heart of the swarm

Are video games art?

I don’t feel particularly qualified to answer this question, as the number of video games I’ve experienced is very small (though the late Roger Ebert didn’t have the same internal conflict when he made his infamous declaration). However, these past few weeks (ever since March 12, to be exact), my free time has been consumed by the long awaited Starcraft II expansion, Heart of the Swarm, and I believe I can comment on the artistic merits of a game that I know relatively well.

sandia: finally, a glimpse of what I’ll be doing

Today I got an email from a person who will be one of my team leads at Sandia. I’ve finally been matched to a project! Here’s what he/she (ambiguous Chinese name, don’t want to assume) said:

We will be developing an application dashboard to monitor software and hardware components on our testing environment.

Okay, I admit that my first knee-jerk reaction was, “BORING.” Then I paused and realized that the word “testing” probably jumped out at me and triggered that reaction when in fact I’ll be developing. Not testing, thank goodness. After all, I did make a point to my interviewer/testing manager that I wanted to move away from testing. (Testing at IBM has firmly cemented my belief that it is extremely dull. I know some people like it, and are amazing at it, but I am not one of them.)

So, it’s still not the most exciting program in the world (especially when compared to working on missiles and other cool things I imagined to be happening at Sandia), but I’ll take it. And the fact that it’s a “dashboard” has me hoping that my hiring manager paid attention when I said I was interested in GUI programming because it’s related to HCI, which I want to gain more exposure to. I’m contemplating emailing my team lead to ask. I also would like to know which language I’ll be programming in so I can either get a head start in learning it or refresh my memory if I’ve done it before.

The semester is finally wrapping up. Before I realize it, I’ll be in Albuquerque!

hard data

Hard Data is a musical piece by Luke DuBois, but it’s so much more than that. It is a data mining and sonification project. Using statistics from American military conflicts in the Middle East, such as civilian casualties and missing soldiers, datasets are created so that musical notes can be strung together to form a string quartet. The years spanning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are condensed into minutes, and the data is represented chronologically with notes.

DuBois calls himself a generative musician and describes his work as “turning data into music and stories.” (Hear him talk about it in the first segment of this video.)

Data visualization is something I am familiar with. We are bombarded with infographics on a daily basis. Sonification is essentially the musical equivalent of data visualization, but I have not thought about it much until now. At first glance, turning data into sounds seems less intuitive and less useful than turning it into pictures. We can quickly look at a pie chart and analyze the data it holds, but the same cannot be said for a piece like Hard Data. However, I believe that transforming such a dismal set of numbers into a beautiful composition is a legitimate art form. DuBois’ work is also a way of taking cold statistics and humanizing it, which can make difficult-to-comprehend numbers hit closer to home.

On another note (haha), sonification is sort of like the inverse of the process that Matthew Plummer-Fernandez used to create Sound/Chair. The former takes data and turns it into sound; the latter takes sound and turns it into a visual piece. Sound/Chair is not a perfect inverse as the sound was specifically generated to shape the chair, but this is the general idea that inspired our final project.

frustrations

I believe that there’s this moment for every non-certified-genius college student, a moment when we think to ourselves, “Oh shit. This isn’t high school anymore. College is hard.” And I’ve finally experienced that moment, halfway through the spring semester of my junior year.

Warning: whining ahead.

scumak 2

Roxy Paine is an American sculptor who was very active in the 1990s and continues to be today. Most of his works can be divided into two categories: precise, detailed replicas of objects found in nature, and machine-based works. SCUMAK 2 is one of his more famous machine-based works. 

This piece is essentially a machine that automatically creates sculptures by melting plastic with pigments and then extruding the mixture onto a conveyer belt, producing blob-like objects that are quite similar but not identical. The use of a machine, something that isn’t human and can only follow instructions, coupled with a conveyor belt that you might find in a factory, is perhaps a critique on mass production and consumption. In fact, Paine’s sculpture subverts the the idea of mass production by creating unique pieces despite coming from the same machine and presumably, the same program.

I can’t help but think of Andy Warhol, who embraced mass production through his art with his soup cans and silkscreen prints. Warhol came before Paine’s time, so it’s a possibility that there was some influence there. But rather than take the same path, Paine presents another perspective when he rejects mass production even as he takes advantage of its processes.

Paine’s other machine-based works are also worth looking at: Paint Dipper, PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit), and Erosion Machine. Each of these pieces were conceptualized and built by a human artist, but on their own they create “art” by removing the human artist from the process and relying entirely on machines and programs.

malwarez

Upon first looking at these images, I think of words like “organic” and “microbial.” So when I discovered the name of the piece and how the images were created, it all fell into place. This is Malwarez by Alex Dragulescu:

…a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

These images cause me to ponder the connection between microbiology and computer security–two very different fields in completely different worlds that use the same terminology: most notably, viruses and worms. (Side note: the word “bug” is used in both medicine and programming, but is generally not used to refer to malware so I left it off the list.) It has been awhile since I’ve taken a biology class, but they seem to function similarly in both fields: the biological agent needs a living cell to replicate while its digital counterpart must attach itself to a program to do the same.

I would be interested in examining the artist’s program, as I am currently wondering how he managed to find enough “patterns and rhythms” across different types of malware in order to generate fairly similar organisms that actually look like they could be biological entities. I originally thought that worms were very different from viruses which were very different from trojans, but after skimming through this article, they probably do have similar structures in terms of code after all. (Worms are considered a subclass of viruses–something new I learned today.) I find these artificial organisms to be quite aesthetically pleasing, a feature that I definitely did not expect from such terrible bits of code.

proxima centauri

The more I learn about Lillian Schwartz, the more I’m amazed by what she’s done. And the more I wonder why her name wasn’t even mentioned during our Computing and the Arts lectures.

According to Wikipedia,  she is considered “a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first women artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media.” Particularly active during the sixties and seventies, Schwartz made many groundbreaking contributions to research areas in computer graphics and sound while working at Bell Labs alongside the brightest engineers of the time.

Proxima Centauri, one of her many works, is a kinetic sculpture that was selected by The Museum of Modern Art for an exhibit entitled “The Machine as Seen at The End of Mechanical Age.” It consists of a dome (reminiscent of a fortune teller’s orb) sitting atop a mechanical structure, with a pressure sensitive pad that allows users to interact with the piece and change the color and flow of whatever is in the dome.

The interactivity of this piece, as well as all the mechanical components, remind me of certain aspects of cybernetics. In particular, it reminds me of Nicolas Schöffer’s CYSP I because of the way both pieces are affected by their surroundings and reflect changes in their environment by moving or changing. While Schwartz’s sculpture doesn’t seem as focused on networks of interconnected processes as Schöffer’s due to its relative simplicity (only one interactive component), it still supports the idea of art being driven by the viewer. Also, the videos I came across were very short and not of high quality, so I am actually not certain how complicated the sculpture was. Perhaps stepping on the pressure sensitive pad in different ways led to a variety of different effects. According to her website, the sculpture was able to “generate a number of vigorously dramatic effects on the dome,” which sounds pretty exciting.

Fun fact of the day: this sculpture was later used in a Star Trek episode as a prison for Spock’s brain.

programmed machines

I wanted to discuss conceptual art, so naturally, I googled “conceptual art.” From the lengthy list of works on the Wikipedia page, Maurizio Bolognini‘s Programmed Machines immediately jumped out at me.

Programmed Machines is a conceptual installation consisting of hundreds of computers that he programmed to generate never-ending flows of random images. These machines have been left running since the beginning of the project in the 1990s. (Apparently, most of them are still working. The former high school Ecology Club member in me wondered how much electricity these computers have been eating up in the name of art.)

Bolognini wrote the following concerning this piece:

I do not consider myself an artist who creates certain images, and I am not merely a conceptual artist. I am one whose machines have actually traced more lines than anyone else, covering boundless surfaces. I am not interested in the formal quality of the images produced by my installations but rather in their flow, their limitlessness in space and time, and the possibility of creating parallel universes of information made up of kilometres of images and infinite trajectories. My installations serve to generate out-of-control infinities.

As with all other conceptual artworks, the concept and idea behind Programmed Machines takes precedence over the finished piece. If I were to go to a gallery and look at Programmed Machines, it would probably take all of half a minute before I had seen all I needed to see. The computers aren’t moving or changing, and as far as the viewer can tell, they aren’t doing anything. It’s all very static.

But if there were monitors that could display images, and assuming that the artist actually did what he said he did, we would see that these machines are actually very busy, tirelessly producing picture after picture using the algorithm that Bolognini had coded. Thus, the installation becomes interesting when you think about the artist’s process and what message he was trying to convey.

Because these computers have limited storage, I would guess that an image is stored for a certain amount of time before being overwritten, if it’s stored at all. In the grand scheme of things, the life of an image on one of these machines is fleeting. To take this to an unnecessary, pseudo-philosophical level, I must ask the question, does an image exist if no one ever sees it?

So individually and aesthetically, the images probably aren’t that impressive. But the idea of countless images being produced ceaselessly by these machines is what’s noteworthy. Staggering, even. How many images have been generated in the past two decades? What did they look like? No one, not even Bolognini, knows for sure.

battle at cliffside hill

I don’t follow photography much, but one day I stumbled upon Brooke Shaden’s flickr page and I was blown away. Her pieces are definitely less “computational” than the other works I’ve discussed, but because she relies heavily on photo editing software as part of her process, I decided that her artwork is perfect example of using technology as a tool to create art.

There were many photos to choose from, but eventually I settled on this one, entitled Battle at Cliffside Hill. The artist describes the process she went through in great detail here. I always appreciate it when artists reveal their secrets–sure, it takes away some of the mystery, but when I see all the components come together I am even more impressed.

Looking through her blog post, you can see how she took individual shots of the woman (maybe herself?), the sky, and the ground, dirt, and tree branches and then manipulated everything in Photoshop. By starting with photos of reality and combining them with concepts from fantasy, she can create new realms that are fascinating to peek into.

I thought about how to categorize Shaden’s work. The first thing to come to mind was hyperrealism. However, because hyperrealism refers to paintings and/or sculptures (not photographs) that look as realistic as photographs but with some element that takes it a step away from reality, I ruled it out. Then I discovered that Surrealist photography is a flourishing movement, especially with the ubiquity of Photoshop. Shaden’s work falls into this as it embodies the art of taking realistic photos and creating dreamlike, otherworldly images with them.

As for the meaning of this piece, I can only share what it means to me. I see it two ways: one where the woman is trying to free herself from the roots entangling her, and one where she is willingly letting the ground swallow her. The ominous, cloudy sky and the dark earth, which divide the piece into two sections, make it ambiguous: which side is good and which side is bad? Whose side do you want to join, and who do you want to win the battle?

wooden mirror

Dr. Angus Forbes showed us this piece during class and at first it seemed like voodoo magic. Take a look for yourself:

Wooden Mirror is a piece by Daniel Rozin. From the artist himself:

This piece explores the line between digital and physical, using a warm and natural material such as wood to portray the abstract notion of digital pixels.

I was immediately intrigued by the idea of “the line between digital and physical.” When we look at an image on a screen, it’s near impossible to single out individual pixels unless you get extremely close. Not being able to see a pixel on its own then makes it difficult to think of pixels as physical objects. We cannot touch them; they are intangible. Only en masse do they become something we can behold.

Rozin attempts to bridge the disconnect between pixels and the real world with Wooden Mirror. By using wooden squares large enough for the naked eye to see, the “pixels” of his piece have become tangible–and physical. Using a natural material such as wood makes the effect even better, as we can now associate the pixels with something from the Earth (which to me makes it as “real” as it can get).

As for the mechanics of the piece, I found it quite ingenious how he used video cameras to capture the viewer and then somehow translated that data to cause each square to tilt a certain way and using light to change the “color” (i.e., lightness/darkness) of each square. He applied the same technique to other objects too, most notably trash from the streets of New York, among other interesting materials.