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18 November 2017 by nathaniel

Syllabus sharing! Interactive and Generative Art – a Max, MSP, and Jitter class at UWM

Welcome back to another episode of syllabus sharing here at Implicit Art!

“Bound by periphery,” Caitlin Driver in Art 316

This class focuses on interactive technologies and aesthetics in contemporary art. Students will learn basic software development and real-time computational methods. They simultaneously learn and make projects with MIDI sounds or drawings, digital audio, human interface devices (USB game controllers, Bluetooth phones and more), and recorded and live video files for mixing and computer vision (body- and motion-tracking, for example). Assignments include many small projects with varying technical goalposts, as well as a mid-term and final artwork that will be more focused on conceptual-material aesthetic themes.

Most of my students have little or no background in coding, so, like my Electronics and Sculpture class, this syllabus works as an introduction to interactive art. That said, I offer it at the 300-level, so that my digital art students will understand bits and bytes, audio and video, how computers “think,” and my other artists will be able to bring their skills with crafting images or objects (etc) into the mix. I also “stack” it with a 400-level class, so grad students, or advanced students that want to take it a second time, can add another dimension of creativity and criticality.

I teach this in Cycling74’s Max: a visually-based, object oriented programming environment. What does that mean? You build a flow chart for your data (whether that be sensors from a phone, a video feed, sounds, etc), and that input is transcoded and turned into something else. Come again? OK. For example (an example I give on the first day, and that I remade in my PJs while typing this – shown left), plug a microphone object into a meter object to see how loud real-time sound is. Take a video grabber and plug that into a screen (“world”) object to see your live webcam. Use a multiply (“*”) object with each stream on either side, and you get a live video that fades in and out based on how loud your subject speaks into the microphone. (Kitty, from kitchen: What are you yelling about in there? Me: Just blogging!  Kitty: ???) It’s relatively easy, super cool, and completely visual. (Processing, which is more direct coding in Java, is actually taught in the music department at UWM, and I often recommend my students take that, too).

Joe Grennier’s “Faces” in Art 316

I’m gladly sharing last year’s syllabus and calendar online. It is under a CC-by license (Creative Commons Attribution), meaning, you can do whatever you want with it (use, distribute, remix, etc), so long as you credit me and acknowledge the license I used, link back to this page, and do not prohibit anyone else from doing said same.

The semester arc is project-based, and I teach ‘objects” (in the flow chart) and data dynamics (etc) as we go along with make, make, making. This is the order:

“R2-generator”
A generative “doodle” of software-based sound, which often sounds like R2D2, using MIDI and/or digital signal processes, and any combination of buttons, toggles, metronomes, randomizers, counters, and/or other learned objects.

“Pollack-bot”
A small, generative drawing project using jit.lcd or jit.gl.sketch, math, decision trees, gates, switches and/or the keyboard or mouse.

“Vizzie Visualizer and/or BEAP beater”
A generative or interactive project that uses randomness, feeds, and/or live input towards somewhat interesting or provocative ends. Students will be required to use both video (live and/or pre-recorded) and digital audio (live and/or pre-recorded) as part of this project – and pre-made patchers from the Vizzie and BEAP libraries are most welcome.

“Stupid pet trick” (mid-term)
An interactive art work with some form of external input (Human Interface, Computer Vision, Arduino, etc). uses pre-recorded video and/or live or pre-recorded sound along with some other form of input/output. Students will write a brief statement about their work (less than 300 words), and their technical abilities and use of inventive juxtapositioning will be judged against this text’s framing of concept, creativity and both interactive and visual aesthetics.

Final Project
A large-scale interactive and/or generative and/or networked installation, performance, tool or art object. Again, students will be graded against their artist statements, on technical abilities, conceptual frames, creativity and both interactive and visual aesthetics. Undergraduates will show complete and working software, budget, and sketches for the full installation. Graduate students must set up the full installation somewhere in Kenilworth as part of their final critique.

Of course, as with all my classes, there are consistent discussions around the aesthetics and ethics of our work. The readings for undergrads are:

  • “Action, Reaction and Phenomenon,” Rhizome.org (free online) (2008)
  • Katherine Hayles: Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments (available via Muse) (2002)
  • Philip Galanther: What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory (available from CiteSeer) (2003)
  • Nathaniel Stern: Interactive Art and Embodiment (introduction) (2013), made available by the instructor.
  • “The Aesthetics of Play,” from The Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, by Katja Kwastek.

Grad students do additional readings and context-based work, and are additionally required to read (and we discuss):

It is SUCH a fun class, with great work, and a high satisfaction factor as I watch my students learn to think differently: about technology and data, about art and aesthetics, about interaction, relationality, and ethics. AND, while I’m on parental leave, I’m very excited to see what new dimensions Jessica Fenlon can add to the class and program. I’m working on getting her in at UWM – and look out for a feature on her work on this blog in the coming weeks…

Here’s the Interactive and Multimedia Art syllabus, in Word format. Enjoy art, teaching, and learning!

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25 October 2017 by nathaniel

Sketching: The World After Us, speculative media sculptures

This blog post is a sketch – something I will occasionally do about my own work, or with others. It will always be a thinking-with of new materials and ideas, with this one coming out of the writing of my forthcoming second book (Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics), chats with colleagues and peers and specialists, playing with media objects, proposing a fellowship (I didn’t get), and more. I welcome feedback! I imagine this particular proposal being a years- and perhaps decades-long project, with this first exhibition being produced over the next two or so years… The images are very recent experiments!

THE WORLD AFTER: US SPECULATIVE MEDIA SCULPTURE

What will Digital Media do, after us?

Galaxy (yes, the phone)

The World After Us will be a new series of media sculptures that materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. Through research, experimentation, and craft, I will try (and likely fail) to turn phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels – and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes. I will attempt to mimic geological time, as pressure and heat – through chemical interactions or specialized machinery – on laptops and tablets, then display where that potential lies, as petrified-like LCDs or mangled post-exploded batteries, on pedestals in a gallery. I hope to turn “dead media” computers into efficient planters for edible goods, food for mold, or seeds of their own growth – and show both those experiments, and their results, as videos and sculptural forms. I will also turn ground phones into usable supplies, for example ink and paper, and put them to use in these new forms. The final outcome will be an internationally exhibited body of work, and catalog. It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on an Earth scale, or conversely from the perspective of bacteria. But we can feel such things, through art and storytelling – making our aesthetic encounters both conceptually and ethically vital toward new futures. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.

The World After Us will be a traveling exhibition and catalog, beginning in Milwaukee, and shown in several other spaces internationally. It asks:

What will digital media be and do, after us?
What will my laptop, or phone, look like in a million years?
How will our devices weather over time?
Can we artificially weather our devices, to sense and feel this?

Torch phone (yes, literally)

These are not rhetorical questions. But they are more speculative than they are able to be answered directly and correctly. And with this research project, I will speculate and experiment, wonder and wander, with our materials. I will (safely) mix phones in blenders, press laptops under steamrollers, break down tablets with borax. I will soak iPads in chlorine and sludge, cook iPhones like cakes, inject the Apple Watch with spores and mold. Torch, grind, freeze, flower. Highlight, amplify, ironize, intervene. Resiutate, speculate, wonder, and propose.

Can we use biofuel processes or hydrothermal liquefaction to turn a phone into fuel?
How might a laptop make the most efficient planter, or bed for life?
What would a tablet made of carbon, instead of plastic, be and do?
What does a joule feel like?

Geological time and Earth size, decomposition and regrowth: these are concepts we can comprehend rationally, but they are impossible to truly fathom. I propose that we can feel such things, aesthetically and thus ethically, if we substantiate future potential, artfully, in objects and installations. My experimental project will do precisely this. It will take the form of between eight and 15 objects or installations that might be: beakers of coal- or oil-like matter labelled with the device they once were (ie iPhone 7); laptops growing spores and mold, propagating life in new and different ways; participatory machines that take our energy and convert it into media; new designs for carbon-based phones, which will more easily decompose over time; prints made entirely of media devices: image, ink, paper, etc… These objects will be accompanied by the stories and experiments that produced them (text, image, video), as well as an essay which mediates the research as a whole.

Some relevant reading (not including my not-yet-released book!):

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27 September 2017 by nathaniel

Artist Feature: Bryan Cera and Critical Machining

Bryan Cera is a former student of mine (he did both his BFA and MFA with me at UW-Milwaukee), and I couldn’t be prouder. Not that I can honestly take any responsibility for the person and artist Bryan has become – one who far surpassed his teacher long ago; but rather, I am proud to call him a friend and colleague, proud of the hard work he has done, and what he has achieved with it.

Cera was the featured artist at Maker Faire Milwaukee last weekend – the largest Maker Faire in the country – showing off his custom-designed 3D/ceramic printer, and some Daft Punk cosplay, among other things. The former’s main innovations are a vertical shaft worm gear box in order to seriously increase torque, so as to work with standard clay (rather than the over-watery liquid that often doesn’t hold form in most models), and real-time, manual  controls to similarly adjust speed and viscosity as needed. The latter (which gets heaps of Interweb hits), he happily told us, uses an Arduino Nano and addressable RGB LEDs.

But it is not Bryan’s technical innovation nor his open source attitude alone that make me proud. He was always this way, generous and smart, able to figure things out and willing to help others understand them. (See some of Cera’s best tutorial shares here.)

What continues to intrigue and impress me is Cera’s ability to smoothly move between cool pop culture fun, and important questions about how we perform and understand technology, ourselves, and the worlds they together make and change. For him, and for anyone who spends any time with him, art and craft, technology and culture, philosophy and fun, are never far apart – and the stakes in that distance – or the lack thereof – always have consequences.

When I met him, Bryan was making traditional art and going through school on the one hand, playing with technology and his sense of humor on the other. He didn’t see these two lives as connected until he was pushed to explore his fun and geeky side in his (home) work. What initially came out was various versions of Supercontroller – a full-body, interactive interface for Super Mario Brothers. Delightfully fun, we grab coins and jump over (or on top of) turtles to rack up points; this piece’s various iterations also begin to show how digital realms do not enhance our behaviors: they actually limit them in how we must face the screen and interact. Pung – the title a cross between the 80s game Pong and the word sung (like singing) – sees us control the up/down paddles of the classic table tennis arcade game with our voices. Here microphones stick out like robot arms from the screen, and gallery-goers sing and scream into their controllers in order to make it go. It’s a hilarious amplification (literally!) of the weird things we do to make our technologies function (watch the video!), between play, performance, and habit.

These two works embarked Cera on a journey around precisely the tensions between such things. One breakthrough open-source piece that got a lot of attention was Glove One: a fully functional phone you wear on your hand. Though a lot of folks really loved it – you dial on your fingers, do the classic “call me” gesture to speak and listen with your thumb and pinky, hang up by slamming your fist – there was a much funnier, and more critical, joke to the entire gesture. You see, there’s this great hand-phone you can use with natural movements and that looks super cool… and all you have to do is give up all other uses of your hand. You can’t do anything else. Pick things up, hold hands with your partner, wipe – none of it is a go. And Cera’s argument is that we often give up just so much when we adopt our new tech toys. Even when our phones are not there, for example, when we try to shut down and shut off, we feel the phantoms ringing in our pockets, pulling away our attention and our time…

ARAI: Arm For Artistic Inquiry (pronounced array) goes in another direction, but explores similar concepts. We constantly hear how robots are going to outperform us, steal our jobs, become more human. One core argument for this future is so that we humans can spend more time doing important things… What if, Cera asks, we made a robot more human, by having it do the things that humans would actually do in that free time? So… he made a robot that procrastinates. I kid you not. ARAI constantly opens the fridge, peers in, then closes it. It surfs Facebook for pictures of cats. It stares at magazines but does not read them. Ironically, says Cera, the more human the robot becomes, the more useless it is to us. Scary, funny, something to think with… He talks about it brilliantly in the TEDx talk above.

I’m super excited to see what’s next from Bryan Cera. Now an Assistant Professor of Craft and Emerging Media in the Media Arts Department at the Alberta College of Art and Design (that’s a mouthful of awesome right there), he seems to be playing out how more general materials think and act, and how they may change our media, alongside and within them. His beautiful Video Crystals, for example, shape moving images into moving sculptures, and he is in the process of imagining ceramic robots.

Good job, Bryan. Thank you for your work.

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24 September 2017 by nathaniel

Wednesday Sept 27: Morehshin Allahyari at UWM

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian artist who moved to the US ten years ago, and produces work across Internet art, video and installation, sculpture, writing, and other forms, all of which explore, she says,  the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day.

Two of Allahyari’s recent and most well-known works are The 3D Additivist Cookbook (with Daniel Rourke), and Material Speculation: ISIS. The former is a book of 3d .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists.

And it is absolutely free.

Download The 3D Additivist Cookbook here, or torrent (yes, a completely legal bit torrent!) the archive here.

Material Speculation is a reconstruction of 12 selected (original) artifacts (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Allahyari 3D modeled and 3D printed these forms, creating, in the artists words “a practical and political possibility for artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool both for resistance and documentation. It intends to use 3D printing as a process for repairing history and memory.” She includes a flash drive and a memory card inside the body of each 3D printed object, making each a kind of time capsule with images, maps, pdf files, and videos gathered on the artifacts and sites that were destroyed.

She is also a friend: generous and fun, smart and friendly, I highly recommend you try to make it to her talk this week, September 27, 2017 here in Milwaukee.

Artists Now! lectures take place every Wednesday at 7:30 pm in the Arts Center Lecture Hall on the UWM campus. They are always free and open to the public.

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19 September 2017 by nathaniel

Brefiew: Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious by N Katherine Hayles

Welcome to another briefiew (brief review)!

N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics was hugely influential on my dissertation and thinking, and I still cite her regularly in my classes and texts. Here her ironically titled book re-members (that is, embodies again) how humans (and data) both “lost their materiality” in our minds, and then she shows us that this is dead wrong, and that there are major stakes in that misperception. Her 2017 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious differentiates between a thinking that describes “thoughts and capabilities associated with higher consciousness such as rationality, the ability to formulate and manipulate abstract concepts, linguistic competencies, and so on,” and “cognition” (2), which is the nonconscious capacity for processing information, the latter gained through biological sensation or perception, or technological sensors, mechanical feedback, or data received from external sources, among other things. Cognition, in other words, is a “much broader faculty” extant on some level “in all biological life-forms and many technical systems” (14).

Hayles wants to have the humanities engage with and better understand “the specificities of human-technical cognitive assemblages and their power to transform life on the planet” through a more coherent “ethical inquiry” (3-4). She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why. Hers is an important premise and fascinating study of the “supporting environments” humans are “embedded and immersed in,” which “function as distributed cognitive systems” (2).

I found myself alternatively nodding and shaking my head while reading. I agree that we must pay more attention to the things that think and cognize, and the ethical questions at play; though I also believe the distinctions more blurred and subtle (and sometimes non-existent) than laid out by those Hayles cites (book forthcoming – though mine is entirely about art!). Still, this is precisely because it is such an interesting topic, with too much to debate. And Hayles’ bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and her modes of storytelling around them are as funny and smart as ever. If you haven’t yet read  How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, I would start there – not because you need it to understand Unthought, but because the first is her strongest manuscript, by far.  If you enjoyed that, or have more interest in the later/recent book, I do recommend it. It’s not as easy of a read, but it is more than worthwhile, and may yet prove to be the game-changer the first was.

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14 September 2017 by nathaniel

On Geek Girls: some thoughts with my 11-year-old

This post is written in collaboration with (mostly by) Sidonie “Nonie” Ridgway Stern. This photo was her first selfie. “Daddy, I look so dorky!” she crooned. God, I love her.

Yeh, so occasionally my daughter and I are going to post some reviews of movies, comics, art, coding, and more, from a tween’s (and her dad’s) perspective. This is the first!

On Geek Girls…

  1. What is there to know about geek girls? We are girls, and we are geeks. Do the math. Or… we could do it for you!
  2. Geeks come in different forms. I like: coding, playing guitar, basketball. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl. My dad!
  3. We don’t have a single appearance. Most days, I just want to wear sweatpants. But then, I like dressing up in a skirt, blazer and bow tie, too (see below).
  4. I am not your stereotype, and no geek is. Braces, glasses, etc… Yeh, some of us have those things. And so do some of you. I am unique! Heck, those glasses in the photo above? NOT prescription. Just for fun / to get used to them for when I’m older (both my parents wear glasses). Yeh, OK, I have braces.
From left to right, that's Nathaniel Stern, Jack Cooney, and Sidonie Ridgway Stern. Photo by Mary Catherine Cooney. First day of school, Fall 2017!

From left to right, that’s Nathaniel Stern, Jack Cooney, and Sidonie Ridgway Stern. Photo by Mary Catherine Cooney. First day of school, Fall 2017!

  1. blah blah blah
  2. As we type this, we are hanging out with our screen-devices in bed, preparing to watch old episodes of Supernatural, then read some Heroes of Olympus. It’s nearly Friday; our brains are mush…
  3. Next up: we will review something. Something new. We’ll see…
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