Gaps / In between conversations

Meeting at Starbucks coffee, Lausanne

Establishing a link between notions of migratory (links to CB’s work) and growth (links to Lalie’s work)

CB talked about the exhibition Time as matter, seen this summer in the Macba in Barcelona. First reading of Constant, and his text about The New Babylon (by 1960). Constant describes new nomad cities, where human beings will be free to create, move without working (el homo ludens). The cities adapt their structures and their functions according to their needs. All is controlled by the technologies, which allow people to interest themselves in intellectual and creative activities.
CB notices some similarities with Internet, but also with the homoncule aspect of Constant’s theory. Who is behind the technologies?
Homocule problem:
(…) appelée le problème de l’« homoncule ». La personne semble mue par une instance interne qui dirige le comportement de l’organisme qu’elle habite : un  homoncule. Mais qu’est-ce qui, au sein de cet homoncule, est responsable des décisions? On ne peut qu’imaginer un autre homoncule, et ainsi de suite à l’infini ! Bref, le recours à une instance interne susceptible d’être à l’origine des décisions individuelles n’est pas très satisfaisant d’un point de vue ontologique (DENNETT 1991) (lien: FABRICE CLÉMENT Du proto-soi social au sujet moral: rupture ou continuité?

Constant, New Babylon, 1963

Lalie talked about the city as a living organism, and a recent article “Math and the City” published in the NY Times by Steven Strogatz (professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University). Stongatz points to recent mathematical observations according to which the mathematical patterns that are used to calculate cities growth and infrastructure could also apply to those of the living organisms: “the architecture seen in the circulatory system and the airways of the lung, (is) not too different from the roads and cables and pipes that keep a city alive. “

Additional readings: Tristes Tropiques de Claude Lévi-Strauss, what is organising a city growth? How a population leaves one place for another one?
and the entropy notion (Remy Lestienne, Les Fils du temps) in which the notion of progress is not linked to an increase in size (for example: of an organism) but to its increase of complexity.

Lalie mentioned Martin Kippenberger Metro-Net and the crushed aluminum Subway Entrance (exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery) as part of Kippenberger’s imaginary network of underground connections (e.g. connecting cities in Greece, Germany, Canada and the US through an underground transportation system).

Entrance to Syros Metro-net station

View of the Metro-net station at KTHMA KANNE property in Syros

We share ideas towards present and future collaborations:
Keywords: Same images from different places / To be opposite, in Thonon and Lausanne for example / and the creation of transportation systems between impossible places.

From Geneva, meeting at HEAD

We spoke about ideas of borders, limits such as those suggested by Gilles Clément in Manifeste de Tiers paysage. e.g. “limite administrative” vs. “limite biologique”.

Working with ideas of limits (or no limits) we spoke about artworks that speak of limits that we cannot grasp.  For example: Terreform by Jane Marsching at Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art):

What does a seven degree temperature rise in the Artctic really mean? Fields of projected color change in accordance with the forecasted temperature increase at the North Pole over the next 100 years. 

As well as work by Piotr Kowalski

We had lunch with Professor Daniel Pincas, and Daniel Sciboz

From Boston, MA, USA

FX on Shoestring: Visual Effects and Experimental Video / Massachusetts College of Art: A workshop by Janne Holtermann, focusing on the use of visual video effects including concepts and techniques such as the time remap tool, compositing, keying and masking.

Screening of experimental video includes deconstruction of video work such as:

- Martin Arnold / passage à l’acte 

- Martin Arnold / pièce touchée 

Lalie’s experimental work in Faneuil Hall: Exploring ideas of time and image perception using 2 shooting positions, time line manipulation, chroma and Luma keyer and composite.

From Boston, MA, USA

Visiting the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival

2 works that particularly relate to our conversations are Loops by Golan Levin, and Evolving Darwin’s Gaze by Steve Dipaola. Loops speaks about gaps (the spaces in between the coordinates of Cunningham’s fingers) which are reconstructed into suggestive of natural organisms.  Evolving Darwin’s Gaze speaks about evolution of a portraiture image, but in fact it is about the evolution of the digital information itself.

The Loops Project: Four artists, Brian Knep, Golan Levin, Casey Reas and Sosolimited will re-purpose the data and software from 2001’s Loops Project into new digital forms.  Loops, a digital portrait of Merce Cunningham by artists Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser has been released as open source data by the Cunningham Foundation and OpenEnded Group (the artists’ organization) for this purpose.

Loops by Golan Levin: Merce’s Isosurface returns a mortal coil to the disembodied datapoints of Merce Cunningham’s 2008 “Loops” performance. Here, the digitally captured coordinates of Cunningham’s fingers and knuckle joints are used to structure a smooth field of simulated energy. The result is a twitchy, fleshy blob, animated by Cunningham’s own movements, which dances in the liminal territory between pure abstract form and medical information visualization.

Evolving Darwin’s Gaze by Steve Dipaola: Dynamic computer projections and graphics, this computational multimedia piece attempts to bring ‘the ghost (creativity) out of the machine (the computer)’ using Charles Darwin (his namesake techniques and portrait).  It demonstrates the living Darwinian evolutionary process through portraits that strive to resemble Charles Darwin’s most famous portrait over 1000s of populations.  The piece demonstrates in real time the process of evolution, creativity and art making.

From France, Christian Nold’s work and his emotional maps

From France, also the article in the Courrier International (french), about The History revised and corrected by animals
(by studying the DNA of mouse or louses, scientific people reach, as from the events of our past and to drill some of its mysteries.)

Third meeting, Cafe de Grancy, Lausanne / Switzerland

The discussion was a mix between the concept of Memes, formalized by Richard Dawkins, the idea of interval in montage described among others by Dziga Vertov, and the notion of Monad in Leibniz’s theories.
About Monad, you mentioned the book of Nicholas Jolley.

The point of departure in the conversation was one of the important aspect of Lalie’s work, the notion of building-block.

Of course, we talked one more time about Dizga Vertov, and the Men with the camera

Keywords: Survivance / Ether / Score /
The idea of survivance is linked to Aby Warburg’s theories, I mentioned Philippe-Alain Michaud, and Georges Didi-Huberman and their works about the link between the history of art in Aby Warburg and the cinema display.

Software: a fractale software, which displays growth of populations (source to find again).

Artists:
Cornelia Parker, Cold dark Matter, 1991 - which works with ideas we can not qualify or quantify; and Einstein’s abstracts, 1999 – to look at spaces in between marks.

And also Gerhard Richter, Femme descendant un escalier, 1965. Later by email, you sent me the work of Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, and also Descending stairs and Turning, by Eadweard Muybridge.

I promised to show you the work Etienne-Jules Marey.

We spoke about hybrids Lalie’s exhibition in London.

We ate the same salad!

Second meeting, Vevey / Switzerland

Conversations about our respective art practice.

Paradox mentioned:

- the Zenon’s paradox, and the arrow time

- Leibniz’s observation analyzing the behavior of series of natural numbers: The series of natural numbers looks as the following series: 1 2 3 4 … to infinity. If we multiply each of the numbers in the natural numbers series by two, we should receive a series with even numbers: 2 4 6 8 … to infinity

According to Leibniz, the multiplication did not change the amount of numbers in the second series. Therefore, can we come up with the conclusion that the number of all natural numbers (even+odd) is equal to the number of all even numbers?

Lalie also talked about Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener and ideas of “Newtonian vs. Bergsonian time”: ”Bergson emphasized the difference between the reversible time of physics (e.g. Newtonian Physics) in which nothing new happens, and the irreversible time of evolution and biology, in which there is always something new…”  Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: of Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, the MIT Press, 1948 and 1961.

Random meeting at Lucy Macintosh Gallery, Lausanne / Switzerland

(during Lalie’s exhibition, titled: Offspring)

First conversations and exchange of ideas. Spoke about: the artistic and scientific work of Jill Scott and the artist Tania Ruiz who works with ideas of loops, and time representation models. 

Caroline has interviewed Tania Ruiz for her Ph.D. thesis!

Projection in a torus