Month: October 2017

Contexts/calls for my work:
Rhizome Microgrants

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.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2017/jul/18/open-call-rhizome-microgrants-2017/

“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()?

Brecht’s Three Gap Events has inspired me lately:

What is the Three Gap Events of the 21st century?

I’ve managed to find a rather large Fluxus Event Score workbook pdf that will be of great use, and a good preliminary resource on Fluxus history from the MIT Press.

And perhaps a little motivation for myself:

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)

DNA PLAY Slide Deck 

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.

And you can download the MP3 here.

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’ll be posting slides later today.