critiqueofnoise

[critiqueofnoise]

Participation Note

Was present for all exhibition meetings + the exhibition take down, had to help and take Burce’s piece down as well because she was in Turkey. 

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In researching for my dissertation I refamiliarized myself with the ideas of Jean Baudrillard. Since then I have been keen in better understanding the theoretical backings of the great modernist movements of the 20th century, specifically that of Dada. It is appropriate then that Dada’s most radical pioneer, Marcel Duchamp, in many ways predicted and worked around many of the observations Baudrillard would put forward half a decade later. Namely the continuity between these two figures that I am most interested in is the treatment of image as an object in itself.  

Working in the computational medium, the object image takes on novel qualities. Images exist as outputs, not as finished products. In turn digital life is saturated with these visual outputs. In acknowledging this I believe there is room for conceptual investigation and experimentation with the mode of output in the computational medium. 

Many works in computational art make use of screens or installations. Clear and tangible fabrications/projections of the digital work into 3 dimensional space. But I posit that there may be more ephemeral, abstract and conceptual potential in the computational medium. In researching how my work will be shown in the exhibition space I have come across spinning 3d holographic projectors. These projectors display videos through a rotating apparatus. In effect, the output of these machines cannot be photographed as they rely on an analog mechanism of animation.

By using these machines as the mode of display, I believe the images I present will be in a sense protected from reproduction or capture.

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For my project I want to incorporate the programming in a way that dictates artistic choices as much as the visuals. I am interested in automating more vague components of the artistic process. Placing the computer in the role chance might play in painting.

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- A composition of various strobing animations based off of captured imagery.

- I have created a reliable technique for strobing using random umber generation; however I believe I may need post processing for the “compositional” aspect. 

- I want a large tube TV playing the visuals, with some sort of speaker system. TV should face the wall, audience should stand behind the screen so as to create a sense of privacy. 

- Going forward I need to collect more and more visual assets to organize into sequences.

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The 1971 short film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, follows the processes of autopsy. A morgue is indifferently portrayed as just another quotidian place of occupation as pathologists work between rows of elevated cadavers. The bodies are filmed at an observant and respectful distance. At one point the perspective distortion caused by the zoom on the camera’s lens is evocative of the foreshortening in Mantega’s Lamentation of Christ. Neutral, detached, and without sonic or other elements to impart context, the film leaves the viewer to interpret the images alone, just as they are. Though undeniably snuff in its nature, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes composes a formula of actuality and abjection that yields an affective experience far from that of any mondo film or piece of pornography. Professionally conducted dissection leaves blood and viscera simply and plainly there; an absolute existence rather than a trigger for cinematic response. The montage of post-mortem procedures demonstrates actuality at its most dignified. In the abjection of these bodies, cut, opened and reduced to a sum of anatomical parts, an actualizing of death takes on poetic significance.   

The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes presents death in existential meditation rather than as a device to shock its audience. In this way both the hyper-reality conjured by The Killing of America and Cannibal Holocaust as well as the enveloping power of the image in media as expressed in Videodrome and elucidated by Jean Baudrillard are overcome. Mondo and pornographic works seek a predetermined mold of affected response, whether that be shock or arousal. The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes’s affect becomes the site of an impressionistic field, a visual palette of snuff images. Here abjection does not designate ambiguity between an actualized hyper-realism and corporeality, rather in this case affect becomes the instrument of abjection, an experiential force actualizing a moment of abstraction. It is more fitting to think of The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes in the mode of a sublime painting than as an assemblage of images. The film, in being witnessed, becomes an ethereal object that emanates its affect for the limited duration of its presence.   

  There are moments in The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes where the inner substance of the bodies on display become visually abstract, indistinguishable and unknowable. The macabre objects become a fabric of color and texture. These snuff images decompose into the pure visual content that occupies and animates the screen. Here, actuality does not emphasize what is on screen, ‘as it is’, or ‘as it was’ captured, but rather an actuality of the moment, ‘that is happening’ - the literal abjection of these images expressed over time. Abjection and actuality in this case are applied, not on the subjects of the filmic material at hand, but on the filmic materials themselves. In turn, snuff is not authenticated in the image, on the other side of the screen, but rather becomes an abstract and aerial presence within a time and space that is being affected. The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes operates abjection and actuality in a way that posits the image as that which emanates, not that which contains. Thus, by no longer embodying but inhabiting the site of affect, the viewer becomes the bystander of an event of images, not the witness of what they display.   

 Consider innovations in musically driven sensory extremity. Appreciation of noise music, from the Dada and the Futurists through Stockhausen to genres such as harsh noise and death metal, require a tolerance for sustained dissonant tones and textures. In its musical abjection, a style like harsh noise emphasizes the temporality of experience, overwhelming the moment by insistently enforcing its presence. What is suggested by the song titles and cover art of a harsh noise album is only actualized during its play. In harsh noise, sound is the mode of abjection, temporality the mode of actualization, giving way to a singular moment that is the site of the formal and aesthetic qualities of a complete work of art. Just as the canvas grants the aestheticization of the plane in two dimensions, and the sculpture that of three dimensions in space, affect enables the aestheticization of time. In that the duration of a harsh noise album delineates a period of auditory experience, time and space become formal properties in the decoration of a fleeting condition. Sound imparts affect ethereally, being a truly abstract and emotive art form. Here, the artistic properties of harsh noise become analogous with The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes. The abstract is made concrete.  

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Technique

Main problem with cinema may be the same problem with modern music production. In that all these techniques had been professionalized so much so that there is no artistry or experimentation inherent in its formal practice. In a lot of ways all of these methods should be combined and abandon their closest counterparts. 

DAW and video editing software are tied to a playhead, digital art is bound by abstraction. It’s essential to find a middle ground between these ways of working to develop new technical frontiers. 

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UK Drill as vanguard transgressive medium

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Some base line references for the thesis.

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My primary concern/interest as an artist is by providing the brain, our dear and only perceptual organ, nutritious and potent stimuli. Whether that’s composed of low level components such as image (STROBE) and sound (NOISE) or high level elements like symbols or cultural reference; I strive to harness and apply the structural efficiency of a pop song to my own experimental work. 

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POW! effect is in place. Text-as-aesthetic has been replaced by the much more exciting fast flashing colors + loud music = immediate response formula. The hypnotic “groove” I’m looking for is closer achieved here by eliminating any interactivity with the viewer. Higher levels of intensity make transparent the underlying exchange of computational (brain) power for novel aesthetic experience. 

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Year 2 final project; Painless - an expansive hyperbolic rpg. Too ambitious to develop to a level where ideas were actually translating to an audience. 

Done with the text-as-aesthetic aesthetic. 

Need the POW! effect.