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Epilogue

One of the first days of X-Lab Matt read back to us the final posts of some previous X-Lab members.  When I was listening to how nostalgic and introspective the posts were, I never imagined I would be able to write one myself.  I definitely am not a very emotional person, but this studio really did change me.  Many of us today talked about being uncomfortable at points of the class or while finding ourselves in our projects, and how that is okay.  My personal biggest takeaway from this studio is being okay with discomfort and working with intention.

Not until the final week of class and the final presentation did I feel my final project would be anything special.  I think at the beginning of every studio I wonder if it will have my new favorite final project, and I didn’t expect this to be my new favorite.  I have never been as attached and genuinely proud of a project before.  I think this is entirely due to the nature of the class.  These projects are extensions of the self that reflect waves from the universe.

The family dynamic that forms in studios is always so poetically bittersweet, because it always has an end of sorts.  Of course people can get together on their own time, but there is something about the energy of a studio group, especially one as close as X-Lab.  Hell, we even took a family picture today.

This post doesn’t have some fancy artistic video, some provocative art with some discussion, or a song I like.  This is not even an epilogue.  An epilogue cannot exist for something so fluid that there is no definitive end.  Here’s to the universe waving back and being awake for it.

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Time

A random conversation with my roommate led to the topic of our biggest fears.  His is snakes.  Mine is a little harder to visualize.  My biggest fear is wasting my time.  As a result of the increasing existentialism I find myself in, I find that the most truly valuable thing anyone can have is time.  Everything we own, even existence of everything we know is temporary.  The only thing we can really truly control is our use of time, and enjoying our time.  This is the main reason I am working on my shipping container plan.  I want to enjoy the extremely short time I have existing in this world the most I can.

One of the qualms I have with the set standard mentality of immediately post-college students is that one needs to get their “foot in the door” of the “real world” so they can work their way up the ladder to get enough money to enjoy things.  This is not to completely denounce the normal rhythm, but rather just to encourage questioning of it.  The time it takes to work your way up that ladder to get to a comfortable place seems like it takes so long that it might not even be worth the initial time investment.

This becomes even more critical right now because there will never be a stronger level of physical ability and motivation to try new things than this time in my life.  Therefore, working a desk job or standard job where I can’t explore and work on my own interests seems like a poor use of extremely valuable time.  This mentality has even extended into how I go about things day-to-day, where I quantify any purchase in terms of the hours of pay it required to afford, and if it is worth spending a physical equivalent to time.  My biggest fear, is getting to a retirement age and realizing that I spent my most precious years working towards a goal that was not nearly as rewarding as time spent doing what you truly love.

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I suppose with X-Lab coming to a close, it seems relevant to discuss plans for the future.  This isn’t a plan for the immediate future, but it also isn’t too far away ideally.  I want a shipping container house.  I don’t need anything else.  Having the right things matter a lot more to me than having enough things.  Ideally, the setup would consist of two shipping containers offset next to one another like a Tetris piece.  I would love to have a full roof of solar panels, a wind turbine, and a water collection and two-stage filtration system.  Energy independence gets me excited.  If I can collect my own energy from ambient always-existent sources for infinitely cheaper, why not?

I find this plan to be much more fulfilling than any 9-5 job in a standard apartment in the city.  I know that this plan isn’t exceedingly philanthropic or capitalistically beneficial, but it’s much more satisfying.  I also know how this plan might seem completely crazy and unrealistic for a 20 year old to even attempt, but I might as well give it a shot.  I have done the energy calculations, and on average, I should be able to achieve a net gain of 65 kW/h per day, which isn’t much, but it is a positive number.

I’m sure all of you have seen shipping container houses before, but just so everyone is on the same page, here is a simple example.  Shipping containers on average cost around $2,000 each, which is incredibly cheap.  There are of course the logistics of actually installing insulation, appliances and fixtures etc, but I think it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.  I follow multiple digital artists on Instagram who render fantasy stylized versions of shipping container palaces, which are absolutely stunning.  I am in no way thinking of trying to create something this extravagant, but the aesthetic is much closer to my main goal.

I consistently practice living one day at a time, so thinking far ahead is not exactly a strong skill of mine.  So much can change that I don’t even know about at the moment that the majority of large scale planning seems irrelevant.  However, my current “plan” is to assess my situation in a year at graduation and determine how close I am to creating this dream.  A large part of this dream is related to location.  As much as I love the multiple feet of snow and humid mosquitoes, I definitely plan on returning to Colorado as soon as I can.  Specifically within Colorado, I have done research on this small artist community between mountain ranges called Salida.  

A small two-shipping container home in a valley of the Rockies is perfect for what I’m looking to get out of life.  The shipping container home is more of a “home base” between adventures, so the materialism of the house itself is severely diminished compared to even my current apartment.  I do not plan to fully channel Thoreau’s Walden, but I definitely value the therapeutic qualities of maintaining the more permanent things such as having a working water filter or renewable energy.  Especially after the insanity of college life, it might be a fun experiment to try.  See where the world takes me.

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This has been a very chaotic week.  My field trips as a result this week aren’t as conventional, but I still learned so much.  This might be my favorite aspect of the field trip assignments, which is how they cause me to look at serendipity in a completely new light.  I definitely cherish things more than I did before, where things appear as more of a response to my own introspection than a random occurance with no importance.

My first field trip of the week was to see the newest art installation at the Regis Art Center.  I am specifically interested in student work because of its obvious direct relevance as well as support for local artists as much as I would want someone to enjoy my own work in a gallery.  This gallery was a selection of colored pencil and painted portraits, which were individually fairly interesting, but what truly peaked my interest within the gallery was the universe waving back in a bit more subtle of a way.

The perfect alignment of the light on this painting made it infinitely more enjoyable for me.  The perfect perpendicularity as well as how it precisely surrounds the subject of the work makes it seem almost intentional.  “The light on things” is an atmospheric design category that I often find myself obsessing over due to its temporality.  This is one of my favorite parts of the BDA studio honestly, where the exceedingly annoying blocks of sun from the pillar windows come into the room and onto the glass desks, but because of how deep and skinny the windows are, the light moves uncharacteristically fast across any surface.  Watch for it next time we are in studio.  It moves a lot faster than you’d expect for something 93 million miles away.

This is the last little bit of serendipity I stumbled upon in this gallery.  I heard construction sounds behind one of the gallery walls, and followed the sound to a gap between the walls.  The image above was taken between the walls.  I am almost more interested in this than any specific work in the real gallery.  There is an energy in here.  I wish I could actually get in and feel it.  The fly on the wall aspect of looking through the wall into it however offered its own somewhat surreal experience, of something that I felt I was not supposed to see, or something that seemed almost sacred.  I’m not sure.  There’s a lot that can be gathered from a white monolith in a concrete room behind the wall.

My second field trip was a bit more spontaneous.  I was in Chicago for the weekend, and in between exploring every fashion store that I will never be able to afford, I found my way to the brand new Apple Store right on the river.  Something we discussed in class last week was the idea of staying away from doing something thats just “cool” for the sake of cool, and how that translates over into product-design or user experience design.  There is an ideology behind Apple that says that they will not endorse a design unless it is “cool”.  I’m not sure what to think of this.  Cool is such an objective word, and I can see what they were going for with the quote, but something doesn’t seem right about the binarism of it.  Their message behind this belief is that they will not do something just out of functionality, and that it has to have a certain stylistic “cool” factor to be worth the investment.  One could argue removing the 3.5mm jack wasn’t exactly cool, but that is another story.

The new Apple Store in Chicago could be labeled as cool.  I would definitely say this qualifies as cool.  It is definitely corporate and capitalist 100%, but I don’t think that means it can’t also be cool.  The entire exterior is glass walls on all sides, and the building is supported by four decently small pillars holding up a single flat roof.  This is the kind of neo-minimalism that is still doing something new.  White box houses have gotten a kind of (incorrect) negative connotation for being new and edgy but without a purpose.  I don’t agree with this connotation at all, but regardless, this seems to have a much stronger purpose.  

The actual store part of the building is surprisingly small considering the overall footprint of the building, but it kind of works for them.  The building becomes a bit more approachable when it’s so much more public.

In additional to “cool”, I would be tempted to call this kind of design elegant.  The entire back wall of the store is display versions of various phone cases for different versions and devices.  Each of the cases can be pulled out to reveal a drawer of sealed versions of the display case.  Space efficient, concise, and effective.  It seems like a great example of practical elegance to me.  I don’t participate in the Apple sphere at all, but good design is good design.  Additionally, good design with such a large company is hard to come by.

[sine-of-nomine-blog]

Keep moving forward.

I could not be happier with how the presentation turned out Thursday, with serendipitous discoveries right up until the end, I found even presenting the project helped me learn a lot more than I knew before setting it all up.  As I discussed in the presentation, the original design was meant to be a rigid grid of two 2x2 grids of laser pointers.  However during the actual presentation, time constraints, finnicky engineering and my own nervousness led to the project being much more abstract, with dots seemingly randomly lighting up sections of the projected screen.

In this moment, I loved the project so much more.  I think this might be my favorite X-Lab moment so far, where the constraints of rigidity and self-imposed perfection were finally totally washed away.  I was in constant anxiety the entire day leading up to the presentation regarding the precision of the grid, the levels of the speakers being correct, the overall look of the oscilloscopes etc.  But I am so so happy the presentation went the way it did, and it wasnt all perfectly wrapped up and just-so.  That’s been done before.

A huge mission for me with this project was to do something that hasn’t really been done before.  I talk about this a lot in other posts, because it seems to be a rarer and rarer occurance nowadays.  I know oscilloscope music has been made before, but I figured that if I took it back to its extremely analog roots, maybe some magic would happen that a prepackaged version wouldn’t give me.

Learning “what sounds look good” I think is a step in the right direction.  Similarly, this might be my first architecture project that actually caused some kind of awakening within me, where I discovered just how blind I was before beginning this project.  Before now, I listened to music as music.  I immensely enjoyed it, and had massive interest in its intricacies and beauty, but the knowledge of this entire new layer of hidden beauty that is rarely ever seen, but always present, I feel like I rediscovered music.

I suppose this post is a bit of a retrospect on the project and a thank you for this class.  The creative energy I get from this class and its emphasis on doing something interesting has really brought something out of me that I can’t quite articulate.  I hesitate to call this a retrospect, because this project is far from over.

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My last post was pretty tech-centric, so this acts a bit more as an addendum than anything else, but I still find it fascinating.  The clip above is a virtual reality experiment within medicine; specifically helping children cope with getting vaccinated.  Where this differs partially from the last post is this is much more geared towards singular user experience and comfort.  

The majority of innovations in technology is usually related to productivity or some sort of commercial or political gain, but something about this experiment seems refreshingly selfless.  This is equipment that any hospital could technically do without, but those that adopt and invest in this idea are therefore going above and beyond.

This idea of investing in individual happiness on a large scale definitely doesn’t happen enough, but it’s refreshing to see things like this getting attention.  Additionally, this employs an extra level of selflessness to all of the doctors and nurses giving the vaccinations for their commitment to matching the simulation given to the child.

On a slightly different note, on my last post I discussed how many of the tech tropes of yesterday are quickly becoming invalid.  Of these tropes, is the idea that children and technology should not or cannot mix.  While I of course do not deny the importance of time away from the screen and individual discovery without technology, there is exponentially increasing potential for great collaborations with young developing minds and educational technology.  This is just a single example I stumbled across today, but what examples have others seen of a serendipitous marriage of technology and charity?

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It’s a Brave New World.

This article kind of gives me chills.  Chinese artificial intelligence Baidu now has the ability to identify accents and gender and alter them with only a few seconds of sample input.  This is wild.  Baidu’s neural networks can also identify faces from fractions of images and successfully superimpose them onto others.  We now live in a world where identity is becoming something of a fluid concept than it has ever been before with eerie accuracy and efficiency.  This is the time that previous generations referred to as the true “Future”.

The following is one of the deepest rabbit holes I have ever been on within the internet, discovering all kinds of new tech and what new developments can actually do right now.

The first of these is the popular AI behind DeepFakes apparently can transfer whole bodies.  There is a sort of dreamy surrealism to the kind of breakthroughs happening recently.  Additionally, DeepFake technology can even transfer species and time of day.

More recent generative networks can generate music. It can do this the easy way— listening to music and playing around with a music-creating program— and it can do it the right way— listening to music and "imagining" what instruments and voices are supposed to sound like and generating new music entirely from scratch from its imagination.  While down the audio synthesis technology kick, I learned that also with the aforementioned technology, you can almost perfectly synthesize speech. 

On a more visual side, Style transfer can turn ten-second Microsoft Paint doodles into art masterpieces, or detailed designs far beyond your own capabilities.  There is a large opening here for some sort of large scale artist collaboration with our new hyperintelligent computer partners.  There is a classic belief that robotic automation can replace everything but artists, but even this is questionable now.  We have essentially optimized art, whatever that means.

One of the more simple but beautiful new tricks is that AI can animate a still image, predicting what's supposed to happen next.  Generative networks can also now create photorealistic images. It's only a matter of time before they translate this to video, and maybe develop their own artistic medium.  I wish that last part wasn’t as legitimate of an idea.  As with everything else up to this point, it is wild to think about all of the applications this can have.  The possibilities are essentially endless given the rate of advancement.  New is happening again.

This rabbit hole is too deep to escape now.  Breakthroughs in generative networks can take a text description and turn it into an image.  Which is yet another example of multi-media art just waiting to happen.  In a bit more of a surreal turn, style transfer can create psychedelic dreamscapes and nightmares by combining various pre-existing data in a fluid composition.  Generative networks can also smooth out animation, turning even low-budget anime into something coming close to movie quality.  We already have film festival award winning films created exclusively on iPhones, why not just leave it to the algorithms and see what happens?  Its not a good or bad idea, but certainly worth considering.  Speaking of visual arts again, AI can even bring 'Enhance!' out of CSI, which is kind of hilarious, that all of the tropes about people believing tech can do certain things, and “of course it cant, thats impossible” is now possible.

We already see Nicholas Cage spammed into every movie ever made, and you can edit certain parts of movies in action. Not to mention that you can put words into a world leader's mouth and use their faces while you're at it.  This can revolutionize subtitling and many forms of translation monumentally.  It can also lead to some very questionable and never before seen political scandals. The future's gonna be wild, but the wildest part is that when I say "future", I mean the 2020s. The craziest part that all of these have in common is these examples were accomplished using algorithms available for free on GitHub, which is open source. They'll remain free and open source indefinitely. So have your fun. Be Big Brother, or do what I did when I was a kid and try to imagine editing in various effects and new content into shows and games you like, because these are both going to happen.

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This is taken from a website called Moral Machine, created by some creatives at MIT.  The site consists of various simulations of events designed to question individual morality, and I believe it does so in a very effective way.  Moral Machine takes all other variables away and focuses on an A/B decision =, which is admittedly a little too binary, but is effective at forcing the viewer to work in absolutes.  This idea of being pushed into a corner to make a fundamental ethical decision is one I haven’t seen before, and has risen in popularity so much so that Tesla has began using its statistics in their own programming for self driving cars.

A part of this website seems like the epitome of 2017-18 in that this could have not existed in any other era, and that carries some level of magic with it.  It isn’t often in the modern world that something “new” happens.  Determining the morality of an autonomous vehicle isn’t exactly something we as humans have had to measure before, which makes it even more interesting.  Moral Machine even goes further in depth to describe the participants of each scenario, which leads to uncovering of certain biases or subconscious priorities in a productive way.  The variables can change gender, profession, age, and even species.  It’s surprisingly thorough for being so minimal.

The most interesting part of this for me is when it gets a bit more existential.  If an autonomous car crashes, who is at fault?  Clearly someone must be at fault... right?  The car doesn’t have a brain to actively crash into something, so is it it’s creator?  Is it the owner of the car?  The answer might change depending on the specific scenario, but it is still interesting to play around with.  This level of AI is still very much in its infancy, but that won’t always be the case.  

The final pehonomena about this site that I discovered was the comments section.  There is a selection of user created dilemmas which can occasionally be joking or far too wild, but almost all the comments across the whole site are having an eerily polite fundamental debate about morality and why certain actions are better than others.  Anyone who isn’t new to the internet knows this type of debate is never civil.  

I found multiple examples of people being disproven or persuaded to think contrary to their original point, and instead of doubling down out of pride, they admitted agreement and moved on.  Is this due to how the website and its situations are setup?  Is it due to the type of people the site attracts?  Who knows; but designing a digital space that can somehow successfully harbor such in depth discussion is certainly an interesting topic to dive deeper into.

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Mathematics Library & The Politics of Weeds

I wanted to try something a bit different this week.  I was curious about what magical moments would happen if I explored the furthest end of the spectrum from myself.  This idea led me to the Mathematics Library on campus, where I was not disappointed.  One of the first books I found after rows of periodicals was titled “Super Vision”, and it seemed straight out of Hunt & Gather.  Obviously judging a book by its cover I dove deeper, learning that it was essentially an art book based entirely in scientific phenomena.

This (admittedly very blurry) example is probably my favorite in the book, where fluid patterns or chemical reaction residue is captured, and it looks identical to my favorite photoshop trick ironically called reaction-diffusion, which I found long before.  Reaction diffusion is supposed to mimic cell growth and division abstractly.  The pattern can be created in 5 steps in photoshop that are simply repeated a few hundred times, and still manage to create exceedingly organic and unique shapes each time.  I feel like there is something poetic about a computational program successfully creating random organic patterning.

This is a piece I made a few years ago using the same patterning tool described above.  This level of deep serendipity within discovery is exactly what I was hoping to achieve with this adventure.  Super Vision is full of brilliant examples of scientific phenomena mimicing all different genres of visual art, with supplementary text explaining exactly how it is done.  I would like to think that my project would belong in this book some day.

And of course, because it wasn’t a magical enough of a trip, there is a book on serendipity literally 2 books away on the same shelf.  Could not be scripted better.

My second field trip was extremely abstract in a very different way.  I ventured to West Bank to see the Politics of Weeds Exhibit at the Regis Center, and it definitely stuck with me.  The premise behind The Politics of Weeds is using the definition of weeds as an extended metaphor.  The most interesting part of this is that the actual definition for a weed is “An unwanted foreign plant”.  That is basically it.  The openness and interpretability makes it a striking choice of words.  It also lends exceedingly well to the extended metaphor of immigration or refugees as the “weeds”.

The gallery showcases what we would classically define as weeds in a celebratory way, showing the objective beauty in something subjectively unappealing without any words.  This is elegance.  Concise, effective, and graceful.  I definitely plan on looking up more about artist Bo Zheng and his collaborators in the future.

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I posted once or twice before about FKJ in terms of being multifaceted and “being” more than one thing at once, but this deserves its own post.  This is taken from his recent concert at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, surrounded by the La Fée Electricité, a 10m x 60m massive mural.  The concert is essentially, silent.  But not in the conventional way.  This is selectively silent.  Every audience member recieves bluetooth over the ear headphones to listen to the live solo perfomance, and none of the instruments are hooked up to any speakers.  The only way to experience this concert is to either be there or watch the single recorded version.

The other aesthetically notable aspect of this concert is the lack of chairs, almost as a way to emphasize even further the importance of the silence that is experienced without the headphones.  I am not entirely sure if this was intentional, but all of these atmospheric details also seem to strongly discourage any sort of filming of the video, as you wouldnt be able to hear anything.  The encouragement of constant immersion is something I think perfomance art often lacks, but is executed by FKJ very elegantly.

FKJ isn’t as experimental as John Cage or Miranda July, but I think he is really creating something magical with performances like this.  It is a bit more concrete than a lot of what we talk about, but I think the fact that such an otherworldly atmosphere can be created so minimally has some X-Lab qualities.  I cannot imagine any way of improving this performance honestly, and it makes me curious if anyone else has examples of art where there doesn’t appear to be room for “improvement”, whatever that word means.

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The Patagonia National Park is a potential example of a positive of significant wealth.

In class this week we touched on capitalism once again, but this time in the lens of wealth itself, and how it is impossible to possess massive wealth without some level of malevolence.  I believe Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and her husband, Douglas Tompkins, who founded the North Face and Esprit clothing companies are a very modern and relevant example of benevolence within wealth.

Over the last 26 years, Douglas Tompkins put $345 million towards buying massive chunks of the Patagonian wilderness.  The resulting land dedicated to the Patagonia National Park is over 10 million acres currently, which is orders of magnitude larger than Yosemite or Yellowstone.  This is a direct effort to preserve the area against invasive mining, logging, and over-farming.

Tompkins was met with extreme backlash from more conservative news media, which threatened him with deportation and heavy interrogation.  Politicians and the military even argued that he was secretly creating a Zionist Enclave in Patagonia.  These conspiracies and slanderous claims were all of course made with deep roots of a capitalist system.  The news of forbidden large scale human intervention in the form of drilling or otherwise was a nightmare for larger expanding businesses, whom admittedly were far more concerned with the welfare of their company than the ecosystem.

My main reason for bringing this extremely recent example up is to show an example of using capitalism in a benevolent way.  I am by no means giving all of the credit for this amazing decision to the capitalist system, but rather acknowledging the role it played in allowing for such a decision to be made, and that selfless wealthy people can exist.  It is certainly rare, but very real.

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Second Theme - Burgoyne Diller

While at the MIA for a recent class trip, I came across a really unique phenomenon.  It wasn’t until after careful inspection of the description and title next to the work did I realize that this piece was not a Mondrian.  The description cites that Diller’s work “embraced the neoplasticism introduced by Mondrian” and continues to elaborate on the method of execution.  What resonated with me about this work was not as much the specific content, but rather how it is perceived by a modern audience.

I am aware of the intricacies and the nuance of abstract art and the lawlessness of the style, but this piece seemed almost too similar to its inspiration.  I am sure that this was not Diller’s intention, and that neoplasticism is an extremely nuanced style where many of the works within the genre have fundamental similarities, but every person I showed the piece to was convinced it was a Mondrian.  This makes me curious as to if the reactions to the work speak more of the artist or its audience.  Given the benefit of the doubt that this style was not nearly as iconic with a single artist as it is now, and Diller could have never predicted that, I excuse the extreme similarity.

I often find that abstract works tend to tell more about the viewer than the artist in their “Rorschach-esque” qualities.  The viewer sees what they want to see, and what they see says something qualitative about them.  Where this becomes interesting is when the piece has an instant common connection with its viewers of being a Mondrian work, even though it is just of the same style.  The modern perspective of art is often concerned with artistic integrity and what is “copying” or not, which makes this piece almost more relevant now than ever.  Artistic integrity and creative freedom within art and what can be defined as original work is extremely subjective.  Is this modern obsession detracting from the content of the work itself?  It is entirely possible and all too likely.

This is not to say of course that “stealing” or “copying” is not very problematic, but it definitely should not be the only thing to be focused on.  A similar issue I ran into at the MIA regarding more abstract works is the obsession with execution.  This comes mainly in the form of multiple examples of “anyone could make this” syndrome I witnessed in the modern art galleries.  The main qualm I have with this phrase and its connotation is that unless the work has quantitatively challenging aspects to it, it is not worth merit.  This seems like a fundamental flaw in how many people interact with modern art, where time could be spent embracing what impression the work leaves or the message it sends rather than if it is “worth” admiring at all.

Returning to Diller’s work, it was disheartening to know that far too many people approached the work with the expectation of it being a Mondrian work, and upon finding out that it isn’t, labeling the work as a copy or imitation and moving on.  The work itself is not problematic whatsoever, which makes this reaction increasingly tragic.  Diller’s work is much deeper than these labels give it, and this obsession with classification, educated or otherwise, is largely to blame.  The description and label next to the work was admittedly the only thing from stopping me from coming to a very similar conclusion, which also speaks to the importance of finding out an entire story before passing large scale judgements.

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Phonat - Ride The prejudice

I constantly struggle with favorites in art, but I feel confident in saying this is one of my favorite music videos.  I love the aesthetic style and abstract surrealism in each of the individual clips.  I have known about the animation studio that created this gem for ages, but like many other things, X-Lab has given this a new light.

The studio behind the video is Hello Savants.  They describe themselves as “ a fellowship of creative people with unique disabilities and unexpected talents”, and I could not agree more.  They have designed opening animations for MTV, Audi, and Nike, which definitely puts them on the map as far as gaining a reputation.  In a similar vein to what I discussed in my last post, another word I have seen become quickly overused or even completely misattributed is “sellout”.

It seems that the modern definition of sellout refers to any creative source that collaborates with a more corporate or capitalist body.  However I would definitely argue Hello Savants are far from sellouts.  In class today we discussed briefly the importance of language or the limitations of language, and I think using language as a tool for labeling is extremely closed minded.  This new definition of sellout is not only overused, but simply far too binary to apply to anything artistic.

I think the main point I see wrong with this sellout witch hunt that seems to be happening with more modern artists is the connotation it gives partnerships on a larger scale.  The simple act of partnering with a larger company does not instantly make the artist a sellout.  In the majority of cases it makes the artist diverse or gives them increased exposure.  I believe elegance plays a large part in avoiding even appearing seen as a sellout, where the exact execution of a partnership plays a much larger role in assigning such a blanketing label.

Hello Savants differ from what I would consider selling out in a corporate or capitalist sense in that they completely maintained their artistic identity and used the partnership to showcase who they actually are rather than acting like puppets for a brand.  This I believe is what truly defines what becomes selling out.  There are many examples of artists who have drastically changed their style or gone against their own personal morals due to the promise of a large check or more fans, and that to me aligns much more with being a sellout than just a collaboration at face value.

This of course gets a bit muddy when considering what an artist collaborates with, as it does reflect their own morals to an extent.  An example of this would be if an artist I respected did a collaboration with Uber, who is notorious for human rights violations and discrimination, despite knowledge of these things.  Intention, awareness, and execution are critical in elegance within collaboration in the art world, and I believe Hello Savants is achieving this trifecta very well.  It makes me curious of some antithetical examples or other problematic labels that are quickly becoming overused.

[sine-of-nomine-blog]

Masterpiece

This weekend in between working on my final project, I had the chance to catch up on a lot of recent movies.  None were particularly worth an entire blog post, but cumulatively I noticed a definite trend worth discussing.  We need to stop overusing the word “masterpiece”.  This can of course be lumped in with amazing, incredible, and outstanding.  The most obvious culprit of overuse of course is outstanding, where the utter dilution of modern media reviews and art related forums that use the word outstanding by nature of the word makes it infinitely less outstanding.  

The most recent offender however is masterpiece, which has oddly become an exponentially common term for even the most objectively simple things in modern media as a way to get attention.  These buzzwords almost act like verbal clickbait in today’s social sphere, where word choice becomes an investment in clicks or advertising revenue.  This makes the use of such key words a bit less of an anomale, but does not excuse them whatsoever.  I am not faulting the word itself of course, but instead those who tack it onto whatever is a new trend as a way to utilize its power before it becomes another “amazing” or “incredible”.

An article I found recently cited a similar observation, and looked at the trend from an objective lens, and how a signficantly small fraction of modern works can even fit the definition of a masterpiece by them not being a piece from a master, but rather much closer to something easily likeable.  This is not intended to be some sort of elitist rant about how today’s media is all awful and not worthy of praise, but moreso a call to be more conscious about word choice. 

Modern technology has assisted in creating some absolutely great works, but I still strongly feel masterpiece and similar terms need to be held to a bit higher of a standard, lest they lose meaning entirely.  I can’t help but attribute some of this to the hyperexposure that comes with modern media.  As I touched on above, the current clickbait culture is heavily desensitizing us to words that used to hold a much stronger weight.  The biggest question this topic raises to me however is that of what comes next?  What terminology will we use when the current oversaturated adjectives lose any sort of meaning?  Will we ever run out of descriptors or just conestantly search for the next heavy hitting term?  Does the cycle have an end?

[sine-of-nomine-blog]

Walker Art Center Library

Andersen Library

My field trips this week were much more practicality based than usual, which was a refreshing change.  My first visit was to Walker Art Center Library, which was much different than I expected.  The actual route to the library and “presentation value” of it was unlike any library I have ever seen.  It almost felt like some sort of secret or exclusive lair that I wasn’t actually supposed to see.  I would be very curious to do a revisit and learn more about the specifics of why the library is set up how it is, because it is characteristically the opposite of the rest of the building.  Additionally, until it was discussed in class, I actually didn’t know of its existence at all.

I wanted to make the most of my time at both libraries so I did a little research beforehand of what I wanted to find.  If you have seen my previous posts, you know about my obsession with seemingly mundane urbanism, and somehow, Walker library managed to have just what I was looking for.  I was honestly surprised just how niche some of the artistic books were in the library.  It made me definitely appreciate how in depth some categories were, and how passionate those authors must be about such specific things.

It doesn’t get much better than this as far as personal aesthetics go.

My second visit was a trip to Andersen Library.  Being back on campus, I wanted to direct my search to something a bit more documentarian, but still interesting.  I was hoping to find a sister book to the graphic design book I found at Rapson Library about Japanese vintage graphics, and I was not disappointed.

I’m not sure entirely what it is about Japanese design specifically, but I think it is the dedication to efficiency and elegance that is incorporated into the majority of their style.  Unlike the book at Rapson Library, this focused moreso on the actual physical products to come out of Japan as well as their associated graphic design, but in a more commercial way.  After showing a friend images from the book, they remarked about how all of the designs seemed multiple decades ahead of their time.

This is a prime example.  Of course I cannot see exactly how high quality the sound is, but visually, these are gorgeous.  These are also not something that one could find in the US until maybe the past few years.  Are we stylistically behind by a few decades from Japanese designers or do we slowly borrow from them after the trends end?  Or do stylistic choices like this not actually have any correlation with when they happen in each location?  Maybe the history of design trends in different countries will be my next library search topic.

[sine-of-nomine-blog]

Going - Conner Griffith

What is Griffith trying to say?  The piece is beautifully shot and has some quirky surrealism, but what is the message?

I often wonder with more abstract pieces like this if that even is the question worth asking.  Pollock was famous for his work because it was the antithesis of the popular hidden narrative and implications, and let “paint be just paint”.  This is not to say Griffith’s work doesn’t have a message, but its entirely possible that appreciation for the craft gets lost in worrying too much about “getting it”.  I definitely think there is some sort of parallel between the human and the natural definitions of what “goes”, but I definitely would argue Conner Griffith created the piece moreso to transport you into his dualistic world than deliver some specific single narrative.

A thread I read on Reddit recently discussed exactly how to look at modern abstract art, to which someone replied that it’s important to keep a completely open mind to first impressions and initial reactions, and if there aren’t any, and the piece doesn’t resonate, to just move on.  I think this is a practice that is sometimes overlooked regarding some more puzzling art.  A piece can be difficult to process as far as its content or the reasoning behind it, but some of the magic of the work can be lost in the process of hyperanalyzation.

I have been trying to work this mentality into my own perspective of modern art or more avant garde works, and I have found it makes art browsing much more enjoyable.  This isn’t to say that if you don’t instantly get the piece that you should move on, but moreso that it can be counterproductive to try to weave a story that isn’t there.  This is my issue with many forms of photo essays or film essays, is the overanalysis kills the nuance of the work.  Celebrating and acknowledging the intricacies of art I think is a very important practice, but its entirely possible some things are meant to be left in the dark.

I’m still wrestling with this one.  Even as I am writing this I am finding myself disagreeing with some of my own points.  Blanket statements are dangerous, especially in such a diverse artistic sphere.  I would be curious if others found a message in Going, or if you just enjoyed the visuals and accompaniment.  Is one option better than another?  Is there a “right way” to look at art?  It’s a subjective question at best, but worth considering.

[sine-of-nomine-blog]

What does this look like to you?  First impressions for me were a rendering of a dragon or some abstract fractal in grayscale.  This is just a tiny fraction of one side of Michael Hansmeyer’s absolutely amazing columns.  4 years ago I researched Hansmeyer for a calculus project, but I think X-Lab has given his work a new perspective for me.  Each of his pillars are laser cut sheets of paper consisting of millions of layers to create full scale stunning surreal columns.

The intricacies within these columns are made in incredibly small slices, and are procedurally generated by a script written by Hansmeyer.  What I love about these are it essentially gives the script a base shape, but the code is written in such a way that allows for the pillars to all develop in completely unique and almost organic ways with very organic level details.  I don’t know the specific logistics of compiling sixteen million sheets of paper into perfect pillars, but the final project is pretty otherworldly.

The level of detail that can be achieved by just lines of code is breathtaking.

Each slice by itself consists of a cut path that can exceed 8 meters, and while individual slices more closely resemble snowflake cutouts, it’s hard to believe these are the individual building blocks of such an intricate piece.

What really drew me to rediscover this project was its inventiveness in the world of interdisciplinary work, creating what Hansmeyer calls “Computational Architecture”.  A subreddit I found somewhat recently called /r/CreativeCoding really reminds me of this piece, and shows some amazing examples of science and art colliding to make something much more beautiful and detailed than either field could do alone.  Hansmeyer’s work to me symbolizes the importance of this kind of cross-pollination.  Hansmeyer’s work heavily inspires my final project in a nonlinear way, where I am not striving to be like Hansmeyer, (although this certainly would not be a bad goal) but I am moreso looking to achieve the same level of viewer reaction to my work.  

When I see these pillars, they evoke a strong sense of wonder and infinite questioning about the logistics of how in the world such beautiful shapes can occur, and why haven’t I seen this before?  I am specifically intrigued by the last question.  I think this is something I often wonder about with art in any medium that fascinates me, is I ask why I haven’t seen anything like it before, and how anything could possibly be improved on it.  Neither have much of an answer.  

In today’s digital world of hyper-exposure to images, I am consistently shocked whenever I see something truly “new”, because I didn’t think new was still possible.  Of course new is subjective, but I believe combining modern technology with any art form is a very easy way to get closer to something new.  By creating an entire “music video” using a series of poor man’s oscilloscopes, I hope to evoke some of the same curiosity or wonder about my project.  This project definitely makes me curious of other examples of math being so closely integrated into detailed architecture.  Any suggestions?