Gadget OK, a device-art and japanese robot-culture symposium, took place this weekend at UCLA Design|Media Arts. With the lectures, panels, and artist presentations finished, about thirty lucky folks got to spend the afternoon with Novmichi Tosa today. He introduced the process behind some of his recent works, and then led us through a brainstorming exercise designed to produce nonsense objects.

There were 4 main steps to creating an idea using Tosa-san’s method:

1. Write down everything you touched this morning, in order (10 things). After you finish writing down everything, write ‘nonsense’ next to it.

2. Write something for each thing that would make it nonsensical. If you can’t think of anything that would make the thing nonsensical, put in the word of the day. Ours was ‘blue’.

3. Combine each pair of nonsense things and write down the new image they make.

4. Draw your final idea.

The process worked quite well for generating a range of silly possibilities, provided you were open to having silly ideas in the first place. After we went through all the steps, Tosa-san photographed everyone’s ideas and shared them with the group. I came up with a sketch for wooly, felt dentures. They give you a nice, hairy smile for greeting people. Other people’s ideas included time-travel toast, a booger-swapping machine, and an air hotel. Give it a try, and perhaps you will come up with something silly, yet worth pursuing.

At the end of the day, some questions arise. What would it mean to have these nonsense objects in the world? What kind of stories do they suggest, or make possible? These are questions raised not only by today’s workshop, but by much of the work presented during Gadget OK. There are so many strange new things; what are we going to do with them?

Last night, Josiah McElheny gave a talk at UCLA. Among other things, Josiah talked much about the implications of Modernism and what it has meant that a group of men were allowed to decide how our world looks. Josiah presented multiple beginnings to multiple universes, and also dropped some names of significant women who were largely written out of the Modernist history. The ones I caught follow:

• Hilma af Klint
• Lilly Reich
• Charlotte Perriand
• Aino Aalto

The talk was, in many ways, ideal. Josiah cares deeply about the history which he is interrogating, and still maintains a level of modesty about the power of ones work to change its subject. It prompted me to think about areas of research that I deeply care about, and what it would mean for me to engage them rigorously.

I’m ramping up for the next quarter, and have a handful of ideas I want to pursue. For one, I plan to do an independent study with Jennifer Steinkamp, exploring different possibilities for projection onto irregular surfaces. The reason I want to explore this is so I can create fragments of living worlds (like tidepools, mountain peaks, or other micro-climates⁄habitats) that occupy physical space. I have in my mind small islands that rise out of the floor that are activated by a range of animated forms.

At the moment, I’m collecting various reference images and gathering materials for a basic projector setup.

VJ Kungfu has an excellent video detailing how to build your own flexible projector mount. If you’re interested in securing your projector (or pointing it at crazy angles), I definitely recommend looking into their system. The mount consists primarily of standard lighting rig components. I’ve ordered parts and look forward to putting them together soon. Also, I’m getting up a projector to put on said mount. I started with the fantasy that I would get something super high-end, but talked myself down to a more reasonable $1000, 1080p projector. That way, I can still afford to pay my rent.

My brother was in town a few weeks ago and we stopped by the Hammer to check out the work by Chen Qiulin. Chen’s work is obliquely documentary; recording some of the now-submerged cities and valleys of Sichuan, China through video of narratives enacted on the condemned landscapes.

Of primary interest to me in Chen’s work is how she presents the landscape as defining the events within it. Collapsing industrial buildings tower over people, shaping the actions they may take. It seems as if all they can do is wander through the landscape, searching for each other, searching for meaning in their actions. Indeed, they can do nothing to shape the land around them, or to prevent its disappearance. And we can only watch as they progress down a linear path.

I wonder how software and installation can be used to represent landscapes as charged as these, how they can engage viewers in ritual similar to those enacted by the actors/demonstrators in Qiulin’s work. Can we guide people through the environment as effectively as the bride and groom in Qiulin’s videos? Perhaps we need some sense of inevitability in our work; to see an the next step coming, even as we aren’t sure of what it is.

In Qiulin’s video, we follow the actors as they walk the path of their fate. In games, we may need a guide to help us, perhaps we are one of the many men carrying peonies to the lake, and so instinctively stay with the group. In an environment, we can limit pathways, like presenting viewers with a staircase leading up to an unknown plane. At what point do these constraints become meaningful, and how do they shape the narrative for the viewer?

This issue of imbuing work with substantive meaning or context is one I will be tackling in future writings. Simply using a dataset to create an image does not make the image about that data. A higher level of transformation is occurring in successful work, a level which I am trying to reach in my own practice.

While walking with Rebecca earlier today, I began thinking about how online art should be funded. Only some models of funding the material arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) can effectively translate to work that exists online. Websites can’t really be sold to patrons in the way a painting can; there is no value added in owning the domain name, and limiting access to the domain defeats the point of it being online. Grants for the creation of new work can obviously be applied to work that exists online. Corporate sponsorship is another option, although I find it generally unfit for funding personal work (since you have to promote the company’s agenda). What struck me as the most obvious and probably far-fetched method of funding online art is by designating it as public art.

Online art is inherently public art. It exists on the internet, that virtual space is where many people spend the majority of their time (Dangerous words in there; this ain’t journalism). Just as we beautify the public spaces we walk past on our way to work, we should beautify the virtual space that we visit in between trips to productive/useful web sites and applications. It’s not that we always notice the park or sculpture on our way to the office, but that we have the option to stop and appreciate it.

The obvious challenge in all of this is knowing who should fund public works in a space so public it operates largely without regulation. Internet service providers could fund unique works. 2% of their expenses could go enhancing the quality of the content they provide access to. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that AT&T or Comcast actually cares about the things they’re bringing in to your home (not in an anti-net-neutrality way)? Maybe cities should promote the online work of their residents. Physical-world tie-ins bind the content of the online works to a specific place, making the work more meaningful when you visit the city. I would be happier to run across more engaging personal content online that encourages me to visit a new city than to see a Mark Di Suvero sculpture when I get there. Or perhaps an independent entity should be formed, a branch of the NEA (miserably underfunded as it is) or UNESCO.

Yeah, making the work is not about money. However, if making artwork for the internet (or anywhere) began to at least fund itself, it would make thinking about money less critical. Right now, everything is decidedly about indirect revenue streams. I have a day-job making commercial stuff for the internet as a result of spending my free time making my own work. The money I make allows me to pay to keep my personal sites up. Just imagine the quality of work people could produce if they didn’t need to hold down a day-job.