"Art is a System of Research"

Art is a system of research. - Paul Rucker

The interactive artist Balam Soto was featured today in Make Magazine online. Some quick googling uncovered this installation, which I thoroughly enjoyed watching.

Is an interactive installation that links tangible and digital reality, utilizing customized hardware and physical computing. A digital cube, which incorporates visual images of my artwork or other creations, is projected on the wall. A physical cube sits in front of the projected display. When patrons move the physical cube, the digital cube moves in sync. As patrons interact with the installation, they realize they have truly become part of its digital world when they spy a realtime image of themselves on one side of the digital cube.

The piece reminded me of a quote from one of the many, many artists who have appeared at the IdeaFestival, Paul Rucker, who in 2103 said from the festival stage that art is a "system of research." The thought has been penciled into my mind every since. Soto (and Rucker) remind us that we're not empty vessels, but auditors, participants, in the information we consume.

How actively we question that information and our experiences is up to each of us. In that sense, we're all artists capable of asking the sharp, penetrating - or, at long last, obvious - questions.

Stay curious™

Just a reminder: the discounted rate for 2016 festival passes will expire on Labor Day. Don't wait too long to get yours!

Wayne

Is Computer Generated Music, Music?

What is the difference between synthetic pattern-making and those patterns recognized and reproduced musically by humans?

Is computer generated jazz, Jazz? Or is it, like the saxaphone and snare drum, just a new medium for discovery?

The more grandiose would-be applications of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are often preceded by ostensibly more manageable proving grounds – games, say. Before IBM’s question-answering computer, Watson, treats cancer, for example, it goes on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Google’s AlphaGo took on a top human Go champion in a ‘grand challenge’ for AI. But these contests aren’t trivial stepping stones – they can be seen as affronts to humankind. One commentator, realising that Google’s program would win a match, said he ‘felt physically unwell’.
It’s much the same for computer art projects. Kim and his friend Evan Chow, whose code is used in deepjazz, are members of the youngest generation of a long lineage of computer ‘artists’.

Read There is No Difference Between Computer Art and Human Art for yourself.

Stay curious.™

Wayne

Creativity is a Way of Thinking

A popular post on the blog of designer Jared Sinclair offers guidance to anyone interested in fresh thinking. Creative, fresh thinking is what the IdeaFestival is all about, so naturally we thought we'd share it with you.

Here's a snippet:

Creativity is a way of operating, a habit of the mind — not a talent. When you grasp this fact, it becomes painfully clear that the way we organize our time and our interactions with colleagues often undermines the very creativity we’re supposedly chasing after.
Creative sessions should be kept formally separate from the hurried mundanity of getting things done. When we need to solve a problem that requires creativity, we should deliberately shut out all of that noise and stress. For a clearly-defined interval of time — Cleese suggests an hour and a half — we enter a state of humorous, open-ended play. Within this cocoon of play, we strive to think of as many ways to view a problem as we can muster.
The point is not to solve the problem (though that will eventually happen), but merely to explore it. The urge to find a decision and pass judgement will destroy the fragile creative process.

The blog post reminded us of a talk that Jamie Holmes will deliver at IdeaFestival 2016 on the value of uncertainty. Don't miss him!

Read Sinclair's post after the jump.

Stay curious™

Wayne

Peering into Eden

Having just discovered a second source for the long theorized gravitational wave, some suggest that the newly confirmed phenomena could revolutionize astronomy and what we know about the universe.

Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams:

So much is learned by taking advantage of the enormous width of the electromagnetic spectrum, wide enough that, as Gregory Benford points out, visible light is a mere one octave on a keyboard fifteen meters wide. Ultraviolet tells us about the gaseous halo around the Milky Way and shows us active galaxies and quasars while helping us analyze interstellar gas and dust. X-rays and gamma rays deepen our understanding of black holes and matter moving at extremely high velocities, tuning up our knowledge of supernovae....
Unlike electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves have the intriguing property that they propagate unperturbed once they have been created, which places the remote corners of the universe into our field of ‘view....’ As our sensitivity to such signals increases, we should be able to move from black holes to neutron stars and supernovae, and perhaps the merger of binary stars, as events that can be examined by these techniques.

The ability to peer into "the remote corners of the universe?" What a lovely thought.

I hope to see you at the IdeaFestival!

Stay curious™

Wayne

Could a Circular Smartphone "Rethink Tech?"

For the IdeaFestival fans out there who might be designers, Wired asks the question: what's in a circle? The creators of the smartphone, Runcible, are betting that the rectangle-as-frame brings along a number of assumptions that inform the user experience, and not necessarily in a positive way.

Rectangles are still subtly dictating our behavior today. Movie screens, chased by TVs, have gotten bigger and wider, encouraging us to sit back and lose ourselves in the spectacle. (In 1930, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein lamented how the cinema’s 'passive horizontalism.' He wanted the screen to be square.) Smartphones, with their slender, touch-controlled displays, have become a distinctly more active rectangle. Paired with the never-ending vertical feeds that fill apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, they’ve become an irresistible, inexhaustible diversion....

Described by Wired as more "provocation" than product, the phone's creators ask if a circular phone would be less of an interruption and more of an actual information help.

Runcible isn’t meant to be a smartphone replacement so much as an alternative. 'I think we’ve become really, really good at getting interrupted and creating conduits for interruption,' says Monohm CEO Aubrey Anderson, who met his co-founders during a stint at Apple. “It’s time now to use technology to get a little quieter.” If miniaturizing the computer is what got us the smartphone, Runcible asks what a gizmo might look like if you started by souping up a pocket watch. And the shape of the device is central to that thinking. A circular frame, after all, is no good for browsing a Twitter feed.

Read the entire article after the jump.

Stay curious™

Wayne