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Image Tampering, Retouching, and Synthetic Beauty: A Curricular Unit

9 August 2009 / pedagogy, reference

Image Retouching: A Critical Approach for Media Arts Educators
I developed the following course unit on image tampering, retouching and manipulation for my Introduction to the Electronic Media Studio (EMS1) class at Carnegie Mellon. The semester course is intended for first-year students with little or no computer experience, and serves the purpose of introducing students to basic media-editing tools. The emphasis in the course is not on technical mastery but on understanding digital media technologies as tools for creative cultural practice.

The loosely-organized materials I’ve cited below provide starting points for discussions about image manipulation from several perspectives, including: photojournalistic standards of truthtelling; the construction of idealized beauty in vernacular advertising; and the early history of 19th-century photocollages as an extension of narrative romantic painting. I’m grateful to Paolo Pedercini and Rich Pell for their pointers to some of the resources below.

Unit Learning Outcomes:
To demonstrate development of skills in the use of techniques for pixel-based (bitmap) image acquisition, editing, compositing, and output. To demonstrate an awareness of the issues surrounding photographic “truth” and verifiability in the digital era.

Readings:

Images:
Examples of historic photographs, artworks and hoax images produced in various ways through photomanipulation.

Video:

Interactions:

  • Roth, Evan (fi5e). Detouch. Interactive Processing applet. (+blog post). An interactive applet which allows the viewer to see exactly which pixels have been modified in a before/after retouching comparison.

Assignments:

Questions for Students

  1. In your opinion, what sorts of image manipulation techniques should be permissible in news images and photojournalism? Which ones shouldn’t? Why? Be specific.
  2. Suppose an interview article about you is being written for a major magazine, and the editors intend to print an accompanying full-page photograph of you. Would you prefer that the magazine professionally (that is, undetectably) retouch your image? If yes, to what extent — is there a limit?
  3. Identify an artwork (image) which was clearly produced through digital manipulations of photographic source materials. Work to find one that you admire. In your opinion, what makes the image effective as an artwork?
Assignment 1. Glamorization and Aging
From Paolo Pedercini.

  1. Photograph yourself in front-on close up view using a digital camera.
  2. Retouch the image to look as “beautiful” or “handsome” as possible according to the glossy magazine standards of beauty.
  3. Age your original portrait to look at least 20 years older. Take inspiration from your parents.
Assignment 2. A Fiction or A Forgery

Create your choice of (A) a fiction or (B) a forgery. Be clear about which of these you have chosen. For the purposes of this assignment: A fiction is a depiction of something derived from your imagination. It depicts something we all would agree is not true, but for which we nonetheless happily suspend our disbelief, because the “reality” it portrays is so interesting or provocative. A fiction asks the question: “What if….?” A forgery is an image which tells a lie. It depicts something which could indeed be true, and it attempts to hid or conceal any evidence or artifacts that would give away the lie. A viewer may doubt the truthfulness of the forgery, but would need to build an argument using external evidence to disprove it. A forgery asks the question: “Did you know….?” Note: The most important challenge of this assignment is to tell a story with an image you’re constructing. Whether that story is from your imagination (a fiction) or is a lie (a forgery) is less critical — since some images could be both a fiction and a forgery.

Consider the following strategies for how you might create your fiction/forgery:

  • Adding an element
  • Removing an element
  • Moving or dislocating an element
  • Duplicating an element
  • Modifying an element
  • Exchanging an element with something else

Looking for ideas? If you’re not certain where to begin, you could consider making a “chimera” — a creature which is composed of parts of other animals, such as a minotaur (bull+human), griffin (lion+eagle), or something of your own invention. Situate your chimera in its “natural” habitat, etc. Note: this does not imply that you are required to make a chimera.

Additional Recommendations: Unless you have a better idea, your image should involve you, somehow. Please use images from photographic sources. These could come from sources like: the web, your camera, a scanner, etc. I recommend that you use images from at least two different photographs to create your fiction/forgery. However, if your concept is very strong, it is conceivable that you could create your fiction/forgery by rearranging elements within a single source image. Develop your image at the highest resolution possible. A recommended final image size is at least 1600×1200, and preferably closer to 3000×2000. To be on the safe side, keep all of your original source files, as well as your Photoshop .PSD project file, until after the assignment has been submitted. Keep these somewhere safe, such as your “workfiles” directory!

To do well on this assignment, you’ll need to make a provocative fiction or a convincing forgery. Apart from your image, however, your work will also be judged on how completely you fulfilled the following checklist:

  • Your fiction/forgery image is done at high resolution.
  • You created a small, low-resolution thumbnail image.
  • You correctly linked your thumbnail image to your large image.
  • You wrote an accompanying text about your assignment.

Keywords: digital photography, digital imaging, computer imaging, image editing, image manipulation, photo manipulation, image tampering, photo retouching, exaggeration, doctoring, doctored, re-touching, alteration, digitally altered, compositing, composite, collage, software, Photoshop, photoshopping, curriculum, course unit, course materials, classroom materials, educational resource, lecture notes, course prep, curricular unit, slimming, beauty, body image, unattainable, normativity, advertising, imagery, art, illustration, journalism, photojournalism, truth, veracity, forgery, critical approach, contextual study, media literacy, visual literacy, education, educators, teachers.

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Golan’s 2009 TED Talk, online

30 July 2009 / announcement, lecture, press, thanks

The TED Conference just posted a 15′33″ online video of my February 2009 presentation today. Happily, the TED organization also permits their videos to be shared and embedded under a Creative Commons licence:

TED kindly provides the same video for download in additional formats as well:
Zipped MP4 video file / Podcast MP4 video for iTunes.

The snappy formatting of the TED video doesn’t allow space or time for thorough credits, attributions and acknowledgements. For this reason I would like to use this space to mention the following organizations, collaborators and other individuals whose work is cited in my presentation:

  • Slide #1 (Telegram) is courtesy ACCAD and The Charles A. Csuri Project at OSU.
  • Slide #3 (Desktop) is courtesy Mateo Zlatar.
  • Slide #4 (Baby mirror) is from Wikipedia.
  • Interstitial Fragment Processor is by Golan Levin.
  • Slide #5 (Interstitial Fragment Processor) is courtesy Bitforms Gallery NYC, photo by John Berens.
  • Slide #6 (Maluma/Takete) is from Wolfgang Kohler, Gestalt Psychology.
  • Slide #7 (Phonesthesia) is from Shelly Wynecoop, unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1997.
  • Slide #8 (Re:MARK) is courtesy Ars Electronica, Linz. Photo by Pascal Maresch.
  • Re:MARK is by Tmema (Golan Levin + Zachary Lieberman) with the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
  • Slide #10 (Ursonography) is photo/courtesy Juha Huuskonen.
  • Ursonography is an interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, by Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin.
  • Slide #11 (Ursonography) is courtesy Ars Electronica, Linz. Photo by Pascal Maresch.
  • Slide #12 (Staring contest) is from Wikipedia.
  • Opto-Isolator is by Golan Levin with Greg Baltus.
  • Double-Taker (Snout) is by Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White.

The Interstitial Fragment Processor, Ursonography, Opto-Isolator, and Double-Taker (Snout) projects were all created using openFrameworks. Thanks to Emily, June, Martha and Matthew at the TED organization for the high production quality of the video and its subtitles.

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New Media Artworks: Prequels to Everyday Life

19 July 2009 / external, reference, thanks

As an occasional emissary for new-media arts, I increasingly find myself pointing out how some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists. In some instances, we can pick out the unmistakable signature of a single person’s original artistic idea, released into the world decades ahead of its time — perhaps even dismissed, in its day, as useless or impractical — which after complex chains of influence and reinterpretation has become absorbed, generations of computers later, into the culture as an everyday product. This story forms the core argument for including artists in the DNA of any serious technology research laboratory (as was practiced at Xerox PARC, the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Atari Research Lab, to name just a few examples): the artists posed novel questions which wouldn’t have arisen otherwise. To get a jump on the future, in other words, bring in some artists who have made theirs the problem of exploring the social implications and experiential possibilities of technology. What begins as an artistic and speculative experiment materializes, after much cultural digestion, as an inevitable tool or toy.

In other instances, we detect a whiff of outright theft. This may be difficult to prove, or at least, challenging to litigate, particularly for ideas which have simmered in the stew of the public domain for a few years. We simply pity, or perhaps snicker at, the artist who seeks redress from a behemoth corporation like Microsoft for its callous disregard of his Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Well, earlier this month, I experienced yet another day of cognitive dissonance in which

  • I struggled to justify the value of new-media arts research to an audience of Silicon Valley businesspeople;
    while simultaneously,
  • Some new-media artist friends of mine discovered that their work had been ‘appropriated’ by a large corporation.

There’s a clearly a cultural blindspot, here, folks. In the hope that these artists and others like them may receive some recognition for their pioneering prognostication and belated cultural influence, I here offer A few examples of New Media Artworks which Have Predicted the Future, Perhaps Too Successfully:

Myron Krueger’s Video Place (1974), and the Sony EyeToy (2003)

Video Place (1974) = EyeToy (2003)

Myron Krueger (born 1942) is a pioneering American computer artist who developed some of the earliest computer-based interactive artworks. Krueger is also considered to be among the first generation of virtual reality and augmented reality researchers. Pictured at left is a scene from Myron Krueger’s landmark interactive artwork, Video Place, which was developed continuously between ~1970 and 1989, and which premiered publicly in 1974. Camera-based computer play begins here. The Video Place project comprised at least two dozen profoundly inventive scenes which comprehensively explored the design space of full-body camera-based interactions with virtual graphics — including telepresence applications, drawing programs, and (pictured here, in the “Critter” scene) interactions with animated artificial creatures. Many of these scenes allowed for multiple simultaneous interactants, connected telematically over significant distances. Video Place has influenced several generations of new media artworks, including some of my own (see, for example, my short essays, “Hands Up! The Media Art Posture“ and “Computer Vision for Artists and Designers“). By 2003, techniques for full-body camera-based interactions were considered inexpensive and reliable enough for mass commercialization. Pictured here, at right, is a screenshot of the Sony EyeToy, which was released in 2003 and has sold, according to Wikipedia, in excess of 10.5 million units. Today, the Sony EyeToy weighs a few ounces and costs just $29, and offers games featuring mass-market character properties (Harry Potter, Sonic the Hedgehog) and popular sports (basketball, football, Formula One racing, etcetera).

Michael Naimark & MIT ArchMac’s Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980), and Google StreetView (2007-)

Aspen Movie Map and Google Street View

Michael Naimark (born 1952) is a new-media artist and researcher interested in “place representation.” In addition to his influential work exploring cinema-based virtual and immersive realities, Naimark is also notable for his advocacy of media art as a stimulus for technological innovation — having directly helped establish a number of prominent research labs including the MIT Media Laboratory (1980), the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), Lucasfilm Interactive (1989), and Interval Research Corporation (1992).

In the late 1970s Naimark was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT. Working in collaboration with Peter Clay, Bob Mohl, Andrew Lippman and others from the MIT Architecture Machine Group (”ArchMac”), Naimark helped create the Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980), a landmark hypermedia installation which allowed visitors to interactively explore and navigate the roads in a small town in Colorado. The Aspen Movie Map was made possible through an “artistic abuse” of the world’s first laserdisc player — namely, by taking a device which had been intended for the storage and playback of large movies, and instead using it for random access under interactive control. Naimark, who went on to create similar maps for more than a decade, says, “One could argue that the roots of two movements went through the Aspen Movie Map in the earliest days: the roots of multimedia and the roots of virtual reality.” More information about the Aspen Movie Map can be found at Michael Naimark’s web site for the project, including a remarkable video and some additional historic writings. Below are photos showing the automobile rigs used to create panoramas of the streets, then and now.

Aspen Movie Map and Google Street View

Built with financial support from DARPA, The Aspen Movie Map artwork was awarded the dubious “Golden Fleece Award” in 1980 by then-U.S. Senator William Proxmire — a sarcastic recognition he bestowed on projects which he felt were egregious wastes of taxpayer money. Nevertheless, the core ideas of the Aspen Movie Map live on, three decades years later, in Google’s widely-used Street View service (launched 2007), a feature of Google’s networked-based mapping tools that provides panoramic views of streets in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Jeffrey Shaw’s Legible City (1988) and E-fitzone exercise equipment (2008)

Legible City (1988) = E-Fitzone (2008)

Jeffrey Shaw (born 1944) has been active in new media arts and research since the mid-1960s. Currently the director of the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Shaw was founding director (1991-2003) of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1988, Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld created Legible City, an interactive artwork with a sensor-enabled stationary bicycle interface, which allowed visitors to navigate and explore a 3D virtual environment by pedaling and steering. The work is well-known within the media arts literature, where it has been recognized for its advances in the poetics of immersive synthetic experiences and in the field of experimental physical interfaces.

Pictured above at right is a recent (ca. 2008) piece of digital exercise equipment from E-fitzone, a sports promotion “pilot lab” which purports to be Europe’s “first gym for interactive gaming”. An industry press article states: “According to Carla Scholten, director of Embedded Fitness, which initiated the project, ‘The idea for E‑fitzone was based on initiatives in the U.S. where a combination of gaming, entertainment and fitness training has become commonplace. It not only makes training fun, but also offers the option of creating an online account through which you can track your high scores, heart rate and energy consumption.’” It is difficult to judge from the photo, but the E-fitzone interactive cycling station appears to include a trigger-enabled joystick which Shaw’s artwork did not.

Art+Com’s Terravision (1996) and Google’s Google Earth (2001, 2005-).

XXX

Art+Com is a collective of German new-media artist/technologists, founded in 1988, which has since evolved into a small company providing custom interactive installation projects for clients in the industry, culture and research sectors. In 1996, Art+Com developed Terravision, a networked virtual representation of the earth based on satellite images, aerial shots, altitude data and architectural data. According to the Art+Com website, “Terravision was the first system to provide a seamless navigation and visualisation in a massively large spatial data environment. Users can navigate seamlessly from overviews of the earth to extremely detailed objects and buildings. In addition to the photorealistic representation of the earth, all kinds of spatial information-data are integrated, and are streamed into the system according to the user’s needs.”

Pictured at right is Google Inc.’s Google Earth, a “virtual globe, map and geographic information program” that “lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean.” Google Earth was originally called Earth Viewer, and was created in 2001 by Keyhole, Inc, a company acquired by Google in 2004. One significant difference between Terravision and Google Earth, is that the newer project takes advantage of user-generated cartographic annotations, allowing users to save their favorite places, and share these with others.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy’s (IAA) GraffitiWriter & Streetwriter (1998-2004),
and the Nike Chalkbot (2009)

Institute for Applied Autonomy GraffitiWriter and StreetWriter, and the Nike Chalkbot

It has sometimes been suggested that interactive new media art is propelled by two different strands of research: technoformalism, an inquiry which is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and experiential potentials of new technologies, and hacktivism, which is concerned with technology’s critical and sociopolitical possibilities. To the extent that technoformal artworks can be interpreted as neutral “media frames”, and are thus more easily adapted to commercial ends — as illustrated, perhaps, by the first examples in this article — it may be surprising and instructive to note that politically-challenging hacktivist work is not immune from such adaptations, either.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as an anonymous artist’s collective dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. For more than a decade, the IAA has created tactical media technologies, including various forms of “contestational robotics”, which are intended to extend the autonomy of human activists. In 1998 the IAA developed GraffitiWriter, a small “tele-operated field programable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometers per hour,” whose “printing process is similar to that of a dot matrix printer.” GraffitiWriter provoked controversies on a number of occasions; for example, during an award ceremony on live Austrian television in 2000, at the height of Austrian governor Jörg Haider’s xenophobic campaign against immigrants, GraffitiWriter went scandalously ‘off-script’ and printed the activist slogan Kein mensch ist illegal (”No person is illegal”).

IAA’s subsequent project, StreetWriter (2001-2004) consists of a substantially larger computer-controlled industrial spray painting unit that is built into a van or trailer. The system is capable of printing text messages hundreds of feet long, and as wide as a lane of traffic. StreetWriter was developed in order to protest the militarization of robotics and the privatization of public space through corporate messaging. In 2004, for example, the project was deployed in protest of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, where it printed Asimov’s first rule of robotics (”A robot must not kill”). Video of the IAA StreetWriter can be seen here.

In mid-2009, the sports apparel manufacturer Nike and its PR agency, Wieden+Kennedy, commissioned Pittsburgh design studio DeepLocal to create a similar device, Chalkbot, for use in its “LIVESTRONG” advertising campaign for the 2009 Tour de France. The Chalkbot system was used to print inspirational messages sent (via SMS and the Web) by Internet users, as well as Nike’s campaign slogans and logographs. The Institute for Applied Autonomy group was not involved in (or informed about) Nike’s appropriation of its Streetwriter concept, and posted a press release stating their objection to “the corporate appropriation of ‘outsider’ research projects without acknowledgement of the amateur, collective, hobbyist, and activist communities upon which projects like Chalkbot are built.” Deeplocal posted a response to this, asserting the value of Chalkbot for spreading messages of hope for cancer survivors, and more generally for connecting a very large public, so directly, to such a messaging device.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to the artists listed above, all of whom, in full disclosure, are friends or acquaintances. I’m also grateful to Eric Paulos, who alerted me to some important examples, and to the many others online who responded to my request on Twitter for similar instances. I learned that there are many, many examples of new-media artworks which laid the conceptual groundwork for everyday commercial products. (Want some more? How about Motoi Ishibashi and Motoki Kouketsu, whose G-Display artwork (1999) anticipated most modern tilt-based interactions. Or contrast Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s well-known media-art classic, Text Rain (1999), itself a descendant of Myron Krueger’s Video Place, with the new Word Wall “donor recognition system” (2009) by SnibbeInteractive.com.)

There’s also another question I’ve left unaddressed here, which concerns the shifting artistic (as opposed to economic) value of artwork-inventions which become commonplace tools and products. These stories are ultimately, for me, inspirational yet grimly depressing — and so for now, I’ll let the bittersweet job of making a comprehensive list of such projects fall to someone else.

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Pedagogic Resources on Chinese Painting Villages

26 June 2009 / external, pedagogy, reference

Below are some resources about the “Chinese Painting Village” phenomenon, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, which employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings. The information below may be ‘of interest’ to arts educators and/or students, particularly those studying painting. I am grateful to Clement Valla for awakening me to this important trend.

For those not familiar with this phenomenon, here are the basic facts:

  • About 8,000-10,000 “painting workers” are employed in a single village (actually, an urban district) to produce more than 60% of the world’s paintings. (And I’ll bet you thought the world’s largest population of artists was in Berlin or Brooklyn!)
  • Some factories specialize in reproducing famous Western masterpieces; others specialize in creating literally thousands of identical units (for hotels, cruise ships, and retail outlets like WalMart, K-Mart, Ikea, etc.); and other factories specialize in painting custom reproductions of family portraits, pets, wedding photos, and the like.
  • Commissioning a custom painting is done with digital images, via email attachments and PayPal, and takes about 10-14 days including shipping. Prices range from as little as $10 to as much as $1000 (for a high-quality forgery); cost factors include the size, thickness of paint, and presence of (for example) people and/or portrait faces. For a painting whose dimensions are 50cm x 40cm, one might expect to pay $30-100 US.

Painting competition in Dafen Village, Shenzhen
A painting speed competition in Dafen.

Newspaper articles, critical histories and other journalism.
(Lots of good information here.)

This 7-minute YouTube video provides an excellent overview of the painting economy in Dafen village:

Painting competition in Dafen Village, Shenzhen

Example painting factories online.
(There are many others.)

Western art approaches to the phenomenon.
(Interesting work which addresses this trend critically, conceptually, and/or politically.)

Outsourced oil painting is the new “digital output”.

I should perhaps briefly explain my interest in this phenomenon. Of course, there is some very provocative conceptual art which investigates and appropriates these painting resources, such as that by the artists linked above. This is challenging and (in my opinion) necessary work. From my standpoint as an arts educator, however, I do not believe it is adequate for students to be made aware of such clever projects in blogs like this one. Instead, I believe it is essential to directly expose students — particularly those who consider themselves to be painters — to the actual use of this inexpensive, new, internet-enabled “means of production”, and thereon to crucial aesthetic and ethical questions about authenticity, labor, and the cultural logic of mass customization in today’s global economy. They must cause one to be made, once, themselves. They must understand the implications, by being implicated in the process.

Most of my undergraduate students self-identify as painters. Many of them harbor charming ideas about the “aura” of original paintings, which allows them to distinguish their works from “banal”, machine-produced prints. But too few are aware of this extraordinary revolution in their own trade, in which the majority of the world’s paintings are now mass-produced by a superscaled “human machine”. And very few, if any, yet appreciate that the cost of having a JPEG image skillfully painted in China is roughly the same price as having it printed on the HP Designjet in our school’s Digital Print Lab — or that the process of commissioning such a painting over email, is barely more complicated than pressing Command-P. (Perl script, anyone?) I am convinced that our young painters must confront these facts directly. This coming September, in my introductory Electronic Media Studio class at Carnegie Mellon, I’ll be exposing my freshmen Art students to this, in their first week at university — when their Photoshop assignments (a “fiction or forgery” collage, or a “retouched self-portrait”, perhaps) are “printed out” (surprise!) in hand-applied Chinese oils. I’m hoping this will be an eye-opening introduction to art school, and one that makes them think hard about what it means to be a painter in 2009. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Clement Valla and Winnie Won Yin Wong for invaluable pointers for this post.

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A Juxtaposition: John Cage vs. Sam Taylor-Wood

17 June 2009 / external, performance, reference

“When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.” — Yoko Ono, ‘To the Wesleyan People’, 1966. [I'm grateful to Dawn Weleski for finding this quote].

The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the contrast between two particular works which are bookends for advanced uses of the professional orchestra.

Consider, first, the performance of John Cage’s famous silent piece, 4′33″, by the full BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London in January 2004. Cage’s work

“was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. Although commonly perceived as ‘four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence’, the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.” [Wikipedia].

[An additional copy can be found on YouTube here.]

In contrast to this is Sam Taylor-Wood’s video work, Sigh, in which a composition by Anne Dudley is performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Or, apparently performed, as the orchestra, minus their actual instruments, mime the piece precisely as their muscles remember it. In the video installation, which premiered in October 2008, the music is heard as a backdrop. A spokesperson for Taylor-Wood states:

“In a dark, rundown studio, the members of the orchestra sit in their everyday clothes. They start to play a piece of music, sawing and blowing the empty spaces where the instruments should be. Although the music is clear and audible, the absence of the instruments renders the sound oddly incorporeal. It’s a private, ghostly performance.” [London Evening-Standard]

Taylor-Wood’s work follows on the heels of her similar (and remarkable) project Prelude in Air, which focuses on the re-enactment of a solo cello work. Both videos evoke a form of sympathetic synaesthesia (or vicarious kinesthesia, if you will) in which the mind of the viewer fills in the missing instrument, an illusion which could only be made possible through the use of consummately professional performers.

And so we have two unusually intense works:

  • Cage’s 4′33″ at the Barbican: All of the instruments, none of the sound; and
  • Taylor-Wood’s Sigh: None of the instruments, all of the sound.
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Announcing: Interactive Sound Art at NIME 2009

3 June 2009 / announcement, exhibition

Dear friends, if you’re in the Pittsburgh area from June 4-6, come enjoy this exhibition I’ve curated as part of the NIME 2009 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. A brochure with more information is available here: nime2009_installations.pdf (3.4Mb).

INTERACTIVE SOUND INSTALLATIONS
An Exhibition at the Ninth Conference on
New Interfaces for Musical Expression
http://www.nime2009.org/directions.php

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
June 4-6, 2009, 12-6pm
Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
Purnell Center for the Arts, 5000 Forbes Ave.
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
http://www.cmu.edu/millergallery/visit.php

As part of NIME2009, the Ninth Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, we invite the public to enjoy five interactive sound installations at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. Come experience spatialized audio, musical pendulums, solar-powered sound synthesis, and mobile message mashups — in this short-term exhibition of new media sound works by leading artist/researchers.

Featuring the artworks:

  • Elemental & Cyrene Reefs by Ivica Bukvic and Eric Standley;
  • Cellphonia: 4′33″ by Steve Bull and Scot Gresham-Lancaster;
  • Pendaphonics by Dan Overholt, Byron Lahey, Anne-Marie Skriver Hansen,
    Winslow Burleson, and Camilla N. Jensen;
  • Sound Lanterns by Scott Smallwood; and
  • Artificial Analog Neural Network (AANN) by Phillip Stearns.

Installation Selection Committee: R. Luke DuBois and Golan Levin. Installations Chair and Exhibition Coordinator: Golan Levin. This exhibition was made possible with support from the CMU School of Music; the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry; the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University; and the CMU Schools of Art and Architecture.

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Praxis, Theoria, Poesis

16 May 2009 / external, general, reference, thanks

I’m grateful to Stewart Butterfield for making me aware of this quote by John Adams, which I here repost from his Sylloge blog, for the purposes of my own reference and safekeeping:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

As I lack a very substantial connection with tapestry and porcelain, I confess to admiring Stewart’s synopsis of this quote even more than the original quote itself: “some bloke who had to do something praxis-y so his sons could do something theoria-y so their kids could do something poesis-y.”

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Criteria for a Music Department Head Search

15 May 2009 / pedagogy, reference




Criteria for a Music School Head Search.
In early 2006, our School of Music was about to conduct a Head Search. Although my appointment at Carnegie Mellon University is in the School of Art, and not within the School of Music, I was nonetheless concerned for the outcome of the search, and so I drafted the following letter to a friend of mine who teaches in the department, offering (or venting) my opinions. Recently I was reminded of this letter during a conversation with another friend at a different school, where a Head Search is underway, and so I have decided to share this letter with the public. What follows is a litmus test, of sorts, for the kind of hopefully progressive thinking I would expect from the Chair or Head of a contemporary music school or conservatory.

This article focuses specifically on the issue of tolerance for curricular content and does not address other aspects of a good department Head (management and fundraising skills, etc.). For that reason, this article could also be entitled “A partial curriculum for a 21st Century music school.“
- – - – - – - – - -

Dear Professor X_________,

When we bumped into each other in the hallway recently, you were extremely gracious in your openness regarding my suggestions for the Head Search in the School of Music.

To whatever extent it could be helpful, I thought I’d put some of my thoughts to paper and codify some criteria that I would apply to a Music School Head Search process, were I to be involved in it.

My criteria are organized in the form of a timeline of musical forms. My litmus test? The “ideal candidate”, in my opinion, would be comfortable having courses taught in ANY of these musical forms, ALL the way down the list.

My observation is that many people active in music academies tend to draw a line in the sand — a line which represents the division between musical forms which they believe are worthy of “serious” consideration, and those which are not. My prediction is that the following list will provoke a great deal of ire among people who draw such distinctions. For all of those forms that they consider to be music, they might say, “Pshaw! Of course that is a serious and worthy subject; how arrogant to assume that I would not consider it such.” Then they will hit their line, and for all of those forms that come after, they might say, “Pshaw! there’s no way that form is legitimate; it is a fad, a gimmick, it’s barely music. Teach it here over my dead body.” I think we need a 21st-century Music School; the question is, at what point in this list will the new Head’s tastes be “frozen in time”? My hope is that the final candidate is open-minded enough to make it all the way down the following gauntlet.
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1912. The ideal candidate would be comfortable with the changes to Western orchestral music coincident with the birth of Modernism: Serialism and atonal forms, such as in the works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern.

1913. The ideal candidate would be comfortable with the innovations introduced by Luigi Russolo in his “Art of Noises” manifesto nearly a hundred years ago, and implemented in his intonarumori (”noise instruments”). Beyond having students merely read this seminal text, would the candidate see value in having students invent and perform their own noise instruments?

1922. Music from the African Diaspora. In 1922, the first Jazz recordings became available, and the first commercial radio station in the USA opened in Pittsburgh. The success of each was linked to the other. Since that time, Afro-Caribbean and African-American musics (Jazz, R&B, Rock, Hip-Hop, etc) have had an incalculable influence on the shape of modern music, both in and out of the academy. The ideal candidate would have an open-minded approach to teaching African-American social music histories, aesthetics, performance techniques, and even composition classes.

1929-1948. The ideal candidate would be comfortable in educating students to recognize the permeable boundary between “noise” and “music”, as further articulated by Edgard Varèse (”The Liberation of Sound“, 1936), Henry Cowell (”The Joys of Noise“, 1929) and Pierre Schaeffer in the notion of “musique concrete”.

1933. Film sound was introduced in 1928, and the first movie with a complete orchestral score, King Kong, was released in 1933. The ideal candidate would be open to recognizing that film music is a serious discipline in its own right, with distinct aesthetic, economic, and theoretic concerns. It is also the predominant way in which most people now experience long-format orchestral compositions, and (additionally) one of the last remaining sources of regular employment for orchestral musicians. Would the ideal candidate see value in music composition courses for film and television?

1953. How does the candidate feel about the revolutions to contemporary musics initiated by John Cage? To take a few examples, how about the use of aleatoric (indeterminate) and generative compositional techniques? What about visual (graphic) scores? Or the incorporation of ambient and environmental sounds, through both ‘tape’ musics and in live contexts? Again, I’m not just advocating book-teaching theoretics or histories; I mean: how would the candidate feel about an actual course in (for example) reading, creating and performing graphic scores? Or does the candidate feel that John Cage spoiled everything, similar to the way some visual artists prefer to ignore the revolutions introduced by Marcel Duchamp?

1956. Electronic music has been with us now for fifty years and through several generations of composers (Stockhausen, Boulez, Roads, Eno, and beyond). Electronic media have changed nearly every aspect of how music is experienced, documented, and distributed. The music studio, moreover, is not just a tool for recording performances by traditional instruments, but is a musical instrument in its own right. The ideal candidate would have a vision for the incorporation of electric, electronic, electroacoustic and acousmatic musics into the curriculum, in both performance and compositional contexts.

1960. Improvised musics. Whether influenced by baroque performance modes, “free jazz” musicians like Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, or John Zorn, or by more modern ‘academic’ composers like John Cage, Anthony Braxton or George Lewis, improvisation is an absolutely essential component of a contemporary music education. The ideal candidate would take a firm stand on incorporating improvisation into the curriculum.

1965. Popular musical forms. When professor Z________ recently taught a course on the music of the Beatles, the College deemed it so noteworthy (or controversial?) as to require its own press release. Is rock music really news? The ideal candidate would recognize the significance of such popular forms as a legitimate field of study, now that they have histories forty to fifty years long.

1970. Computer music continues to be a field of active research for more than three decades. Outside the laboratory, serious tools for interactive computer audio programming, such as Max/MSP, are now readily available and widely adopted by an entire generation of laptop musicians. An ideal candidate would have a vision for how pedagogy, performance and research in computer music could take a serious place among the topics of the School of Music. This seems especially crucial because of the School’s situation within Carnegie Mellon, proximal to one of the finest technical universities in the world. It would be a travesty to willfully ignore the unique opportunity of creating deep relationships with the Computer Science department.

1980-85. Music in the age of digital reproduction. The introduction, more than twenty years ago, of inexpensive audio sampling hardware and turntablism techniques ushered in a fundamentally new way of creating music: that of repurposing fragments from prior musics. Practitioners like Afrika Bambaataa, Eno/Byrne, Public Enemy, John Oswald (Plunderphonics), Chris Cutler, Christian Marclay, Craig Baldwin and many others have developed serious musical investigations into its possibilities, while the theoretical dialogue about the aesthetics and ethics of the practice has kept a vigorous pace. The debate is not going away, and the form is slowly becoming a widespread mode of computer-enabled music production, despite the RIAA’s displeasure. The ideal candidate would recognize the significance of this shift. It is easy to imagine the School teaching a “Contemporary Topics” course, perhaps taught in collaboration with the Business School and the Computer Science department, which dealt with the ethics of sampling and digital reproduction. But how would the candidate feel about a composition class, built entirely around plunderphonic modes of creation, which treated the ethics of musical debt as a component of practical training in the medium?

2000. Short musical forms. Today, many composers make a living designing complete compositions under four seconds long, for applications like computer operating systems, user interfaces, voicemail and telephony systems, and public address systems. The composition and creation of custom telephone ringtones is now a $10-billion-per-year industry, growing at 20% per year. And of course, commercial music has relied on the thirty-second spot for decades. Are our music students well-prepared to understand the extremely demanding musical logic of such short forms? The ideal candidate would recognize that composing such forms is not as easy as one might suppose. What about courses in the composition of short forms?

Hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Golan

2009 UPDATE 1. This list unjustly omits the study of world musics, particularly in relation to post-colonial national identities, musical hybrids, and mass media — mostly because, when I was writing this, I couldn’t identify a good date for this. So there’s another one.

2009 UPDATE 2. With the eclipse, sometime in 2007 or so, of the film and television industries by the game industry, I would also add the study of generative musics to this curriculum — i.e., algorithmic or generative ‘program’ music for interactive systems.

Keywords: criteria, desiderata, music, school, conservatory, search, hiring, tenure, promotion, evaluation, metrics, head, chair, director, position, pedagogy, teaching, standards.

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