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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
This weekend in Brooklyn there will be several events on the graphics, music, and writing of Herbert Brun, a pioneer in computers and composition.
www.kentlergallery.org/pages/brun.html
Brun was born in 1918 and died in 2000 after living in Palestine, studying in Paris, Cologne, and Munich, and served as a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois.
In 1970, he presented a position statement on technology and composition to UNESCO. (available at http://www.herbertbrun.org) UNESCO rejected the proposal, unable to fully understand its meaning at the time. As I read his proposal with 21st century eyes, it appeared to me that, although he didn't have the words at the time, he was proposing a kind of reverse-social-engineering project. He talks about starting with the desired result, some idealized human condition, and then asking what would be the necessary elements to make such a state true.
He is clearly concerned with the control of technology by idealogues, a situation we are also faced with today. He's concerned with a system in which the deployment of technology for destructive means is acceptable, and criticises his era as not the 'technological' era, but the 'ideological' era. His words ring true today.
But not one to merely criticize, Brun posits the role of the composer as one as an organizer of information or the creator of systems of organization toward the creation of relevance. He presents one of the more interesting discussions of the importance of process in art as a means toward the development of new languages of communication. He calls this process of new language development 'anticommunication.' He uses the prefix 'anti' as in 'antiphony' or 'antithesis', not to mean 'against', but to mean 'juxtaposed' or 'from the other side.' He sees anticommunication as the offspring of communication, an attempt to say something through new modes rather than a refusal to say something, as may be defines as non-communication. One uses anticommunication as an active way of re-defining or re-creating the language. Brun calls this 'teaching language to say it.'
In the best case, anticommunication goes through a transition of being learned and accepted and then becomes communication, but this process may take any amount of time, from minutes to decades. Anyone who has ever looked at a work of art or listened to a concert and said 'What does it mean?' has experienced what Brun calls anticommunication.
I think that at the time he presented this address, Brun felt that he was experiencing the acceleration of anticommunication through the advance of the computer as a tool for composition. His experience of composing had become an unfolding process created by systems that would exhibit unpredictable behavior, and I believe he also saw the experience of the listener or viewer as an increasingly unfolding or evolving process or creating meaning.
Another hurricane will be hitting the coast of Florida today, this one named Frances. In today's New York Times Op Ed section, Scott Huler writes about the history of the practice of naming of hurricanes. This practice began in 1950, although an informal process of naming storms after women began in 1941, and crating informal nicknames for major storms had been common in Western culture for many years, and the naming of winds is a practice with a long history. For example, the Foehn Winds are dry winds found in the European Alps, in Switzerland and Southern Germany that warm as they come down the side of a mountain. In folklore, the Foehn wind is called the 'Witches' Wind' and is rumored to have a negative influence on human behavior. The Foehn effect is also the phenomenon that causes the Santa Ana winds in California, the Zonda and Puelche winds in Argentina and the Andes, The Halny Wiatr winds in Poland and the Samiel winds in Turkey among many others worldwide.
I worked with the sonification of two distinct types of storm data in the Atmospherics/Weather Works project, a winter storm and a hurricane. The sonifications of the storms were very distinct, the winter storm being more regular and resulting in a soothing composition, while the hurricane was quite chaotic. I experienced a much more visceral reaction to and closer connection with the hurricane, Hurricane Bob, and I think besides the nature of the data, much of that connection came from the fact that this hurricane had a name.
Naming has profound psychological importance. In The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy, Anagarika B. Govinda wrote, "…things that could be named had lost their secret power over man, the horror of the unknown. To know the name of a force, a being or an object was (to primitive man) identical with the mastery over it." Perhaps this is why the practice of naming hurricanes started, to make people feel they had some control over an uncontrollable, destructive force. First the names were female only, perhaps emphasizing even more this control and mastery.
The problem with this is that it gives the storm the status of an 'object' and implies that the storm has some of the other characteristics we attribute to objects. When a storm is at its most intense, it most certainly does exhibit a certain 'object-ness.' Just imagine the swirling image of a well-developed hurricane taken from a satellite. The object definition falls apart, however, when you consider the beginning and end of the storm. What is the exact moment when a series of winds turns into a hurricane? What is the exact boundary of a hurricane? It's impossible to determine either of these, although you can certainly know when and where if you are in the middle of it. Hurricanes can also spawn other hurricanes and other storms. If Hurricane Frances will be giving birth to other storms, are those storms to be included in the name?
These difficulties with the process of naming become even more pronounced in biotechnology. The naming of both physical & psychological diseases certainly help us to feel power over these unseen forces. But even more importantly, these diseases did not exist – as concepts understood by contemporary physicians – until they were named in association with elaborating medical theory. Is the process of naming some of these phenomenon actually limiting understanding?
The Formation of Objects | Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language.
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