The Driftless Moment

On June 16 The Driftless Moment, a solo exhibition of new video work will premiere at ACRE Projects, Chicago.

Opening reception 4-8pm
1913 W 17th St, Chicago, IL 60608
(Near 18th street train station, pink line)

still from The Driftless Moment, video installation

still from The Driftless Moment, video installation

Glass, Sound, Space

studio detail, Ruins in Reverse, glass, sound.

Black Box Recorder: UK premiere

On June 15 Black Box Recorder will screen at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, England as a part of Sheffield Fringe: Film at the Intersection of Art & Documentary.

    

"[A] disembodied desire...a pervasive sense of yearning for something impossible..."

  -Esther Harris, curator (London)

still from Black Box Recorder, found film transfers, original sound 

European premiere / B.B.R. filmplakat

official film poster, Black Box Recorder

Black Box Recorder will premiere in Europe 7pm Friday, June 14 at Team Titanic, Neukölln district, Berlin.

Exhibited in the gallery through June 22.

Flughafenstraße 50
12053 Berlin
U8 Boddinstraße

Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Found film footage transferred to video, original sound. View screening copy here.

still from Hour Between Dog and Wolf, 2013

still from Hour Between Dog and Wolf, 2013

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Between Plant and Ghost

Archival giclée print from Chaos, Birth of a Star

Archival giclée print from Chaos, Birth of a Star

Archival giclée print from Chaos, Birth of a Star

The Speed Dream of Heat and Longing (Richmond)

Digital bilboard sequence (3 stills of 10), Richmond Virginia, 2012

Sound Sweep: Sonic Territories and Zones of Forgetting

Coverage map of clandestine mobile radio transmissions in Los Angeles. Read more here.

Black Box Recorder

[Film transferred to video, sound, custom software.]

still from database

still from database

still from database

Melencholia

[Two channel video installation, sound, continuous loop]

Stills from two channel video installation. View excerpt here.

Geotrauma...Geomancy (Detroit)

Digital billboard sequence, 1 of 10, Detroit Michigan

Digital billboard sequence, 1 of 10, Detroit Michigan

News From Home

[Found film transferred to video, original sound]

still from sequence, News From Home (1:51)

still from sequence, News From Home (1:51)

still from sequence, News From Home (1:51)

View here (compressed for streaming).

Microsoundtrack

A six channel sound installation and live performance, in collaboration with Lina Dib (Houston).

Six channel sound installation in four-acre urban wilderness, Houston Texas.

Sonification materials for opening night performance

"Microsoundtrack for Pitman Park features local sounds that can be heard at 6 listening posts situated throughout the Park. In generating these park-based recordings, Dib and Meza decenter the human through a shift in scale. Minute sound samples, microcosmic soundscapes form a soundtrack of life in the park. Recorded sounds are at times beyond human perception, but not beyond all species’ perception. By creating a soundtrack based on other organisms that share this park, Dib and Meza tap into non-human worlds and bring some of their sounds in contact with our senses."  - Divya Murthy, curator.

Murmurs Across The City

QR code-launched serial fiction: four stories, updated daily for ten days

Launched in Finland, view video.

Notes on Utopia: Everything is There

Difference Engines, at Matadero Madrid

Premiere of Difference Engines, opening night, Just Madrid Arte Feira, Matadero Madrid. Curated by Miguel Amado and Filipa Olveira, Lisbon.

And,

There's a hole in the middle of the world, filled with cold light. (Spectrogram of my composition Retba).

The Light of Speed

Big Urban Screens: Madrid

Three-story interactive LED facade, Madrid Spain

Mimodek prototype successfully installed!

Neuroticos Anonimos

Somewhere in the city a number of people gather. They are variously anxious, obsessive, "abnormally" sensitive...tense. They mostly meet at night, and do not disclose their names. No sounds can be heard from inside the building. The windows are blacked out from the street. This is both welcome and troubling.

Some years later the sign will remain, though the people seem to have stopped gathering there. New programs will occupy the space and the "N/A" will be re-purposed for the Neuro-Archaeology Institute...Nuñez Accounting...New Asia Café...Negri Architects, LLC...and later, "Sodium" nightclub. 

It seems as if the original members have stopped gathering in this place, but in every successive venture—every once in a while, an "abnormal" tension seems to grip everyone in the room. Briefly, you can't be certain.

Noasis: Voids and De-programmed Land

I'm using the term "noasis" to describe voids I encounter in the city...unexpected tracts of "no-man's-land."

Ruined Map of Sky

"I was immersed to my very core in noise, but I heard nothing; it was as if I were in a great silence. All I could see was the concrete road running straight to the sky. No it was not a road, it was a band of flowing time. I was not seeing but only feeling time."

Kobo Abe, The Ruined Map

Pulse Demon, Notes

Rough prototype of a networked particle system built around three main design concepts:

1. Constrained Turbulence - capturing chaotic behavior

2. Temporal Multiplicities - enfolded time-scales, feedback

3. Permeability - networks, open to real-time intervention

The turbulence (visualization) was built in Processing. I'll post images soon - essentially two particle swarms influenced by gravitational attraction and energy exchanged through collisions. Temporal multiplicities and sonic feedback structures built in Max/MSP. Permeability was realized through computer vision and User Datagram Protocol communications.

Basically, the goal was to isolate and materialize fluxes of energy moving through topological and temporal systems.

Perhaps as Virilio said, depth of time has replaced depth of field...I'll be publishing more specifically re: temporal webs, sonic feedback loops and other influences in upcoming posts...

Shadow Citizenry, Possession Zones 1

The phenomenon of abandoned houses being illegally reoccupied strikes me as a twisted development on land war.

With Advocates’ Help, Squatters Call Foreclosures Home - NYTimes.com

It makes me wonder if these squats don't perpetuate the "invisible" model of relations. Of course desperate times call for desperate measures, and I would rather sleep for one night in an abandoned McMansion than in an urban waste-zone. I think.

And some of these re-occupations are enacted boldly, in broad daylight, through the front door, but it seems like a larger opportunistic narrative remains unshifted. Somehow I would prefer to see the dominance of this narrative overthrown...evolved into something else. I wonder what other radical rejections might possible in these cases of sudden "landlessness?"

My thought is that we also need contestation in the form of new narratives...that the success of the solitary parasite is limited (limiting?)...

Virilio's Vision Machine comes to mind - " So in spite of all this machinery of transfer, we get no closer to the productive unconscious of sight."     

Loss and exploitation is enabled in some part through spatialized isolation and dispersion...can voids and invisibility be utilized to achieve a solution? I wonder...

Sheaf of Time (Z)

Short hiatus from blogging, now back to it.

What is an organism? A sheaf of time. What is a living system? A bouquet of times.

- Michel Serres, in The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics

[ ]

John Robert McGraham, a Los Angeles homeless man was killed last Thursday night by an attacker who lit him on fire. The murderer and accomplices remain unknown. The LA Times published this map. He had lived on a particular street in the Mid-Wilshire area for more than a decade. Members of his family, especially his sister, would visit him on occasion to check in on him and bring him batteries for his radio.

Los Angeles Statistics

Some interesting points of Los Angeles demography from the Southern California Institute for Future Initiatives researchers at SCI-Arc (Austin, Sasha, Bethsabee and Avani):

• Downtown Los Angeles has been home to the lowest median household incomes in the city and LA county since the 1950's. The contrast is significant - for example, in 2006 the county's median annual income was over $50,000; the city's median income was around $48,000; the median income for downtown was approximately $15,900.
• Los Angeles is a city of renters. Nearly 63% of the population rents an apartment. This does not include "condos."

Archipelago Colony

Here are results from another cellular automata model - a colony of ten agents operating under the same zone-building behavior set as earlier. The question here was whether the efforts of multiple agents would eventually sync to construct a unified zone. At around two days the colony seemed to reach a kind of plateau - building and dismantling at a similar rate.

The software model ran at 120 frames per second. This is the landscape at 30 seconds.











This is approximately two days later.
















And this is approximately two days further, or four days from the launch of the model.

Los Angeles Sigil #1

Speaking of geotagging and emanation, these messages were recently found nailed to an electrical pole in Echo Park. There seems to be an indicator for North, and possibly a message reading UR. I think the lower-right fragment is repeated, and the lower-left fragment is missing (from above view). The reverse faces seem to further reiterate UR by saying TOUR, MOORE, and DETOUR.

WASTE system? As I was showing these to Ed, my computer said SIGIL.

Modeling Exclusion Through Zone-building

In order to see emergent patterns resulting from zone-building over time, I built a synthetic bio-model in Processing. In the model, a single autonomous agent wanders randomly through a landscape of equally scattered white and black pixels. The white pixels are open space, the black are obstructions (designated to be waste in my system). When the agent encounters a black pixel, it picks it up and carries it. Encountering another black pixel signals the agent to drop its current load, turn away, and continue wandering.

The model runs at 30 frames per second and exports a still image at regular intervals.

This sample landscape was fairly extensive (at 720 x 480 dimensions) and ran for 12 hours. This is a still from tZero:















And, the same landscape 12 hours later, or frame 2,678,400:















This sample landscape was smaller (300 x 200), this is frame 3600 (two minutes):











And, 24 hours later:











Another 300 x 200 landscape, at 20 minutes:











And, 32 hours later:












These soft-synth bio-models are based on Mitchel Resnick's "termite" model (but authored in Processing, not OpenStarLogo).