Who are the algorists
At the August 1995 SIGGRAPH show, Hébert participated in a panel discussion on “Art and Algorithms” with fellow artists and SIGGRAPH veterans Ken Musgrave and Roman Verostko. After the panel was over, the three hit on the idea of forming a group of like-minded algorithm-oriented artists. Hébert proposed the name “algorist,” and even wrote an algorithm to define an algorist:
if (creation && object of art && algorithm && one’s own algorithm) {
include * an algorist *
} elseif (!creation || !object of art || !algorithm || !one’s own algorithm) {
exclude * not an algorist *
}
source: http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/hebert/
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Evidence Locker
” She wrote her access forms as love letters, and with a microphone in her ear, persuaded the men running Liverpool’s surveillance systems to guide her, blind, through the city.
“My body became part of the system,” she says. “It was the most intimate experience of my life.” “
Why artist Jill Magid loves an authority figure, Eve Wiseman, The Observer, Sunday 27th September 2009.
Evidence Locker is a work from 2004 for Liverpool biennial
“The artist spent 31 days in Liverpool – the length of time for which CCTV footage is stored by the police before being erased, unless it is requested as evidence of a crime. Throughout this time she was filmed by the CCTV system.”
The final work consists of two contrasting installations. Evidence Locker at Tate evokes the space of the CCTV monitoring station, and includes a soundtrack of the police log being read aloud, and CCTV footage featuring the artist obtained from the authorities. Retrieval Room at FACT reveals the evolving romance of the relationship with the CCTV staff through a daily diary and dream-like video projections.
Filed under: art, body, computation, drawing, performance, systems, writing | Closed
A study of systems
During a recent residency with Maddy Pethick at Spacex, Exeter, UK. We decided to focus on a one word event by George Brecht for one of our DIY Happenings: WATER. Events ranged from water droplet racing, generative rain drawing, musical water bottles, to boat building and transporting puddles.
I’ve always loved Tomas Schmit, Zyklus für Wassereimer (oder Flaschen) 1961 once recreating it with mustard bottles.
Recently I read “Between Water and Stone” by Kristin Stiles from the exhibition catalogue for “In the Spirit of Fluxus” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993, in some ways what she is describing in this passage could perhaps be understood as a live study of the computation, the system of human action, bottles, and water.
“Performed for the 1963 Fluxus festival in Amsterdam, the actions that constitute Zyklus für Wassereimer [oder Flaschen] (Cycle for Water-rhymes [or Bottles] are direct and simple, subtle and conceptually sophisticated. The score permits the performer between ten and thirty bottles or buckets. Its duration depends upon the speed and precision with which the artist undertakes the process of pouring, a procedure either quickly resolved or enduring for long periods. The task may, but does not have to, depend upon skill. It is the kind of quiet action that a thoughtful child might perform as a means to study the operation of things…Speculating on the nature of existence, the artist who performs Zyklus undertakes the careful exploration of human labor as a concrete condition that determines meaning. While Schmit’s score leaves the construction of labor and its significance open to a mechanics of doing, at the same time, doing emphasizes the concrete condition of being. This doing, because it has a temporal dimension, equally calls into question the relationship of being to becoming, in and through time, and positions ontological speculation in the pragmatic activities of labor. Doing both exhibits and stabilizes the unstable relationship between objects and the human states of becoming and being. Metaphysical questions circle in Zyklus in the mundane conditions of the piece itself, in the actual flow and change among human action, bottles, and water.”
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Giorno Poetry Systems
American label/conceptual writing project set up in 1972 by the poet John Giorno, the earliest releases were exclusively poetry collections of the “Dial-A-Poets” (John Giorno, William S Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Susan Howe, Patti Smith Anne Waldman.)
“In 1961 I was a young poet who hung out with young artists like Andy Warhol, Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as with members of the Judson Dance Theatre. The use of modern mass media and technologies by these artists made me realize that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture, dance and music. And I thought, if they can do it, why can’t I do it for poetry. Why not try to connect with an audience using all the entertainments of ordinary life: television, the telephone, record albums, etc? It was the poet’s job to invent new venues and make fresh contact with the audience.
“This inspiration gave rise to Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit foundation under which many projects were born. The record label called Giorno Poetry Systems eventually built up a catalog of 40 titles, ushering poetry onto the radio alongside rock, jazz, etc. for the first time.”
“Wisdom is his voice” by John Giorno.
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hello process
“A theatre of naive computation. Hello Process!
Forty lines, forty iterations of a process. Each printed line represents one iteration. Every line consists of 128 blocks. Each block can contain a small program of up to 1024 bytes. The blocks are executed one after the other. Each program can move, copy, swap or delete any block in the file.
hello process shows a machine doing what it does best, deleting, copying and moving blocks of data. The installation consists solely of a computer and a printer. The computer functions as it usually does, as a black box theatre of processes. The only output comes through the printer, giving us clues about the activity inside, while in the background, the raw noise of the machine creates a sound scape, a sonification of this theatre of naive computation.
A file of 128 blocks is created. In this file, each block can be occupied by a small piece of code. Every piece of code has its own strategy. Some try to conquer as many blocks as possible, others simply target one specific piece of code or an unsuspecting neighbour. When the process is set in motion, all blocks are executed one after the other. This results in a battle between the file’s inhabitants. After forty iterations, a fresh file is created with a new combination of code.
Each piece of code has a special ID. This ID is sent to the printer every time the block is loaded in which the code is residing. Each printed line represents the result of one battle cycle. 128 small graphical representations of code are printed. This process repeats 40 times, creating a map of abstract patterns depicting the changes that took place
There is some duality in this theatre of naive and nonproductive computation. We like to think of processes as actors in a machine theatre, playing with anthropomorphism and metaphors to trigger the imagination. Each piece of code has a descriptive name such as copycat, eraserhead, destroyer, or swapmaster, and displays behaviour to match. But at the same time these programs are just mechanical low level operations, totally inhuman. In the end the computer “computes” and the printer “prints” as a debug device and leaves on paper the only trace of these ephemeral permutations.
While all the code and processes are running as a white box (GPL code on GNU/Linux environment), the audience remains in the shadow side of this Wayang Kulit theatre.”
http://metabiosis.goto10.org/hello-process/
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