One of our guys found this the other day. Really amazing sense of changing space, placement, and movement. The blurring effects are really intriguing to me. From creative agency Superbien, for some sort of mobile phone promotion (but only slightly less interesting because of it).
ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.
…to be the fad it already was. Roger Ebert, my Chicago favorite in film criticism, lays out a powerful slate of reasons for the medium’s irrelevance to the actual development of new and better cinematic experiences. You can read the entire Newsweek article here, but I’ve quoted the follow section as of particular food for thought for Artistic Energies:
Whenever Hollywood has felt threatened, it has turned to technology: sound, color, widescreen, cinerama, 3-D stereophonic sound, and now 3-D again. In marketing terms, this means offering an experience that can’t be had at home. With the advent of Blu-ray discs, HD cable, and home digital projectors, the gap between the theater and home experience has been narrowed. 3-D widened it again. Now home 3-D TV set may narrow that gap as well.
This last line is especially salient as we wrestle with how to develop new technology that isn’t just a marketing gimmick:
What Hollywood needs is a “premium” experience that is obviously, dramatically better than anything at home, suitable for films aimed at all ages, and worth a surcharge.
Just something interest-worthy from BLDG BLOG, as so often is the case (click picture to follow to posting):
The structure is a (primarily or secondarily?) a warehouse for thousands of seed varieties, each having it’s own acrylic spire jutting outward from the inner chamber. As the Cube develops, it will also literally take shape (and that probably won’t be as a square…) – so things like this are food for our imaginations.
It’s in vogue to speak of the advancement of technology as a process that is simultaneously inevitable, and yet, without apparent awareness of contradiction, something which everyone needs to be on board with in order for progress to occur. Technology “wants” things, but relies on us to do its bidding, in the words of some commentators. I ran across these thoughts from W.H. Auden earlier today:
…it is our task to discover what everything in the universe, from electrons upwards, could, to its betterment, become, but cannot without our help. This means reintroducing into science the notion of teleology, long a dirty word. For our proper relation to nonliving things, the right analogy might be that of a sculptor. Every sculptor thinks of himself, not as someone who forcibly imposes a form on stone, but as someone who reveals a form already latent in it…
We have to realize that every time we make an ugly lampstand, we are torturing helpless metal., every time we make a nuclear bomb we are corrupting the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.
-from A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, 1970, New York: Viking, 282.
This may seem like a crazy idea – and it may turn out to be, seeing as it does not appear tested in practice yet – but BLDG BLOG has led me to an interesting project by some folks at MIT. The idea is to have tiny helicopters fly in sequence, emitting various colors and patterns of light, in order to form, basically, a large-scale, flying screen in the open air. See their video from youtube below:
There is a somewhat recent TED talk we’ve come across and been intrigued by recently. The talk by Evan Grant is on cymatics: the visualization of sound waves, or modal phenomena. This is something that could be used by artists and engineers to create amazingly unified image-music performances.
Update: see comments section for a link to the art, machinery and people involved with the CymaScope
I’ve just had a chance to read and juxtapose two recently done articles: Remnants of the Biosphere (from BLDGBLOG) and Whatever Happened to Second Life? (from PC Pro).
The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.
I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.
Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.
This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?
A friend was recently in Jerusalem and had the chance to see a show called The Night Spectacular. It’s an outdoor, projection-based show that takes place on the walls of the Tower of David museum. The projection and film work were done by a French company called Skertzo (you can see other interesting installations of theirs at their website – apologies to non-Francophones). The trailer is pretty over the top, which actually makes it harder to get a good idea of the experience. My hard-to-impress friend reports that it actually was quite good.
Is there Cube relevance here? At least in regards to the communal story experience, set in a spacious area, without all the gimmicks of air-jets and lurching floors (this is the type of thing you write when you just know you’ll never make any compromises – pre-foot-in-mouth prose). Probably the most exciting thing here is the ability of filmmakers to do a new kind of story on a new kind of canvas. There is something irreducible about the palette, something very enabling. What we’re ultimately going for is not the abstract advancement of technology, but rather, the right use of new technology to do good art in more and better ways – for more and better purposes, in other words.
A friend sent me to a great design/film tech site the other day: Whitevoid. I like their aesthetic and mission – very much trying to figure out the best interactions between people and their digital accoutrements.
Here are a couple of their videos on the ol’ youtube (though the Whitevoid site is probably the best way to view their work – I just need visuals in my posts, for neurotic reasons, I guess):
And another, more along the lines of a special category of digital media we call “the courtyard of gizmos” – things related to the hypothetical atrium of the Cube:
It would seem apropos to write this post on a milestone anniversary of the release of the film Koyaanistqatsi, but instead, it came to mind today, a Tuesday, 26 1/2 years later. This has been one of the most significant films of our time on the subject of life in a technological environment. Jacques Ellul’s thoughts figured heavily into director Godfrey Reggio’s vision of “life out of balance”. Ellul is also often on my mind – partly because his perspective is radical enough to be memorable: the city is doomed, so flee from it. Prophesy against it, but also pray for it, because though doomed, it has covered the entire earth, and swallowed much that was innocent. Though its dark heart (the prison, sharing some with Foucault’s thought on that) is irredeemable, there is yet something to be done – a meaningful mission into the technological simulacra that is not optional; we stay afloat or sink always deeper under its crushing pressure (these summary references are from The Meaning of the City).
Beyond Ellul, Reggio’s film explores the insanity of modernized life, the strange beauties within it, and the possible sources of fresh ideas in nature. A connection comes to mind again from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (obviously, my favorite book of the summer). Somewhere in the neighborhood of page 29, Scarry makes the argument that beauty is so important for living well and with justice because beauty gives us the experience of being wrong and liking it. Natural beauty can do this same thing: cause us to realize that we’ve been profoundly wrong about life. When we stand in the wilderness of nature, we get to choose again whether we will be alive in person or by proxy – whether we will exist for the sake of our technology, or whether we will use it rightly in the service of others and the blessing of the earth. Koyaanistqatsi stands out to me so much because it brings me into contact with a different pace and horizon of life – the fast, the massive, the insane: these are all more so in this film, a hyper-reality of experience. But because of beauty, I desire this challenge instead of running from it in fear and escapism.
The whole movie has been posted to Youtube, but I don’t at all recommend watching it on any less than a large screen. Besides, product placement does not mix well with this film.
I’ve started to pay more attention to things Kevin Kelly is writing, especially on the “non-neutrality” of technology. His Technium is going to be a very important piece as we consider the issue of alternative futures and the imaginative visions driving those possible directions (in fact, the Technium project seems to be Kelly’s direct response to Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near). The post that I’ve just been reading today is “Triumph of the Default” (June 22, 2009). Kelly is commenting on the hidden influence on users’ experience of technology as it comes from its makers loaded with biases and presumed ideals. I quote the posting at length here:
Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases. We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.
Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.
I think it becomes obvious that our “defaults” as producers and artists – while not controlling the use or interpretation of our work – definitely carry implications to audiences. We want people to take it a certain way, even if that certain way is “to keep an open mind and not assume it only has one meaning.” This is one of many ways in which the presentation space – physical, acoustic, visual, etc. – profoundly influences audience experiences. Think of the difference between taking in a movie passively on a small laptop screen while simultaneously facebooking/twittering/youtubing around and actually taking the trek downtown to that little theater that plays the independent films on a huge screen with warm projected light beaming through always high-resolution analog film (thanks to Read Schuchardt from his thoughts on this topic). Each format “wants” something different from you – and your behavior as a viewer trends toward that demand, even or especially through inaction (as Kelly points out, on a more general basis). This relates directly to whether we will use technology as it is handed to us, or make something else out of it – whether we will shape the tool, or be shaped by it.
For more from Kevin Kelly, watch his TED talk from several years back on the evolution of technology:
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