c.onscio.us/ly

in 1273 Rumi, the Persian mystic wrote “New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity - therefore increase, your necessity so that you may increase your perception” - Bill Viola’s Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House.

Last time I met Mathew we discussed the HCMF 09 work briefly and I came away with some interesting directions for future brainstorming and experimental work.

As it turned out we both have an interest in doing something interactive / participative. Possibly using portraiture on the visual side and composing with contributed audio. Last weekend, I went off the faces idea a bit and played with forming new structures out of existing building parts. not exactly a great result, although I may revisit it later.

Since last night and for pretty much all day today I’ve been thinking about the scramble suit in ‘A Scanner Darkly’.

Aside from being an amazing concept, visually the treatment they’ve given it is worthy of consideration. The multiple faces merge almost seamlessly and rapidly. the eyes stay aligned throughout.

This is important to me especially how I’m after a painterly aesthetic. I watched the DVD documentaries and anything I could find on youtube about it, as well as finding the people mentioned in the interviews to see if I could glean a bit more. At the end of the day, it turned out that the best way to try and figure out what they were doing was to go through the scrambler sequences frame by frame and observe. This weekend I’ll be experimenting a bit to see what I can come up with.

Needless to say all of this fragmented face stuff, also reminded me of two other bits of work. 1. Mongrel’s work from the late 90’s high concept nice execution. http://www.mongrel.org.uk/colourseparation

Image from Mongrel website.

2. David Meanix’s photo sculptures. I saw his work in Six Feet Under.

DSC04214_variation, originally uploaded by Iman.

I spent some time on Saturday walking around town, in the snow, taking pictures of buildings. specifically ones with regimented repetition, or stark geometric forms and hard edges, anyhow, I came back home and thought of how I could use these.

I remembered what Mathew had mentioned, about the spectral intensity of one sound being mapped onto another, and this is how the image above came about. In 2004 I had a faulty graphics card (ATI) whether it was the drivers or the hardware, I’ll never know, but it would basically corrupt Open GL 3D graphics very much like Tom Betts’ QQQ, anyhow I used an image captured then, and overlayed it onto an already manipulated building image.

Three things are important to note about this.

1. by mapping the hues of the glitch image onto the building image, I became aware of an underlying structure that was previously imperceptible.

2. Im trying to do simple transforms and manipulations first which are programmable in C. Im limiting myself to things I think I can achieve in code over the course of a year or so of tinkering.

3. I’m interested in the point where the visual structure of the glitch, (used as a stencil / mask) becomes the essence of the glitch artwork itself.

Can the glitch be stripped of its host image content in this way and not be a straight up visualisation of some data?

Shenzhou 7. Whether you’d believe the space flight was faked or not. (bubbles or space debris?)
I’d like to think they added these glitches for added authenticity.

diffusion_workshop, originally uploaded by Iman.

I went to a workshop in the School of Music on Sunday 1st of Feb, Mathew wasnt well so Pierre Alexandre Tremblay ran the workshop.

It was certainly very interesting and nice to be around some music technology students for a short part of the day. Basically the Phipps concert hall pictured above had over 20+ assorted speakers, including some fancy 360 degree ones, and a console which allowed you to control each of these. The idea was to ‘multiply the inner space of the music’ and ‘open the piece up’. A short segment of music was to be performed through altering the knobs on the diffusion console. Although it sounds like jargonese, it made a lot of sense in the space.

The basic sound was a bit plain coming through the two speakers at the front, it was a bit distant and certainly not all enveloping.. it was hard to pick up the nuances of each sound, within the piece.
As you increased the levels on the other speakers you could hear a bit more and all the while it felt like it was a form of performance and it was very easy to see how the experience of a piece could change so dramatically simply by lowering or raising levels on the speakers at the front or rear, or starting a section of the music with bass up, and lowering it later or vice versa.

DSC03934, originally uploaded by Iman.

I had an interesting conversation with a student doing an MA in the school who wants to be a classical recording studio technician, I am genuinely very interested in hearing the aspirations and career paths of music students. It was a real shame I had to go off early to do teaching admin stuff. I ran back home before it started snowing properly. Its been snowing since.

I found an article by Jonty Harrison describing diffusion and the Beast system.