 |
 |
Elle One project that deals directly with sensory perception is an interactive sculpture by Colleen Ludwig called Shiver. Using both the digital and the analog, it's a room designed to respond to your presence with linear flows of water on canvas interior walls. We as humans hold emotions on the inside and read them in others through tears, smiles, body posture, etc. In my experience of the work, the room became a vulnerable, animate object, in an interesting reversal of exposure with its "emotions" on the outside and it's physical nature and mechanics somewhat hidden. This was part of a larger exhibition at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee called "Watershed: Art, Activism, and Community Engagement," organized by Nicolas Lampert and Raoul Deal. It addressed the shifting ecological and political dimensions of water (http://watershedmke.wordpress.com/). A short video of Ludwig's Shiver is here: http://www.artbabble.org/video/chipstone/colleen-ludwig-shiver Fo Fo Wilson [log in to unmask] www.fowilson.com -----Original Message----- From: "Ele Carpenter" <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 8:06pm To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Analogue/Digital Art Hello Everyone, It seems the Analogue/Digital discussion is taking place during a month of sliding scales - from the quantum level of digital/analogue processes to the near meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant. The instability of the reactors seems to embody a clash between our understanding of the universe, and our lack of ability to make things we need, such as renewable energy, and our inability not to make things we really could do without (and may soon have to do without - Sean's point about lithium in Bolivia is crucial here). But I'm wondering how this relates to forms of making? A work that keeps coming to mind - is the Flow watermill being designed and built by artists Ed Carter and the Owl Project for the River Tyne in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The wooden mill will harness the energy of the river to drive the acoustic-electronic sound works that combine mechanical and digital automation. See http://owlproject.com/flow Can we relate the discussion about sensory perception of the world to the experience of making? We know that the streaming light of the film projector, or the flow of the river, can be measured as both digital and analogue forms of information, but does it affect what we make? or what we measure? Is there a form-content relationship in other digital/analogue work, which I think the Flow project is attempting to capture? Best, Ele On 8 March 2011 12:51, Jon Ippolito <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> Big picture (though) this is a (natural) philosophical question. In quantum >> physics the universe is discrete and thus digital. There is no analogue. >> Analogue exists only as an illusion, a series of discrete moments where >> every moment is itself binary. > > Thanks for bringing up this Big (or Very Small) Picture, Simon. As much as we're accustomed to thinking of digital media (CDs) as an approximation of our continuous reality (LPs), what we imagine as continuous reality is more like an approximation of a discrete reality. > > As a reformed former student of physics, however, I would caution against taking the universe's lack of continuity at very small scales to mean that it is digital, or even discrete in the usual sense. Such a pat conclusion would provide an early resolution to this month's question--"Digital wins!"--and leave me more time to chop wood and pay the bills. But it wouldn't take into account how wacky things get when you measure them with eensy-weensy rulers and clocks. > > At scales small enough for both quantum mechanics and relativity to apply, you'll find neither points in space nor moments of time. To make matters worse, you won't even be able to tell whether a given region of space-time is occupied or is empty. This last result pretty much nixes the theory supported by Stephen Wolfram (among others) that the universe operates like a computer. According to Wolfram's theory, at its lowest level space-time is a computational lattice full of 1s and 0s. But such a lattice wouldn't be much use to a universal computer that couldn't tell which compartments had stuff (1s) and which didn't (0s). > > For the curious, there are a slew of pop-science books that introduce these concepts by analogy to Asian philosophy or metaphors of "quantum foam." If you aren't satisfied by phrases like "the mathematics are beyond the scope of this book"--and aren't turned off by the sight of Greek letters and square roots, either--then this free textbook is a good introduction: > > http://www.motionmountain.net > > Chapter XI derives most of the "universe-is-neither-continuous-or-discrete" results from a couple basic equations from quantum mechanics and relativity. I'd venture that its conclusions are weirder than anything Lacan, Miller, or Badiou has to say, though I should probably wait for Sean's forthcoming article to be sure :) > > Oh, and most of this cosmic inscrutability is already experimentally verified. Which is like dreaming that you lived in Wolfram Alpha but waking up to jodi.org. > > jon > ______________________________ > Still Water--what networks need to thrive. > http://still-water.net/ > -- Ele Carpenter Curator Lecturer, MFA Curating, Dept of Art, Goldsmiths College, Uni of London. m: +44 (0)7989 502 191 www.elecarpenter.org.uk www.eleweekend.blogspot.com