Abstract: Charles Sanders Peirce conceived the notion of diagrammatic reasoning as a method of inquiry through diagrammatic operations, emphasizing the fundamentally spatial and sensory nature of language and thought. This talk will show a selection of my projects that employ diagrammatic principles in a variety of time-based, spatial, and software formats.

Dietmar Offenhuber is a media artist and research fellow in the Senseable City Lab at the Department for Urban Studies and Planning, MIT. He has backgrounds in architecture, urban studies and digital media and works on the spatial aspects of cognition, representation and behavior.

In his artistic practice, Dietmar frequently collaborates with the sound artist Markus Decker and composers Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl under the label stadtmusik.

His work has been extensively exhibited internationally and been shown, among other places, at ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, the Sundance Film Festival, Secession Vienna, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale and Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid.

Projects include:
mauerpark with Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl: The winter landscape of mauerpark in berlin turns into a theatrical stage, populated by pedestrians and cyclists following various, sometimes mysterious activities. What seems like a slice of daily life is in fact heavily digitally manipulated. The soundtrack creates a second space, sometimes contradicting the visual events in the picture. The travelling focus directs the visual attention and is controlled by subtle acoustic ambience. Its unnatural strength has a miniaturizing effect on the whole scenery.

mauerpark (excerpt) from stadtmusik on Vimeo.

Dust Serenade – with Markus Decker and Orkan Telhan – is a reenactment of an acoustic experiment done by German physicist August Kundt. Inspired by the Chladni’s famous sand figures visualizing sound waves in solid materials, Kundt devised an experiment for visualizing longitudinal sound waves through fine lycopodium dust; a setup that would allow him to measure the speed of sound in different gases. Dust Serenade intends to remind us the materiality of sound. Tubes filled with scraps of words and letters –- cut-up theory –- interact with sound waves and turn into figures of dust. Visitors can modulate the frequency of the sound emitted by moving a rod and create different harmonic sound effects. As sound waves figure, refigure, and disfigure the text, we invite visitors to rethink about the tension between their theoretical knowledge and the sensory experience.

Mark Shepard’s Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps you find something by looking for something else. Join us and participate in a 45 minute serendipitous city walk! Bring an iPhone (iOS 3.1.3 or higher), comfortable walking shoes, and ample curiosity. Bring a friend or two as well! Download Serendipitor for free from the App Store.

Ecoarttech’s Indeterminate Hikes (IH) is an Android app that acts as your guide through urban wilderness, directing hikers to the sublime Scenic Vistas inhabiting our most developed environments. Versions of Indeterminate Hikes have been exhibited previously, but this is the début performance of ecoarttech’s newly launched smartphone app! If you have an Android smartphone, download the IH app for free from the Android Market, or else just hike along.

Mark Shepard will give a lecture entitled Pathetic Fallacies and Category Mistakes: making sense and nonsense of the (near-future) Sentient City: As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, we increasingly find information processing capacity embedded within and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Artifacts and systems we interact with daily collect, store and process information about us, or are activated by our movements and transactions. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban infrastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this near-future “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behavior within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space. This talk will unpack some of the tacit assumptions, latent biases and hidden agendas at play behind new and emerging urban infrastructures.

Mark Shepard is an artist, architect and researcher whose post-disciplinary practice addresses new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures. His current research investigates the implications of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies for architecture and urbanism. His work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and festivals internationally. In 2009, he curated Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition of commissioned projects that critically explored the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing and the city. He is the editor of Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space, published by the Architectural League of New York and MIT Press.

Sentient City Survival Kit – Quick Start Guide from mark shepard on Vimeo.

Mark Shepard
Serendipitor
Sentient City Survival Kit
Media Lab Map

Lichty also works extensively with virtual worlds, including Second Life, and his work — both solo and with his performance art group Second Front — has been featured in Flash Art, Eikon Milan, and ArtNews.

Lichty is an Assistant Professor of Media Theory and Experimental Media Art at Columbia, Chicago.

ADDITIONAL URLS:

http://iam.colum.edu/plichty
http://patlichty.tumblr.com/
http://patricklichty.wordpress.com/

Moments consists at its basis twelve violin études ranging from 3-5 minutes in length each of which uses violin performance gesture as a control input for manipulating a short piece of high-speed film (1000 frames-per-second) of a person performing a social gesture. Taking its title cue from principles in physics that determine an object’s resistance to change, the violinist’s gestures time-remap and scrub the video clip to explore the intricacies of the performed action. Each of the sections of the piece deals with a different gesture, treating the studies as components in deriving taxonomy of intimate social gesture. These gestures (such as smiling, winking, brushing the hair away from the eyes, averting gaze, etc.) are standard non-verbal cues in social interaction that we read into social interactions to infer intimacy. When tied to (or more literally, animated by) an instrumental source, we can investigate emotive affect within the construct of cinema and within our everyday experiences.

The sections at the piece feature a range of violin writing, with each section exploring a different bowing or performance technique (legato, martelé, etc.) tied to a computer accompaniment that records the performance in real-time and time-stretches it in a manner analogous to the time-base of the film (roughly 33-times slower than normal). As a result, the violinist is in duet with her/himself in a much slower speed, using the micro-nuances of her/his previous gestures as a texture upon which to add a new line. These musical explorations of time, gesture, and memory in a concert / cinematic setting are metaphorically linked to our psychological evaluation of our most intimate memories and relationships. Moments of Inertia explores the notion of gesture through the metaphor of effort: by working at such a micro-timescale, it becomes apparent through the sonic and visual experience how hard it is to smile.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival. An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data.

Todd Reynolds, composer, conductor, arranger and violinist, is a longtime member of Bang On A Can, Steve Reich and Musicians and an early member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. His commitment to genre-bending and technology-driven innovation in music has produced innumerable collaborations with artists that regularly cross musical and disciplinary boundaries, regularly placing him in venues from clubs to concert halls around the world.

A forerunner in the expansion of the violin beyond its classical and ‘wood-bound’ tradition, Reynolds electrifies in concert, weaves together composed and improvised segments, and makes use of computer technology and digital loops to sculpt his sounds in real time, seamlessly integrating minimalist, pop, Jazz, Indian, African, Celtic and indigenous folk musics into his own sonic blend. As a cross-genre improviser and collaborator, he has appeared and/or recorded with such artists as Anthony Braxton, Uri Caine, John Cale, Steve Coleman, Joe Jackson, Dave Liebman, Yo-Yo Ma, Graham Nash, Greg Osby, Steve Reich, Marcus Roberts and Todd Rundgren, and has commissioned and premiered countless numbers of new works by America’s most compelling composers, including John King, Phil Kline, Michael Gordon, Neil Rolnick, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Evan Ziporyn and Randall Wolff. His interdisciplinary work includes ongoing collaborations with SoundPainter Walter Thompson as well as media artists Bill Morrison and Luke DuBois and sound artist Jody Elff.

Reynolds is a founder of the band known as Ethel, a critically acclaimed amplified string quartet (represented by ICM Artists), with whom he wrote and toured internationally. He has also produced Still Life With Microphone, an ongoing theater piece which incorporates his own written and improvised music, compositions written for him, and elements of video and theatrical arts. Nuove Uova [new eggs], new works for violin and electricity, another Todd Reynolds production is a ‘new-music cabaret’ of sorts, having as its home Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. He is the recipient of ASCAP awards, an American Composers Forum Grant for Still Life with Mic and a 2003 Meet-the-Composer Commissioning Music/USA award.

Reynolds’ current string quartet featuring all-stars from New York’s new music scene is currently on tour with Meredith Monk’s Songs of Ascension and engaged in collaborations with composers and performers such as Kenny Werner, Neil Rolnick and Theo Bleckmann. Current commissions include music for dance, theater and orchestra, as well as a double CD to released on September 28th by the Innova label.

Moments of Inertia is a commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence.org website. It was commissioned through Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, which is made possible by the generous support of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund.

RECORDING OF THIS TALK:

“Most of my art works, in whatever media, are influenced by my concerns with the physical structure of objects (the growth structure of trees, the shape of the human heart, the particular spatial qualities of a building). I’m equally interested in the way that these familiar objects and places feature in our social and economic landscape: how we use them as symbols (the oak tree becomes shorthand for “Englishness”; the heart symbolises “Love”; landmark buildings both past and present are presented as signs of affluence, regeneration and “Progress”). The third underlying element in most of my works is a curiosity about new materials, new technologies and new engineering processes.

In the past, drawing on the interests outlined, I have made works such as The Landscape Room, and Decoy, both of which analyse and re-present the structure of the English oak, and of the English landscape. Both these works utilise bespoke computer programming and fractal mathematics from which I ‘grow’ virtual trees and change the appearance of hitherto familiar National Trust parklands.

Model Landscapes, extends this theme by moving from two-dimensional still images and animations, to produce a series of vignettes. The Model Landscape vignettes are “model” in terms of being “ideal” and at the same time, “scaled-down”. To make these works, I used a combination of old and new media, combining rapid prototyping techniques, whereby I took my own three-dimensional computer data and made small trees from the fractal mathematics, to hand-cut books, where tree structures popped up from the pages.

Souvenir of England references our Englishness and the nostalgia we sometimes feel for the loss of native flora and fauna due to changes in agricultural policy and practices and climate change.”