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.

On the electronics side, Sarah and Lara breadboard all their circuits, making it easier for them to experiment. Once they find a stage in the circuit that they think would be interesting to let the user play with, they replace the hard resistor, capacitor or pot with the soft resistor, or the felt sensor, by connecting the textiles directly to the board.

Sarah and Lara first showed me this pink interface, which I had also seen briefly at the ITP thesis show this past Spring. This pink interface uses a handmade stroke sensor, housed in the tendrils that are designed to invite people to pinch and stroke it. Each tendril is made of resistive and conductive thread stitched onto pieces of felt and embedded within the casing. There is more resistance at the bottom and less at the top, so pulling the tendril upwards increases the intensity of the sound, hooked up to a sound producing circuit. The tendrils also respond to pinching, where each pinch along its length locates a specific place on the linear path.

On the back of the felt square are alligator clamps that connect the signal from the circuits to an octave divider. The octave divider regulates the input frequency and outputs in various octaves, and this output is then plugged into the 555 timer, which makes basic square waves. This signal is then sent to a speaker, so you can hear it.

For their new project, they are building a quilt-like structure that will operate like one large modular analog synth. Sarah and Lara showed me one square of this structure.

These patches represent one module, and work as one circuit. There is an input and output on both the top and the bottom, and a stretch sensor made of crocheted wool connects these two with snaps. The crocheted wool cord is a stretch sensor – meaning that if pulled or stretched, it regulates the frequency of electricity and therefore manipulates the sound. Like the tendrils on the pink square, it is a variable resistor.

Once the project is complete, it will operate like a grid. There will be multiple patches like this – and the crocheted wool cords can be used to connect modules, shifting the sound around the grid. Additionally, as variable resistors, the cords themselves can be pulled and stretched to change the sound.

Lara also discussed the similarities between the DIY culture of felting and that of electronics. She hopes that these communities will pick up the techniques used in Felted Signal Processing, and towards this end, started putting tutorials online and is currently considering creating kits so that people can make their own soft circuits. For those who may want to learn soft circuitry in person, the Grants will be giving a workshop during the upcoming In/Out Fest happening on September 17th and 18th at the Tank in New York City. The subject of their workshop is textiles and electronics, and they will be teaching various techniques of soft circuitry while instructing participants on how to connect the textile to a circuit.

Thank you Sarah and Lara for the visit! Be sure to check their site for upcoming projects and announcements.

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.

Peitersen’s work stems from his desire to investigate how it feels to see the world through somebody else's eyes. In Peitersen's words,

If I could construct a device to record the view in front of me, a miniature camera I could wear without noticing, and if I could simultaneously track the movement of my eyes, then I would be able to calculate the direction of my gaze and project it onto my recorded scene-view. If I then meticulously constructed a video filter, according to the latest scientific research on how my eyes receive visual stimuli, and applied this to the scene-recording, then I would be able to see what my eyes had seen before my brain had interpreted the input. This way, I would see the world as it really is, pure and unobscured by neurological filters. And if I asked someone else to wear the device, I would be looking through their eyes. I would be seeing the world as they saw it, for a brief while we’d share the same visual reality, the same vision. That is, if there would be anything to see at all…

These questions led Peitersen to the discovery of the Mobile Eye, a device normally used in scientific research in order to track the human gaze and decipher visual impulses imperceptible due to the power of the brain to erase visual 'noise'. Peitersen used this tool to record his eye movements in various situations, from a simple visit to the park or a stroll around the building to more intimate settings, like his bedroom. The result were videos of uncanny beauty, in green-gray colors, resembling more a recording of somebody's nightmare experience than the record of a full-colored reality as we normally see it. The first series of photographs entitled Homunculus (2009) was Peitersen's first step in working with the visual results. Here, the green-gray images of the scenes recorded while wearing Mobile Eye are overlapped by an image of the all-observing eye. In naming his first series "Homunculus" - a term used in scientific research to designate “the little man inside the brain” - we can read Peitersen's desire not to stop at that point of investigation, seduced by the hallucinatory nature of the images. Instead, he had decided to continue further with questioning the contemporary definitions of how this little man sees and how this interpretation is shaped by the culture.

The following step was to ask somebody else to wear the device and to use scientific methods to reconstruct the visual perception of the other. This video material was first presented in Amsterdam in a show entitled “Saccadic Sightings: Ophelia” in 2009, accompanied by photographs of the same visuals. In the single-channel video projected in a dark room, a viewer was confronted with the uncanny feeling that stems from the sensation of entering someone's intimate world. In this work, one becomes a woman who runs through the fields, picks flowers, lets them float in a nearby spring, and then abruptly wakes up at the end of this dream-like sequence.

Peitersen's attempts to translate and understand somebody else's experience of reality brought him to science. What seemed to be the most striking revelation to him was that the quantum revolution, although it transformed the science of physics and had major practical implications on technology, did not manage to disturb Cartesian definitions of how we perceive reality in our everyday lives. In other words, we are still trapped in the world of Newtonian physics and never made the step towards truly understanding and integrating Einstein's postulates. This striking revelation seems to have prompted his questions even further into the direction of how an artist, assuming that art has the power to change the way in which we perceive the world, can help this revolution take place on the level of the visual. Is there a real power in art of doing so, or are we led into yet another deception of the mind?

Peitersen turns to history to help address this question. The story about the close friendship between Einstein and Bohr, and their contradictory positions on material reality, is the theme underlining Peitersen’s show “Saccadic Sightings: Einstein and Bohr.” Einstein's revolutionary discovery from the beginning of the twentieth century indirectly proved the non-existence of objective material reality; nevertheless, he had spent most of his late years trying to prove he was wrong. From his side, Bohr had embraced and deepened new discoveries in the sub-atom field, sketching the theory that solidified reality exists only through the eyes of the observer. In spite of this, what we witness in the decades that followed was the growth of the Cartesian division and supremacy of the brain, following the supremacy of the eye stimulated by the media. The remaining question is if this cultural training of sensory segregation actually erases the possibility of not only a true perception of reality, but also of the possibility to tune into somebody else's world view. In Peitersen's last show, the uncertainty of one’s perception and the particular reconstruction of the reality in the eye of the beholder reveals accordance with Einstein's and Bohr's early findings, prompting us to revision what we thought of vision in the first place. Hence, Observing Uncertainty reveals the ungraspable nature of observed reality, while the Observer Effect further translates the effect a beholder has on the observed. In both works, our vision appears to be out of control, where the final image resembles more a dark square disturbed by small fields of clear and focused vision. The rest is being reconstructed and re-imagined by the brain, a powerful machine that decides what we actually see in the end. The mode of viewing elaborated by these works uncovers how we are locked within the safety of Cartesian division and illusion of the brain’s mastery over matter. In order to see or feel like others do, we will perhaps have to turn to the undisciplined, uncivilized segments of our senses. If our mind has a problem of understanding the transformed reality after Einstein and Bohr, maybe we should look for the help of other senses in helping us to truly perceive this. Nevertheless, what we should always have in mind is that the moment we think we got it all, it is already gone. And the “Saccadic Sighting” is there to point this out.

Vesna Madzoski is an Amsterdam-based freelance researcher and curator. At the moment, she is working on the last part of her PhD project at the European Graduate School. The project focuses on the transformations in the field of contemporary art after the World War II in relation to the crisis in anthropology and the representation of the Other. For more details please see: http://madzoski.synthasite.com

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.

What are some of the techniques you've used in your video work to address serialization and sequencing? Are your videos analog or digital - does this difference in format come into the conversation at all?

At this point my videos are entirely digital. I am striving, however, for an aesthetic that relates to film but isn't merely imitating it. In my latest video Zing, all the images are digital but I processed them only in ways analogous to film processing: double exposure, negative/positive, fades and dissolves, looping, etc. I uploaded 'Zing' to my website today.

I scan a lot of stuff and use scripting in Photoshop to generate the video frames. The material I scan ranges from 8, 16, and 35mm film to sheets of plastic or paint. I'm also partial to things which form series like color samples and color correction cards. I collected my bus transfers for several years and used them in a count down sequence, mimicking the countdown you see on video/film. I also use Max/MSP Jitter for audio and visual processing.

I still collect images and objects that have some property of sequence. I'm also turning my attention to close examination of things and patterns around me---common things, visual and audio---that I can investigate, speed up, slow down, magnify, and convert to sequences.

You had mentioned in our correspondence the 1966 essay by Bruno Munari "12,000 Different Colours"- how does this essay connect with 16777216?

“Red, green, yellow, blue, white, brown, violet, orange, turquoise, grey … a list of colors such as this ends almost as soon as it has begun, but there are in fact twelve thousand colours in existence, like cockleshells all in a row. Think of it. Maybe it is not possible to tell them all apart, but they are there all the same. They exist in the catalogue of an American company which produces plastics, and their purpose is to guarantee a constant production that will always satisfy the needs of the market….

“How does one arrive at such a vast number of colours? There are various methods…. So we may in theory set about obtaining a great number of colours in the following way: let us imagine a red which contains not even the most infinitesimal quantity of yellow, blue, or other colour. Take this red … and paint a disc as big as a penny on a very long strip of paper. Add one drop of black to the red and paint another disc. Then another drop, another disc—and so on until the red has turned black. On the same strip, working towards the other end, paint other red discs, but this time progressively lightened by the addition of white, one drop at a time. By the time we have finished we will be extremely tired and our strip of paper will be several miles long. We can then repeat the operation starting with another red, for example with one drop of yellow added to the original pure colour. Then we start with a red with two drops of yellow added….”
—Bruno Munari. Design as Art. 1966.

When I read the Munari essay it seemed a perfect fit, strategy, or solution, to bringing out the properties of computer color and display we don't normally notice—the huge number of colors and their sequence and structure, and how they are tied to numbering/counting. I wanted to reveal this, to make it palpable, tangible. Something you can watch.

In the past, you've worked primarily in film and photography - when did you decide to also implement the internet into your practice? Have you worked on other online projects?

I have been working on Web stuff for a long time. The first website I built, in 1995, was to display works by me and other artists involved in a group I belonged to called untitled. As the number of artists on the site grew, the problem of keeping the data up to date and correct led to my interest in content management development. I had been working as a programmer since the mid 80's and was familiar with databases. So it seemed natural to use a database to manage the content of a site. (Incidentally, I'm an artist who took up programming, not vice versa. I went to college intending to major in chemistry but graduated with a degree in fine art/painting and almost a minor in music.)

It strikes me there are two ways of using the Web for artistic purposes: as a form of production and/or as the means of distribution. My early efforts focused on digitizing existing works and publishing them on the Web. One could also create the works digitally, but that site of creation is still outside the browser. I wanted to use a partnership between the page code and the browser itself as the site of creation. As I say this, it seems rather difficult to assign clear boundaries to where creation takes place. The idea arises in my head; I code it, test it, code it some more; I distribute it over the internet; the browser parses the code and displays the work. Is there an analogy here with painting or film? Or is video art more analogous? In this case it’s self-generating, purely iconic, i.e. with no indexical or symbolic dimension.

16777216 uses the Web for both production and distribution: the piece 'performs' in a web browser, is distributed via the Web, and is synched through the server. No matter where a user/viewer is, the 'performance' happens at the same time, discounting network latency and inaccurate clocks on clients.