10,000 “painting workers” are employed in a single village (actually, an urban district) to produce more than 60% of the world’s paintings. (And I’ll bet you thought the world’s largest population of artists was in Berlin or Brooklyn!)
• Some factories specialize in reproducing famous Western masterpieces; others specialize in creating literally thousands of identical units (for hotels, cruise ships, and retail outlets like WalMart, K-Mart, Ikea, etc.); and other factories specialize in painting custom reproductions of family portraits, pets, wedding photos, and the like.
• Commissioning a custom painting is done with digital images, via email attachments and PayPal, and takes about 10-14 days including shipping. Prices range from as little as $10 to as much as $1000 (for a high-quality forgery); cost factors include the size, thickness of paint, and presence of (for example) people and/or portrait faces. For a painting whose dimensions are 50cm x 40cm, one might expect to pay $30-100 US.

A painting speed competition in Dafen.

Newspaper articles, critical histories and other journalism.
(Lots of good information here.)

• James Fallows, “Workshop of the world, fine arts division.” Atlantic Monthly, 12/19/2007.
• James Fallows, “A little more about the ‘art factory village’ of Dafen“. Atlantic Monthly, 12/20/2007.
• Le-Min Lim, “China’s Factory for Fake Art Tries to Beat Slump“. Bloomberg News, 9/24/2008.
• Evan Osnos, “Chinese village paints by incredible numbers“. Chicago Tribune, 2/13/2007.
• Martin Paetsch, “Van Gogh From the Sweatshop“. Spiegel Online, 08/23/2006.
• Wong, Winnie Won Yin. “Framed Authors: Photography and Conceptual Art from Dafen Village“. Yishu- Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

This 7-minute YouTube video provides an excellent overview of the painting economy in Dafen village:

Example painting factories online.
(There are many others.)

• Book530
• Dafen Art
• Gold Apple Art

Western art approaches to the phenomenon.
(Interesting work which addresses this trend critically, conceptually, and/or politically.)

• Michael Mandiberg. In memory of the man in front of the tanks (Tiananmen 20 years later). 2005-2009 [More at Flickr]. Mandiberg commissioned paintings of the famous Tienanmen photograph, obtaining results which were censored or modified in a variety of ways.
• REGIONAL OFFICE design group. Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen. 2007. REGIONAL OFFICE commissioned self-portraits of the Dafen artists themselves.
• Alan Butler. The Image Factory, 2009.
  Butler commissioned a painting of the first photograph above (of a painting competition in Dafen village, from Spiegel Online).
• Michael Wolf. Real Fake Art series.
• Christian Jankowski, Super Classical exhibition at Maccarone Gallery, 2007.
• Clement Valla:
  • Paintings from Wushipu, 2009.
  • 100USD-90USD-65USD, 2008.
  • “Original Copies” (RISD MFA Thesis, PDF format), 2009, pp. 24-59.
    Valla commissioned a variety of experiments, including the creation of painted feedback loops, open-ended instructional paintings, and paintings corrupted by digital transmission errors. His thesis provides an excellent discussion of the aesthetic and ethical issues.

Outsourced oil painting is the new “digital output”.

I should perhaps briefly explain my interest in this phenomenon. Of course, there is some very provocative conceptual art which investigates and appropriates these painting resources, such as that by the artists linked above. This is challenging and (in my opinion) necessary work. From my standpoint as an arts educator, however, I do not believe it is adequate for students to be made aware of such clever projects in blogs like this one. Instead, I believe it is essential to directly expose students — particularly those who consider themselves to be painters — to the actual use of this inexpensive, new, internet-enabled “means of production”, and thereon to crucial aesthetic and ethical questions about authenticity, labor, and the cultural logic of mass customization in today’s global economy. They must cause one to be made, once, themselves. They must understand the implications, by being implicated in the process.

Most of my undergraduate students self-identify as painters. Many of them harbor charming ideas about the “aura” of original paintings, which allows them to distinguish their works from “banal”, machine-produced prints. But too few are aware of this extraordinary revolution in their own trade, in which the majority of the world’s paintings are now mass-produced by a superscaled “human machine”. And very few, if any, yet appreciate that the cost of having a JPEG image skillfully painted in China is roughly the same price as having it printed on the HP Designjet in our school’s Digital Print Lab — or that the process of commissioning such a painting over email, is barely more complicated than pressing Command-P. (Perl script, anyone?) I am convinced that our young painters must confront these facts directly. This coming September, in my introductory Electronic Media Studio class at Carnegie Mellon, I’ll be exposing my freshmen Art students to this, in their first week at university — when their Photoshop assignments (a “fiction or forgery” collage, or a “retouched self-portrait”, perhaps) are “printed out” (surprise!) in hand-applied Chinese oils. I’m hoping this will be an eye-opening introduction to art school, and one that makes them think hard about what it means to be a painter in 2009. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Clement Valla and Winnie Won Yin Wong for invaluable pointers for this post.

The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the contrast between two particular works which are bookends for advanced uses of the professional orchestra.

Consider, first, the performance of John Cage’s famous silent piece, 4′33″, by the full BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London in January 2004. Cage’s work

“was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. Although commonly perceived as ‘four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence’, the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.” [Wikipedia].

[An additional copy can be found on YouTube here.]

In contrast to this is Sam Taylor-Wood’s video work, Sigh, in which a composition by Anne Dudley is performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Or, apparently performed, as the orchestra, minus their actual instruments, mime the piece precisely as their muscles remember it. In the video installation, which premiered in October 2008, the music is heard as a backdrop. A spokesperson for Taylor-Wood states:

“In a dark, rundown studio, the members of the orchestra sit in their everyday clothes. They start to play a piece of music, sawing and blowing the empty spaces where the instruments should be. Although the music is clear and audible, the absence of the instruments renders the sound oddly incorporeal. It’s a private, ghostly performance.” [London Evening-Standard]

Taylor-Wood’s work follows on the heels of her similar (and remarkable) project Prelude in Air, which focuses on the re-enactment of a solo cello work. Both videos evoke a form of sympathetic synaesthesia (or vicarious kinesthesia, if you will) in which the mind of the viewer fills in the missing instrument, an illusion which could only be made possible through the use of consummately professional performers.

And so we have two unusually intense works:

• Cage’s 4′33″ at the Barbican: All of the instruments, none of the sound; and
• Taylor-Wood’s Sigh: None of the instruments, all of the sound.

INTERACTIVE SOUND INSTALLATIONS
An Exhibition at the Ninth Conference on
New Interfaces for Musical Expression
http://www.nime2009.org/directions.php

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
June 4-6, 2009, 12-6pm
Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
Purnell Center for the Arts, 5000 Forbes Ave.
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
http://www.cmu.edu/millergallery/visit.php

As part of NIME2009, the Ninth Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, we invite the public to enjoy five interactive sound installations at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. Come experience spatialized audio, musical pendulums, solar-powered sound synthesis, and mobile message mashups — in this short-term exhibition of new media sound works by leading artist/researchers.

Featuring the artworks:

• Elemental & Cyrene Reefs by Ivica Bukvic and Eric Standley;
• Cellphonia: 4′33″ by Steve Bull and Scot Gresham-Lancaster;
• Pendaphonics by Dan Overholt, Byron Lahey, Anne-Marie Skriver Hansen,
  Winslow Burleson, and Camilla N. Jensen;
• Sound Lanterns by Scott Smallwood; and
• Artificial Analog Neural Network (AANN) by Phillip Stearns.

Installation Selection Committee: R. Luke DuBois and Golan Levin. Installations Chair and Exhibition Coordinator: Golan Levin. This exhibition was made possible with support from the CMU School of Music; the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry; the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University; and the CMU Schools of Art and Architecture.