I spent last weekend out in 29 Palms with Pete and a few dozen other artists from around the UC system. Many of us installed work in the desert, and invited the public to come see what we had been up to. Pete and I worked together after the first symposium to come up with an idea for work we thought would make sense in the desert, which resulted in a piece called Trace: Resonance Field. It is a field of ceramic plates that are struck with rhythms controlled by seismic data from the surrounding mountains. I also had a chance to install Tamarisk in a more suitable location.

We’re working on editing our documentation into a cogent bit of video for the internet. For now, you can see photos of the process and some short video clips on flickr. New photos of Tamarisk will be online soon, as well.

There was quite a bit of press for the show. Among others, there was a writeup in artinfo, and a video and photo gallery by press enterprise.

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.