Syndicate: Machine Aesthetics, Rotterdam 27 June - 13 July

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

Machine Aesthetics

Exhibition, Wiretap, Workshop, Student Seminar

V2_Organisation presents an exhibition and works-in-progress that reflect
on the possibility of a new aesthetics of the machine. Does digital
technology make it possible for the machine to develop aesthetic behaviour,
to create art, and to become an autonomous agent?

Date: 27 June - 13 July 1997
Place: V2_Organisation, Eendrachtsstr.10, 3012 XL Rotterdam


Programme

Friday 27 June
17.00 - 19.00 hrs
Opening of the exhibition with works by Nicolas A. Baginsky (D), Jutta
Kirchgeorg (US/D), Martin Schitter (A), and Gebhard SengmŸller (A).
Performance by N. Baginsky with The Three Sirens (also on 28 and 29 June,
14.00 and 17.00 hrs). (Entrance free.)

The exhibition will be open until 13 July, Tuesday - Sunday, 13.00-18.00 hrs.
Entrance fl. 2,50.

Saturday 28 June
14.00 - 18.00 hrs
Artists workshop about the use of machines in art, and about a potential
aesthetics of the machinic. With Knowbotic Research (D), Daniela Plewe (D),
Pit Schultz (D), and the other participating artists. (Reservation
required. Please call: tel.+31.10.4046427, v2@v2.nl)

Sunday 29 June
14.00 - 17.00 hrs
Wiretap 3.06 - public presentations by Eric Kluitenberg (on the history of
machine art) and Nic Baginsky (on his machine ) ects), a commentary
by Knowbotic Research (on the machinic), and performances by Baginsky's
Three Sirens and Gebhard SengmŸller (about Vinyl Video). Entrance fl. 2,50.
In English.

Montag 30. Juni
11.00 - 16.00 hrs
Seminar for students and others about the theory and practice of
contemporary media art. Guided by Eric Kluitenberg (media-gn) and Andreas
Broeckmann (V2) with presentations by Nic Baginsky and Seiko Mikami. Fee:
fl. 20,-. Held in Dutch, presentations in English. (Reservation required.
Please call: tel.+31.10.4046427, v2@v2.nl)

Further Informationen:
V2_Organisation, Eendrachtsstr.10, NL-3012 XL Rotterdam
tel.+31-10-4046427, fax.+31-10-4128562, e-mail: v2@v2.nl

Supported by: Goethe Institut, Rotterdam; Ambassade van Oostenrijk,
Amsterdam; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Rotterdam Art Council


Concept 'Machine Aesthetics'

The machine is beginning to talk back. The machine can learn, act and
create. Computers do meaningful things that we no longer understand, they
communicate amongst each other without human interference, and they develop
structures, objects and plans that no human would ever think up. Machines
are no longer mere passive instruments of human will, they are becoming
partners of our everyday existence.

Artists are exploring the machine as an independent agent, they are
questioning the relationship between the machine and the human body, its
perceptions and actions, and they are developing models for new forms of
interaction between humans and machines. Are we entering larger, machinic
environments in which we cooperate with machines, rather than contolling
them? And what will the social and cultural relations in such machinic
environments be? How are we going to live in a world of intelligent
machines?



Hyperlinks

Nicolas A. Baginsky - http://www.provi.de/~nab
Eric Kluitenberg - http://www.media-gn.nl
Knowbotic Research - http://www.khm.de/people/krcf
Seiko Mikami - http://w3.cnds.canon.co.jp/cast/al5/home-j.html
Daniela Plewe - http://domini.zkm.de/muser
Pit Schultz - http://www.desk.nl/~nettime




Exhibition

Nicolas Anatol Baginsky

Three Sirenes

The Three Sirenes are partly robots, partly musical instuments. They teach
themselves how to play. So called 'neural networks' (nerve cell
sumulations) use self-organized and unsupervised learning to find out about
improvisation and instrumental virtuosity.

They first play at random, listen to their own sounds and to the other
sirenes. In the course of the performance, they learn to control their
motors and mechanic characteristics and develop rhythms, to invent melodies
and to improvise. Through the human's user interface (electric guitar,
microphone etc.) session-like experiences are made available to everyone.

Saying "this machinery is creative as musicians are" feels like touching
one of the very human abilities since music appears to be extremly related
to emotional response.


Nicolas Anatol Baginsky

Narcissism Enterprise

Narcissism Enterprise deals with the portrait of the visitor and his
narcissistic love for his self-image. The face of the visitor is recorded
by a small video camera which follows the movements of the head, and his
sounds are picked up by a microphone. Sounds and images are processed by a
self-learning computer system and replayed via a projection and speakers.

Using artificial intelligence, the system recognises, extracts and
recombines facial features (eyes, noses, mouths) from the video images. It
'remembers' sigificant, recurring traits and displays them as composite
portraits which are the result of classifications that the system makes
itself. The machine decides which images it will return to the visitors as
their desired optical and accoustic mirror images.


Jutta Kirchgeorg

The Information Age

Under the guise of a presentation on the history of electronic
communications, "The Information Age" examines problematic issues in
present computer mediated communication, such as the mystification of
computers and the resulting frustration as well as the underlying
structures of control and power. Wrapped as an educational CD-ROM product
it stages a situation where the viewer experiences the computers deficiency
as intelligent interface for human interaction and his gradually vanishing
power of control over the machine.



Martin Schitter

[m]

The light installation [m] is formed by a network of light sensors and
guided spotlights positioned in a closed, dark space, all of which are
connected through a computer interface. The spots are directed at the
sensors, which through the computer's parameters in turn cause the lights
to be dimmed. On the basis of the internal laws of the technical system and
its cybernetic models, the light in the space is held in a continuous,
unstable oscillation. [m] visualises and reflects on the relationship
between architecture and computer, on cybernetic principles as artistic
interfaces, and on the psycho-accoustic manipulation of space.



Gebhard SengmŸller

TV Poetry

"TV Poetry" is a random poetry generator that uses the words that are shown
in television programmes. The system is connected to a satellite dish and
scans the incoming stream of fast changing TV broadcasts (commercials, news
broadcasts, quiz shows, light entertainment) for images containing text
passages, which it filters, processes and reads back out in an ongoing,
real-time process as an endless text string. The phrasing is determined
solely by the TV schedule and CPU programming.




Wiretap


Eric Kluitenberg

The compulsive beauty of the Machine

A fragmentary, yet illustrated, exploration of the compulsive nature of
machine aesthetics. Reflections of the machinic in the arts are hardly ever
unambiguous. A certain uneasiness qualifies most artistic ventures that
treat the machine as a theme, as a medium, or as a process. On the one hand
they reveal some intrinsic features of the technological apparatus they
explore, but at the same time they also hint at sub-liminal anxieties that
seem to relate more even to the machinic, than to technology as such. The
subconscious delocation of primal fears of the machinic contributes
strongly to the compulsive beauty of the aesthetic of the Machine.


Gebhard SengmŸller

Vinyl Video - low resolution trashpeg format

"Record your favourite TV movies ... using plain longplay records."
VinylVideo is a piece of fake media archaeology. It is based on a new form
of compressing video data so that they can be stored on and replayed from
traditional vinyl records. This technology would have been possible in the
40s and 50s, so that SengmŸller and his collaborators of Onlineloop are
retrospectively filling a gap in media history.



Workshop


Knowbotic Research

IO-DENCIES - Fragen an das Urbane

The development of cities and urban processes are unpredictable. The
project transposes urban questions from the real physical space into the
virtual, experimental field of electronic data networks.

A current urban construction project is transformed into electronic fields
of development and action and is thus made available for collaborative
activities in the virtual space. Architects, urban planners and local
inhabitants can share their ideas and visions. The project is aimed at
generating active connections between urban realities and the new
connective data spaces. It strives for the construction of new forms of
publics which realise widely distributed, creative local potentials.


Seiko Mikami

The Self Referentiality of Perception
"the ear does not hear, the eye does not see"

Mikami's new project uses a 3-dimensional eye and sound recognition
program. Her projects have included works that use the visitor's pulse as a
medium. The VR installation "Molecular Informatics" (1996) traces the
movements of the user's eye and translates them into virtual moleculer
structures which the user can see as they evolve. They are constructed via
an input directed by the visitor's line of sight. The new, 1997 project
uses the audience's heartand lung sound which are amplified and transformed
within the space. These sounds create a gap between internal and external
sounds.

Mikami's works fragment the body into data, employing them as interfaces.
She chooses to organize these works in such a way as to elaborate how the
structure of "interface" exists within the body itself. The set-up
externalises the body's mechanisms.

"The ear is not a merely a thing that hears; the eye is not merely a thing
that sees."



Daniela Alina Plewe

Ultima Ratio

What happens when one tries to present literary contents in a
machine-friendly format? What will come after the 'paradigm of the peaceful
coexistence' of information in hypermedia? Will it be argumentation and
intellimedia? Will hypertext be followed by networks of argumentation?
Which price will one have to pay for the dynamic representation of
knowledge (formalisation, removing ambiguity, etc.)? Does it make sense to
use the criterion of autonomy in the context of computer arts?

The work-in-progress Ultima Ratio is located at the borderline between
artificial intelligence research and art. Using the computer's
formalisations, it attempts to tackle logical problems like conflicts and
contradictions. Analysing and reconstructing dramatic and narrative
structures, the computer lets reasoning run wild, following all the
cascades of doubt. Free from any obligations to act in the real world, the
program investigates the realm of ambivalences and contradictions, those
important conditions for aesthetic experiences.


Pit Schultz

money machines

the concept of the machine within the critique of capitalism by deleuze and
guattari got burried many times. it became itself appropriated by free
market rhetorics like of Manual Delanda. the internet as a classical
"desiring machine" produces money out of desire for what is called a "huge
potential". the collective logic of such expected growth is normally bound
to a narrative about a non-subjective quasi-natural entity identified with
technique or a complex machinery which includes all known sectors of
production under a program of inbuilt vital forces, an evolutionary
finalism, and a pathetic vocabulary around a machinic-algorithmic
auto-genesis as the "will of the machine".

this decentered, non-personal will gets projected onto markets. or appears
in descriptions of human society as cybernetic systems, described as having
an immanent will which leaves the concept of the human will and subject
behind. the neo-vitalist aesthetification of economy, art and technology
under the metaphors of life leads to a complex problematic of "Bio-Power".

technique is not at all only an anonmyous force of devine beauty driving
modernity forward, but a social process based on mutual desicions, little
fights and silly interests.