An ecology project – reflections from review on 02/24/2010

diagrams20100224_midterm

Reviews of project from invited guests:

-Approaches of memory toward the surface: at the moment the surface is reacting to people’s actions, but may be should consider the other way around i.e. having the surface as the activator and affect people’s actions

-Should define the definition of memories and narrow down the area of exploration on memory

-Imaginations: it can be a project to explore the possibilities of opening up our imaginations to a new way of approaching the architecture discipline

Responses / brainstorming:

- I thought about the approach of having the surface as an activator to affect people’s actions. What will then be the differences of it from having people’s actions affecting the transformation and motion of the surface?

-Definitions of memory:

Etymology: Middle English memorie, from Anglo-French memoire, memorie, from Latin memoria, from memor mindful; akin to Old English gemimor well-known, Greek mermēra care, Sanskrit smarati he remembers

1 a : the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms b : the store of things learned and retained from an organism’s activity or experience as evidenced by modification of structure or behavior or by recall and recognition
2 a : commemorative remembrance <erected a statue in memory of the hero> b : the fact or condition of being remembered <days of recent memory>
3 a : a particular act of recall or recollection b : an image or impression of one that is remembered <fond memories of her youth> c : the time within which past events can be or are remembered
4 a : a device (as a chip) or a component of a device in which information especially for a computer can be inserted and stored and from which it may be extracted when wanted; especially : ram b : capacity for storing information <512 megabytes of memory>
5 : a capacity for showing effects as the result of past treatment or for returning to a former condition —used especially of a material (as metal or plastic)

Source from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/memory

-Memory in more developed sense:

Memory and Timescapes

http://urbantick.blogspot.com/2009/12/memory-timescapes.html

-imagination = yes

Some references for ideas:

Multiple ways of playing the idea of memory

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/motion/motartists.html

Computing an identity

Delayed reflection of self of the participant overlayed with previous those of previous participants. When the space is not occupied, the installation started reconstructing from images of previous events into series  interpreted events like those in dreams.

http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/computing-an-identity-tetsuro-nagata.html

Travel in Light

- light and shadows on stilled images of different landscapes played out the illusions of participants being in different places.

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/17238/en

Pockets full of memory.

Collection and arrangment of vast memories from the globe. The Participants inserted  images of possessions through internet to this central computer. The program set out for the images to move around and search for others with similar characters. The installation became a self organizing map through the whole duration of installation.

http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/pockets-full-of-memory/

Protozoagames

Interactive installation having human to follow the act of protozoa and vice versa. An very interesting installation.

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/art/protozoagames/protogames10.html

Video of protozoagames:

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/art/protozoagames/proto.playmov.html

Realm-1

Collection and arrangment of vast memories of people or events. A model of the processing of incoming images: storing, naming, ordering, structuring, experiencing, sedimentation and erosion. It is a (re)construction of memory, built from 266,144 photographs, taken over a period of 4 years, on different levels of being handled.

http://videomedeja.org/en/realm-1-part-1

Silicon Remembers Carbon

http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/src.html

“… the video source is made up from 2 streams of MPEG-2 compressed video, resident in RAM on a computer. The live mix between the two video sources is defined by a third video stream composed in real-time by a second computer. This mix-defining stream is made up in various ways of cross-frame dissolves (as in the first version) and silhouettes. The silhouettes are derived from the images of 4 video cameras positioned one on each side of the projection as though looking over the shoulders of people standing around the image. The sand/screen is lit with infra-red light by 4 infrared illuminators and the cameras have infrared-pass filters. Thus the sand is seen by the cameras a brightly lit back-drop against which people’s shadows are dark. Instead of casting shadows of darkness, people cast shadows of video, cutting the hidden layer of video into the visible one.”

Watch

http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/watch.html

“The video processes both present distortions of the perception of time. In one, the only things visible are things that are standing still. The effect is that of long-exposure photography, except that the image is truly live, changing subtly at every video frame. People that are moving are blurs or fogs across the image. People that are still are seen clearly.

The second process is the conceptual inverse of the first. People are only visible if they are in motion. They float as outlines of themselves in a dimensionless black void, and disappear again as soon as they are still.

The two images are projected with the first image beside the second, and with the second image flipped horizontally to mirror the first image.

There is the sound of a watch, a clock, a heartbeat and light breathing.

When the images are in this state, they are mutually exclusive. A person cannot exist in both images at once. The relationship between the two images may in fact be difficult to discern.

There is a motion sensor detecting motion in the installation space. At key moments (for example at the start of movement after a period of stillness), the processes are changed. Accompanied by the sound of a camera shutter, the two images become, for a moment, the real live video images so that the mirroring is properly established. Then the upper image starts blurring increasingly across time until it returns to its “long exposure” state. The lower image shows the outlines of the static aspects of the space as well (a sort of schematic of the context in which that motion exists.) then returns to only showing motion. These effects will happen only occasionally since I want the dominant relationship between the public and this installation to be one of “watching”, not acting.”

Hallucination

- virtually put people’s images on fire and an image of a non-existing woman were projected onto the “burning” images

http://www.jimcampbell.tv/