This is a call for a Rhizome Microgrant from this past summer. I’m hoping to have artists, coders, and the general “creative technologist” population as an audience for my work, so I can easily imagine some of my outreach or platform to be web based in some way or another. The small, contained nature of event scores lend themselves to this kind of “microgrant” program.
“Since 2014, the Rhizome Microgrant Program has awarded small grants for the creation of new artworks, online exhibitions, and other web-based projects. This program is run as an open call, and awards range from $500 – $1,500. Past funded projects have included a website critiquing a notorious internet misogynist, an excavation of the emails left behind by one of the largest corporate frauds in history, an exploitation videogame inspired by the Kardashians, and an analysis of the use of language in Egyptian social media during the 2011 revolution. This year, we invite proposals for online artworks and exhibitions from artists of any nationality. We aim to support a diverse range of experimental practices, and we particularly encourage proposals that engage with gender and internet culture.”
In this posting they stated a 150 word limit, but I’ll go for the 25 word approach as originally assigned in class. My project description would be the following:
Combining event scores with computer programming to imbue more meaning to less technical work, inspire creative technologist practices, and challenge requirements of mastery in tech-art.
(…if “tech-art” counts as one word I made it to 25…)
Thought Map
This the thought map I’ve come up with to start (click to view full size):
There are a few more Temporary Expert checklist items that I will have to come back to in separate posts, but I wanted to get some of the fundamentals up now.
Goals:
• Know more about the history of events scores
• Investigate a potential theory of creation for event scores
• Highlight links between event scores and computer programming/creative coding/tech art
• Provide a new context for event scores in the creative technologist community
• Help other creative technologists create art within this context
Questions:
• What is a practice theory for creating event scores?
• How can this process be used in a 21st century context in regards to technology? (If it should at all?)
• Can using this process in current tech art practices bring a more personal, human, and soulful perspective to art practices?
Identify precedents:
• Dada, Surrealists, Situationists
• Exquisite Corpse
• Happenings (not sure the timing of this, might have developed alongside event scores)
Analogies: An orchestra score, source code for a program, pattern for clothing, cooking recipes, a play script (kind of hard to make analogies… because these could also literally be event scores)
For my new topic in Temporary Expert, I’d like to investigate event scores. I had come into the class with this in mind, but my investigations into Junk DNA lead me into a shared territory. In the attempt to interrogate DNA (junk or otherwise), I wanted to sonify the data. However, this sonification is just a procedural mapping determined by the user. It is subjectively useful from moment to moment and user to user depending on intent. Same for designations of “junk”.
Creating this translation of nucleotides to notes is an act of translation, or “mapping”. The instructions for doing so could look like this:
For nucleotide G, play note G,
For nucleotide A, play note A,
For nucleotide T, 50% chance of playing note F vs. F (octave lower)
For nucleotide C, play note C (octave lower)
The writing of this instruction set could also be described as an event score. This was an approach used by George Brecht, Alison Knowles and others affiliated with the Fluxus movement of art that was pioneered in the 1960s.
It also reads a bit like pseudo-code that one might write out in preparation for creating a computer program. This winds up being true of many event scores because of their imperative sentence structure. Though not all even scores are written as concrete instructions. Some are intended to be interpreted by the performer, such as Brecht’s Three Yellow Events (1961):
1 yellow yellow yellow
2 yellow loud
3 red
However, even in these cases the intent was to think of this as a score for performance, even if subjective.
We can see artistic inspiration for creative coding in other places, as well. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings have instructions for how they are drawn that reads extremely similar as something like a nicely conceived Processing sketch. Or, that is to say, the art actually is the instructions themselves. This allows them to live after LeWitt, while still being manifested in places like Dia Beacon.
My hopes for the rest of the semester is to learn about event scores and similar instructional based procedural art and re-approach them from the cultural vantage point of creative technologists. While procedural and generative approaches are not new in this field, I’m hoping that taking the ethos of play, irreverence, and public engagement of the Fluxus could provide a new methodology for my practice and perhaps inspire the practice of others.
Computers can faithfully interpret our commands (if we express them in a language they understand). However, my early readings on Fluxus talk of a kind of engagement with “the street”, and human to human connection. How do we bring this to tech art? How do we make meaningful events, even if they are events like onClick()?
This will be the slide deck for my presentation tomorrow. I’m still editing a bit and adding presentation notes, but for now this is the core content of the deck. (I’m planning on playing music in the background)
I’ll be posting my slide deck for my presentation later, but the bulk of my project is a ~10 minute piece of audio. Since I won’t be able to play the whole thing tomorrow, I’ll post it here for review.
I’m doing my best impression of a trendy podcast in order to get people excited about a potential way of sonifying data. In my research, I’ve seen some direct links between my topic and sonification (Dr.Ohno practiced this himself), but also some metaphorical ones.
I’ve mocked up a potential user interface for performing DNA music:
Originally, I was thinking about how to best create an instrument as a tool for performance. But I wasn’t really convinced that people would understand why they should use it at all. I wanted to play with an idea of a narrative (in podcast form) “instruction manual” that doesn’t teach you how to use an instrument, but motivates you as to why you should be excited about it.
I’ve gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole with my thinking about Junk DNA and analogies, metaphor, and communicating to the public. In talking with people about my topic, I’ve had to describe the rift between “pro junk” vs “anti junk” positions. Switching from an already complicated scientific phenomenon to a complicated philosophical conversation about “value” and how we determine it doesn’t lend itself to an “elevator pitch”-style, compact explanation.
So I tried to develop a higher level metaphor for the entire situation. We have a complicated, multi-faceted debate that can seamlessly morph between facts and science into value judgement and personal world views. And then back again. An argument where both sides are trying to advance a broader goal of the general good, but differ on terminology, rubrics, and what is really considered “good” in the first place.
Maybe I just have a bad case of 2017, but this reminded me of politics.
“Junk or functional DNA? ENCODE and the function controversy”
Pierre-Luc Germain • Emanuele Ratti • Federico Boem Source:Biology & Philosophy Date: November 1, 2014
Linking here for documentation’s sake. Will remove link if this is somehow inappropriate or otherwise requested.
Quotes and impressions:
“and that selection is but a useful proxy for relevant functions, which might well be unsuitable to biomedical research.”
(emphasis mine) This is elaborated on at length in the article, but an interesting qualifier to note.
To start off Temporary Expert, I pulled a random topic from the basket and got… Junk DNA!
I’m excited to be a four week expert on this. I’m segmenting this first blog post into two parts. My initial, uninformed ideas about junk DNA, and then my thoughts, feelings and followup after doing research.
At first, the thing that immediately draws me to the topic is the use of the word “junk”. Why is it junk? Says who? What are the motivations for such a categorization? I assume scientific, that this might be DNA that doesn’t “do” anything. But perhaps there are financial motivations for figuring out what certain things are caused by DNA, which could open up a possibility of critique.
My mind goes there because of “junk sales”, “junk bins” and so on. This term is evocative to me personal, as a somewhat hoarder, in the sense that I’m almost challenged to find something that I value inside of junk. “Junk” is almost a dare. Find something, it screams. The obscure piece of electronics. The dusty but solid piece of furniture. The cloth strips or old polaroids ripe for an art project.
And of course, ITP’s famous junk shelf comes to mind. I check it at least once a week (sometimes maybe two… three… ok, four times). It is junk, but is certainly useful to everyone on the floor at one point or another. With this in mind, I made this video:
This was made with my (not junk!) Macbook Pro and a quick Max MSP patch:
These are my initial, gut reactions to junk DNA. Was I right?
First, Junk DNA is known as a sub category within “noncoding DNA“. From the wiki, the key take aways are that noncoding DNA, “are components of an organism’s DNA that do not encode protein sequences,” and “When there is much non-coding DNA, a large proportion appears to have no biological function, as predicted in the 1960s. Since that time, this non-functional portion has controversially been called junk DNA.”
Oooh controversy! Lets look at the footnote for that.
“In 2007, the pilot project’s results revealed that much of this DNA sequence was active in some way. The work called into serious question our gene-centric view of the genome, finding extensive RNA-generating activity beyond traditional gene boundaries.”
However, this article did not point me towards who even created the term “junk DNA” to begin with. Doing a quick search lead me to the charmingly old school “junkdna.com” (Marina, what was that about the internet being an unreliable appeal to authority?), and Dr. Susumu Ohno:
And even though I thought that this topic might be a departure from more of my performance and sound based interests, I found this:
From the wiki:
“The biologist, with no formal training in music, ‘decided to assign notes according to the molecular weights’ and ‘put the heavier molecules in lower positions, and the lighter molecules higher’.”
This is an amazing bit of serendipity for me, as I have been interested in isomorphisms and event scores as a way to instigate creative inspiration and connection. The above paragraph reads to me like Fluxus in a lab coat, and I love it.
I didn’t expect to find this happening in the category of junk DNA. Not sure how much more I should indulge this specific aspect, but I’ll take it as a sign that I’ve got a great topic and the next few weeks will result in fruitful and inspiring research.
Components for understanding all of this will include understanding genomics, the differences between DNA vs. RNA, noncoding vs. coding vs. junk DNA, how gene/dna sequencing works, among many other things. (The more I read preliminarily, the more I uncover as necessary information. This list is expanding daily.)
