Technical Research for Installation

In terms of making standing walls I have had prior experience to doing this, when making our Y2 studio shoot, as well as helping build a Y3 film set which was a 3 walled room.

Things have to make sure when building walls include:
• Making sure the panels are straight together
• Two people are needed to hold the panels whilst one person secures in place with a power screwdriver

• Put screws into the top and button of the panel
• Attach back support fixtures (add weights and sandbags for extra support and safety) 

I contacted Tom Gilley asking if my installation idea would be achievable. He suggested my projector would be best placed on top of the table, as mounting it underneath the table may be too low, however he said the distance between the chair and projector would be fine.

 He also suggested using the 22’ and 32’ Samsung flatscreen TV’s as there are a large stock of them, they can easily be wall mounted, and videos can be played on a loop via a USB stick.

He also suggested for a roof I stretch a large piece of white material over the set to act as a ceiling. This would be ideal as it could allow light through if I were to put the lights on top.

Not only would using material be safer to construct and have in my installation, it also gives me flexibility on how I want this aspect of my room to be, and if I am going to use it creatively.

If putting the chair on the table would not work well, another alternative is to no have  a ceiling on the installation and have the projectors hanging from above down onto the chair. 

References and Notes - Main Theorists

Donna Haraway

Cyborg Manifesto

This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. 

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. 

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. 

...utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which perhaps a world without genesis. but maybe a world without end. 

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality. through final appropriation of all powers of the parts into a higher unity. 

"a cybernetic organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (Simian 151)

" ...the cyborg has been instantly and systematically appropriated by the tradition of representation, and come to stand for many of a human figure - solider, spaceman, woman, foreigner, the disabled, the privileged, the underprivileged , white,, black and so on. The practice of (mis)representing the cyborg, particularly in literary studies and social sciences, is most evident in the discussion of teratology, where the cyborg is associated with traditional monsters. "

"all forms of talk about what it means to be human - and post/human-are representations, forged within cultural contexts"





Rosi Braidotti

How We Became Posthuman

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitabilityoflife. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, re- Toward Embodied Virtuality I 3 garded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. 

Drawers, Cat and a Table - Additional Ideas

As the audience moves around and interacts with the room, they will begin to notice that the furniture and props consists of/ have elements of living matter combined with them. The hybrids of non-living props and the ‘living’ objects represent the blurred boundaries that biotechnology presents to us.

Drawers (sideboard cabinet)- when you open up a draw it has teeth growing on the inside of them. Inside the cupboard could be a glowing heart sculpture attached to the inside

Cat- Sculpture of a cat laying down. Parts of its body are made up of non living items, such as marble for an eye, shoe lace as a tail.

Table - On the table there is a bowl of fruit. One of the apples has been bitten into and reveals furry inside or fish scales inside. The table could have animal like feet. The bowls, knives, plates could be fashioned from animal like textures.

Lamp table - On the lamp table there will be a green bioluminescence lamp, growing down the side of the lamp and the table will be the bacteria spreading and escaping.

The hybridization of these objects will represent the blurring of the boundaries between artificial and natural, living and non-living, and questions what would be class of living, or natural in the future.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Chiara Lecca

I really like Lecca's work as it challenges the boundary between natural and artificial, by using an unusual style, whilst being visually interesting. The use of taxidermied animals parts to replace natural parts on plants show that not only the life stilled in the form of cut flowers, but also in dead nature by these animal parts.

Film & Video Inspiration

Projections in the forest

Explore your duel world

List of mainstream films - fear of cyborgs, AI (what we create) taking over

• Blade Runner
• Terminator
• iRobot
• AI
• Splice
• Ex Machina
• Human (tv series)

Michael Naimark - Style Research

http://projection-mapping.org/projection-mapping-in-1980

In Displacements, Naimark explored the concept of recording a live event, then re-playing that event via projection in the same physical space. Naimark constructed a mock living room out of thrift store finds, including a sofa, easy chair, several tables with ashtrays and junk food, wall hangings, etc., all situated around a working television set. He then filmed the living room with a rotating camera (at 1 rpm) shooting 16mm film.

I really like the idea of painting a story onto a plain lifeless background and room with different textures. Because the projector rotates you only get fragments of what in happening in the projections leaving the audience to place together a narrative. It is also a good example on how to project onto different surfaces successfully. 

Orlan - Artist Research

Orlan is a performance artist who uses her own body and the procedures of plastic surgery to make "carnal art". She is transforming her face, but her aim is not to attain a commonly held standard of beauty. Orlan is the only artist working so radically with her own body, asking questions about the status of the body in society.


What is "Carnal Art"?

Carnal Art is a self-portrait in the classical sense, yet realized through the technology of its time. Lying between disfiguration and figuration, it is an inscription in flesh, as our age now makes possible. No longer seen as the ideal it once represented, the body has become an 'modified ready-made'. Carnal Art loves the baroque and parody; the grotesque, and other such styles that have been left behind, because Carnal Art opposes the social pressures that are exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art. Carnal Art is anti-formalist and anti-conformist.

Stelarc - Artist Research

Stelarc discusses that technological instruments that can enhance your sensory apparatus, we are still in biological bodies but are accelerated by our machines, we are enhanced by instruments of new technologies. 

"so the body can be see as a construct of meat, metal and code" . Soon there is going to be a blurring between what is human, what is animal and what is robot. In bio-art artists can now make moving sculpture, or semi-living / living sculptures. That idea of making a sculpture not from inanimate matter, but that has components of ourselves. 

I want my projects to explore these blurred boundaries, and explore fantasies and what we could become by creating a dystopian world. 

I watched a lecture that he gave on youtube of his works and how the relate to technological research and future hopes to enhance ourselves/our survival.

He discusses that we are in the "age of circulating flesh" , in the sense that we can transplant one part of living matter in to another living organism (organ transplants).

"Theres a blurring of not only what it means to be live, but what it means to be dead" - referring us to be able to reserve bodies forever

Development of flexible circuitry that can be attached to the human body. The circuits can pick up body functions and wirelessly send the information.

"In a future of augmented reality you'll be wearing virtual clothing as well as your physical clothing."

They have developed contact lenses that have LED's that can display simple data, such as arrows and text in your field of vision. - going to be difficult to detect if people are recording you ect because of implantable technology

Stelarc's third hand project which he could control and write 3 letters at the same time.
"The Third Hand has come to stand for a body of work that explored intimate interface of technology and prosthetic augmentation- not as a replacement but rather as an addition to the body. A prosthesis not as a sign of lack, but rather a symptom of excess."

In this project he used heartbeat to pulse lasers from his eyes, and eye movement controlled the direction in which the lazors moved, so the eyes are not passive receptors of light and images but rather activity generate images in the space.

In the project above he had an audience control and manipulate his body using muscle stimulators. 

Working on a project that allows a tiny robot to climb up his tongue and into his mouth, the performance will be video streamed (robot will have a webcam mounted) -  a crude gesture to our increasing intimacy with our machines and machines are no longer going to be external to our bodies ... nano sized machines will inhabit the internal spaces of the body... most technology of the future will be invisible because it will be inside the body.

Animal like robot -" ...whats rather uncanny is that it's obviously a machine, its even got a handle on it and yet, the locomotion is seductively real"

"With human robots we have the problem of the uncanny valley. As you make a robot more and more human- like it begins to sort of get somewhat more and more creepy, partly because it isn't quite successful in its asynchronous speech, in its metallic sounding voice, in its sort of non-recognition of its internal computer ... it's slightly out of sync with human behaviour so it seems a bit creepy."

What is so uncanny is how a simple set of facial expressions generates empathy resulting in a more seductive interactive agent - David Handson-Diego

3D print tissue in hopes that in the future they can print organs.


"...theres of course the concerns with ethics, if we're going to be attaching technology into the body we can now in fact do surgical procedures  on unborn foetus' and soon on embryos with micro miniaturised technologies... so what are the sort of not only the aesthetics involved in attachments or insertions inside our body but what are the ethics? so interrogating both the aesthetics and the ethics is the humanities side of things that we are doing here. And of course that interest in identity, embodiment and agency. You know what constitutes what it means to be a person, what it means to be human, and the realisation of what it means to be human is determined historically, culturally and by the technology that is available. "


"What is interesting for us is to consider engineering contestable futures. As artists we're not interested necessarily in doing methodical scientific research for immediate utilitarian use,  but rather generating contestable futures, constable possibilities that might be examined, possibly appropriated, often discarded but will it sort of contribute to that discussion and that interrogation of what it means to be human. "

Visual References for Living Room Style - Style Research

Pippilotti Rist

I always seem myself finding my way back to some form of Pippilotti Rist's work that I am inspired by for the own project. I really enjoy the style of her projection work, and how she projects it cleverly onto different surfaces. Another aspect that I love about her installations is the use of lighting.  When creating my installation I have to really think about how I use lighting not just the colours of them, but how to balance by having enough light to safely move around the room, but it being dim enough to show projections well. 

Although the room style of this built room is not going to be like mine, it good to research how people construct their own room installations, and how the make sure the styling and colours are cohesive through out the whole room.

George Gessert - Iris Project - Artist Research

Gessert creates his artistic irises by hybridizing wild varieties and discarding the undesirable results in his compost pile. He keeps, and breeds, those flowers that are aesthetically pleasing to him, those that display traits such as vivid vein patterns in their petals and unruffled edges. His decision to compost the flowers that have ruffled edges is both an aesthetic choice and a reaction against commercial flower breeders, who tend to breed for ruffled petals in every flower species.

He work shows that nature is interpreted and even authored by humans. He has previously been accused of "genetic graffiti" in previous scatter projects, as he scatters the seeds of these hybridized plants in the wilderness, where people associate it as a place of never-changing natural purity exists. However when trees are cut down for logging or to create roads this is not seen as "genetic graffiti", even though this does greatly change the genetics in the area. 
"With Gessert's folkstyle of genetics, he does not need the expensive tools of genetic engineering to create conceptually intriguing artworks about the interaction of humankind with nature."

Natalie Jeremijenko - Artist Research

Cloning is another method that has been used to literally create life as artwork. Rather than changing the structure of existing life forms, artist Natalie Jeremijenko makes her statement about genetics by cloning a single black walnut tree 100 times (again, with help from scientists). The baby trees were displayed at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in an exhibition entitled Ecotopias, but the work will exist for many years to come, as the trees are being planted throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. By revealing the cultural and environmental differences of their particular locations (although they are genetically identical), the trees will stand as a challenge to the popular notion that genetics equals destiny.

Facilitating public and lifestyle experiments that can aggregate into significant human and environmental health benefits.

Jeremijenko’s practice develops the emerging field of socio-ecological systems design (or xDesign) crucial in the Anthropocene, using attractions and ongoing participatory research spectacles that address the C21st challenge to reimagine our collective relationship to natural systems. This integrates diverse strategies to redesign energy, food and transportation systems that can contribute to the common good, increase soil, aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity and improve human and environmental health.

Natalie Jermijenko - Science is important to politics and ideology. Global activists belong to a economic. People science - ecological issues


http://www.nataliejeremijenko.com/

http://www.nataliejeremijenko.com/projects/

Louis Bec - Artist Research

Louis Bec creates beautiful, colorful artificial life forms and believes that these new creatures will 
serve as a kind of communication bridge between the biological and technological worlds. Bec asks, "Is it not the case that, at the very heart of artistic endeavor, there has long been the demiurgic ambition to create the living via multiple simulations? Do cloning, genetic engineering, and the creation of transgenic animals open the way to teratological art?"

He endows the series of potential beings with chimerical and fictional characteristics. This extension of biological evolution and simulating new life forms, emphasizes on how these could bring forth evolution, a unique search for new zoomorphic types and forms of communication between artificial and natural species. Bec is both artist and scientist in the field of artificial life and 3D technologies.

I like the style of these potential beings, as while it has chimerical characteristics, it does not display the typical hybrids of common animals we sea. The less obviousness of these creatures, create curiosity. I hope to create some of my imagery using a 3D program. Not only will this give me unlimited possibilities to my creations, it also connects the communication between biology and technology, like Bec aimed to do.

Tutorial with Kathleen

After my tutorial with Kathleen she suggested I did further research to strengthen my theoretical framework behind my project. It also will give me various opinions on the subject of bio-art, developing technology with the body and the post-human.


Eduardo Kac Site
Amy M Youngs
Extracts from the article:

"The longstanding artistic tradition of creating life-like artworks evolves as technology grows from paint and chisels to computers and DNA manipulation. Artists are now able to create digital works that engage in the processes of life and biological works that exist as art and actual life. The author examines the differing ways in which artificial life and biological artworks smear the boundaries between what is considered natural and unnatural, human and nature, and explores the role biological art might play in relocating humanity within the complex ecological systems of life, rather than above or below it."

There is a desire to break down the barriers between art and living reality. 

"For the first time the word organic ceases to be an unobtainable ideal held out to the artist; following in the wake of cybernetic technology, systems with organic properties will lead to "sculpture" - if it can be called that - rivaling the attributes of intelligent life."
Jack Burnham (Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 320)

"In his book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, written in 1968, Jack Burnham predicted the possibility that artists could create amazingly lifelike artworks. He traced this artistic impulse back to the idealized human forms of Greek sculpture, followed by clockwork automata, early kinetic art, and finally the robot and cyborg art of the 1960s. He clearly predicted the artificial life art forms that are being created in silicon today, but he did not foresee the art of creating new biological life forms. Now that genetic engineering companies are bringing forth a cornucopia of new life forms, I wonder about extending into the biological realm Burnham's idea that future artworks might be "capable of intelligent intercourse with their creators.

At this point the field of genetic engineering is too specialized and expensive to be considered as a viable medium for most artists. So it is the genetic engineers who are doing almost all of the creating, while the rest of us on the sidelines are watching with great interest, as traditional species barriers are being breached before our eyes. We have seen sheep-goat chimeras, the blending of tobacco plants with firefly genes, producing luminous plants, and a variety of animals and plants with human genes inserted into them. Presumably these freakish creatures will end up helping humanity by enabling us to make cheaper, better medicines, cure famine and causing the stock market to rise forever. The other presumption is that genetic engineering will disrupt the delicate balance of life and lead to environmental destruction. As an artist, however, I am not as interested in the polarities of this debate as I am in the ways that genetically engineered organisms challenge deeply held convictions about what is "natural" and where humankind stands as the DNA is reshuffled."

This is a very important point, that it is due to genetic modification and technological advancement it has risen many issues. I have not only seen this is artworks, but also in mainstream film and cinema. Even 80's films such as Robocop, Terminator and  Blade Runner, reflect the fears of combining biology and technology, the artificial with natural human like attributes. I also think the fears also stem from the fact that we (society) do not have control over these manipulations and it is  the governments and genetic scientists that have the control. Biotechnology has a strong political power behind it. 

"to break down the psychic and physical barriers between art and living reality." - Burnham




Why Not Cute, Colorful Animals?
So "why is it that dogs aren't yet blue with red spots, and that horses don't yet radiate phosphorescent colors over the nocturnal meadows of the land?". Over a decade has passed since that question was posed in Artforum by writer Vilem Flusser, and still we do not see these creatures being created by artists. Artificial-life artists could certainly mock up this kind of scenario in digital form, but it is still out of the reach of artists working with biological genetics. The creation of new mammalian life forms has certainly occurred in the world of science, but no artists have been able to participate as of yet. This will likely change as the tools and techniques become more available and we all become accustomed to the new ways of creating life. The creation of a transgenic animal -- a dog that glows with the green fluorescent protein of a jellyfish -- has been proposed by artist Eduardo Kac in his article "Transgenic Art." A project like this will require a lab with specialized equipment, but since this protein has already successfully been incorporated into mammalian cells, such an animal is entirely possible [15]. The artist's desire to genetically alter a dog may at first seem immoral, until, perhaps, one considers that dogs did not exist before humans genetically altered them through the selective breeding of wolves. While Kac's project has remained unrealized, he has recently succeeded in the creation of a transgenic rabbit that glows green under special lighting. Kac considers his rabbit an artwork, a family pet (named Alba), and an instigator of dialogue on issues such as genetic engineering, biodiversity, normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, and interspecies communication [16].

Conclusion of the article

Whether the art of today has lived up to Jack Burnham's predictions of intelligent interaction between humans and nature may be in question, but there is no doubt that genetic artists have been able to create works that do, as he says, "break down the psychic and physical barriers between art and living reality." 

As the rhetoric of the biotechnology industry focuses on the control of biology for the good of humanity, the manipulation of DNA to create new biological life forms seems to assert the superiority of humans over the rest of life on earth. However, the intentions of the artists who have altered biology in their work are not the same as those of the biotech industry, and their artworks do not reinforce the hierarchy that places humanity at the apex. In fact much of their work deeply celebrates nonhuman life while acknowledging -- even pointing to -- humanity's interconnection with it. Perhaps this kind of work has the potential to do what some environmental thinkers believe is imperative: relocate humanity within the complex ecological systems of life rather than above or below it.

Notes

Complexity theory of the relationship between physical and technological systems -
When data is collected from the human body for example genes, there is a link between biological systems and code. There is this fusion of data that goes beyond the material, build and gambled as part of experiment.

There is a link between all of this and money. It seems to be able to have the power to be able to make a difference genetically, there needs to be a lot of money involved.

Ethics are gone, don't know when life begins, cutting into things - moment you cut into it is 'dead' - shadow side to technology and we are aware of it, it plays on human fears.
- When dealing with sometime that is human there needs to be the consent from something living.


Kathleen suggesting rather than using the typical animals for my hybrids to look into other species from different levels of evolution. The use of  the less obvious 'ugly bug' creatures such as catfish, seahorse with frills, which catches us by surprise and makes more of a visual impact.

The fact that we will be able to design our own traits is getting closer. Not only is there ideas of being about to change our babies appearance, but also make neurological advancements. It questions the human psyche, and how like a computer, our minds can be programmed and made and certain way. The code in the computer compared with the code from the genes in our cells.

Common living room - take the idea that all matter is alive, matter is acting on use, giving us ideas. Matter and us creating sensibilities. AI might detach itself from humans. When we build these systems and they start to converge, and we start to loose control and the material takes over itself.

Designer babies - neurological advancements  -frilly seahorse - designing our traits
Contemporary biological advances

interstices: Installation at the Alice Austen House - Amy Hotch - Style Research

Using the shoreline house of Alice Austen, the pioneering Victorian photographer, I wanted to allow the house itself—the walls, the baseboards, the keyholes, and underneath cushions—to tell the story of her complicated life and coded sexuality. Video loops and camera obscuras were embedded into various furniture and household objects; video projections, cast shadows and mirrors were incorporated into the existing interior. Using the notions of the domestic interior and the camera as visual conceits for the self, this installation explored the complex relationship between the “eye” and the “I.”
Using different surfaces and ways to display screens is interesting. Like the new forms of biotechnology are progressing, I think expanded cinema will become more popular due to audiences wanting to engage more deeply or interact with ideas, rather than just watching them on a screen.  For my project I'd like to create a room using projection and maybe screens to bring the viewer into this futuristic biotech led world.

All this research, but what am I actually doing?!?

Below are some of the mediums I want to explore and create an output at the end of this year for the exhibition. Although right now they are very simplistic (and seem strange) there will be a lot of contextual and factual research behind them. The reason why I want to do a series of different thing is I hope to become more confident with using each program within the Adobe Suit (mainly focusing on photoshop, illustrator, after effects and premiere). Another possibility to consider would be using a 3D program such as maya to create small 3D printed sculptures. I later posts I will draw up my ideas, and begin to build them. I hope to record my method of creating things, which will be supported by help from lynda.com and library resources. I also want to carry out a photo shoot in the studio, and strengthen my lighting knowledge for group projects I will be working on. My aim this year is not only to become more confident with software, but to also become more confident on leading and producing.

1. Installation
A room of a Utopian/dystopian future - has projections or a human hybrid, sculptures of bio engineered food (fish tomato), projection into a fish tank with neon flowing fish ect

2. Photography
Photography series of grown bacteria.
Portraits of people with glowing parts of skin - beauty

3. Animation
A two or three small screen projection of shapes and colours that represent cell division or bacteria

4. Sculpture
Mini 3d sculptures created on maya or 3D software, and then 3D printed (if I have access to the facility)

5. Music Documentary - helping Josh

As I experiment more I will have other mini outputs, however above are the main projects I want to achieve within the next unit.

In future posts I hope to produce more detailed sketches.

Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin

Art Orienté objet, a French collaborative group comprised of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin, began a series of body modification experiments intended to communicate with animals outside of language. “Basically the project was to artistically adapt Jacob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, which argues that the meaning of an environment differs from one animal to another in relation to its sensorial system” (Marion Laval-Jeantet, “Self-Animality,” Plastik: Art and Science, June 2011). The project began with an investigation of cats — what eventually culminated in a single piece, Felinanthropy, where Laval-Jeantet put on a pair of cat-like prosthetic hindquarters; by transforming her status as a bi-ped, she was able to change the hierarchical relation between herself and the cat. A subsequent experimental work led Mangin to put on a prosthetic giraffe head and engage giraffes in a zoo — exploring the giraffe’s ability to recognize Mangin not as a human, but as something almost giraffe. More recently, AOo embodied an equine perspective; Leval-Jeantet built up a tolerance to horse blood by injecting a small bit of the animal’s plasma into her system over the course of a year. She subsequently staged a horse blood transfusion performance with her partner Benoît Mangin. What remains of Que le cheval vie en moi!, is the “relic,” a small, innocuous petri dish, with human/horse blood. In the following interview, originally conducted for Paper Monument where an affiliated essay, “Humanimals” was published, I asked Laval-Jeantet a few questions about this work. All answers have been translated into English by Basia Kapolka.

http://www.artorienteobjet.com/

Victimless Leather - Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project

The Victimless Leather is grown out of immortalised cell lines which cultured and form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stich-less coat like shape. The Victimless Leather project concerns with growing living tissue into a leather like material.

This artistic grown garment will confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise. An actualized possibility of wearing ‘leather' without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion.

Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings. We see our role as artists as one in which we are providing tangible example of possible futures, and research the potential affects of these new forms on our cultural perceptions of life. It is not our role to provide people with goods for their daily use. We would like our work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context.