All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Part 2, "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts".

This episode continues to explore the idea that humans are being colonised by machines. Our modern idea of nature as a self-regulating ecosystem is a machine fantasy. It has very little to do with the realities of nature.  This cybernetic idea of nature emerged in the 1950s. Human beings, the rest of life and everything else on the planet are mere components of that eco-system.

These ideas of a self-regulating ecosystem have it is argued become the model for utopian ideas of human ‘self organising networks’. These networks would bypass the traditional needs of government or leaders of a society. The Facebook and Twitter revolutions, the Arab Spring in Syria and Egypt among a number of Middle Eastern countries and the protests for change in Iran gives proof to the idea of global vision of connectivity that would bring about social and political change. Global visions of connectivity fuse with Gaia Theory. One also thinks of Ted Nelson’s description of computers as “liberation machines”.

Buckminster Fuller Witchita House, Kansas 1946

In an earlier blog or two I spoke of the counter culture as an influencing factor in cyber evangelism. This model for connectivity and freedom was developed in the 1960s communes of America. Buckminster Fuller’s designs provided this fantasy with its architecture. Such communes include Drop City in Arizona in 1966. It was the counterculture scientists that would go on to help formulate the global computer networks.

Drop City, Arizona 1966.

As we began to believe in an idea of an ecosystem, ecologists were quietly proving that a self regulating ecosystem did not exist. Nature constantly changed and was rather unstable. However this idea of a self-organizing network had captured our imagination and it had offered us an alternative to political ideologies. 

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Part 1, "Love and Power".

A story about the rise of the machines and fusion of ideologies: Ayn Rand's objectivism and "virtue of selfishness", free market capitalism and the Californian sun drenched individualism and utopian dreams that seem to be the basis of so much that came out of the sixties. These ideas came to influence many in Silicon Valley with some citing Rands Atlas Shrugged (1957) as a key influence on their lives.

This film proposes that humans have been colonised by the machines they have built and shows us how we have let this happen. Since this has happened technology has dangerously started to shape how we view the world.

This series tells the story of the dream of the information revolution that was going to create a stable world and bring about a new kind of global capitalism and democracy. It meant the abolishment of hierarchies as represented in computer networks such as the World Wide Web. We are, it proposes, just mechanisms in a larger cybernetic system.

A small group of disciples gathered around Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They imagined a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The idea of a global utopia was also being developed in Silicon Valley. Many of these entrepreneurs were disciples of Rand and her philosophy. They saw the new computer as their salvation and the computer networks would create a new society where it would be possible to follow one’s own desires. Alan Greenspan was one of Rand’s disciples became convinced in the 1990s that computers were creating a new kind of capitalism that would move us away from decades of boom and bust economies. Yet, it was human desires for love and for power that would tear apart this dream of stability.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Trailer

New Synths

When the Photosynth is exported as a jpeg it renders a three dimensional space as a flat image. Here the image recalls collage or montage, cubist art or expressionism where distortion is expected.

Photosynth: Obama Inauguration - The Moment

Photosynth: Obama Inauguration - "The Moment" CNN.

Boulevard du Temple, taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839

Uricchio in “The Algorithmic turn: photosynth, augmented reality and changing implications of the Image” (2011) notes the distortions seen in the imagery produced by the program and the photographs that could be rejected because they were taken at different times of the day. Then, Uricchio asks, “what about the "transient, the contingent‟ that Baudelaire ascribes to the modern” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29)? The most widely seen example that “addresses this problem” was CNN‟s "The Moment‟: “a synth of 628 user-submitted photographs of the moment that President Obama took his oath of office” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). Uricchio suggests that „The Moment‟ “reveals a lot of temporal slippage- changes in bodily position, different configurations of the flags in the wind and so on. The constants, the point clouds, seem grounded in architectural detail and the configuration of the podium more than anything else” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). Yet, the more “one examines close shots of the crowd, Uricchio argues, the more one is reminded of early-nineteenth-century, where long time exposure often resulted in ghost figures” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). The photographic images: “these fugitive images emerged from the gaze locked within three-perspective and subject to early photochemical emulsions” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29).Within Photosynth, “there is a different mechanism is at play: tolerances of algorithmic reassembly; but the ephemeral, nevertheless, seem to pose a very real challenge to the system” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). Uricchio points to the work of Canaletto‟s Piazza San Marco with its Basilica 1730 as an example of an image where the “subject-object relationship is fixed” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30). In Photosynth‟s “dynamic assemblage” “the relationship is unstable” and “subject to the whims of the user and the capacities of the algorithm” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30). What project 3 iis concerned with is Photosynth‟s “radical disjunctures” and the “unstable nature of the composite” and as in cubism, many points of view are called upon (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30).

Sources:

"The Moment" final version - Photosynth:  http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=05dc1585-dc53-4f2c-bfb1-4da8d5915256

Uricchio, W., (2011) “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image” Visual Studies vol 26 Issue 1pp. 25- 35

Tim Head

Tim Head (1946-) is a British artist who according to Nikos Stangos (1994) studied with Richard Hamilton at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1965-9). I have a friend who may have known him then. Head went on to teach on the advance sculpture course run by Barry Flanagan at St Martin’s School (1969-70). In his work he employs a variety of media and forms. In his installations he uses mirrors and light, projections and painted serial imagery and patterned pictures.

Tim Head  “devised several installations in which photographs were projected on to those same objects and spaces” (Walker, J., 1992: 543). The series works that he is famous for is called Displacements (1975-6).  Displacements are installations which was first constructed and exhibited at the Rowan Gallery in January and February 1975. According to the Tate Gallery The Tate Gallery 1976-8: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, “the title Displacements is used to indicate that in each case the projected images are a displacement of the view originally photographed, i.e. the projected image has been moved in a particular direction away from the original position in which it was photographed” (1979).

Sources:
 

Head, Tim:  http://www.timhead.net/

Stangos, N & Read, H., (1994) The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists London: Thames and Hudson

Tate Gallery, (1979) The Tate Gallery 1976-8: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=5928&searchid=9915&tabview=text

Walker, J. A. (1992) Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design Since 1945, Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall & Co.

Johannes Kahrs

 Finally Accept Fate (2002)

In the catalogue for the exhibition "The Movement of Images" (2006) it states that Johanne's Kahr's I Finally Accept Fate "is a work emblematic  of the temporal space in which the works" of the artist "are situated" (Racine et.al, p.125).

Kahrs "favours drawings (even though he also makes videos) to amplify, using editing effects, the emotive and narrative charge of photographic images and film sceneshe has selected (p.125). In the above image "Kahr has used charcoal drawing to focus on the hands glimpsed in images of American political life. Suspended on a black back ground and placed outside of any context, their gestures form an ambiguous drama with mystical overtones" (Racine et.al, p.125).

Racine et.al (2006) The Movement of Images Paris: Pompidou Centre