c.onscio.us/ly

Going to Iran was actually quite amazing. not only did I get on with some essential research but I also got a chance to show my partner round Tehran and of course see my relatives. The last time I visited there was over 5 years ago which is a very long time indeed, in terms of how far things change over there. Going there made me question some of the things I value in life, and since I came back I’ve had a renewed interest and vigour in altering my normal trajectory and take on things.

Sadly as my students could potentially read this I cant be as candid about my current predicament as I’d like to. But a couple of fairly large changes are on the horizon for me, and they’re all fantastically good.

16/03/2009, originally uploaded by Iman.

I think I’m still on schedule for publishing the ideas I’ve been working on. before I leave for Iran.

On the 16th of March, I went to see Nicola Perren in the Textiles department to discuss carpet making. Nicola was incredibly generous with her time and showed me round a few places in the workshop building. I had a look at hand tufting and the Jacquard Loom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom we had a really good discussion about computation / glitch aesthetics. It turns out she’s a fan of Maedas work! I think we might be able to work on something together.

Designing Imperfection Site Redesign, originally uploaded by Iman.

a lot of good things are happening, and everyone in my network is being incredibly supportive as ever.

But I’m actually in a weird situation where I can’t exactly say whats going to happen next year. I love my teaching and I love my PhD. Im looking at options so I can focus more on my PhD and related work with a remission in my teaching responsibilities, in particular the parts which require lots of redesign , rethinking and planning each year, as well as awkward documentation. So far this year, I havent in any way permitted myself to let the PhD take precedence over my teaching responsibilities.

In my experience so far, I think doing a PhD to the standard that I want requires a rethink on how much teaching I can have in a given year. As a priority I certainly dont want to jeopardize the quality of teaching, or be in a situation were I’m doing a PhD just at the weekends.

Anyhow, Im being as positive and constructive as I can. I enjoyed redesigning the Glitch Designing Imperfection site at the weekend. I’ll post it when its up.

Im going to go insane dont write this post. Theres a lot going on.

Ive had a rough time over the past few weeks, someone beat me to doing the Glitch Carpet idea which is a concept I’d originally written about in my PhD project proposals, and its actually very clever and very nicely done, nice job Mr Richard Hutten. A carpet as an analogue decorative and functional object is so far removed from all that is digital, apart from its link to the pixel aesthetic in its making so I thought that idea would be safe and quite unique but it clearly isn’t. Despite this initial dissapointment. I’m still going to do my concept which is based on the idea of the ‘persian flaw’, where the god fearing carpet weaver would deliberately create a mistake in the carpet so as not to presume divinity in creating an object which exudes total perfection.

Over the past few years, Ive come across a few trends here and there. but few things have both amused and irritated me more than data moshing. Lets start with the name. which I hate btw. ‘Mosh’ is one of my most detested words in the english language.
I dont care massively for its etymology or wish to propose anything other than saying these are simply the manifestation of compression artefacts as David O Reilly has also pointed out.. Secondly this is like a completely mindless effect. Its like giving some kids crayons and allowing them to let rip on the walls. Ironically I think its been really hindered by the two music videos which have promoted it the most, Although I love the chairlift one, and I dont mind Kanye’s vocals and the lyrical content, the use of this effect is bordering on the abusive. Its like a lensflare effect circa 1991.

1. “Welcome To Heartbreak” Kanye West
2. “Evident Utensil” by Charlift

yes Ive seen them and I’ve got them on my bleeding ipod touch.

Im far more interested in research like this:
http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/ recently. portraiture, representation, and a slight glitch aesthetic (maybe)

I’ve come to the realisation that to avoid further frustration I’m going to put all of my PhD proposal ideas out there. There are so many concepts I’ve looked at, maybe the public scrutiny will force me to tighten them up.

Face Detection, originally uploaded by Iman.

I’ve been looking at this for a few days. For the HCMF09 collaboration, some form of face detection would be useful. I started by looking at a couple of recent projects.

after a few minutes of wrangling with a few kludgy facedetect libraries tonight, I discovered an OpenCV example, I now know where the framework sits, where the library should go and its up and running as the example shows. fun stuff tomorrow.

For even more speed, I might try OpenCV in C++.

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?