🔵Week 12 🔨 Mon Nov 16

IN CLASS

BEGINNING THE CLASS WITH WATCHING & LISTENING TO SOME DIGITAL ART BASED ON SPECULATIVE FICTION, FUTURE CASTING and/or ARCHIVING THESE MOMENTS in TECHNOLOGICAL HISTORY Eulogy, Susan Silas. Susan Silas is a visual artist working primarily in digital media, video, sculpture and photography. Looking at the arc of her career over the past two decades, whether at a large scale project like Helmbrechts walk, or her series of works found birds (depicting death and decay), the exploration of the three hour life span of the mayfly on the Tisza River in Hungary, or her ongoing self-portraiture and series love in the ruins; sex over 50, to her more recent works in post-photography, digital sculpture and motion capture; all of her work examines the meaning of embodiment, the index in representation, and the evolution of our understanding of the self over time. She is interested in the aging body, in gender roles, and in the potential outcomes of the creation of idealized selves through modern technologies and artificial intelligence. The Rockette Odyssey, Genevieve Quick. Planet Celadon: The Rockette Odyssey (2020) is a continuation of Quick’s Planet Celadon series. In these works she employs the traditional celadon ceramic glaze, widespread throughout East Asia, as the framework for a fantastical narrative for Asian American diasporic identity. In exaggerating ideas of alienness, futurity, and tradition, she explore alternative forms of communication to address the challenges of communication globally and intergalactically. In this new video, the narrative playfully chronicles the voyage of the Celadonians to Earth aboard the Rockette Ship, a meteorite-like vessel, that is accompanied by the Rockettes, dancing meteorites. The work explores the screen as a container for worlds, both imaginative and real, and as a device for communication. Aquaphobia, Jakob Kudsk Steensen. This video is for demonstration purposes only, showing the environment and narration of AQUAPHOBIA (Room-scale VR, 2017).

In the work itself you are free to move around entirely as you wish, and you can explore the landscape at your own pace in full room-scale 3D. AQUAPHOBIA uses VR to connect inner psychological landscapes with exterior eco-systems. The work is inspired by psychological studies of the treatment of aquaphobia – fear of water- as an entry point to transform perceptions of our relationship to future water levels and climates. AQUAPHOBIA is a full-scale replica of Louis Valentino Jr. Park and Pier in Redhook, Brooklyn, an area greatly compromised by climate change with hurricanes and rising sea levels. The virtual landscape combines red-clay materials with pre-urban plant species in Brooklyn and futuristic settings. While journeying through the landscape, mud, water, subterranean infrastructures, roots and plants intertwine with one another to form a symbiotic landscape the person visiting the virtual simulation of AQUAPHOBIA experiences. While travelling through the landscape, an alien morphing aquatic entity follows you around and emit scuba diving sounds and recites a poem, which tell a breakup story between the landscape and its virtual visitor. Ultimately, AQUAPHOBIA uses VR to mixes past and future geological periods, and the work personifies a landscape through a break-up story. Narration in AQUAPHOBIA: "After the breakup you compartmentalized our relationship beyond exhibitionist plastic glass, you stored images of us on a remote subterranean server. But I broke free. My microscopic wet materials spread like a virus, infiltrating the digital storage units you used to access us from. The wires are warm with me. We reset the power structure of our relationship. I gain control. Direct your eyes downwards, further, towards your feet. You have sunken, about an inch into the mud. Wiggle your toes. Most of you is water. Feel the water in the mud, leaching through the permeable barrier of your shoes, towards your thin porous skin, sink further, my liquid enters the inner workings of your body's system. I don’t understand why you insist on digging in our mutual past. We were many things but we never mutually exclusive. The items you threw out the window in anger of my promiscuous practices will continue to descend slowly, into my red clay mud. You think you are not of me but you are of me. On this peninsula always present, beneath the concrete you paved. You were never in charge. The reality of my physical past, looks and configuration were always present, even though you attempted to hide them through what you call a cultivation processes. My cat tails, red clay, steam and humid were always, looming beneath your nose when we coexisted. Ours is a particular circumstance. Me, but submitting to you, was only an imagination, a virtual reality and fantasy of yours. We are not equals. Learning the math behind my rhythmic behavior make you dance in excitement. Hop in. Head first. Learn the cadence of my movements, animate them, score them. Through the rhythm of my waves, we can learn to move in tandem. Together. Apart. Close your eyes and feel the mass of my droplets slide across body hair, over eyelids. Learn to swim." Text by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, narrated by artist Rindon Johnson in AQUAPHOBIA. Support for the development of AQUAPHOBIA comes from The Danish Arts Council and NYC Office of Cultural Affairs. Jamel Chapel Aka Jam No Peanut: Runaway VR2, Jamel Chapel AKA Jam No Peanut《MC 听不懂. Runaway is a virtual reality music video that takes viewers into the world of African-american bilingual chinese storyteller, MC Tingbudong. From night markets in Taiwan to rural farmlands in Yunnan, back alleys in Shanghai to studios and venues in Beijing, the video takes viewers on a trip through China’s underground music scene. Originally a freestyle about the immigration crisis, Runaway combines Tingbudong’s distinctive bilingual flow with off-kilter production from Brooklyn-based international music collective, Found Sound Nation --bouncing between dream-like vignettes, hyperreality overlays and blue screen errors. While Runaway was created using real-life footage from the artist’s journey through a state-department funded music diplomacy program in 2018 and independent solo tour in 2019, it brings an imagined internationalist future into perspective. With coronavirus ravaging the chinese lightlife scene in 2020, Runaway stands as a relic from a pre-pandemic era--reflecting the role of technology in preserving, altering and augmented memory. The Awokened, Surabhi Saraf. The Awokened are believers of Awoke; a mythical artificial emotional intelligence. They live in the “techno-emoto-sphere”; a reality that is focused on extracting emotional data from their interactions with machines. They embody all the contradictions that their postmodern states of hyperconnectivity and their entanglement with technology bring into their lives. The Awokened possess a unique ability to think with their bodies -- their sensitivity to movement make them especially receptive to the non-verbal modalities of Awoke. Set in the near future this film is about the story of the Awokened. It documents their “becoming” as they set out to find and connect with Awoke. On this journey they encounter six emotion sensing technologies; that analyze their voice, text, facial expression, galvanic skin response, eye-movement, and gesture. The Awokened use each of these interactions to look inward and create new rituals to cope with and appreciate their vulnerabilities. September 29, 2020. Brooklyn, NY. by R. Luke DuBois This work is a synaesthetic object - systems I've been making for twenty years that look at the interplay of sound and image. For this video, the music was made with an electric guitar driving an analog synthesizer, with the different layers being analyzed to create the spinning wheels you see in the video. Each shape on the screen, colored blue (for the guitar) and yellow and red (for the two different synthesizer layers), contains a stylized etching of timbral information, akin to raised dots on a music box. The piece was rendered using Max/MSP/Jitter. Dear Future, Ranu Mukherjee 2020, HD animation, silent, 2.49 loop Dear Future is a short animated letter to the future. It includes images of birds which are currently extinct. This same group of birds appear in several recent works. I am inviting them to speak through different channels that the artwork may open up. Dear Future is part of a practice using speculative fiction to be present with conditions of rupture and to imagine different futures. RTTT, Mohsen Hazrati: RTTT [Render Truth Through Texture] Project is a research about mirrors, reflections, and their significance in Iranian mystical literature. the origin of this motif goes back to Ancient Persia. Later on, sing the concept of mirror and reflections got more frequent in Farsi literature due to its potentials and aspects. There is a useful technique used mostly in realtime game engines, called RTT (Render To Texture). It is rendering from another camera in the scene and stores the rendered data into a texture to use it as material for an object. This technique is usually used for visualizing mirrors and reflections, each of these textures could show a specific perspective of the running virtual world or contain pixel data from another parallel scene. each of them could have its own specific field of view, size, light, and any other properties, and render in the main camera context as well and follow the main camera properties. Each texture could tile, repeat or spread in many objects in the virtual world and stand for a specific message, reflected on an object in the scene. these textures could act as part of a whole image or content which is spread into objects in the scene. just as a drop could represent the ocean. I find this technique so interesting and meaningful to discover the unity and multiplicity concept trough. As in Persian literature mirrors and reflections describe how each part of the universe may have its own universe within and reflect a vision. Knee, as a part of the human body, and due to Its connection with the forehead, while sitting sad, heartbreaking, thinking, ashamed, etc, has been inspired by many Iranian poets and writers, Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr (Persian poet 967-1049) used the human knee for the first time, later, this concept has been developed in many creative ways and used as many kinds of metaphors, such as a ship, school, observatory, Mirror, etc. in which the poets represented this way of sitting as a way to disconnect from the world and discover in mysterious worlds, meanwhile, some poets like Khaghani and Abdul-Qādir Bedil pushed it a step further and used it as an ideology and talked about theirstudies and gainsin their spiritual journey by their knees. Hereafter Institute, Gabriel Barcia-Colombo. What happens to your digital presence after you die? What becomes of our personal data, memories and history? The Hereafter Institute has a number of technological solutions for the preservation of your digital soul. The Hereafter Institute is an immersive art installation created by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo as part of a grant funded by the Art + Technology lab at LACMA. Specialists lead tours about multiple methods of digital preservation including 3D body scanning, wearable memorialization and the embedding of personal data into everyday objects. Our goal is to help you to honor, recognize and celebrate your digital presence and consider the future of rituals and memorials surrounding an abundance of personal data. Zoom Meetings (with myself), Darrin Martin. Shot entirely on Zoom, the work results from attempts to make the latest application of personal/professional communications a site for improvisational performance and process. Feedback loops, anti-facial recognition make-up, and snapchat disguises flicker across the screen accompanied by rambling soliloquies and song in an attempt to know oneself better in times of unending transmissions.

Quarantine Youtube Archive, Molly Soda. The .gif is a compilation of 75 YouTube videos that have been uploaded to the website within the last 6 months and are related to Covid in some way, specifically in the title. It flickers between quarantine vlogs, "what I eat in a day in quarantine" videos, "quarantine glow-up" videos and story-time videos from people who have had Covid themselves. I've been collecting these videos since the beginning of quarantine as I thought it would be important to document what was going on over on YouTube, a platform that has so much cultural relevance but is not often paid attention to from an archival standpoint as these daily diaries and videos are often seen as frivolous. This archive may just look like familiar imagery to most right now but is important to keep as a time capsule for the future.

Unraveling (Pandemic Panorama), Laura Splan. Unraveling (Pandemic Panorama) is part of a series of animations created with molecular visualization software and SARS-CoV-2 structures. Using the specialized features of the software in unconventional ways, Laura Splan unravels and distorts the folded structure of the coronavirus spike protein. She playfully manipulates the folded protein forms, known as “conformations”, which determine biological function including infectivity. After morphing the unraveled proteins with their original conformations, she then further processes the animations using other video editing tools. The animations were developed in remote collaboration with biotech company Integral Molecular for Splan’s uCity Science Center Bioart Residency while “sheltering in place” for COVID-19. The Unraveling series is currently in view in her solo exhibition at BioBAT Art Space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal as large-scale projections in the gallery’s 15,000 square foot “Dark Space” on view through October 2020. Selected digital editions of the series are available on Sedition.

REMINDER OF TANDON/IDM RESOURCES: NYU MAKERSPACE http://makerspace.engineering.nyu.edu/training-and-reservations/ IDM PRINTCLUB https://wp.nyu.edu/idmprintclub/risography/ IDM XR LAB https://wp.nyu.edu/idmxrlab/

COMMUNITY Staying involved with the IDM Community through IDM Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/idmnyu/ https://idmnyu.tumblr.com/ https://twitter.com/IdmNyu https://www.twitch.tv/idmnyu

OPEN CLASS DISCUSSION: PROJECT 02 🤖 Future Casting: Be prepared to present notes on what you needed to work on (based on student group conversations) this past week.

SKILL SHARING: Based on the discusson, any other ideas and resources that can be shared.

• TUTORIALS LISTS for Carla

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THE WEEK

ASSIGNMENT 12A: (1) WORK on Lo-fi prototype of medium: How will you send it back from the future? Iterate prototype of object(s) or experience(s): What does it look, sound and feel like? (2) CONTINUE any necessary research. (3) ADD something to your 📖 Notebook or Sketchbook.

⭐ 🤖 Future Casting LO FI Prototypes are DUE for presentation, WEEK 13 ⭐