Guy Claxton: Creative-Mindedness: When Technology Helps and When It Hinders

Skilful Looking

• Development of slow and patient ‘seeing
• Looking at other people – admiration (a kind of cognitive connection that opens the channel of imitation)

Making

• Drafting, crafting, coyping

Imagining

• Visualisation, dreaming (hypnagogic imagining), emphathising (taking another point of view), intuiting (feeling of rightness – embodied cognition)
• E.g.: Tibetan buddhists and the ability to stabilise, control and manipulate mental images
• Nobel prise – “what role did intuition play…”
• Thomas Edison – “smart dreaming” – thinking while dosing off – hypnogogic state (a state of mental play) – holding ball bearings above metal tray while falling asleep

Thinking

• Describing, explaining, hypothesising, analysing, critiquing

The creative mind as an improvising ensemble

Notes from a Marine Biologist’s Daughter – poetry / attention / imagination

Aesthetic vision engages a sensitivity to that which is beneath the surface, as well as to the surface itself… aesthetic vision perceives the potential for transformation within any apparent fixity”

Vera John Steiner – seeking the right sounding board for yourself / being a good sounding board

Studying Medium Effects on Childrenʼs Creative Processes

The Fourth Grade Slump

Tools for thinking – Vygotsky, 1867

Combining Concept Maps to Catalyze Creativity

How can concept maps aid creative problem solving?

Insight through analogy – transferring one problem to another – implicit hints, diagrams, abstractions, animation

Visual reasoning is an integral part of analogy (e.g. Davies and Goel, 2001)

The source problem: The description of the military problem –> The target problem: The description of the radiation problem.  Fortress / Tumor

Encouraging people to come up with an analogy – what if you don’t have a source problem?

An Artistic Dialogue with the Artificial

Asthetic experinece occurs when the information coming from the artwork interacts with information already stored in the viewer’s mind – Csikszentmihalyi

Artists as black box – artists as production mechanism – DARCI – darci.cs.byu.edu - neural nets that use image/adjective seeds

Compound analogy – TRIS – contradiction matrix – indexes prior solutions

Understanding Repair as a Creative Process of Everyday Design – Leah Maestri & Ron Wakkary

• Characteristics of physical objects for repairability –
• Digital materialness – repairability

Enduring Interaction: An Approach to Analysis and Design of Animated Gestural Interfaces in Creative Computing Systems  - Kenny K. N. Chow & D. Fox Harrell

• Merleau Ponty – our bodies absorb experience
• Deleuze – cinema is a new procession of time – our normal time is non-divergent, cinema (camera cuts) are divergent happenings in an environment
• Enduring environments in digital media
• Motive input and enduring environments:
  • GeNIE (Gestural Narrative Interaction Engine)
  • social narrative – William Lebuff

Atau Tanaka

• Sensor Band
• The instrument… acoustic / guitars / self-containedness
• Tool –> Instrument : Present at Hand –> Ready to Hand
• The Ladder of Citizen Participation – Sherry Arnstein (1969)
• Attali –> Composition
• C. Small –> Musicking

Dance – clatulip@uncc.edu

A Scale Model of Mixed Reality – Evan Barba

• Figural Space – Objects less than or equal to the size to the human body, can be apprehended without locomotion, can be subdivided into object (3D) and pictoral (2D) spaces.
• Vista Space – As large or larger than the human body, can be visually apprehended from a single place without locomotion.
• Environmental Space – Larger than the human body, too large or obscured to be apprehended without locomotion and therefore requires the integration or summation of information over time.
• Geographical Space – Larger than the human body, cannot be directly (physically) experienced and, therefore, must be represented figurally in a map or model.

• Combining scales 
  • Metaphors from other media
  • Cuts in film
  • Character arcs – growth
  • Movement between scales / transitions

Media Archeology

• nostalgia - abandonware – vinyl listening parties
• generational –
• history of commodity form – objects intermingling with dream worlds
• Abbie Warburgs
• Erkki Hultammo – Siegfried Zielinski
  • Media times
  • Paleur ontological – geological metaphor
• Kittler 
  • Foucault of the Digital Age
  • Tate 2008 Kittler with Rolling Stones

• remediation – thinking about the new through the old
• obsolete media
• planned obsolescence – media garbology – ecological phenomena
• Digital Rubbish – A Natural History of Electronics – Jennifer Dabrys
  • An expansion of the notion of time
    • Going inside the machine
    • Expanding notions of
• Bernhard Siegert
  • Aesthetics is a science who’s primary reality is signals (symbols)
  • Herman von Helmholtz
• The 4th Floor of Berlin VonHumbolt
  • Media Archeology Archive
  • Epistemological Toys – the usability of things as toys
  • Epistemological toys – media are epistemological frameworks – incorporate
  • Wolfgang Ernst
  • Worlgang Hagen (homepage) – you can read a whole Foucauldian genealogy into an object of technology
• Theory can be taught in ways that approach artistic practice
• lowtech.org – redundant materials – access space – rescuing from trash

• Deadmedia research versus zombie media

Garbology

• Residue materialities of un-useability
• Second level economy in reclaiming of material mining…
• Data carvery & Crystallisation
  • Howse
  • how a sledge hammer and a bunch of chemicals might do the
  • “daily data sediments” sonified - 
    • jussi: “not very aesthetically pleasing”
  • present pathologies of crystallisation
• capital, material, computer
• ecology of subjectivity – Guittar

data, capture of data, privatisation of data, obsolescence…

INTUITION & WONDER

Penelope Gouk

• The Renaissance
• Entertained and aroused to wonder – technical
• New musical instruments / private gardens
• Musical instruments cultivated a significant role of wonder
• Florence – Medici Family 
  • 15th Century – Platonic Academy
  • Marcilio Ficino
  • Poetry and music as magically effective
  • New translations of plato’s republic
  • Ficcino’s Plotineous – Hermes to invoke gods and cure disease
  • 1489 – Three books on life
    • drawing dawn astral influences through song
    • magical songs – early music impulse (to create music the way the Greeks did)
    • Lira – stringed instrument – Greek orchithera
    • Ficcino’s attempt to recreate a lost sonic world
  • Viol consort – cultivate music in parts – as part of their courtly identity – humanist agenda.  Playing of music associated with stability / social order
• Roman architect Vitruvius 
  • curious devices which display technical skill at the same time as giving delight
• Jesuit – Anthanaseus Kircher –
• Pythagoras – the hearing of a hammer at a blacksmith’s shop
• 16th Century
  • Clear nexus: Trade / culture / musical practice / philosophical theory underpinning it
• Antonio Naldi – new double stringed instrument
• Power of music – comic play – Chitteroni – chithera reproduction
• Galileo’s dad – correcting Pythagoras –
• Naturalis – Porta 
  • Sound as a way of transforming the humours ‘at a distance’
• 16th/17th century – magic was experimental
• “We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds.”
  • a mythical island where sailors –
  • foucauldian panopticon –
• Bacon – Baroque – courtly musical practice
• Kircher – 1620s
• Marin Mersenne – the nature of sound – models of particles
• Hooke – musical analogies
• “wonder mongerer”
• Later part of early modern – a shift away from courtly patronage – towards a more inclusive commercial environment

Guerino Mazzola

• When Einsteim was asked what time was – he made a gesture of the clock’s movement
• Formulas <–> Gestures  | Mathematics <–> Music
• Making music / performing
• The Topos of Music
• La Vaerity Du Beau Dans La Musique
• Flow / Gestures and Space
• Musical Creativity (Springer)
• Oniontology of Music
  • Communication
  • Facts – Wittgenstein – the world is everything
  • Processes
  • Gestures
  • American transformational theory
• Facts – notes chords
• Processes – form diagrams  (Poeietizes Facts)
• Gestures – David Lewin transformational theory (Brutah)
• Apologies for the abstract nature of the talks but the abstract is the concrete – we survive through abstraction
• Topos theory
  • There are three compound space types
    • Product
    • Union
    • Form (library)
• Gesture – “the topological category of continuous paths on diagraph”
• Functions as movement – Bruha – most functions are lies (“mathematicians are liars”) – i.e.: they are transformations from one domain to another

Joel Ryan

• The Inside-Out Trombone
• Interface and instruments are different –
• George Lewis – trombone is a ‘joke instrument’
• Metalurgy and musical influence – the way that sound lives inside the materiality
  • Mayan creation myth
  • Mechanical systems and models – matter is lifeless
  • Musical model – vitalism – an inner principle
  • Newton – although often thought of as modern –
  • Romantics have a concept of the mechanistic
• Trombones look and feel like a computer instrument
• Musical instruments are simpler than they used to be?
• How to make a flute from a stone
• Improvised music as audible risk taking
• Interfaces with no risk – cannot become musical instruments

Discussion

• Understanding is the gesture and continuing 
  • The difference between the french and american version of gesture (gesture for americans is a symbol,
  • Japanese knoh theatre – the stage is an instrument
  • Gesture as a measurement of time
• Every instrument is a stage
• Representing quantity in language
• The artist as creating a world – the universal and the local

GARDENING COMPLEXITY

Koert van Mensvoort (Next Nature)

• Coevolving with the technological autonomy
• Our goal: Create Humane Technology
• Language for complexity – gardening, nurture, growth

Chris Salter

• Organisation of material over time and space
• Notes on composing with complexity
• Composition within the overflowing of science and technology
• Complexity – ambiguous
• Responsive environments – a performative space that responds
• Perception / Affect – between the body and the environment
• Mark Weiser – “The Computer and the 21st Century” – the most profound technologies are those which disappear
• Ubiquitous computing – how computers dissapear into the environment.  Wieser is looking to having many many many computers.

• NIME – musical expression – mapping

• Xenakis 
  • Wanderley – mapping is the liason between performer and
  • Poly Topos – Montreal / Pluni – Brownian motion
  • Polytope Beaubourg
  • 1/25th of a second changes – near the fusion rate of the eye
  • A vast audiovisual synthesis previously unattainable and, above all, placed in the realm of Abstraction, which is the natural and indispensable environment to its existence.” (Notes towards a musical gesture)
  • Programmer – Robert Dupuis

• Rethinking complexity
  • How can temporal patterns be mapped to something that was not envisioned by its designers
  • Dynamical system
• Complex Systems are made up of a large number of parts – Herbert Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity”
• What is a complex system?
• “They are the laws of the passage between complete order and complete dissorder” – Xennakis
• Defining complexity
• Defining actions: Nonhuman actors within a system consisting of many similar elements which are interacting in a disordered way and has the potential of forming patterns or structures both internal to itself but also in relationship to the audience’s perception.

• Symmetrical systems don’t create order – statistical mechanics –
• Stuart Koffman’s attempt – structure for nothing – asymmetry – the different is the force (cosmological)

• The time of material technologies versus the time of ‘the human’ – LEDs and strobes have different ‘light up’ times – so become a ‘non-human’ (Latour) kind of time
• Interaction is never developed in time – but in space – i.e.: in state space

Dick Rijken – Intro

• Infrastructure – providing infrastrucutre
• Complexity – ecologies 
  • Things are so complicated that we can’t understand things anymore
  • The idea of awe – the sublime -
• Sonic Acts – V2 – Instute for Media Kunst

Adi Altna from V2 & Sonic Acts – Chair

Kristina Andersen – STEIM Archives

• Peter Schat
• Synthi AKS
• Wim van Kuillenburg
• Instant Composers Pool
• Dick Raaijmakers – burning microphone
• Misha Mengelberg
• Archeology – media archeology
• Maurits Rubenstein
• Sabien de Kleijn
• Sher Doruff
• Philippa Cullen
• Dirk Dekker
• SenseLab

Context & Matter

Neue Slowenische Kunst

ZTT

Paul Morley

Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy in conjunction with York St John University

Earth Sky Gods and Mortals

Actants / Actors / Monad / Substance – Morton / Leibnitz / Harman

Neither physical objects not human subjects only (radical toolism between human and world)

We cannot think human without world or world without humans

Subject are a special form of objects – OOO is not a materialism

What objects are

• Aristotle as a figure of the cutting edge
• Hussrl’s intentional objects
  • the intentional object does not hide, they are encrusted with extraneous detail
• Heidegger
  • Tool-beings – Any change in the world from one state to another
  • Withdrawn from consciousness –
• Two philosophies of entities as complete things… 
  • Undermining and overmining of objects – too shallow or too deep

Each of these has numerous sub-variants

Two ways

• Finding a fundamental – making things smaller
  • Mainstream materialism – basic mathematical
• Apaeron – treating the universe as a single whole from which all things 
  • A

Part and pieces of a body can be changed without changing the body…

Overmining of objects is…

• subjectivism / idealism
• cannot explain why anything would ever change – there must be an excess to the things that are hidden
• Meillasoux – absolute contingency – too high a price to pay…

Critique of Materialism – Undermining

• “Believing in bananas and cities is just a surface effect”
• Breaking things down to quarks and atomsss
• Dogmatic set of traits that undermines materialism in the first place…
• Pre-socratics – amateur boxers, slaves in a household – they are obsessed with the obsession with material gloss

Latour / Whitehead – are overminers – too concrete . cinematic

Bergson / Deleuze – underminers – deny the ontology of the object itself

not reducible downward to constitutents – not reducible upward to their apparences to us

Aristotle – the individual thing reaaserting itself

• Badiou on Deleuze – the return of the question of being is the most contemporary problem in philosophy
• Heidegger asks the question of being in a
• Truth and Method – “What being is should be determiend … Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself was time…” – Goddamer’s realist conception of Heidegger

Time for Heidegger

• Sheer presence undercut for threefold structure
• Bergson’s movement
• Vertical reasons – instants are more than what they seem to be…
• Tool Analysis – 1919 (Being and Time)
  • Tool Being – radicalising phenomenology
• Dewey having already
• Lavoisier – relations with objects (oxygen / hydrogen / chair )
• Temporality for Heidegger – things cannot be thought outside of their use (realism)
• It is not humans that cause objects to withdraw…
• Medieval islamic philosophy – fire burning cotton
• Being and relation – being is that which exists in excess

Husslr and Heidegger – for Husserl everything is overdetermined… for Heidegger everything withdraws into the dark void

Islamic philosphy – occasionalism – nothing interacts, only God interacts with them

• The problem with occasionalism is not that God is at the top – but that any one entity is specifically involved
• Asharites – A Farabi -
• Artistotles – autonomy of individual substances  - A.’s prime mover is not one who accounts of every act / event in the world, but one of an originary movement

Aporea – if a thing is one than how can a thing have parts…

Aristotle’s attack on the Metagarians – Chapter 3

Saul Cripkey

Reductionism of “Objects” – trees are objects but

Manuel Delanda’s definition of objects – Philosophy of Society – redundant philosophy

Chicago is no less a real thing than the blades of grass on the Cubs’ field (“The Chicago Cubs cannot be overmined or undermined”)

For Aristotle – Time Magnitude and Motion as continuous – Substance as discontinuous

Aristotles non-individual forms was his fear of infinite regress

Violence (ethics?) and naturalism – what is the difference between splitting a bag of balls down the middle and a splitting a duck down the middle

Bertano – immanent objectivity – precursor

What Heidegger is actually talking about with time is space – “Being and Space” – space and time is the tension between the relation and the representation

Distinction between intentional and real objects

• Intentional can be aggregate
• Real objects are all aggregate
• Not all aggregates are real objects

Aristotle’s four causes – vicarious causation – two things cannot effect

Latour – Pandora’s Hope – politics and neutrons – Latour Jolieux – Latour’s problem of infinite regress…

Respect for modern physics

• Quarks, etc. – it they are objects

Everything Must Go – scientific reductionism – all these crazy ways of getting around autonomous objects

Aristotle is very c

Stephen – Occasionalism – Islamic – Mallabranche

How two things can effect each other – if they are indefinable

Pan-psycheism – everything gets a mind that has subject / object relations.  Correlationism of a form where humans are not at the top or bottom of a hierarchy would be ok.  Meiilasoux is too Hegelian… as are Badiou and Zizek.

Deriving an ethics / politics from ontology, e.g.: Badiou – theory of value from ontologies are often too hasty… People like Badiou’s politics but they may seem arbitrary / loose from his ontology.

Radical Evil The fate of the image – church history

Object A oriented ontology

Iranian filmmaker book – abase kuriostami

Recurrence of the image of a zig zag going up a hill… Sinuous path.

Visionary geography – curbin book – third or intermediary realm between matter is immTerialised spirit is corporeal – 869 Ad – Constantinople council – the holy spirit – according Christ the power of god. Making body and soul … – subtle matter – - abosena – the falassiffa – the Devine had to be returned to an incarnate – a single finite being

Curbin – 869 – philioqua clause – the image

Icons -’john the iconophile – the image gives us something to see and to see through… Shows us the absence of the thing depicted

The source of light remains hidden – the meNing of light was altered – lumen (invisible source, unique singular) and lux (no longer real but abstract). De-illuminated source… Islamic philosophy is the philosophy of light

What was lost – the changing iconography of Christ… Eternally youthful boy becomes the mature man with signs of a differentiated virility (curbin)

The demonstration of the son of god as a man… With austentstious artistic eepesentation of his penis

Steinberg book on renaissance representation of Christ

Incarnation – draws it’s power from faith – flesh needs to be real

Dosetists dosetism – christs body

Postipherous doctrine

Docema – to show and to expect

Koran passage – about the Jews not having killed Christ – curbin tries to insist that this is docetism

Man can eradicate the devine

The docetist asks for a physical spirit – genetalia of Christ – the sexuAlised body as a physical spirit

Deleuze -’the image conceived once again as an opening of a duality – not in space and not in the head. The light lux became challenged … Cinematic lighting

Kirrustemi close up 1990 movie Image theft – Macmal bak – film The Cyclist

Retreat of the state in the film – similar to the retreat of god in the islamicist philosophies

Islamicist philosophy as the philosophy of ONE – but once this is said – the reality of the other has to be affirmed. “Unity ignores and refuses you”

Mirrors – the theophanic form – material substrate – linked to proximity

Practices of performance as offerin something to philosophy

Athenian tragedy and Ionian philosophy

Theatrical turn in philosophy

Zarathustra

Anthony ulman –

Staging the philosopher as a character

Conceiving the philosopher

Metaphysics in action – theatre is in reality the

Application implies instrumentalisation – disciplinary issues

David Saltz – performance theory very rarely advance it’s own philosohical ideas – philosophical parasite

parasitic on the arts – arts as philosophy 101. Stories and ideas from film – that arts use philosophy as a way of articulating philosophy ideas ‘correctly’ – Francis

Richard j lane – Beckett resisting critical treatment

Deleuze – material and sensual

What us theatre and what is philosophy … Presuppose the

The creative mind – Bergson
To bring perception closer to metaphysical change

Experience and insight from the activity of kaprow – straw and ice – could waiting, melting, straw be a philosophy

Philosophies of… History, science… A philosophisarion of everything

Disciplinarian takeover paranoia?

Francois larowell – to thing without the authority of philosophy, nonphilosophies

• Mark Dorrian

• metis: Adrian Hawker + Mark Dorrian
• northroom – Edinburgh / panopticon prison – Admiral Neilson telescope shaped monument
• Calton Hill
• 1785 – first ever panorama – Barker’s panorama
• Leiscecter Square panorama in London
• panorama as first ever immersive viewing device
• Bentham’s psycho-architectural point about there not being the need for a subjective
• Optical super-ego of the prisoners
• Hume’s Monument
• Edinburgh optician – Short – builds the camera obscura – outlook tower
• Geddes v Short
• Geddes camera obscura – large dish – walking across a piece of paper
• Malign power of visibility and opticality
• Maria Short – popular camera obscura observatory – wanted the camera obscura back from Geddes
• feniskitoscope / zeotropes

• Hume’s Monument 
  • James Turel – sky spaces – more about material
  • “weathered by culture and also by nature”
  • “the way a shadow moves slowly could tell us about the latitude of the city”
  • speculative mapping of the cracks and seems and edits (re-inset dates of the death and birth of Hume)
  • mirrors looking up into a fresco

• ‘whale bones’ and petrified pine trees – screens and shadows of holding positions
• architectonic
• “a panorama of peripheral vision”
• www.northerncity.co.uk – Paul Carter essay:  NORTHROOM

• cultural centre – northwich – chesire
• tudor buildings – tourist center – riverside walk

• Egypt – museum – pyramids, gun club, tourist centres
• Michel Serres – 1881 Plan of Triangulation of the Pyramids
• The effects of myth is to establish the founding moment of geometry – time stops so we can measure the shadow of the sun.
• Repeating the nets of a form

• teaching in architectural practice – alternative cartographies
• architectural projects having a different set of orientations –
• Warsaw project – boomflak (german sprayable paper product) – photo of materials, computers, complex interplay of methodologies in a chain of representations
  • stalin’s house of culture – returning landscapes to the city – folding /
• “these things are never yours” – as a collaboration with materials, chance and one’s thoughts
• spaces are not neutral – architectural speculation -
• architecture is representation – the studio as a “second site” (could this site leak into the first site…?)
• Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914)
• Haec si tu postules ratione certa facere nihilo plus agas…  ”To ask for these things to be confirmed by reason is just as idle as to try to be rationally mad” – lord minto’s palace edinburgh – pediment

Mike Stubbs:

• collaboration
• chance – stocausen
• “an artist that didn’t want to be an artist” – didn’t want to
• prankster

Sarah Cook

• Bringing together of the remit of both of the organizations – Tate and FACT
• Distinction between producing a more museum-based
• Blogs, youtube, file-sharing…
• Media in a more expanded way – which is what Paik’s work is all about

John G. Hanhardt

• Film and video collection
• Whitney / Guggenheim
• Smithsonian American Art Museum – Nam June Paik New Media Center
• Madison Square Park

• Dusseldorf / Liverpool
• Institutional difference and breakdowns – representations of video tapes as very important
• NJP – embraced a large and multifaceted view of media…
• Challenge and example for a new generation of artists

• NJP Story
  • Korea birth
  • University in Japan – music, theory
  • Participation – avant garde music, Fluxus 50′s and 60′s
  • 1964 zen for film
  • Exposition of Music Electronic Television – 1963 – Gallery Pernas
  • Overcoming the institution of television – reconfiguring the apparatus – tearing apart the television – remake the CRT
  • Paik viewed the television as a means of open communication
  • NYC – 1964 – 40 years of incorporating the latest developments of technology as well as creating new technologies
  • Never satisfied with what he could ‘buy off the shelf’ – Paik synthesizer
  • Charismatic – current events – reading, writing, speculation – inquisitive, radical transformer of thoughts and ideas
  • Writing was part of his thinking
  • 2012 – Smithsonian’s work in developing a show about process
  • 1970 – Global Grove and the common market
    • goal: open free flow of information
  • 1973 – Global Grove
    • imagine a future when the tv guide is as thick as the telephone book
    • when will artists have their own television stations
    • when wall to wall video art will be installed in homes
    • when will the video chair be put into museums
  • Inquisitive / demanding intelligence
  • Lending support to innovation and other artists
  • The TV labs – artist residencies, technology dissemination, public access television
  • Alternative Space Movement for video production and exhibition

• Utopian

• The Principle of Hope – Ernst Bloch
• Pragmatic – imagined big, brought key people into the process

• Living with the living theater
• Alan’s complaint
• Good morning mr orwell
• Wrap around the world
• The More the Better (Public Artworks – Korea National Museum)
• Candle Projection – TV Chair – Random Access
• Paste the strips of audio tape directly on the wall – scraping the sound – releasing the sound
• Magnet TV – reconstruction and deconstruction of these media and technologies
• Rhetorical forms – metaphor to irony
• The goal of humanising technology
• TV Garden – TV’s explosive growth
• Remix – the use of film segments, and favorite musics, refashioning the body of his work as he advanced
• Appreciation – importance and value attached to collaboration – Ginsberg, Cunningham, Cage, Moormann, Abe-Paik Synthesizer, Kubota
• Relationship to today’s changing and expanding media technology

• process
• linking of people
• community / communities
• sharing ideas and differences
• art and ideas

• Electronic Superhighway – Guggenheim
• Cybernetics -
• Bell Labs – 1960s -
• Towards ultimately how we receive language, music, moving image
• Paik’s relationship to museums and alternative spaces:

• physical institutional spaces
• two pieces – one from early one from late
  • 1970 – Video Commune (Beatles From Beginning to End). WGBH Boston – 4 hrs – Judd Yelka – TV Studio that becomes in Nam June’s hands an experimental space – Rock and Roll as embodying a new spirit – Fred Barzick producer in television
  • The studio as an open circuit – celebrating process and an openness to innovation
  • David Atwood
  • Material – ‘different with film”
  • Magnet TV and interactivity… distorting the image processor’s output
  • Rotunda Center PIece – 2000 – The Worlds of Nam June Paik
  • “Modulation in Sync”
  • Post-video space – 7 story waterfall – laser projected onto the water – return to laser
  • The laser as power / capacity as a means of transmission – Baumann / laser artist 70s/80s (Whitney 1982 retrospective)
  • Baumann had a system where you could project by laser Nam June’s video images – but Paik wanted to push this further and projected the laser through a crystal – so creating undistorded echoes of the video
  • fusion – modulation and sync – projecting a new media environment
  • ‘post-video space’ – new media possibilites that embraced and transcended the new media space
• both spaces transformed – the
• Charlotte Mormoon – Whitney performances of the TV cello… Public performance
• K456 – robot that was out on the street and hit by a car – comment on the tragedy of technology – so we could learn how to cope with it

• The fundamental impact of all of the arts – the artists gave us new ways to see ourselves and the history of media…
• The virtual archive of moving images and histories… will only expand our thought process
• Inspired
• A thick history of many artists movements and initiatives – there’s a tendency to reduce this history – stress the collaborative mechanisms
• Politics – not in isolation – process tapes
• Conceptual art not isolated from imagining a new art practice
• Today: technologies can be activated can be transformed and remake the hierarchies and structures of the art world
• The example of NJP’s history is to remake new practices and new histories
• New kinds of museums – the “post-museum environment”

Sarah Cook & John Handhardt

• Anecdotes – experience of working on exhibitions with Nam June
• Hackers – being led by technology – versus being led by ideas…
  • In the 80′s – fulfilling what the programme could do – the imagination, the image the idea…
  • Remaking the television set – anticipating the development of the portapack
  • Megatron matrix – software
  • Seeing the technology and what it can do – but then imagining beyond that
  • Flat screens – being done in artistic practice in galleries
• The notion of speed / music
  • New Music – Pop Music – Detroit Wheels (Global Grove)
  • Wanted to capture the audience – not boring
  • The rhythm of the music – play, tricksters
  • Television as only framing a larger part of the world
  • Shot Analysis – of Global Grove – the rythms of editing and analysis
  • Sook – curator – rythm of the video image (record player pieces, tape pieces)
  • Living with the living theatre -
• The aesthetic links to Madison avenue…
• Questions about the links to contemporary digital practice (was Paik interested in the “Analog” moment)
• Enlightening / Insttructional role

Anton Lukoszevieze – video piece… water from sea, poured into bowls

• musical outcome of fluxus performance
• Paik was a composer – studied
• Friend / colleagues – Stochausen
• Dick Higgins – John Cage
• Brecht – empty vessel – card

• Paik – Primitive Music – sonic potentials of that object…
• the potential in a primitive object
• kankles – lithuanian harp dulcimer thing

Roy Ascott

• Iowaska – peruvian
• Senses of the first order – sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste
• Second order sense
  • Korea – a company opens up a new building and shamens come to restrcutre the psychic space (not an empty ritual)
  • The ways that environments can change science
  • “As not what science can do for art – but what art can do for science”
• Second-order cybernetics – about the individual within the system
• Critique of science + art -
• The end of the single-self organism – we will all be transparent
• Art practice has an import function as rebuilding the self
• Duchamp – Cesanne – relationships to the picture
• Fernando Pessoa – portugese poet – heteronym
  • cracked the whole notion of the western self
  • he was open to other personalities
• Applying curiosity – h

Roy Ascott & Mike Stubbs

• studied under richard Hamilton and passmore
• Cybernetics and Business -
• Ross Ashbury – the computer as a brain
• Analogy versus digital – the possibility of neural networks
• Basic Design department – move to the computer
• Cybernetics to biology – move to the computer
• mythology of instrumentality of geographical features – a mound is not just a mound
• Contemporary utopianism – witnessing via television events in north Africa – collective consciousness?
• Realign anatomy – to a hyper-cortext – a dynamic set of parts that is constantly shifting. More and more possible with these telematics to understand dynamic mind
• Not just talking about agreement between people – but a different kind of dynamic thinking (Facebook, etc.)
• Inquisitiveness and curiosity
• Speculate on the future:
  • inevitably thinking about the city
  • outlived its point
  • dichotomy of city/rural will change
  • shifting seemlessly between different states
  • ideology – set about bravely
  • redefining what it is to be
• Question about authenticity:
  • centuries of definition of authenticity
  • questioning the idea of authenticity of self
• Question (John Hanhard) about terms:
  • modern (object in space) / post-modern (process) / syncretic (flow)
  • aesthetic values – we exist in a kind of media flow (of life, variable reality, ecology)
  • contemplation time spaces – have shifted
  • seeking the unified self
  • attacked Freud in the newspapers of
  • Uspensky
• Question – utopian imaginings – hope for human good to technological development
  • The way that technologies develop – the way they bring to bear on being instrumental in the world… rethink education in this way
  • Utopianism is not foolish, is not empty – telematics – African telephones (it didn’t require
• Question – Paralysis or crisis of identity
  • gridlock – living becomes an outside external world
  • where might the opening up of the
• Question – Imply the shaman as a kind of ancient technology
  • shamans as a somatic technology
  • instrumentality of the shaman
  • psychic space – frequently shaped done through music -
  • we would do well to pay attention to psychic technologies as much as those of a chemical colloidal computational kind
  • shifting the balance of a cartesian mind – meat generating mind is childish
  • Evolution as accessing the field of consciousness (which is already there)
  • David Chalmers – australian – how the mind relates to fields of consciousness
  • Correlation is a ‘disease of modern science’ – in that we use brain power
• Question – ownership and capitalism – worrying?
  • RA – we must act fast
  • Using these utopian ideals to counteract -
  • Paik positioning – linguistic disguise and poise  

Ruth Cathlow

• Furtherfield
• Nam June Paik as a tinkerer
• Andy Deck (american) – Any Abrahams (dutch in France)
• Artist’s approrpriate of new media to bring hte audience closer
• Utopian projections of a networked world (dark mirror)
• Realtime cybernetic feedback loops, emergent collective behaviors, narcissism,
• Dissagrees with the catalog – that NJP was not the father of new media art unless you can have more than one father
• Diwo – do it with others
• Budda and the awareness of the self – appearing in the work – contemplation of contemplation of contemplating
• The big kiss by Annie Abrahams
• Camera as screen
• Random access – upset about lack of access at Tate
• Deck – open system of work online – public glyphiti wall
• Part of the desire to renounce and decry the capitalistic overbearing is to get us closer to technologies we “ignore, but that will again ignore us”
• These things are about us understanding the world as well as influencing it

Sook

• Paik taking the role of translating the Avant garde via technology to an audience
• The broadcast box – can u separate the Early and late work of paik as more/less radical (ie using broadcast as a means Instread of taking apart tvs)

John Hanhardt

• a medium doesn’t make itself redundant – Corey archangel – archive of computer technology
• Chris burden remaking the first tv pattern
• Kit Galloway – Doug Davis – inserting oneself (Marisa olson) – 80s performative presence

Charlie Gere question about military history…

• Paul baron – diagram of networks – nuclear war – Paik was a product of the cold war -
• Sook – technology is cheap and was never thought through as a threat – it was welcomed with open arms (does the military history matter?)
• Stan vanderbeek
• The art world is a closed system – something will emerge from this
• Roy Ascott – Gregory Bateson – Norbert Weiner
• Robert Malina – his dad was a rocket maker
• Alister Crowly
• Technology and the situations of contemporary culture – these are just systems, yes… But all human systems are technologies

Question about ‘not forgetting’ about the filmic history of this work… Cinema, Youngblood…

• Michael Snow Ramos nephew
• Gary Schume

Me: An initial definition of openness of systems art for the 21st century : there is nothing you know that the artist maker doesn’t.