Week 3 (Aug 26) What Is Place & Space?

Description

Place & Space

Lecture: Defining terms

View, present and discuss next iteration of body intervention prototype

Works

CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY (Experiments in Mapping):

The Spatial Analysis Lab @ USC School of Public Policy:
https://slab.today/

TUNING PLACE:

Dear Photograph: http://dearphotograph.com/

Street Museum:

Janet Cardiff, “Alter Bahnhoff”:

Blast Theory “Can You See Me Now”: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/

Corning Ad:

Toyota “Window to the World”:

UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY:

Tokyo Pizza Box:

Hiroshi Ishii Tangible Media Group at MIT “Ambient Room” (1997):

PUBLIC MEDIA ART:

Kingsley Ng “25 Minutes Older“, 2016

A city gets old
People get old
Something doesn’t

Twenty five Minutes Older invites the audience to board a tram, a moving time capsule that does not get old in the fast-paced city. Like travellers in time, passengers on board see scenery passing by—not through the windows, but in an enclosed compartment, turned into a camera obscura with two apertures on its sides.

Running in parallel to the moving images is a textual narrative, made up of literary fragments generously shared by renowned Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang. The text is taken from his novella Tête-bêche, whose chiasmatic structure, stream of consciousness and projection of its time are echoed in other aspects of the present work. We are grateful for Mr Liu’s consent, and hope to pay tribute to the classic through this cross-disciplinary encounter.

Shin Gray Studio, “That Child of Fleeting Time

“That Child of Fleeting Time” is a sculpture/ video artwork by Kyungmi Shin at Shin Gray Studio. The 16 feet high metal sculpture resembles four film strips which now is becoming an artifact of the past in this era of digital imaging. The front facade of the sculpture is lined with more than 50,000 LED bulbs to create a video screen. The screen plays thousands of clips lasting 6 seconds in duration each, shuffled randomly, resulting in an artwork that is always in motion and is never the same. These clips were created from early technology test films including an animation of the sound technology used for the Jazz Singer, color tests done by Thomas Edison, Kodak, movement studies by Muybridge, among many others. Analog noise was added by distorting the original footages to create colorful abstract sequences that refer to the digital future while looking back at the history of film industry’s technological evolution.

Daito Manabe & Motoi Ishibashi – 2011 – Particles (more links below)

This is an art installation which is able to create a visionary beautiful dots pattern of blinking innumerable illuminations floating in all directions on the air. The number of balls with a built-in LED, pass through one after another on the rail “8-spiral shape.” We see this phenomenon like “the light particle float around” because the balls radiate in various timing.

The position of each ball is determined via total of 17 control points on the rail. Every time a ball passes through one of them, the respective ball’s positional information is transmitted via a built-in infrared sensor. During the time the ball travels between one control points to the next, this position is calculated based on its average speed. The data for regulating the balls’ luminescence are divided by the control point segments and are switched every time a ball passes on a control point.

The audiences can select a shape from several patterns floating in aerial space using an interface of the display. The activation of the virtual balls on the screen are determined by the timing which a ball moving on the rail passes through a certain check point on the rail and the speed which is calculated by using average speed values. The sound is generated from the ball positions and the information of LED flash pattern and is played through 8ch speakers.

YouTube videos
Project website (Flash)
Project PDF

Assignments

1. REFLECTION/SKETCH  to start ASSIGNMENT 1:
Take the words you used described when prompted by question “What is the feeling you associate with HOME?” and create a SKETCH of how you might visualise this sensibility.  How has this changed due to Covid-19? POST your sketch and describe your concept on OSS and we’ll review them in class next week.

2. VISIT + DOCUMENT + REFLECT on the Singapore Heritage Light Up Singapore event.
Until August 30, 7:30pm-12am daily (FREE)
This year, as part of SG 55, architectural landmarks were “lit up” to commemorate National Day.  Such culture and heritage initiatives are just one way in which our public spaces and monuments are refashioned using technology.  These events are curated to convey certain meanings and to make us consider our public spaces differently.- What is it that is being communicated?
– What might the “curators” have to consider to plan such a transformation?
– What alternate ways could YOU imagine transforming these sites to communicate something unique or unknown about Singapore culture?

3. View (Extra Credit):
BLAST THEORY TALK, June 23, 2020 Talk at ArtScience Museum (1 hour, 15 min):

SPIT SPREADS DEATH: THE PARADE:

UK-based Blast Theory creates interactive art that reveals the interconnectedness of cultural, scientific, and political issues. Catch the limited screening of Blast Theory’s Spit Spreads Death: The Parade (2019) and join founders Matt Adams and Nick Tandavanitj who will discuss how this interactive parade of light and sound commemorated a ‘superspreader’ event in Philadelphia during the early days of the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. As part of the parade hundreds of participants honoured the many victims of the virus by walking with the death certificates of individuals who had died, accompanied by a moving score from composer David Lang. For this artist talk, Matt and Nick will also reflect on their research undertaken as part of a residency with World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018 where the artists were embedded within the team which monitors epidemics and pandemics across the world. The resulting interactive installation piece, A Cluster Of 17 Cases (2018) examined in detail one of the early sites of transmission of the SARS epidemic – the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong – and maps the movements of people and pathogens, as part of the epidemiological studies that followed. Click here to watch the film: https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/spit-spreads-death/