News
The latest on the activities of CRCA, it's faculty and alumni with some information on related events.
- cover story: SOFT CINEMA: Navigating the Database DVD is now available.Soft Cinema
- Ecce Homology @ SIGGRAPH2005: Ruth West is presenting her project of interactive art using genetic sequences as part of the conference's Emerging Technologies program. SIGGRAPH2005
- motione Project at ASU is presented as a collaborative project with composer Roger Reynolds. motione
- A new UCSD Computing Arts Alumni Chapter is being developed as a "virtual" chapter for graduates. Virtual Alumni
- RHIZOME ArtBase 101 presents work by CRCA/UCSD alumni Mark Daggett, Brody Condon and Amy Alexander and Eduardo Navas New Museum
On display from June 23 - September 10, 2005 in New York City, New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Amy Alexander will be Artist in Residence this summer at Digital Research Unit at The Media Centre in Huddersfield, UK. She'll be working on her upcoming software/live video performance project (codename: "AI to the People"), which looks at the subjective aspects of technology by developing unconventional computer vision techniques and using them to generate live videos. Project collaborators include CSE PhD candidate Vincent Rabaud and incoming ECE PhD candidate Nikhil Rasiwasia.
Some other recent and current sightings of Amy's work: Scream software was released in May; Extreme Whitespace was exhibited in the "Ghost in the Shell" exhibition at Sonar '05 in Barcelona in June; theBot is currently being exhibited at the "Rhizome ArtBase 101" show at the New Museum in New York; collaborative project Runme.org was included in the Open Line exhibition in Maribor, Slovenia in May; and CyberSpaceLand will receive an Honorary Mention from Prix Ars Electronica this September in Linz.
After Land Art
Article by Brett Stalbaum
intelligent agent's online magazine
CRCA visual arts researcher Brett Stalbaum has recently published an essay, "After Land Art: database and the locative turn", in intelligent agent's online magazine. This essay asks whether we might learn something from the history of land
art that might be important for any re-evaluation of the ontology of art
after modernism and conceptualism. It examines the tensions between the
20th century notions of modernism and conceptual art, underscoring their
constant interoperation as art system. After exploring the history of
database in computation and tracing how the concepts and implementations
of database in computer science were taken up by artists, the essay
proposes that the binding of abstraction to material actuality allows us
to move on to 21st century model of art practice that focuses on producing
located actions instead of visualization.
Manovich and Kratky Produce DVD Envisioning Cinema of the Future
How might cinema evolve in the era of next-generation networks, very-high-resolution displays, and unlimited computer storage?
To investigate an answer to this question, Lev Manovich, one of today’s most influential thinkers in the fields of media arts/digital culture and a Calit2 participant, teamed with award-winning new media artist and designer Andreas Kratky. The result is SOFT CINEMA: Navigating the Database, a DVD published and distributed worldwide by MIT Press (2005).
The DVD includes invited contributions from the leading figures in a number of fields: DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music); servo (architecture); Schoenerwissen/Office for Computational Design (data visualization); and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).
The DVD presents three films. Although they reference the familiar genre of cinema, the process by which they were created and the resulting aesthetics belong to the software age.
The films demonstrate the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema -- a “cinema” in which human subjectivity and the choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run an infinite number of times without repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts, and narratives. They envision a new media art form in which multi-frame, database-driven films can be assembled automatically by software in real time. The multi-frame layouts used were influenced by research at Calit2 in next-generation computer and network infrastructure.
This project started in 1997 when Manovich begin to think systematically about what cinema would be like with practically unlimited computer processing, unlimited bandwidth, extremely high-resolution displays that may cover whole apartment walls and buildings, and unlimited data storage.
“Imagine my excitement,” he said, “when a few years later I learned about the OptIPuter project at Calit2, which, according to is leader and Calit2 director Larry Smarr, was set up to figure out how to scale up all elements of today’s IT infrastructure, including computation, networking, and displays. I find it very exciting to be working on cinema aesthetics of the future next to computer researchers who are designing the technology that will make this possible.”
Lev Manovich, leader of the Soft Cinema project, is an associate professor of Digital Art at UCSD and author of The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), which has been hailed by Telepolis as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” In 1994, Manovich created Little Movies, the first film project created specifically for the World Wide Web. His computer-driven installations and films have been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, media, and film festivals in the US, Europe, and Asia, including ZKM, Karlsruhe; the ICA, London; SENEF, Seoul; and the ICC, Tokyo.
Andreas Kratky, author of the Soft Cinema software, has been responsible for media design and co-direction of a number of groundbreaking new media projects, including the award-winning DVDs That’s Kyogen and Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (both published by ZKM).
This DVD was produced with support from:
Soft Cinema: www.softcinema.net.
Manovich’s “RADAR” column at Calit2’s Website:
http://www.calit2.net/manovich/index.html
CRCA: crca.ucsd.edu
This article was written by Stephanie Sides, Calit2 Director of Communication
CRCA's Associate Director and Professor of Music, Miller Puckette, has pre-published his latest writing effort online. The Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music is about ...
..."using electronic techniques to record, synthesize, process, and analyze musical sounds, a practice which came into its modern form in the years 1948-1952, but whose technological means and artistic uses have undergone several revolutions since then. Nowadays most electronic music is made using computers, and this book will focus exclusively on what used to be called ``computer music", but which should really now be called ``electronic music using a computer".
The ideal reader of this book is anyone who knows and likes electronic music of any genre, has plenty of facility with computers in general, and who wants to learn how to make electronic music from the ground up, starting with the humble oscillator and continuing through sampling, FM, filtering, waveshaping, delays, and so on. This will take plenty of time."
Visit Puckette's website to browse an html version of the book, or download it via PDF or postscript. Pd examples and patches are also available online.
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