Processed

On the Road

Stephen Shore’s solo show at the International Center of Photography focuses on a collection of photos made during extended road trips back and forth across the United States in the 1970s. His project revels in the ephemera of travel—a half-eaten hamburger, a pair of table tennis paddles, an anonymous ladyfriend, a decaying drug store marquee, a lonely intersection in a small Midwestern town, to name just a few.  In lesser hands, any one of these prints would be an ordinary souvenir made by a pretentious East Coast art school student on a post-graduation vacation. Seen together as a set of generously sized prints, however, Shore’s work achieves a slow burn. There is a restless spontaneity to his selection of subject matter that comes from a careful awareness of his constantly shifting surroundings, and yet his resulting documents show acute attention to subtle details of color and composition. For the most part Shore seems to show little interest in making any particular commentary about the places and objects he captures, but concerns himself first and foremost with using them as pure source material to be captured and framed by his sensitive eye. It makes for an understated but quite powerful documentation of a life on the road, and for an intimate, unvarnished portrait of the artifacts of American culture. If you can’t make it to the ICP, check out this online gallery of Shore’s images, and this recent short video documentary on his approach to his craft, and maybe this interview.

77BOADRUM

While the rest of the planet was spending 7/7/07 watching the Live Earth concerts, Yamataka Eye of The Boredoms instigated a special show in DUMBO that included a thunderous ensemble of 77 drummers. And it wasn't some hippie drum circle. Thanks to the generous souls who posted this edited video of the spectacle, and for all of these videos. I am very sorry I was out of town and missed this, though there is still hope for me. The Daily Swarm has a nice collection of reviews and info, and claims Eye is planning another show on 8/8/08, including 88 drummers.

Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?

In an earlier post, I briefly described a New York Academy of Sciences conference exploring the interaction between biology and art. We have just launched an Academy eBriefing covering the event. In addition to a very nice written synopsis of the conference and the issues it raised by my colleague Alexis Clements, be sure to check out the multimedia page for a recording of an utterly genre-defining lecture by French curator and writer Jens Hauser and a fascinating video documentary showing artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest projects. There is also a brief but insightful interview with artist Laura Splan about the rationale behind using the tools of biotechnology as artistic media, and lots of links to related web sites, books, and artists.

Your Brain in Aspen

When the wealthy, the famous, and the beautiful weren’t listening to Bill Clinton and Karl Rove at the Aspen Ideas Festival two weekends ago, they were treated to a set of symposia featuring some top-flight neuroscientists and neuro-dilettantes. The goal of the sessions was to explore recent developments in our understanding of how the brain works, how differences in brain development make each of us unique, and the potential social ramifications of the increasingly undeniable realization that everything we experience happens in the chemical and electrical reactions taking place in the three pounds of wrinkled meat in our heads.

There seemed to be general consensus that the highpoint of the sessions was a presentation by Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist now based at Duke University who has conducted some truly remarkable experiments to understand how the brain controls our physical movements. He and his colleagues have devised an interface that translates the firing of configurations of neurons in the monkey’s brain into physical motion. In a series of experiments, he first taught a monkey to play a simple video game using a joystick to move a cursor around a screen. By implanting a set of sensors in the monkey’s brain, he could determine which neurons fired as it performed various tasks. Next, he took the joystick away from the monkey, but connected the sensors to a robotic arm that held the joystick. When he put the monkey in front of the game again, the firing patterns in its brain were the same, enabling it to learn to manipulate the cursor and the robotic arm merely through its “thoughts.” Nicolelis’s discovery of how to create such an interface has enormous potential for everything from new types of prosthetic limbs, to robotics, to (I would imagine) defense industry technologies. His work is the stuff that cyborgs are made of.

The lecture series also featured two presentations discussing the potential ramifications of neuroscience for the practice of the law. As brain research and genetics increasingly show that there is a purely biological component to many of our thoughts and actions, it presents some difficult questions of personal responsibility. If it is discovered that particular types of development in the brain increase the likelihood of antisocial behavior, should an individual still be held responsible for his actions? If a brain scan can predict the possibility that an individual would be more likely than others to commit a crime, is it right to take preventative actions against him?

According to legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen, who published an article on the subject in a March 2007 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, such questions are already being raised in the courtroom, and judges are increasingly being put in the uncomfortable position of needing to decide on scientific issues. Rosen argued for the pressing need for a public dialogue to reach a consensus on how best to reconcile neuroscience with constitutional law and legal precedent.  Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s most prominent cognitive neuroscientists, took up similar topics on Sunday. He recounted scientific findings showing the existence of a gap in mental processing between the moment when the brain commits to a decision and the moment when we become conscious of that decision. Such a construct could call into question the existence of the free will on which so much legal theory is based. Gazzaniga argued that even if neuroscience does produce the ability to predict whether a person is likely to commit a crime, however, the question of personal responsibility is ultimately a social, not a biological, one, meaning that, at least for the time being, it wouldn’t be correct to rely too heavily on the brain when making legal judgments.

I was also intrigued by a presentation from Marcus Raichle. Raichle is one of the most important researchers in the field of neuroimaging, and contributed to the invention of positron emission tomography. Following a general introduction to explain the history of brain imaging and how current methods work, he talked about the importance of studying the “intrinsic” functional activity of the brain instead of the “evoked” responses so often analyzed in neuroimaging. He likened the intrinsic activity to the large portion of an iceberg that floats below the ocean surface. Whereas much current practice is good at identifying the changes in brain activity associated with specific events, he proposed that researchers should be attending to the vast, unknown activity in the brain that remains constant, or that constitutes the noise in measured brain signals. His ideas point to the critical importance of a vast, complex world.

At the Academy we’ll be publishing an eBriefing on the conference soon, hopefully in August sometime, featuring a detailed meeting report, video, and recordings of all of the talks. Stay tuned. Thanks to the Academy and the Haseltine Foundation for allowing me to attend the festival, and to all of the speakers for being so friendly and helpful.

Dub Housing: Joel Sanders's Architecture of Surveillance

Architect Joel Sanders presented his Mix House project at Postopolis (video if you scroll down here), having been invited following this enticing post from Bldg Blog a few weeks ago (Click here first for pictures and additional information.) The Mix House is not just another modernist contortion, but a dwelling as three-channel audio device. Outfitted with architectural features and parabolic microphones oriented to capture sounds from the street, the backyard, and the sky, it gives the homeowner the ability both to listen in on the soundscape surrounding him, and to mix and record the three inputs into a musical composition from a command station in the kitchen. It's a contemporary twist on what Brian Eno in the 1970s described as his "efforts to produce original pieces ... for particular situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres."€ Here the compositions are not composed for specific spaces, however, but by specific places at particular times. These recordings might then be broadcast as audio perfume throughout the neighborhood, or saved and replayed to color the house's interior like a shade of paint, or furnish it like a 21st-century remix of Erik Satie's Musique d'ameublement.

Sanders explained that the Mix House is the first project he has developed to deal explicitly with the sonic possibilities of architecture. It's an inspiring thought experiment, since it provides a fresh reconfiguring of the ordinarily visual and tactile preoccupations that determine so much of what we experience in our built environments. As Sanders pointed out, citing historical work by Emily Thompson, except for concert hall architecture "we're typically indifferent to acoustics, unless something is wrong."€ The goal of sound design is often to craft space in ways that prevent us from even noticing its sonic character. Though often outfitted with a/v systems these days, it is still unusual that a piece of architecture could be constructed specifically to emphasize and utilize these characteristics. As Bldg Blog points out, the Mix House is a live-in musical instrument, offering its inhabitants an array of opportunities to create art from the ambient environment, and to customize the sound of their own space.

Such an innovative, interactive design is fascinating, but several conceptually unsettling leitmotifs also emerged over the course of Sanders's presentation. Tellingly, the architect placed his project in the context of both the early warning listening systems that England began constructing prior to World War II, and modernism's iconic floor-to-ceiling glass window, which offered the owner the unimpeded ability to monitor and blend into the landscape surrounding him. In this sense the Mix House is also a tool of surveillance, a topic Sanders has also explored in projects like his House for a Bachelor. Here, he sank the front lawn below ground level to give the owner the ability to remain unseen in the dwelling's core while simultaneously experiencing the environment around him. He can walk into the external environment, yet he is simultaneously protected and detached from it. The Mix House incorporates a similar visual sense of what Sanders characterized as "vulnerability,"€ but gives it a sonic turn.

Sound theorist Douglas Kahn is among those who have found a critical importance in the difference between vision and sound. In Noise, Water, Meat, his study of sound in the arts, he observes,

Although light traverses the space between an object and observer just as readily as sound does between an action and listener, the reflection of light is understood not as an action comparable to one that might create a sound but, because of a constancy of action, as the result of a state ... Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences...

Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.

For Kahn, whereas vision is an act of one body perceiving another discrete body in a subjective relationship, hearing is an act of mingling between bodies. Italian Futurist painters like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla sensed this possibility in paintings like The Street Enters the House and Speeding Automobile representing the turbulence of modern life as an amorphous interweaving and interpenetration of lines of force. Musician and critic David Toop also heard this in his landmark book Ocean of Sound when he described ambient music as an art of "openness,"€ in which the composer recognizes the importance of the sonic dimensions of life and the connections that tie its various elements together. The ambient attitude is not only an aesthetic choice but a political act. Whereas the eye has been conceived in modernity as a tool of subjective perception and interpretation of a world that is "out there,"€ the ear is omnidirectional, permeable, and impressionable, surrendering to the influence of the wider world, while seeking to incorporate it into one's own being. If the eye is an organ of division, the ear is one of community. "There are ear plugs,"€ Toop writes, "but then I just hear the sound of my own shell."

The Mix House's openness, as a machine for listening, is a profoundly wary one, however. One might argue (and Sanders indicated that others have suggested when reviewing his project) that the house could very well achieve the same goal merely by opening conventional windows. However, by adding extra steps of mediation in the form of overengineered prosthetic ears, the architect is exploring a queasy tension between private and public spaces. The Mix House incorporates sounds of the neighborhood within itself, but only if the windows can be shut tight and the sounds can be personalized through manipulation. The inhabitant wants a connection to public space, but interacts with it at arm's length, and only insofar as he can get what he needs from it as wallpaper for his cocoon.

Seen in this light, Sanders's constructions might be providing apt metaphors for certain facets of the way we live now. At the same time that the Mix House offers new artistic opportunities, it achieves them at the expense of the owner's participation in a public space. It is a suitable solution for an age when social interactions and politics are no longer practiced in the streets but on the Web, when friendships happen via corporate-backed networking sites, or when sprawling, gated suburban communities are planned in ways that minimize interaction between families. This is suburban architecture for the age of terror, the age of illegal wiretaps, the age of Megan's Law, when any neighbor could be a threat, or where everyone has something to hide.

Review: Leaderless

By dint of some pre-holiday goodwill on the part of my employer I managed to catch a fantastic show at Printed Matter on Friday afternoon.  Arranged at the back of their new space on 10th Ave. (conveniently located across the street from the meticulously curated 192 Books), Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now focused on some recent iterations of a community of musicians who for decades has released their music on home-recorded cassette tapes. Before MySpace, and even before indie rockers discovered the virtues of the four-track in the lo-fi '90s, a largely unnoticed, loose affiliation of artists created music in their bedrooms and traded tapes in networks that continue to exist outside the typical systems of music distribution. Years ago, Autonomedia published a landmark project called Cassette Mythos documenting the early years of this movement. The show at Printed Matter concentrated on recent artists and labels working in the thriving noise, psychedelic, and experimental music scenes, such as those showcased in the now annual NoFun Fest. Labels represented included Hanson Records, American Tapes, Drone Disco, Fag Tapes, Tone Filth, Heavy Tapes, RRRecords, and Animal Disguise, among others.

We're currently in an age when anyone can have a band and, at least according to the New York Times, can attract an audience and become famous through the Internet. Initially, cassette culture arose out of necessity because it was the easiest and cheapest way to create and distribute idiosyncratic music to a small audience of like-minded enthusiasts. Today, digital recording tools have made it easier than ever to make music, and the Internet now enables anyone with a decent connection to upload music and reach the masses. Web sites like AudioStreet and CD Baby have massified the phenomenon that the earliest cassette traders pioneered, taking advantage of the democratizing possibilities of electronic media and circumventing the traditional model for music distribution.. for better or worse. Whereas a couple of decades ago, there was a virtue in obscurity, the post-Nirvana age gave birth to a suffocating exhibitionism in "alternative" music. If it is possible for anyone to be a star, many are answering the call and trying to become one, which does not necessarily make for an innovative environment. In such a context, what does a willfully obscure cassette culture tell us, and why does it still need to exist?

Visiting Leaderless, I was struck by the sense that these artists use the cassette not only as a recording medium, but perhaps more importantly as an aesthetic artifact. From austere and even elegant packages by Prurient to cheaply photocopied cards containing cassettes covered with melted goop, the tapes included in Leaderless have an often slapdash but refreshing physicality that is disappearing in music in the digital age. In many of the pieces on display, the packaging becomes an integral part of the artistic statement, echoing the alienating sound coated onto the ribbon inside. The cassettes are often seductive in their crypticness, and off-putting in their sheer juvenile delinquency, sometimes simultaneously. (Skull Erection, anyone?) Many contain only a few minutes worth of tape. There is little information about the artists, making each cassette a practically anonymous missive. Most are priced cheaply, and available only through mailorder. The average listener would be very reluctant to call the sound on many of them music.

For the cassette audience, enjoyment of these tapes is not only enjoyment of the sound that comes through one's speakers, but also the awareness that one is privy to something willfully marginal. Difficult to find, the underground cassette is a talisman of one's belonging to an arcane sect, even as "noise" has morphed into a genre with its own stars. (Check out Wolf Eyes, who have recorded for American Tapes, for example.) For the artists represented in Leaderless who have gained some notoriety through more conventional releases, the fact that they continue to operate in this parallel universe suggests that the tactile immediacy of this obsolete medium offers other unique opportunities.

Mechanical Music Television

Trying to repair a broken tracker bar on your player piano? If so you probably already know about the Mechanical Music Digest, which has been operating an online bulletin board for mechanical music obsessives since 1995. The MMD interface isn't the easiest to use, and even if a lot of the posts are of interest only to true gearheads and trainspotters, interesting cultural nuggets pop up all the time.

Browsing this evening I learned that the community is discovering YouTube as a way to disseminate information about mechanical musical instruments and related events in video form. Check out, for example, this very interesting and helpful documentary on how player piano rolls are made. Or this tv segment of a performance of the American Photoplayer that would make Spike Jones smile.  More on the Photoplayer is available here.)

There is also a perplexing number of videos composed of a tightframe shot of the front of a player piano or nickelodeon in operation. (See for example this one.) Notwithstanding appearances in Renoir's Rules of the Game and television's The Simpsons (alongside a cameo by baseball star Jose Canseco, who runs into a burning building to save one!), mechanical music instruments have never made for a particularly captivating on-screen presence, and so I wonder what's behind the impulse to do such a thing.

One impetus could be the longstanding collective project visible in such forums as the MMD to document these pieces of otherwise dead media and to trace the subtle evolution of the technologies that distinguished one from the next. Collectors have for years recorded performances of mechanical music on records and CD's, and so this can also be understood as an extension of the tradition of translating old media into new. Other videos appear to be made not by collectors, but by nonspecialists for whom the novelty of the gadgets is comparable to that of their great grandparents when encountering them for the first time over a century ago.

Still, seeing these instruments on video highlights the coldness of the mechanical music performance that can go missing in a pure audio recording or in the experience of watching a mechanical instrument in a "live" setting. Here the piano is the star of the show, but even in the midst of the most raucous number is stone-faced and impassive, protecting the secrets of its cold virtuosity deep inside the box.

Upcoming: Postopolis!

At the end of May, the architecture and design blogging masses will be converging on New York City for a five-day conference titled Postopolis!, hosted by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. The event promises nonstop discussions "themed around landscape and the built environment." Organized by the excellent Bldg Blog, City of Sound, Subtopia, and Inhabitat, the event makes for a timely parallel to the recent Storefront exhibit Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x - 197x. That show celebrated the age of small independent publications of the print age, photocopied and disseminated in limited editions, offering a crudely compelling package for considering issues of architecture and design. Architecture has several "established" magazines and journals today that travel some similar terrain, but there is something refreshing about the architectural blogging community, armed with digital cameras and defamiliarizing the spaces they pass through in impromptu (and not so impromptu) missives. Check out these posts on pedestrian nostalgia, architecture and soccer, and urbanization of panic.

The Storefront's current exhibit of photos by Frederic Chaubin of 1970s-1980s experimental architecture in the Soviet territories also looks fantastic. (For more pictures and an inverview, you can also visit PingMag.)

When Ideas Outstrip Reality

A recent play by Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the oral contraceptive, receives its U.S. debut next week at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Phallacy tells the story of an art historian who has bet her career on the authenticity of a statue believed to be crafted during the classical era, and explores her reactions when a chemist proves that it is a 16th-century copy.

In addition to being a tale of academic infighting and the prejudices of C.P. Snow's two cultures, Phallacy raises some interesting questions about the value we attach to artistic objects. How much does an artwork depend on its history and social context for its aesthetic value? And what does it mean when that context is the result of the narratives we've composed for ourselves, hobbled as they are with limitations in knowledge, unprovable approximations of truth, and the influences of our hopes and ambitions?

At times the play suggests that the humanities are particularly at fault for playing fast and loose with reality (cf. Alan Sokal), while the rigors of the scientific method give it a better claim to authority. But science is driven by its own hypotheses, and it, too, can be led astray. How, for example, might Djerassi's play shed light on recent scientific scandals like the case of Hwang Woo-Suk and his fabrication of claims to have created human embryonic stem cells by cloning? Or much-publicized hopes that string theory's efforts to reveal an elegant universe will turn out to be an accurate representation of reality, despite the lack of a single experimental test of its claims? Could these be cases in which aesthetics trumps objectivity, blinding researchers to a messier and more complicated truth? Hope is a powerful force, the play argues, and separating the world as it is from the world we desire can be can be a difficult task.

I've been drafted to moderate a panel discussion titled Falling in Love with Hypotheses following the matinee performance on Wednesday May 16, and I'm sure such matters will be among those on the table. The playwright will also be participating, along with Brian Schwartz, codirector of the CUNY Graduate Center's Science and the Arts program, and Roger Payne, an expert on whales and founder of the the Ocean Alliance. So come on down.

Update (5/18): Science Friday has posted a video clip of the play and footage of Carl Djerassi during the panel discussion.

For the Birds

I’m a little late on this, but an article on bird flight in Nature magazine arrived a couple of weeks ago in step with the change in season. The focus of the article was a study of how swifts adjust their wing configuration depending on the particular task facing them. (See some free coverage, including the spectacular cover image, at ScienceDaily) “Wing morphing” optimizes swifts to be able to make the sharp turns needed to chase insects or to glide while sleeping in the air. Engineering has always looked to birds for inspiration for flight, and projects are already underway to use this understanding of avian design for next-generation aircraft. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has apparently already been working on morphing wing designs for fighter planes.

More birds: Herzog and DeMeuron’s bird’s nest brutalism in renderings for their 2008 Beijing Olympics stadium | Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH station | birdsong as a model for human language acquisition | vintage automata that replicate the sound of singing birds | Wikipedia’s list of fictional birds | turning bird song into musical notation and modern composition.