wigwamjuice

Osmose lends itself very well to me to study for my installation piece. There is a lot i can learn from reading about immersive virtual reality that relates to a user-interactive installation environment.
First of all, simply naming the participant as the "immersant" makes way for a new way (at least for me) of thinking about those other than myself who experience my piece. In other words it broadens my vocabulary of descriptions for others in relation to my personal artwork. Refering to someone as an "observer" implies passive sensory intake on their part. Refering to them as a "participant" implies to me that they co-create the environment in which they exist. this may or may not be desirable depending on what i want the final outcome of my project to be. Calling someone an "immersant" implies that i am using all the resources available to me to draw them into the piece and entirely abolish the "fourth wall".
Davies' piece seems as much of an experiment in the abilities of technology to affect sensory perception as it is an experiment in sensory perception itself. For my piece, i do not want the participant (this is the word that i have settled on for now) to lose him/herself in the environment to the point where s/he is exclaiming all sorts of things about no longer fearing death. I want to create an environment in which the participant becomes aware of him/herself in a new and unique way but i would like to guide them through a more concrete and intellectual path than the different "worlds" of Davie's Osmos.
I feel that Osmos can be equated to pieces such as Stockhausen's Kontakte in that it surpasses all previously existing barriers in a field (in this instance VR) but that it does not necessarily follow the straight line of natural artistic development. I do not mean to condescend the work of Stockhausen or Davies because it seems that art cannot develop in a strate line if there are not brashe and often times even abrasive advances for others to follow.
in this way, i hope to draw from davies' aesthetic of vr and incorperate the idea of an immersed conciousness in a piece of art.

critical recombinatory ensemble art

first of all, i think that the term "wetware" is really awsome.
Ok, that's out of the way. Something interesting i learned about the electrical engineer Claude Shannon was that he discovered a fractal pattern for transmitting data on the noisy channel. it had something to do with the fact that bursts of static noise when measured against time are self-similar and so by studying the bursts for a short period of time one could predict when the line would be clear enough to send a signal.
CAE's idea about Duchamp's too-far-ahead-for-his-time artwork strikes me as interesting. While theirs is not a unique assesment of his theory, it has sparked interesting discussions between me and other people. Regarding computer programming as an essential part of the creation of digital music, i feel that breaking down a piece of music to its fundamental machine-language level can be paramount to understanding the true creativity and inspiration of the piece. Like it says in the chapter, "order comes from order".
An apparently chaotic piece of music by Schoenberg becomes quite organized when it is broken down into individual cells and matrices consisting of tones, rhythms, instruments, dynamics, and the like. Likewyse, when one sees the intricate architecture in the orchestral score for Xenakis' "Metastasis", the aurally abstract glissandi become immediately apparent as beautiful recombinations of visual media.
The Critical Art Ensemble's agenda of "street theater" contain many elements that i hope to incorperate into my own art. The idea of setting up a temporal situation where communication can occur is very important to my belief that art should be interactive. Temporal situations are vital because they so unique and cannot be replicated. In this sense, the idea of "street theater" seems more like a lifestyle than it does an art movement.
I do not understand why CAE warns of the risks in the failure of experimental theater. They point out that any experiment has its own inherent risks, but i see the risks of their everyday theater as being part of the experiment. if an experimental actor becomes victim of authoritarian culture, doesn't the fact that the theater caused a reaction mean that the "performance" was successful?

absolute multimedia piece

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atjByPSKTRA&feature=related&fmt=18

here's a video by chris cunningham for autechre's "Gantz Graf". Incredible use of Max/MSP/Jitter take a generative piece of music and make a generative music video out of it.
Background:
Chris Cunningham does a lot of music videos for IDM artists especially Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. He's done some cool stuff with Portishead and Bjork too.

season in hell

The visit to the "Season in Hell" exhibit proved to be very insightful and inspirational for me. Since i want to do an installation piece for my project, it was very useful to visit an actual installation where i had access to a lot of information that went beyond the piece itself. The fact that i personally knew the artist and that i was able to meet one of the performers became to me an integral component of the piece itself.
A piece of art that comments on and challenges the environment in which i live can be difficult to accept at face value. Viewing a still life by one of the Flemish Masters does not necessarily require enormous effort for one to understand its aesthetic quality. For me, even viewing political art from the 1960's feels as though i am viewing a slice of history and not active comment or statement.
Not so with "A Season in Hell". The fact that since i was in the eighth grade I have grown up with a war that is fueled by fear and individual gain at the expense of others makes the installation a lot more personal.
The narrative of "A Season in Hell" is a very playful and yet serious method for tying together many intellectual and factual aspects in a creative way. Documenting the journey of a well-developed semi-fictitious and semi-real character while he tries to gain understanding of a world that is so absurd that it might as well be a surreal artistic creation is frighteningly poignant. I feel that having a fictitious narrative using real characters and real events creates a unique glue that ties the artwork together.
This piece has made me consider how i can get the audience as involved as possible. sure it wont be possible for me to meet everyone who views the piece, nor are the subjects of Godel, Escher, and Bach current topics of much debate, but the notion of changing the viewer into more than just a viewer has become very important to me. maybe i can do this if i find a way for the viewer to understand how the piece operates by displaying and explaining different max patches or sensor arrays.

pd

here's a programming environment that i've used before. it's by miller puckett, the same guy who mad Max/MSP/Jitter. puredata is the freeware/opensource/prototype version of Max. apparently it's more flexible than Max which is pretty wild because i have never found an area where Max is limited. granted i've only used max for 30 days.
i feel like pd uses a lot less RAM/CPU resources because it's not half as colorful and there's not really any rounded edges or anything like that. from what i've heard if you can use pd you can use max but if you use max you can't necessarily use pd. since pd is opensource it's a lot easier to create specific function blocks using direct code.
above is a simple patch i made a long time ago to approximate a sawtooth wave by inputting a sine wave. the box that says "pd fund" is an encapsulated object that has inputs for the fundamental frequency and amplitude of the wave. coming off of those inputs are boxes that say "s amp" and "s freq". these things send the data of the frequency and the amplitude of the fundamental wave. the "r amp" and "r freq" are the receiving ends of the sent data.
Sawtooth waves have every single integer overtone. the amplitude for each overtone is the the fundamental's amplitude divided by the integer.
"dac~" sends the data to pd's digital audio converter.
wagwan.