In Sound From Shapes, the authors talked about creating art real-time with a body part like the hand or mouth. The most fascinating thing, I thought, was the mouthesizer, which basically allows a person to sing a song onto a canvas propped in front of them. They set it up so that there is a small camera aimed at the performer's mouth which senses the shape of the mouth when he/she is singing--whether it's in a big circle, a small one, etc. This determines the way the paint goes onto the canvas.

This sort of art is completely different from anything I've heard of. The performer's have to practice to have some sort of control over what they're "painting," and then their art is created and viewed all in real-time. Then with a simple gesture of the mouth, they can erase the entire painting in a fraction of a second, and their art is gone forever. This is the idea that author of Sound From Shapes talked about, the "create, manipulate, destroy" component of this form of art.

I went to see the Dada exhibit at the National Gallery of Art the other day, and I hate to say it, but at first I wasn't very impressed. Last year I had a course that dealt with life in Germany during World War I, and we had many classes about Dada. Before I walked into the exhibit the other day, I remembered the lessons from last semesrabout how Dada was revolutionary, and how they were changing people's concepts of art, and how they were sticking chewed gum and cigarette butts they found on the street into their works.

So when I walked in and looked around, I was expecting to see this crazy art that I had never seen before. But, as it turns out, Dada actually happened about a hundred years ago! Of course I knew this, but I suppose when I kept hearing "revolutionary", I was expecting the art to be revolutionary in my eyes, not in the eyes of someone living 100 years ago. A lot of the art I had already seen before, like the Mona Lisa with a moustache. And in large part because of the whole Dadaist movement, our concept of art has changed so much by now that sticking a urinal on a wall and calling it art is not a totally foreign idea to modern society.

But all that aside, and when I started getting into it, I did appreciate the art and what the artists were doing. For its time, Dada was really changing the concept of art. I admire the way the artists had the guts to completely blow off all their classical training and redefine art.
And all the Dadaist artists went about redefining art in their own individual way. They all shared the same sense of the absurd, and there was really no limit to what they could achieve after they destroyed the boundaries.

(This is actually my first post. I just realized that I had put it on a different url than all my other ones..)

Real-time, non-linear media experience and recorded, linear media are different ways of experiencing art. I’ve never worked with anything in real-time, but from what I understand, it is art that the viewer experiences as it as it is being created; there is virtually no time elapsing between the time it is being created and the time the viewer is seeing it.

I suppose, in a sense, it is the opposite of recorded, linear media, where the artist prepares art that follows a linear pattern. Usually when one watches a movie, one is seeing linear media. The artist has arranged a chronological or sequential story and the viewer is seeing the finished project.
Nonlinear media is not sequential. Movies like Memento and Pulp Fiction are examples of nonlinear media because the stories are out of order. Nonlinear media can also be non-sequential in the sense that the viewer gets to navigate through the media.

Indeterminacy is something that is not fixed or known in advance; it has an uncertain outcome or future. Real-time and nonlinear media are indeterminate. In Dick Higgins’ essay on “Intermedia”, he discusses the history of art and where he thinks the future of art lies. It was interesting to hear his view on paintings and Broadway shows and other traditional art, how they are becoming things of the past. Higgins reasons that traditional art is unchanging and essentially uninteresting. He says that a painting’s sole purpose is ornamentation and that people in this century find Broadway shows weird and artificial. Intermedia, however, is much more unpredictable and therefore more interesting. It is often nonlinear and can involve more than one medium in a given piece, and tries to include the viewer.

I think Higgins’ view about the path art is heading down is a valid one. Although traditional art is still revered to an extent, the majority of people from emerging generations would probably agree with Higgins when he says that paintings are boring and Broadway shows artificial. Today, when college students walk in silence around a painting exhibit from the Renaissance era, it is not because they are in immense appreciation that they are respectful, but rather because they have been instructed to be quiet all their lives. What was incredible art in the past has become commonplace today. Intermedia provide an answer for our boredom. This new, broad category holds infinite new possibilities for the present day artist.

In the discussion we had the other day about the videos we watched, it was interesting to hear different people's reactions to them. I think it was in response to the Barney Haynes's video that someone said what Haynes was doing with Max MSP he could have done without using the program at all.
Some people seem to be skeptical about MSP in general while other people think it's totally awesome and that the art that's being created with it is incredible. I can understand both sides, and I tend to fall under "the people who think it's awesome" category. However, I'm an easily excitable person and I don't know much about computers so I'm easily impressed too. So take it for what it's worth.
I liked David Tinapple's use of the program--the Bush/Kerry thing was really cool to watch because we got to really see an aspect of their personalities that you wouldn't see anywhere else and that you wouldn't really even look for or notice unless someone did a project like this. Tinapple set it up so that when the candidates were giving their speeches and the amplitude fell below a certain specified point, in this case it meant when they weren't talking, MSP would take that portion of the video and put it on an edit list separate from the video. So that's how we could see what each candidate was doing during the silences in their speeches, the expressions they wore on their faces, the way they prepared to answer questions, the gestures they used.
Then Ali Momeni did some really cool stuff with Max MSP too. He created his own electronic drums out of plastic and wires that were sensitive to touch, which is closer to the project we're working on right now creating musical instruments out of computer keyboards.

I went to see a documentary on music the other day called Music From Inside Out. I was skeptical at first when reading the blurb about it because it claimed that "the main character of the movie was 'music' itself." Whatever that means. But having nothing better to do with $9.50, I saw it anyway. And I was impressed. They did a lovely job with it and there were some pretty lovely ideas in there.
I liked hearing from all the different members of the Philadelphia orchestra. I've always been inspired by the intensity of the music in orchestral performances, it can be so severe. But it seems odd to me now that I had never even thought of an orchestra as consisting of several unique individuals before I saw this movie. Maybe it was the uniforms that fooled me, or maybe it was the way all those instruments produce one prolific sound, that had me thinking of all these people as one great whole. Whatever the case, it was fascinating to hear all of these people talk out of uniform, about their lives growing up, their successes and insecurities, their past dreams and future dreams.

I went the other day to see the Interface exhibit at the Fraser Gallery. My first impression was surprise over how small the space was. It seemed like there would be another floor or another room, but it was just one good sized room. It also appeared empty at first, with one torturous looking device the size of an elephant in the middle of the room.
When I looked closer though, there were actually paintings on every wall. I walked up to the first painting I saw and when I looked at it, I saw it wasn't a painting at all. It was titled "The Looking Glass," and I guess that's what it was. I saw a reflection of myself, only I looked like what the big monster in the movie "Predator" would have seen-- it looked like a heat sensor reflection with a bunch of different colors representing the different features of my face.
I then walked over to the other side of the room and saw a set of dark little paintings mounted in a line on the wall. When I looked closer, the subject of each was moving. They looked little sea anenomes made of pins and needles. Behind each was a revolving magnet that made the pins move around making them seem alive.
I find this sort of art a great step forward from convential art. Paintings are boring. This is new and interesting. I think part of the interesting-ness is the surprise element involved in each piece. This new intermedia stuff always seems to have viewer participation of some sort, or something that makes it different than regular art. It allows for so much variety that it seems one could never reach the end of it.