Rhizome

I met with sisters Sarah and Lara Grant of Felted Signal Processing the other week at their Brooklyn apartment. Felted Signal Processing is an ongoing project, which came out of their individual research as graduate students in NYU’s ITP program. Sarah entered the program to further her skills in new media and Lara went to learn how to program, play with hardware and generally learn the electronic side to apply to her interactive fashion. Now graduated, they have teamed together up in their Felted Signal Processing project, which allows them to explore their joint passion for soft circuitry and wearable technology. Together, they build colorful, handmade felt interfaces that allow users to manipulate sound through physical interaction such as pulling, scrunching or stroking. Most of their interfaces are built to output sound, but they are also interested in the development of new materials and techniques for fabricating soft sensors for interfaces that can be hooked up to a variety of outputs. Lara has been felting for 7 years, and they explained that felt is their “dream medium.” Sarah was the first of the two to apply the medium to soft circuitry; the name “Felted Signal Processing” actually came from her thesis, where she hacked a guitar pedal and integrated conductive felt into the circuit, letting users squeeze and scrunch the material in order to literally shape sound. Once Lara embarked on her thesis, she chose to develop a skill set of techniques to create and control variable resistance in soft circuitry. Sarah, a programmer with a background in new media art and a long standing interest in sound, focuses on the software and hardware side of their projects while Lara, who spent years working in fashion and textiles with an emphasis in conceptual, interactive design, handles the logistical side of interface and soft circuit design. They explained that once they start developing and producing their projects, they draw from their individual strengths and skill sets, where they share equal responsibilities and interests in all aspects of the projects creatively and technically.

The felt works as a variable resistor, meaning it doesn’t have fixed resistance and its conductivity can fluctuate when plugged into the circuit. In order to attain this property in soft circuitry, FSP designs with a variety of natural wools and metallic wools, as well as using conductive threads, yarns and fabrics. Merino wool is combined through with steel wool through a process called carding, in which the two materials are essentially combed together to achieve a blend. The material is then turned into durable textile by dry felting with barbed needles or by using a wet felting technique that involves hot water, soap, and pressure.

If our eyes were to be turned into a camera, it would be a rather poor device. More precisely, it would not resemble a single-frame snapshot camera, but a video stream of a mostly blurred visual field with only spots of clarity. Our eyes move rapidly and continuously update the image in the brain, and it has been concluded that the brain, resembling a high-tech processor, cleans up the received input. Paradoxically, one of the functions of photography is to remind us of the impossibility of our eyes to perceive reality as a still image – as the saccadic scanning of our eyes show, there is nothing fixed or stable in nature. Matter is always in flux.

In his artistic practice, Rune Peitersen explores precisely this aspect of the visual apparatus through a research project he started two years ago. This summer, he presented the most recent series of his results in Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, in a show entitled “Saccadic Sightings: Einstein and Bohr.” In a secluded room, one was able to indulge in the three main elements of the show: a short text on Einstein and Bohr, Observing Uncertainty – an enigmatic large photograph of a hallucinatory scene covered with a map of small printed squares, accompanied by Observer Effect - a series of smaller black photographs with dots of visual clarity representing each of the square from the large photograph.

Shadow, Glare explores such experiential disruptions through a subtle visual intervention: Without altering the computer's normal operations, the program renders a morphing series of translucent forms that seem to float between the screen's real surface and the immaterial desktop. This simulation can blend unobtrusively with any actual shadows that happen to be cast on the screen; users may continue to work or browse while only peripherally aware that the program is running. But the slowly evolving forms can also occlude the desktop and interrupt the user's focus. To Shirreff, these subtle shifts in attention characterize the experience of working at a computer: "Time evaporates, and while at points I'm engaged, for the most part I'm folded into the experience, while somehow still scanning its surface." Unlike an object in an art gallery designed for close observation, Shadow, Glare operates between the multiple levels of awareness encouraged by a computer interface.

 

In pop culture, “ghosting” is:

n. the appearance of one or more false images on a television screen.
v. when players that have been killed in a video game watch other players.

As viewers look through the gas mask, a video self-portrait is super-imposed onto the action figures via the pepper’s ghost theatrical illusion.

When Orpheus’ beloved Eurydice dies, he cajoles his way into the underworld with his musical charms and his lyre. Wanting her but not her shade, he cannot forbear looking back to physically see her and so loses her forever. In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love. Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.

Our narrator remembers that once, with her back turned while facing the Adriatic Sea, a Google Street View car drove by and took a picture of his beloved, who detested being photographed, without her realizing it. Our narrator cherishes this photograph and the entire relationship becomes encapsulated in the screen capture replacing all other experiences and memories. Soon it is not enough. Our narrator cannot imagine that, in a world where everything is recorded, that someone could completely disappear. In daily systematic searches for photographs of the nameless other, Google Street View and Google Earth allow him to move seamlessly through vast detailed three-dimensional space. This extraordinary geographical and social exploration is favored by Google satellite images, user-created 3D renderings of Stonehenge and Machu Picchu and Street View panoramas of favorite vacation spots. As an undifferentiated series of cultural, historical and contemporary symbols float together or follow one another in rapid succession, in a world where Dutch anthropologists discover pre-Socratic fragments on Turkish islands, perhaps we come to wonder as to the significance of anything and the place of tradition and history itself. Unlike Orpheus, our narrator is not seeking for his lost love but for photos of his love, he yearns for records of the relationship not the woman herself or the relationship itself. In the ultimate irony when he returns to the original photograph, it has been removed. By getting as close to possible to the world through technology, has our narrator not unwittingly distanced himself from this world? But maybe even more than a doomed quest, does not this whirlwind tour of an individual’s personal history and the world’s cultural history, this modern tale of loss, retrieval and loss again, expose that the change in our consciousness has preceded the change in our technology?

“Wherever I go, there I am” is the old adage, be it Yogi Berra or the Buddha. The detached gaze of a satellite image or an automatic Street View camera confronts a human consciousness whose ability to seek connectedness and meaning has already been compromised. Contemporary technological tools simultaneously open and close vistas on our inner and outer worlds.

16777216 is a new online work by Richard S. Mitchell, a San Francisco-based artist with a background in video. 16777216 is viewable through the Jancar Jones Gallery's website from August 28th until September 4th, click here to see it. The work consists of over 16.7 million frames, each a color in the RGB color model, displayed at 25 frames per a second. Colors are displayed when the web browser synchronizes with the server, where the colors slowly move from black towards white.

Your project 16777216 launches on the Jancar Jones Gallery's website this week - can you talk a little more about this project - what are you trying to achieve with this work?

I've been interested in using the Web as a medium for art for a long time. By medium I mean the place, center, and means of production, and not simply as a way to distribute work produced elsewhere. One early idea was a dynamic HTML spinning beach ball, using the inherent capabilities of a Web browser to display color and change its display over time, even without interaction from a user. I didn’t follow through on the beachball because I felt it was too much a one-liner, not multi-dimensional.

Issues surrounding sequencing, series, and serialization have been a major point in my video work for several years now: including numbers, text, and colors (from color sample sheets, etc.). Obviously, the RGB system is a numbered sequence of colors with many possible routes through it depending on how you map the total number of colors, a 24-bit number, to each of the 8-bit channels, which are semi-independent.

My goal with 16777216 is, on the one hand, to make tangible certain aspects of the computer’s representation of reality and, on the other, to produce a work pleasing to look at and contemplate.