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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
The human range of hearing is between 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but the human body can be affected by sounds in both the ultrasound (above 20,000 Hz) and infrasound (under 20 HZ) range. Infrasound has been shown to have a negative effect on the body. Frequencies between 7 and 8 Hz are thought to be the most dangerous to humans, causing vibrations of the chest wall, changes in respiratory rhythm, gagging sensations, headaches, coughing, and post-exposure fatigue. Research has determined that infrasound can cause vibration of the eyeballs, and therefore a distortion of vision.
Infrasound caused by machine noise in the environment or natural phenomena (approaching storms for example) has been speculated to explain accounts of ghost sightings (the infrasound causing a feeling of dread coupled with eye vibrations creating blurred hallucinatory visions). Mistral winds in the Rhone Valley and Sirocco winds off the Sahara are legendary winds that are said to produce temporary insanity. These winds have been discovered to emit infrasound frequencies.
Infrasound has been explored by governments for use in both lethal and non-lethal weapons, but humans aren't the only species that might use infrasound to stun enemies. Recent research suggests that tigers deliver a physically-stunning 18Hz roar immediately before attacking.
In calm conditions when warm air sits on top of cool air, something called a temperature inversion results. In certain cases, the point where the warm and cool air meet behaves like a mirror and magnifying glass to create incredible mirages that make visible places hidden under the curve of the earth. For example, residents of the Orkney Islands were able to see a clear image of the coast of Norway 500 miles away, and in Hastings the coast of France 50 miles away both in 1987 and 1992.
These temperature inversion mirror effects also alter the virtual images at times, creating upsidedown images or stretched images called Fata Morgana. Paul Simons suggests that these mirages might have been the inspirations for myths like that of The Flying Dutchman ghost ship and literature like the flying city of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels.
Simons, Paul Weird Weather. Warner Books London 1997
In the early 1960's, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz was curious to see if a model of non-linear dynamics would benefit his work in weather prediction. He developed a simple model of gaseous motion and was shocked to discover that a slight variation in initial values input into a simple recursive equation would create vast divergence in the results after a number of recursions. His work with this model, later named the Lorenz attractor, defined the phenomenon of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in relation to the study of weather and to any complex system and he coined the term 'the butterfly effect' to describe the effect of the Lorenz Attractor.
Lorenz also created another efry interesting experiment called the Lorenzian Waterwheel. The Lorenzian Waterwheel is a normal waterwheel like one that might be used to drive an old-fashioned mill, except in the Lorenz version each water container has a hole in it that allows the water to escape. The holes in each are the same size and the water (or, you might say energy) in each container escapes at the same rate.
When water flows into the Lorenzian Waterwheel, the effect is just what you would expect, the wheel begins to turn. However, if the water flow (or, input energy) is increased, suddenly something very strange happens. The wheel might be moving along in one direction and then suddenly switch and spin the opposite way, the buckets become filled at all different levels, in short, the waterwheel behaves chaotically.
Well, you might think that this would happen for a while until the system finds an equilibrium and then the wheel would settle down. Or, at least after a while you would be able to see a pattern in the movement of the wheel. However, neither of these things happen. The Lorenzian Waterwheel never repeats the exact same pattern of motion, it becomes a truly chaotic system.
The world doesn't always work the way we expect it to.
On Sunday the Dalai Lama spoke in Central Park to a gigantic crowd of people. One of the things he talked about was how scientists are now discovering that in the 20th century the lives of individual human being have become increasingly more dependent on the global community. He called for a new global humanity that recognises this inter-dependency.
He may have been referring to the research of complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam, who has recently written an article called 'Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile'
In the article, Bar-Yam applies the mathematics of complex systems to the structure of human civilisation itself. He finds that the organizational stuctures of ancient civilisations closely corresponded to three kinds of structural behaviors: random behavior like that of crowds, coherent behavior like that of a marching army, and heirarchical behavior like that of a traditional corporation. Although the elements that make up these actions are composed of highly complex human beings, the behaviors themselves are simple. Prior to the modern democratic capitalistic era, this kind of structuring that moved from the complex human being to a simple organizational structure was believed to be the most effective. Even in this century, in the industrial age, the response to the need for large numbers of goods was to create highly heirarchical manufacturing plants in which each individual behaved more or less like an automaton carrying out a very specific task.
However, the sustainability of structures in which individuals act independently within a global setting like that of the global marketplace and the failure of strictly heirarchical organizations like communism have caused new complex structure to form which Bar-Yam calls networked structures. Within these networks, individuals act independently and in conjunction with other individuals, communication is open between nodes of the network that heirarchical structures disallow. These structures are difficult to analyze and understand because they are able to quickly change structure to respond to external or internal needs. Collective action can spring up like smart mobs out of thin air and dissipate just as quickly.
Although Bar-Yam believes that an understanding of these complex social systems is about as difficult as knowing the exact coordinate movements of each individual atom in a glass of water, he also believes that if one understands something of how complex systems work, it is possible to figure out the scale of action needed to respond to various needs. He is optimistic in saying that this kind of organization is likely to be able to organically respond to needs and hopes that these kinds of structures will be more effective in solving the problems of war, famine, and disease in our global society. The system itself can be said to have a need or desire to survive. However, he also observes that complex systems (like human beings) can sometimes produce behavior that causes some to fail to survive.
Yaneer Bar-Yam 'Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile' http://www.necsi.org/Civilization.html
Yesterday I heard from Anthony Hornof of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon. He and his colleagues are working on a series of projects using eye tracking and he wanted to ask me about my work with the Intuitive Ocusonics eye tracking musical instrument.
One aspect of their project that is interesting to me is that they are working with The Cognitive Modeling and Eye Tracking Lab at the University of Oregon, a lab that analyzes eye movement data for scientific research. Traditionally, eye tracking data is analyzed at length after the experiment because of the complexity of the information, but the Hornof team suggests that a sonification of eye movements in real time could provide some rough information to researchers before the data is analyzed in detail.
Another interesting aspect is the ability for the system to record pupil dilation diameter in real time. While eye movements are a combination of voluntary and involuntary movement, pupil dilation is clearly an involuntary movement. Certainly pupil diameter is affected by the environmental lighting levels, but it is also thought to be affected by interest level. Is there a universal temporal pattern of interest and disinterest that can be determined? Or, do different individuals have different kinds of patterns of interest and disinterest? There is a lot of potential for this research.
Hornof, Anthony, and Anna Cavender, Rob Hoselton, and Linda Sato. Art and Music With the Eyes Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon Unpublished manuscript
According to Myin in the Introduction to the Brussels Papers, there has been philosophical resitance to the theory of representation, most notably by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau Ponty. The most well-known opposition to representation in the field of visual science is James Gibson, who presents an 'ecological' theory of vision that takes into account the whole body of the viewer as well as the environment surrounding the viewer. Rather than the representational paradigm that says vision consists of a series of fragmented perceptions, Gibson's view of vision is a very active one.
For instance, in Gibson's view, when I am faced with the retinal image of a tiny speck, I determine just what this speck is through movement and interaction with the environment. I move my eyes and head and the corresponding change in position of the object tells me if the opbject is close or far away. Visual stimulus is tested against our knowledge of natural laws, knowing that objects far away appear to move more slowly in our field of view.
I observe the trajectory of motion of the object over time, see how this object affects its environment (if it could be a plane, is there a cloud trail behind the object?). I also use any other available sensory information combined with the visual simulus, listening for the sound of a distant plane or the buzzing of a bee.
This ecological approach is then applied to a perceptual analysis of visual art by Myin. This is when the theory really starts to make sense to me. The idea that visual perception is part of a whole body system of interaction with the environment, it would follow that visual artists would be interested in creating environments that viewers would interact with. Within this model, the context of viewing would be extremely important because the overall effect of the artwork would be determined not only by the specific visual stimulus as a fragment or series of fragments, but as an integrated experience. Of course context is extremely important in the experience of art. Viewing an actual painting is a very different experience from viewing a reproduction of that painting, but more tellingly, artists have been for many years creating experiences for viewers. From Gothic alterpieces that are experienced only after an approach through an impressive architectural pathway to contemporary installation art, the context is the experience of the artwork.
Interactive artists are taking this even a step further in working at the level of the interaction itself. The viewer's natural expectations of the behavior of the world when observed are either confirmed or denied through a work of interactive art. this kind of surprise created when the work does not match the natural laws adds to the pleasure of the experience of the artwork. These interactive experiences can also heighten the viewer's experience of the natural world after seeing the work by emphasising new ways to ake sense of the constant stream of information.
A couple of nights ago Hurricane Isabel hit land on the Eastern US. Here in New York City, although the Hurricane didn't do any damage, late in the night there were very heavy winds and a downpour of rain. Prior to that, Chuck and I went out for a bit and noticed that the air was very cool and there was a strong cold breeze. Although I didn't want the Hurricane to cause any damage, I was kind of excited about the chance to experience a Hurricane. Living in the Midwest, the only major storms are the much smaller tornados. Storms are very special to me in a way that is almost nostalgic. When I was a child, whenever a storm was coming, my father (probably trying to keep us from being afraid of the storm) would let us stay up and watch the storm approaching from a big picture window in the living room of our house. Since then, I have always associated storms with being able to stay up late and watch and exciting show in the window with my family.
One surprising statement Myin makes in critiqueing the representationalist point of view in his Editorial Introduction to the Brussels Papers is "Consciousness is a stream, not a series of unconnected snapshots." Although consciousness is experienced as a continuous stream, some have argued that there are gaps in consciousness.
To me an interesting aspect of the idea of the continuity of consciousness is the continuity of personality and awareness. When I was about five years old, I remember standing in the backyard of the house I lived in next to a chain link fence separating our yard from the neighbor's. I became aware of my height in relationship to the height of the fence and realized that this relationship would change as I grew. This of course was no great revelation, but I continued along that line of thought and realized that although my height would change relative to the fence, I would still be the same person and as such would be able to remember the exact moment I was currently experiencing. To me as a child, this was something of a revelation because I realized that my consciousness was not only continuous, but that my memory was something that I could affect willingly. So, I decided at that moment that although there was nothing particularly dramatic about the moment, just an ordinary moment in an ordinary day, I would make it a moment that I would always remember. I thought of it as a kind of experiment, and at least now 30 years later, the experiment has so far been successful.
A conference on Perception, Science, and Art was held at the Free University of Brussels in 1999 in response to the expansion of studies of perception in recent years in the field of cognitive science. In the editorial introduction to the conference, Eric Myin divides the recent research into two conceptual bases: the theory of representation and the theory of pathways.
Both theories attempt to resolve why and how the brain deals with ambiguous information. For example: how does my brain determine if a speck in my field of view is a distant airplane, a tiny insect nearby, or a speck of dirt on the surface of my eye?
The theory of representation defines ambiguity as a problem of 'fragmentation', in other words, if the visual stimulus is not the complete picture, how is the visual scene assembled from these fragments?
From the representationalist point of view, the stimulus is tested and compared against any number of mental scenes already represented as ideas in the mind. Myin posits that the visual artist from the representationalist point of view acts as a kind of 'experimental psychologist who probles the visual system with pictures' working in a representational mode unconsciously modeled after the way the brain works. In the representational model, visual artists try to create representations that interact with the mental scenes of viewers, or that play with various illusions in the visual system.
Myin points out that although the theory of representation is the most widely accepted by the cognitive science community, there are many unanswered questions. If visual input in the form of fragments are compared to existing mental images to form visual perception, where do these mental images come from? Critics argue that this creates a problem of a 'homunculus', or a fully formed person that exists in the brain separate from the perceiver that interprets the representation. The theory of representation says that mental are formed by previous mental images, but if you go back to the very first visual input, how is that mental image formed. The theory of representation cannot explain how initial mental images are formed from fragmented input.
Erik Myin, Two Sciences of Perception and Visual Art Editorial Introduction to the Brussels Papers Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 no. 8-9 2000 pp 43-45
Yesterday artist Cai Guo-Qiang presented his work 'Light Cycle', an explosion event in Central Park. The work was scheduled for 4-5 minutes at 7:45PM, right after sunset.
Wanting to experience the work, I waited on the rooftop with a hope of catching a glimpse. The weather was not accomodating to the artwork, low hanging clouds created ghostly images, exaggerated in my mind as I had been reading an article about the spirit photographers of the early 20th century. The clouds also served to exaggerate perspective, creating the illusion of the park very far off in the distance. There was a certain claustrophobia from these clouds, closing in the open sky and muffling the sounds from the bridge. Cai Guo-Qiang's work was meant to symbolize renewal and vitality, making Central Park the brightest point in Manhattan on the park's 150th anniversary, this would be a welcome sight in contrast to the gloomy evening's scattered raindrops and the memory of the September 11th tragedy still fresh in my mind after the previous week's anniversary.
This work of Cai Guo-Qiang's is something of a paradox, however. The fireworks are both beautiful and dangerous, and he intends to evoke the history of the Chinese invention of gunpowder. he brings center stage a feeling I had in my gut while watching the city's 4th of July fireworks display a few months ago. Gazing at this spectacle of explosions that are a veiled (or perhaps not so veiled) metaphor for military might. He calls some of these forms halos.
San Francisco writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has a rare ability to connect the personal, political, and cultural issues seamlessly in her writings. She writes about Eduard Muybridge's Motion Studies, about the joy (and human need) of walking, about the need to protect and preserve the environment, and about hope.
When I read Solnit's work I feel a sense of nostalgia because her descriptions of experiences are so visceral and tactile, but she does not idealize the past. In an odd way, Solnit's work produces a kind of nostalgia for the future, for positive social engagement and change. In 'The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans' about the changes wrought by the global narketplace she writes:
"What bothers me about the mall is its silence, a silence we mostly live in nowadays; what cheers me are the ways people are learning to read the silent histories of objects and choosing the objects that still sing. "
The article begins by talking about the way an object made by hand contains the story of its history even if the object maker is unknown. Goods made in an assembly line process lack this sense of history, and perhaps items imbued with technological intelligence like 'Cindy Smart' is an attempt to give back the life of the object in a mass production economy.
Solnit's work, so evocative and filled with metaphor, has also inspired artworks, for example Timothy Collins' Homeostasis installation in which tiny dollhouses slowly leak water that evaporates into the air.
Part of several writings by Solnit are published with information about the exhibition, here is a short sample:
"Money is like water. So go the economic theories. Money as water is a metaphor that endeavors to convince us that what happens in the economy is natural. You hear about currency in circulation, about liquid capital and frozen assets, about cash flow and trickle-down. It's true that money flows, though it might be more like blood in a body than water in a landscape--in which case we might talk about scabs and clots and hemophilia and heart failure. Then again, it might be possible to justify the metaphor by complicating the model. If money is like water, it is a thing as dammed, channeled, drained, dumped, tainted, rerouted and stockpiled as water is, and if money is like water then we should look at who builds the dams and whose land gets irrigated. If money is like water, should the pyramid of wealth be stood on its head, since it all seems to drain toward the very rich, no matter how hard the poor struggle?"
The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16440
HOMEOSTASIS Tim Collins http://slaggarden.cfa.cmu.edu/people/tim/homeostasis/index.html
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit on hope in dark times http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=677
An artist's group has developed a mod for the game Unreal that has caused some controversy. The game, called '911 Survivor', recalling the popular reality television program, sets players inside the towers on the day of the WTC attack. Players are invited to find out if they could survive that day.
http://www.selectparks.net/911survivor/911about.html
After some critical debate about the ethics of such a game in ludology.org, an anonomous post allegedly from Jeff Cole, one of the designers of the game, called the game a work of art that is not designed for commercial profit but designed to make a critical comment on the media.
Arguments against the game raised the sensationalization of the WTC attacks, while others didn't see a difference between the 911 Survivor game and action games designed around WWII.
Games design consultant Ernest Adams gave a keynote at the Cosign conference on Thursday, focusing on the state of storytelling in game design. To Adams. game designers are like the Victorians of our time, seeing a world transformed by the integrated circuit like the world was transformed by the steam engine in the Victorian era, and writing simple games like Victorian novels, filled with the themes of perseverance an redemption.
Adams also compared the plots and characters of video games to those in Classical works describing the heroic quest. Characters act in first person shooter games act like Achilles with magic armor and weapons designed to fight evil.
A particularly curious current game dealing with the depiction of good and evil is called 'America's Army' and has been put out by the US Army as a recruiting vehicle. This online game allows players to experience combat operations against other online players. The dilemma with this online game, however, is that the designers wanted every player to be a member of the US Army, but they also wanted online players to play against eachother. The solution they arrived at was to make every player appear to him or herself as a member of the US Army, and every other player appear as a terrorist. That way, if you are playing the game, you think you are the american and everyone else is a terrorist, but whoever yu are fighting against sees themselves as the US and you as a terrorist. Very confusing, a world in which everyone believes that they themselves are good but everyone else is bad. In this world I imagine a lot of violent game play.
Thursday was the second anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy and I was glad to not be in the US. I listened to a presentation by italian media artist Ennio Bertrand, whose work focuses on the new media. In 1992 he created a work called 'Memory of the Surface' in which viewers enter a dark room full of incessant sound. After a minute or so, as the sound builds, there is a sudden flash of light accompanied by complete silence. As the viewer's eyes adjusted to the the darkness, she could just make out a shadow image slowly changing to negative. She realizes the shadow is her own as the sound begins to build again.
Bertrand stated that this work was meant to recall the shadows of victims of the Hydrogen bomb attack on Hiroshima. The bomb blast occurred so quickly that the shadows of standing bodies in motion were burned in negative onto the walls of buildings.
The strange image of the negative shadow, an image that according to Stuart Antsis's work in perception, may never be understood by the mind. Antsis found that experimental subjects viewing the world in only negative are never able to mentally invert the world even after long periods of adjustment. Shadows, present everywhere but not often perceived consciously, when shown in negative appear to be flashes of light, always distracting and disturbing, like images of ghosts everywhere.
Another one of several works he presented was 'Lux Sonet in Tenebris', made of 144 tiny speakers arranged in a 12 x12 grid on a gallery wall. As viewers approach the work, they realize that the shadow of their own bodies are creating tiny sounds coming from the speakers. This work is a very playful way of working with the shadow image, allowing the viewer's presence as a solid mass able to block light to affect change in the sonic environment.
Finally, Bertrand showed an interactive piece called 'UnderAttack' which he dedicates to the WTC attacks. In this work, he has taken images of the towers from television broadcasts on September 11, 2001, and has allowed viewers to navigate the temporal space. There are 9 small video monitors on the wall, each with a proximity sensor. As viewers apprach or recede from each monitor, the video frames move forward or backward in time respectively. This work allows viewers to seamlessly interact with images, giving the viewer a sense of agency and the ability to closely examine each second of the historic footage. In one way, I felt that this piece fulfilled a fantasy I had on the days of the attack, a dream that I could hit the rewind button on my vcr and rewind the events of the day, taking us back to a time in which the attacks had never happened and an alternative reality in which they never happen. Like Borges' story in which many possible world exist, Bertrand's works has us look at history through the lens of interactive media. We realize that the dream that is afforded us in the world of interactive media we have created is far removed from the reality we live in. The rewind, the branching narratives, the alternative endings pretend to fulfill our dream to turn back the clock, but the real world does not allow such indulgences.
The goal of the Hemispherium, like any virtual reality system, is to create a totally immersive experience in the visual image. The desire to create immersive vsiual experiences has been around for a very long time. At the end of the 18th century, there was a breakthough in this area made by the Panorama painters. Unlike the mathematically derived strong focal point of paintings in the Reanaissance, the paintings of the Panorama painters created vast lanscapes without one central focus point, but with many elements held together by the horizon line. This way of seeing the landscape was not only an attempt to create a more relaistic depiction of nature, but it was also creating a more democratic way of seeing, one that did not priviledge only one point of view.
The panoramic paintings created an overwhelming effect on the viewers, but it also had the (perhaps unintended) affect of placing the real world experience on a equal plane with the work itself. To the 18th century viewer, the panorama was so much like the natural world, that the natural world itself gained importance because it was seen in a new way.
At the University of Teeside Computer Center for Virtual Reality in Middlesborough, England, there is a custom designed VR environment called the Hemispherium.
The Hemispherium is a gigantic fiberglass half-sphere painted on the inside with reflective paint onto which a computer created virtual reality is projected. Viewers sit in a small auditorium facing the inside of the sphere, with one of the audience members seated in the very center in a control seat atop a clear glass floor equipped with a joystick.
Creating the images are seven projectors, six placed along the periphery of the half-sphere and one pointed into the center. Each of these projectors have custom lenses ground to project effectively on the curved surface of the inner sphere.
I had the opportunity to view several virtual environments in this system, including Greg Little's 'Body Without Organs' created a few years ago that gives viewers the opportunity to explore shapes created out of information obtained from a full inner body scan of the artist. The walls of the Body without Organs (a title taken from the work of Gilles Deleuze) are lined with words of poems, barely legible, embedded into the form. In the abstract space of the Body without Organs without traditional flat walls or boxy rooms, one loses the sense of perspective and position easily.
Other environments we viewed were reconstructions of lost English architecture and an English landscape created for a military flight simulator. The simulated flight was created to test robot control systems for unmanned aircrafts (known as 'drones')
The feeling of being in the Hemispherium was similar to the feeling of flying over Englan's low level clouds a few days ago. Although detail was easily made out, distance and perspective was less discernible. One strange effect of the Hemispherium was unintentional but interesting to me. The center projector was a bit out of alignment, and although this did not effect the experience of the virtual world, it created a faint shadow of a hexagon in the center of the screen. Because my mind was resolving the depth of the sphere based on the images projected on it, seeing it as mich deeper than it actually was, I often saw this faint hexagon as floating on in front of me and moving along with the motion of the plane. The hexagon, one of the most efficient shapes and the shape of the beehive, Bentham,'s Panopticon, and Steve Mann's DeCon chambers, also appears here in the Hemispherium as an artifact of the process used to create a panoramic experience.
There is power in numbers, but sometimes too much power can be disastrous.
The number of humans living today is over 5 percent of the total number of humans estimated to have ever lived on earth. World population pushed over 6.2 billion in 2002, and although the earth's resources could potentially sustain this number of people, the fact is that almost half of the people living today (3 billion) are living on $2 a day or less. The projected population for 2050 is an almost 50% increase in population, to 8.7 billion.
Along with the population increase, energy consumption and pollution production is at an all time high, and because of our numbers and our technology, we have begun to alter the climate of the earth.
Unfortunately, the power to change the climate of the entire earth is not the ability to control the weather. It would certainly be a farmer's or military general's dream to create rain on demand, but because of the complexity of weather systems, controlling the weather is not something we will be able to do in the foreseeable future.
However, this great number of humans can easily influence the weather and climate, and this is what is happening today on a global scale. The earth's atmosphere is becoming warmer. This long-term rise in global temperatures could cause sea levels to rise around the world and bring an increase in tropical cyclones and wave heights.
The chief cause of this global warming is our reliance on fossil fuels as an energy source and the widespread destruction and burning of forests. Both of these activities are responsible for carbon emissions—aka greenhouse gases—that cause global warming.
Are there any solutions? Cutting down on the use of fossil fuels is an absolute necessity and is possible in this country. In 1991, a national wind resource inventory by the U.S. Department of Energy reported that the three most wind-rich states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy the entire nation's electricity needs. Today, with new wind power technology able to harness more energy, those estimates are seen as extremely low. Other countries like Denmark have transferred almost 20% of their energy consumption to wind and Germany lead the world in the number of kilowatts of energy produced through wind power.
June 25, 2003-4 Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute Wind Power Set to Become World's Leading Energy Source Lester R. Brown http://www.earth-policy.org
http://www.worldwatch.org
Agnes Denes was a pioneer of conceptual and environmental art. her best-known work is a two acre field of wheat that was planted in a vacant lot in downtown Manhattan in 1982. Wheatfield--A Confrontation was an invitation to urban dwellers to reconsider their priorities as human beings and global citizens. The harvested grain of the wheat field traveled to 28 cities as a part of 'The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.'
Through this work, Denes re-defined her role as an artist. The work was seemingly devoid of any aesthetic content. The labor she performed in cleaning the soil, planting and harvesting the wheat, was more the work of a farmer an artist. The wheat field itself looked like any other wheat field from any farm in the world and forced viewers to re-examine their definition of art and the role of art in the community and world.
Agnes Denes' 400 year project Tree Mountain was created between 1992 and 1996. A mountain in Finland was planted with 10,000 trees according in an intricate mathematical pattern derived from a combination of the golden section and sunflower pattern. Denes sees this work as a living monument to endurance, and again, although the pattern of the trees is a specific design, the design is based on nature and the mathematical interpretation of nature and the work itself is far outside the traditional notion of art. In short, Denes' work has created an expanded aesthetic vocabulary that embraces the sciences as well as the arts.
In 1969, Mierle Ukeles wrote a 'Manifesto for Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition' that questioned the separation between everyday life and art calling for artists to become more involved in creating a sustainable ecology. She asked viewers to reconsider the definition of art, and began defining herself as a 'maintenance artist', defining the housework that she did as a new mother as a 'performance'.
Maintenance, Ukeles emphasized, is a necessary part of the human condition, and her maintenance art served to place a spotlight on the maintenance process on a personal and an urban scale. I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976) was a performance project exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in collaboration with 300 maintenance staff at a bank in Manhattan. Ukeles took photographs of men and women doing routine jobs, asked them to discuss their labor as either art or work, and exhibited the workers' statements alongside the pictures.
Touch Sanitation was a project that drew the art world's attention to the ecological maintenance of a city through its garbage men. Ukeles shook the hands of over 8500 New York City sanitation employees during a year-long performance. She spoke to the workers, documenting their private stories in particular those related to the humiliations associated with the job of sanitation work.
Ukeles' performances, about the performance of a task rather than theatrical entertainment not only brings her audience to question the role maintenance plays in their own lives, but to question the definition of art and performance. If this art is the peformance of a task, can't any performance of a task be considered a form of art? To Ukeles, if the performed task sustains the life of a city, it is.
While going to Grainger in Maspeth Queens yesterday to find some electronics components, one of my companions noticed a sign for 'Wing's Performance Center' and wanted to investigate, imagining a space for community theater tucked into the warehouse district of Maspeth. As we approached the garage doors, we laughed as we realized that of course the 'performance center' garage was an actual garage and the 'performance' was the performance of a vehicle and not the workers.
Phillips, P. (1995). "Maintenance Activity: Creating a climate for change." In Nina Felshin (Ed.). But Is It Art: The Spirit of Art as Activism. (pp. 165-193). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Lacy, L. (Ed.). (1996). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Oakes, B. (1995). Sculpting with the Environment: A Natural Dialogue. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
greenmuseum.org is an online museum of environmental art, advances creative efforts to improve our relationship with the natural world http://greenmuseum.org/
One of a few motion-based visual illusions is the waterfall illusion, which has been documented as far back as Aristotle. If you stare at the rushing water of a waterfall for a few minutes, and then move your eyes away, you will see a motion after-effect: stationary objects in the scene appear to move upwards, the opposite direction of the waterfall.
Visual Illusions and Neurobiology by David M. Eagleman Perspectives December 2001 Vol 2 Macmillan Magazines
Up to now, we've mostly been talking about how difficult driving in a car is for the human perceptual system and how our perceptual abilities have not evolved enough to effectively handle the task. However, there are ways in which our visual perceptual system works that actually can help us with driving. One is contrast enhancement. Our nervous system consists of a network of billions of cells that have the ability to inhibit or excite their neighboring cells. In the visual system, this allows our brain to enhance contrast between similar regions. Think of it as similar to the way a digital imaging application can increase or lower contrast. Pixels that are similar in hue and value become more so, and differences between pixels become more pronounced. When driving in a fog, this system aids our ability to see anything at all.
If Blake and Yuille are correct in their description of Active Vision as opposed to pure vision concepts, then our visual perception doesn't occur only from the bottom up (perceiving visual signals at the lowest level first and then interpreting the sigals on a higher level) but that the process moves from higher to lower and back as needed, then our visual system might again aid us in driving. The active vision concept allows for an object recognition that is affected by expectations. We are all familiar with this in a driving situation when seeing a spot in the distance as an oncoming car. The bottom up approach at its most crude would say that our perceptual system won't identify the speck as an oncoming car until more detailed information can be seen. Unfortunately, if that was the case with our perceptual system, I imagine there would be quite a few more accidents on the road because we wouldn't be able to respond to an oncoming car until, well, it was too late. Of course, there has to be a combination of top down and bottom up in visual perception. A visual system that interpreted every speck in the field of view as an oncoming car would be braking every time a fly landed on the windshield.
A. Blake and A. Yuille (editors) Active Vision, MIT Press 1992.
Adjacent to our rooftop garden is the off ramp to the Queensborough bridge. Although Manhattan's skyline is an extraordinary sight on the rooftop, from our vantagepoint in several directions, the higway actually dominates the visual scene.
The flow of traffic is constant, not once at any hour of the day or night has the bridge been clear of moving vehicles in the year that we have lived here, although we have noticed a pattern of traffic flow density at different times of the day.
The process of driving itself is an improvisation. Drivers make choices based on the presence or absence of other drivers or just on a whim. They respond to events on both the macroscopic scale (choosing a route for example) and a microscopic scale (hitting the brake or gas at a specific moment in time). The decisions of each driver is based on many factors including the visibility of other cars from inside a particular model or make of car, the state of mind of the driver (tired and distracted versus alert and awake), the manueverabilty of a particular car, and the position itself of a car on the road determined primarily by chance.
Like the birds in Craig Reynold's flocking algorithm, individual cars acting independently work together to create patterns of traffic flow.
Another artist working with perception is California based lecturer, painter, and writer Amy Ione. Many of her writings explore the history of cross-disciplinary developments in the arts and science and how these developments have affected representation.
She addresses active seeing in relationship to 20th century imaging technology, specifically the autostereogram:
(an autostereogram is a 3D illusion that can be seen when the eyes change focus on a single image specifically created for that purpose. The most popular type today are known as random dot stereograms appear as complicated color or black and white patterns out of which emerge simple geometric shapes)
"With the autostereogram the viewer must fuse the representation experientially to see an embedded image — and thus cannot be a passive viewer. "
Ione's writings also shed light on the 19th century work of Paul Cezanne in relationship to the science of perception of the day. She uncovers that:
"Cézanne’s letters and his recorded conversations with Joaquim Gasquet indicate that while he was aware of the radically revised theories about optics, vision, and perception put forth by Brewster, Wheatstone, and von Helmholtz."
and characterizes his artistic process as one that is similar to the artistic process of many new media artists today, that of solving problems through artistic epxerimentation and investigation.
Crossing Boundaries: Imaging Innovations in Art and Science
Amy Ione Berkeley, California found at: http://www.amyione.com/ione-spie.html
Takahiro Iimura is an artist who pioneered film and video art since 1960. His work examines language and media and issues of identity in the realm of the philosposhical. His work mixes languages and plays with synchronization/de-synchronization and distortion inherent in digital and electronic media.
He has recently produced a DVD art work that collects 25 years of video and texts all inspired by a single quote from Jacques Derrida: "I hear myself at the same time I speak".
Iimura explores through imagery, sound, text, and various combinations of the three, the process of constructing an image, representation, and identity.
To me one aspect of perception that is exploited by Iimura's work is the cross-modal illusion. This is the phenomenon that allows a ventriloquist to fool an audience who actually perceive sound emanating from a moving mouth. Our minds, trained to match visual and aural perception, have a difficult time picking out inconsistencies when faced with strong imagery to support a sound source.
The McGurk illusion also illustrates this phenomenon. The McGurk illusion occurs when a sound of a syllable (for example 'ba') is synchronized with lip movements mouthing a different syllable (like 'ga'). Observers will mix the inputs of each and perceive another syllable (in the case of 'ba' and 'ga' the observer perceives 'da')
This effect is also seen when observers try to listen for emotion in the voice of a speaker while viewing various facial expressions. Even when the facial expressions are so subtle as to not be consciously perceived by the viewer, the expression will change the perception of emotion in the speaker's voice.
By playing with the influence of sound on vision and vice versa, Iimura is able to make viewers aware of the influence of media on their perception of identity and construction of the 'real.'
Seeing/Hearing/Speaking Michael R. Mosher review of Takahiro Iimura's DVD distributed by Heure Exquise!
Leonardo Electronic Almanac vol 11, no. 8 August 2003
Visual Illusions and Neurobiology by David M. Eagleman Perspectives December 2001 Vol 2 Macmillan Magazines
Active Vision is a task oriented approach that has become an established area of machine vision research. The idea is that a machine's (or human's) perception of a visual scene is enhanced through interaction with the environment.
Active Vision is a concept that is opposed to the idea of Pure Vision. The pure vision concept is that a scene is analyzed by the mind using a hierarchy of information and representations that flow from bottom to top. That is, low level representations (like hue, saturation, and basic forms) lead to higher level representations (a building). The active vision concept opposes this idea by saying that visual perception is not heirarchical and that information flows both ways, informed heavily by memory.
Active vision implies a constant process of evaluating and re-evaluating a visual scene based on past experiennces and best guesses. Active vision also implies a purpose-oriented viewing, that is perception to satisfy direct needs.
This approach has been useful in the design of effective machine vision systems, but also in the development of videoconferencing applications that use the active vision model to enhance the flat screen image.
Malcolm Slaney A Critique of Pure Audition Interval Research, Inc. from the Proceedings of the Computational Auditory Scene Analysis Workshop 1995
D. Marr Vision, Freeman, 1982.
A. Blake and A. Yuille (editors) Active Vision, MIT Press 1992.
Max Wertheimer was the founder of Gestalt Psychology, publishing Über Gestalttheorie in 1924, but the beginnings of Gestalt Theory are seen in 1912 when he described apparent motion or the 'phi phenomenon'. The phi phenomenon is the perceptual fact that stationary objects can appear as though in motion under certain circumstances.
Wertheimer writes that his study of the phi phenomenon was inspired by a perceptual experience he had while riding a train. As he watched the lights blinking, he realized that if two lights blink on and off at a certain rate, they appear to be one light moving back and forth.
Wertheimer's perceptual observations are in sync with the early stages of the development of moving pictures, and he must have been aware of toys like the zoetrope and flipbooks that exploited persistence of vision. So, what was particularly new about Wertheimer's observation and subsequent developments in Gestalt theory? Besides breaking down the phi phenomenon into very specific rates of time, what was new was the idea that the mind's perception of a temporal experience is continuous and cannot be broken down into a series of snapshots. In other words, our minds do not work like flip books or zoetropes, cutting up our perceptual experiences into a string of still images. Instead, our minds process the information as it unfolds over time.
Wertheimer's ideas came from the results of work done by experimental physiologists. Between 1865 and 1868, Franciscus Cornelis Donders performed a series of experiments attempting to break down the exact amount of time taken up by decision making. His work influenced many experimental laboratories to start measuring reaction times. The assumption implicit in the study of reaction times is that perception and thought are processes that occur over time. This assumption informed Wertheimer's work that said if perception unfolds over time, then events that happen over time can have a gestalt, or be grouped into perceptual units just like aspects of still images or scenes are grouped into identifiable units by the mind. The larger philosophical issue implicit in Donders' work is that if thinking is a process that takes time, then it could be a material process, not metaphysical or spiritual.
This brings me back to my experience observing the New York skyline from the rooftop. In this experience, I spoke of a number of visual artifacts that my mind needed to navigate: floaters on my eyes, specks on my sunglasses, distortion due to heat and smoke from smokestacks, etc. Negotiating all these artifacts and differentiating them from the actual scene made the experience of viewing the visual scene a constantly unfolding process. A speck observed in the visual scene had to be analyzed and placed in a group. Was it a speck of dust, a fly, or a plane far off in the distance? For a very small but certain amount of time, the object would be unidentified, until examination would place it into a category.
Über Gestalttheorie [an address before the Kant Society, Berlin, '7th December, 1924], Erlangen, 1925. In the translation by Willis D. Ellis published in his "Source Book of Gestalt Psychology,"
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1938.
Mind and Body Rene Descartes to William James by Robert H. Wozniak in Serendip http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exhibitions/Mind/Consciousness.html
In The Analysis of Sensations, Ernst Mach mentions discussions about how a thought a large as a tree could fit inside the head of a man. Poet Emily Dickinson answers this conundrum in the poem 'The Brain is Wider than the Sky' where she states:
"The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside."
Text by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published 1963, from An Emily Dickinson Mosaic
As I write this series, I am finding that philosophical ideas keep creeping into what was originally intended as a purely scientific investigation of the senses. This is not entirely my fault. A large number of the historical texts I have found (and even the contemporary texts) written about sensory perception include extensive material about philosophical issues.
For instance, Ernst Mach, a scientist who studied visual perception in the late 19th/early 20th century, wrote 'The Analysis of Sensations' in 1886. In his introductory remarks 'Anti-Metaphysical' he addressed the need for a development of a physiology of the senses in support of the physical sciences. He then immediately begins talking about the connections between the senses in the mind and the function of the ego in relation to the fear of death. This may seem like a giant leap, but remember this was a time before neurobiology when the study of the ego was one of the more concrete aspects of the study of the mind.
He talks about hearing the question seriously discussed of how it is possible that a perception as large as a tree could fit inside the head of a man. Mach observes that this question borders on the absurd, but the question also has a philosophical content, and puts light on the fact that at the time the connection between 'brain' and 'mind' was a shaky one (as it is starting to become again as various chemical reactions related to thought are being found in areas of the body outside the brain).
Toward the end of his introductory remarks, Mach states that the ego must be given up. Not as a scientific idea, (his work assumes that the ego is real without question) but the ego must be abandoned as a controlling force in the lives of artists, scientists, inventors, social reformers, etc. He believes that the abandonment of the ego to give people the ability to 'renounce individual immortality' and 'arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life.'
Finally, if there is any doubt as to the philosphical investigation happening in Mach's assessment of the senses, he discusses Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics' and even the meaning of 'cogito ergo sum'.
My perspective as I write this sounds somewhat critical of Mach's focus on the philosophical. This is not true, what and how he writes about the senses is very common for the time, but very uncommon for today's scientific writing about sensory perception. Although Mach's perspective is clearly a 19th century perspective, I believe there is still the need for philosophical investigations (updated to the 21st century of course) to lie side by side with the scientific investigation of the senses.
Mach, Ernst The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical" 1886 (revised 1905) Dover Edition 1959.
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